Chupitos! Chupitos! Chupitos!

Hi all! Just left Spain last night! I’m absolutely wiped. Thankfully, we don’t have classes today so we can rest up before we reach Italy.

A recap of my last night in Barcelona:

I met up with few friends and we headed to get tapas and sangria at about midnight. After that, we headed to a place we’d heard of called Chupitos. For those of you who aren’t Spanish scholars, chupitos roughly translates to ‘the best thing ever invented,’ or in more proper terms, ‘shots.’ A bar that only serves super cheap shots? I thought such a thing only existed in fairy tales! (I mean, if fairy tales were written for college students.) So, we headed to the hole-in-the-wall bar known for its infamously named shots, like the Monica Lewinsky (if you wanna know how this one works, ask). When we got in there, I maneuvered through the crowd of people and in my broken Spanish, I told the bartender that we wanted two rounds of his ‘chupitos favoritos!’ He replied with, “Te gusta el fuego?” (Do you like fire?) So I said, “Um, si?” Next thing I know, bartender man is whipping out shot glasses left and right and filling them up with a variety of alcohols.  In awe at all the fun colors, I picked up a red one and he quickly said “No! Un momento!” He pulled out a lighter and handed us each straws. Then, he lit the bar area around the shots on fire and let them simmer for a few seconds before fishing them out with tongs. “Ahora!” he exclaimed as he gestured for us to put our straws into the flaming shots. I figured he knew what he was talking about so, I did what he said and hoped that I didn’t burn my mouth. Turns out, the fire didn’t burn my mouth one bit. The alcohol, however, did. Whoever decided that sipping a shot through a straw was a good idea was clearly a masochist.

After recovering from shot #1, bartender man pushes the second round of shots toward us. He pulls out the lighter again and points to his thumb, then says “in” and points to the shot glass. Okay, so he wants me to put my thumb in the shot. Weird…but whatever, I’ll do it. Then he says “fuego,” points to his thumb, and proceeds to put his thumb in his mouth. I give him a confused look, so he decides to demonstrate. He puts his thumb into his shot…pulls it out…and LIGHTS IT ON FIRE. And as if that’s not bad enough, he proceeds to stick his flaming thumb into his mouth and then take his shot. I give him a horrified ‘you want me to do THAT???’ look and he starts laughing and yells ‘Ahora!’…So, I do exactly what he showed us to do and into my mouth goes my flaming thumb. And it didn’t hurt one bit! This dude knows what he’s talking about! Officially the coolest shot I’ve ever taken. And to top it off, the shots were only 2 euros each….Boy, this place is the closest I’ve ever been to Heaven on earth.

After taking a moment to say goodbye to the place that I’d come to love in less than ten minutes, we grabbed a taxi and told the driver to take us to Razmatazz, this club we’d heard about from other SASers.  As we got into the cab, the driver kept muttering, ‘ohh….muy guapa!’ (pretty). It was a little creepy, but I just giggled awkwardly and hoped that the club was close. We started taking pictures in the cab and the driver offered to take one of us. So, like any good European driver would do, he stopped the taxi in the middle of the road to take our picture. Then, looking at us expectantly, he said something along the lines of ‘un beso para mi?’ (a kiss for me?) while pointing to the camera. Did this old, creepy Spanish cab driver just ask to take a picture of one of us kissing him? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’d envisioned finding a hot Spanish guy to sweep me off my feet…but this guy? Maybe if I was 70...and had really low standards. But even then, I doubt I’d want photographic proof of the incident.  Thankfully, he got the hint and we finally reached Razmatazz, where we practically catapulted ourselves out of the taxi. 

After we paid the cover charge, we walked into the club, which was MASSIVE. There were five floors and huge crowds of people dancing. It was pretty interesting because basically everyone in there was speaking different languages….which made it a little awkward when you bumped into them and said sorry and they just looked at you, like, huh? Dancing there was a lot of fun though and we ran into some other SAS kids. We danced for a few hours and headed back to the ship around 5am(substantially earlier than a lot of people) because we had to be up early in the morning.

On the last day, Brianna and I had signed up for a tour of the Chocolate Museum, which was pretty cool. They even let us make our own chocolate houses and a chocolate painting. After that, we shopped for a few hours and headed back a little early so we wouldn’t be late. Although we weren’t scheduled to depart until 8pm, we all had to be back on the ship by 6pm, which was designated ‘on-ship time.’ If you don’t make it to the port by on-ship time, you get dock time, which means that when we get to the next port, you have to stay on the ship for an allotted amount of time while everyone is off exploring. 1-10 minutes late=3 hours of dock time, 10-30 minutes=6 hours, 30-45 minutes=9 hours, 45-1 hour=12 hours. If you’re later than an hour, you might as well just forget your plans in the next country. Some people were asking why they were so harsh about giving dock time…turns out, for every hour that the ship is docked in a port beyond schedule, it costs SAS $10,000. Yikes.

We dock in Civitavecchia, Italy (which is right outside of Rome) tomorrow morning! I’m gonna do my best to find internet and post pictures!