Spain

After 10 days at sea everyone on the ship was more land sick than ever. There was a tremendous amount of excitement at the first notice of Barcelona. The night before in our pre-port debriefing, you could feel the anxiousness just building and building in anticipation of exploring. Because I’ve spent an extended amount of time in Barcelona in 2007, I opted to go to Ibiza with a few other people for the entire duration of our stay in Spain.

June 27th, Happy 21st birthday to me.  I have been fortunate enough to have already made some really good friends here on the ship. At exactly midnight, I was bombarded by pounding on my cabin door and a stolen plate full of random deserts from the dining hall. 2 of my friends had decorated my door with a Happy Birthday sign and a giant homemade birthday card. It was amazing for me because I had only known these girls for a very short amount of time and they still wanted to make my birthday as special as they could knowing that I missed home.
When daylight came, hundreds of students rushed the streets of Barcelona in anticipation of every museum, cathedral, marketplace, and tapa that we’ve heard of for the past 10 days.  My roommate and I were no exception to this rush into the city. We walked las ramblas in search of…………… can you guess?........... WIFI! Where else other than McDonalds would we be able to find some free wifi, and about 30 other SASERS there for the exact same purpose.

5 o’clock rolled around and we had finally made it to the airport and on our way to Ibiza. We were all pleasantly surprised to find that Ibiza was a lot bigger than we had thought. As directed by a past SASER we hopped on the bus from Ibiza town, to San Antonio. From the bus station, we had to figure out how to get to our hostel. Now that was a mission and a half seeing as none of us had any idea where we were going, we were just so excited to be in Ibiza. We walked around the main strip of San Antonio and sat for some food and my first legal (in the states) drink. We ended up meeting a club promoter and bought our tickets to go to Pacha for Swedish House Mafia’s opening party – thought they weren’t there due to EDC. It was still an epic way to start off out Ibiza mission. We got to Pacha and it was jam packed with people from wall to wall, but there was no stopping the dancing. We danced until the club slowly began to empty and we then realized that it was 7am. Walking out of Pacha at 7am and get back to our hostel at 7:30am was ridiculous. We all said, okay if we get up by 1 we’ll be golden to explore a bit of Ibiza town. Not so surprisingly that didn’t happen. At 5pm we finally got up and went to Old Town Ibiza and walked the entire old town and went to the infamous Bora Bora café where people danced on tables for hours. It was an interesting scene. Later that night we were suckered into going to Fiesta Del Agua at esParidis. We walked in and were blown away by the set up. It was huge in there; we had no idea what we had gotten ourselves into. We had run into about 15 other SASERS which was kind of comforting to be around familiar faces. We’re all having a good time and at 5am- on came the water. The entire dance floor turned into a pool of water up to your hips and people were sloshing everywhere, water and drinks – you were completely drenched. As gnarly as it sounds it was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done. My roommate and I were extremely hesitant to it at first, but once you’re surrounded by people having an amazing time you lose yourself and just go with it. The night ended with a nice soaked 7am sunrise walk back to the hostel. Showered and finally clean we passed out at about 9am and surprise, surprise woke up at 6pm. Out we went to explore San Antonio. It was a really nice walk. Later that evening we went to Café del Mar to meet up with Paul, a 2010 summer SAS alumni to watch the sun set. It was amazing to see the amount of people there. With ambient music in the background and hundreds of people littered along the coastline. I wish I could post some pictures up. That night was our last night in Ibiza and we had to do it hard. We walked around San Antonio finding the place that offered the best drink prices and ended up finding a little bar with super cheap drinks and basically no one in it. There was an older woman bartending and you could tell that she was excited about the company. She bought us all a few rounds of drinks on the house so it was amazing. We then headed to Space for Armin van Buuren’s opening party – Be. AvB is pretty much my absolute favorite so it was… EPIC. There are defiantly no words to describe that event. I’ve got a bunch of videos that I will post later as well. But it was mind blowing. We ended up leaving Space after Armin’s set at about 5am and slept for a couple hours to catch our 8am flight back into Barcelona. We made it back to the ship and ended up passing out until dinner where we met up with everyone else to hear about their Barcelona stories. When they asked about Ibiza, my roommate and I just looked at eachother, shook our heads and said “it was.. EPIC.”