CITY STROLL

When one goes to a new city, one is usually bombarded with all the tourist attractions, the tourist deals, and the troublesome tourist tax. If not planned correctly, visiting the city‘s main tourist attractions can become stressful instead of enjoyable. Barcelona is known for being a historic city, full of special places, landmarks, and various types of architecture. Many people come to the city to see the buildings and get a taste of the famous architect Gaudi‘s taste. As a group of international students, we were not the exception. When packing and planning for the mobility week of the ICCS course, we noticed that we had a lot of free time in our hands and wanted to have a plan to explore the city. Go to La Rambla, visit Park Güell, the infamous Sagrada Familia, the many plazas scattered around the city, and also get to know more, not so famous places. We looked for different tours, because what better way to get to know the city than with a local. Coming from Kaunas, Lithuania, that idea seemed foreign to us. Kaunas is a small city that you could tour in a day if you really wanted to. Barcelona is the contrary, you can tour it all day and still be missing many other touristic parts. We were overwhelmed by the number of tours offered online, some were long, around three to four hours, others short. Some were walking tours, and others were bus tours. Some, if not all, were very pricey and after reading some reviews we realized maybe we were better off just taking a city stroll by ourselves and using tools like Trip Advisor, and Google Maps. Luckily for us, the wonderful Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona was very thoughtful and invited us on a walking tour of the city called „BCN>2000 years“. We were beyond excited and relieved that we got some help, and the experience of seeing the city in a different way.

We agreed to meet at Plaça Catalunya, and lucky for us, it was only a fifteen-minute walk from our hostel. We were a little worried because all the previous days that we were in Barcelona the weather had not been the best. It had been raining and really cold, which we were not prepared for. Back in Lithuania, the weather was ranging from minus two to five degrees Celsius, and when we checked the weather for Spain during the mobility week, we noticed that it was going to be sunny and around ten to twelve degrees Celsius. Anyhow, the day of the walking tour we had nice weather, no rain, it was just a little cloudy. We left the hostel thirty minutes before the tour started, but to our surprise we got lost in the way, took a few wrong turns, and well it made us run a bit late. We were so worried that the tour was going to start without us, luckily, we had a group chat and we could let everyone know -we kind of knew we were not going to be the only ones. Thankfully, we were the first ones to arrive, and we had some time to talk to the tour guides and get to know them while the others arrived. Since we were a big group, we were split in two and we got assigned to Maria, the awesome tour guide who spoke five languages and was born and raised in Barcelona. From the very start of the tour, she made it really interactive and fun for us. She made us introduce ourselves, showed interest in our answers -which it is worth mentioning, not a lot of tour guides or lecturers do-, and explained to us the dynamics of her tour. She gave us all earphones and a mini radio which were really useful because I think it would have been impossible to hear her in such a busy city.

Continuing with the interactive aspect of the tour, the main focus of it was to show us some of Barcelona's many facets and try to squeeze twothousand years of history in a two hour tour showing us places that were within walking distance to each other. Let's be honest, some history teachers and tour guides can be boring, filling the space with dates only that eventually we are going to forget - not Maria.

See, she was different, excited, eloquent, passionate about history and she connected with us in that sense. She told us about Barcelona’s history with such ease, as if she was singing a lullaby to a baby. It was fun, it was a theatrical experience. She sat us at the stairs of museum plaza and told us the story about the building, the reason behind Barcelona's name, the political context behind Spain and Catalunya and it was all very clear and fun to hear. While walking from place to place, Maria also took into consideration recent events and traditions, talked to us about our opinions, and kept us eager to answer her questions. One way she did this was by dividing us into subgroups among us. She would ask questions such as “who likes chocolate?” and three people would raise their hands, she would put them all into a group and ask another question, and repeat the process until we were all in groups. The name of the group in this case was “Chocolate”, and so on and so forth. We answered questions about the previous attraction, kind of like knowledge checks which kept us engaged. This allowed us to also connect and work with other people, not just among us, the four girls that went to Barcelona from Lithuania.

The two hours spent with Maria as our tour guide were enjoyable. We learned not only about the origin of the name of the city, where Romans would stroll and impose their empire, the Santa Inquisicion’s headquarters and their atrocities to society; but also, about more contemporary traditions of Barcelona such as the Pooping Man and Pooping Log. Following the same process from the groups, at the end we had a final quiz at Casa Batllo, at the street where a long time ago, three families fought to earn the title of prettiest house in the city. Here, we were asked to find different depictions of animals on the street. It was very interesting because these elements were hidden in the architecture, and if Maria had not told us about them, we probably would not have known about them. It opened up our eyes to different parts of the city, and we are sure this feature not only applies to Barcelona, but we will use this for our other trips in different cities. Since it was a historical tour mainly, some dates were asked in the final quiz, and we found out that our friend Akvilė is great when it comes to remembering dates. Overall, it was a very enriching, intercultural experience, being surrounded by so much culture, differences, and history. It was a key element to us practicing our communication skills, culture appreciation, and other cultural competences learned in the online part of the module.

By Giovanna, Akvilė, Raminta and Gabrielė