Miley Cyrus and a Whole Lot of Madness!

This past Friday I was lucky enough to be invited to go to a Miley Cyrus concert in the Palau Sant Jordi located in Barcelona. I knew for awhile that Miley was coming to Spain while I was here, but I had no idea that I would actually have the chance to go to the concert myself! It was a last minute invitation and needless to say I was STOKED!

Friday, the day of the concert, was a nice low key day to start out with. My friend Quinn (another AFSer who was bringing me to the concert) and I were back and forth on the little details like what we were going to wear and how the heck we were going to get back home after the show!

Around six o'clock I met up with Quinn and her host family and we all drove over to the venue together. The concert started at nine thirty, but we had heard that a bunch of people were camping out and standing in line for forever before hand so we quickly grabbed some dinner to go and headed for the seemingly never ending line. 

Between good food, endless conversation, and really interesting people watching (it's a Miley concert... you can imagine the things we saw!) we found ourselves at the door around eight thirty. We got in easily, despite the fact that we had left our IDs in the car which you need for every little thing here, and we were doing all we could not to start just jumping up and down from excitement!

We went to the bathrooms quickly knowing we had floor seats and once we went into that hysterical crowd there was no getting back out until all was said and done. We joined the crowd and a DJ came out to start and get us pumped up. At this point we were probably only about sixteen people from the stage, which sounds like a lot, but in reality is only about fifteen feet or so, not bad at all!

After a lot of bass drops and remixes that neither Quinn nor I knew the lights went down and we knew what was coming next! I'm not sure if you have been to a Miley show or not, but it is EXACTLY how you would imagine it! The very opening of the show is a bunch of dancers dressed in full body suit animal costumes while a huge projection of Miley is shown on the screen. Then out of no where the projection opens her mouth and Miley comes sliding out on her very own tongue.

Because how else would you enter your own concert!?

Here's a link to the opening but be warned, this is Miley Cyrus content we are talking about!

Bangerz in Barcelona

From an early point in the show Miley explained that this concert would be longer than most including covers of songs such as "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", "Summertime Sadness" and a few more that I can't remember at the moment. In addition the show would be filmed for the NBC station, but she wasn't sure if the channel would end up using the footage because she swore so much throughout the show, so don't hold your breath waiting for that footage!

Anyway, when she sang a few of the covers she moved to a different stage on the complete other side of the floor area. I would say about half of the people in front of us stupidly left running for the other stage leaving us room to push and shove to the front of the main stage for when she returned and played the best songs of the entire show!

When she came back over to the main stage Quinn and I were THREE PEOPLE from the front row. I don't know how we did it, we received a good amount of dirty looks and sassy comments but hey YOLO and I am a foreigner so there is always the "I don't understand you, I am American" card! That move only works about 50% of the time because the entire world knows how to speak English as well as their native language, but hey it's worth the odds!

After a few more songs the lights go down and Miley disappears, that girl has got a LOT of outfits ok? And we see a light coming out of somewhere in the security section they have between the stage and the audience. Quinn and I were like "Is she coming to say hi or something?" super confused, but thennnnn the lights came up and we saw it was Miley's little sister Noah dancing around about ten feet in front of us! So that was pretty cool too!

Finally the most well known songs are playing and I had heard somewhere that the last three songs were "We Can't Stop", "Wrecking Ball", and "Party in the USA" (Quinn and my excuse for pushing so hard to the front was so that we could be in the front row for "Party in the USA" considering we were most likely the ONLY Americans in the crowd). So "Wrecking Ball" ends and she says goodnight (these songs were already a part of the encore) and we were DEVASTATED! THE song we were waiting for the entire time was "Party in the USA" and she wasn't even going to play it! We were trying to reason, ya maybe that song is only played in the USA leg of the tour because it is about a specific country that we aren't in, then all of a sudden I turned around and I see like a pointy green SOMETHING peeking out of the floor. I turn to Quinn and scream "IT'S THE STATUE OF LIBERTY" and then the whole party comes out decked in "American history" and just the biggest show you can imagine! 

Miley (we are practically on a first name basis now) did not let us down and the show even ended in indoor fireworks and red, white and blue confetti! It was just the best show of a concert that I have ever seen and Miley is honestly one of the few few artists these days that sounds just as good (if not better) in person as she does in studio versions! 

After the concert we were dead and I mean just completely dead. I am not sure we found our way home but it included an hour long bus ride and then a fifteen minute walk (before finding out there was a stop closer to my house... oh well). We stumbled into the house and were basically passed out within minutes.

Only hours later...

We had to wake up and get our butts on a train to a two day AFS meet up. 

Saturday consisted of a six hour long beach day just chilling with the other students. Then we hiked a bit to eat dinner at a restaurant in the mountains where it started raining. The plan was after dinner we would hike up a bit further into (into? onto? not too sure at this point) the mountain and sleep under the stars. So we walked up there set up camp and... it started raining. Not too bad, except there was clearly thunder and lightening coming from the distance. 

So we packed it back up and started to walk back down to the restaurant. Halfway back down it stops raining and someone says oh lets just sleep here. Oh that wouldn't have been too bad... except for the fact that the clearing was located DIRECTLY under about eight power lines with a possible storm heading our way. 

There was a majority vote (basically ending up to be boys against girls) and the majority voted we return to the restaurant to sleep in their patio. However it was only (ya only) about one in the morning at this point which in Spain is still a perfectly reasonable time to eat dinner and obviously the owner wasn't going to kicking his paying customers out just so a bunch of teenagers could sleep on his floor for free. So a few hours went by of an awkward balance between trying to sleep (we were tired man!) and being woken up every few minutes to be asked a question by a slightly tipsy customer about who knows what. 

Finally two thirty in the morning rolls around, everyone is gone besides us kids and one volunteer, and we are free to sleep! Great right? Ya sure... for all of an hour and a half. Four in the morning creeps up on us and BAM, CRASH, BOOM (insert storm onomatopoeia here) BIGGEST THUNDER AND LIGHTENING STORM OF MY ENTIRE LIFE COMES ALONG! 

You occasionally here of thunderstorm tragedy stories, but you never really understand how a storm can get that bad, but trust me NOW I KNOW! It was quite possibly the most terrifying, this is it, moment of my entire life because not only is this a huge storm, but on top of that we are in the mountains (we just wanted to be close to the action I suppose) and we are not even inside! We are sleeping on a freaking slab of concrete covered by a super loosely thatched hay over hang! Not ideal for a thunderstorm.

I mean this storm was intense! The thunder claps were so close it literally, LITERALLY sounded like a ginormous human clap two feet above your head and the lightening was striking down and HITTING THE GROUND a meter away from our little awning camp out. The volunteer, a normally carefree anything goes type of guy was on his phone (probably not the safest thing he could be doing during a storm) freaking out trying to figure out what he should do with us.

After about a half hour of pure terror and using my sleeping bag for protection the restaurant owner shows up and lets us sleep inside on the dining hall floor. Not super ideal, but way WAY better than electrocution! From then on it was consistent readjustments trying to get comfortable on the tiled floor and trying my best not to kick someones head since we were super cramped in between the tables and chairs in the dining hall. 

Very few hours later...

Eight thirty AM wake up call since we had to pack up and move out so that the restaurant crew could set up for there normal day... genial (great). 

The rest of the day consisted of a hike to see an entire birds eye view of Barcelona, a flour and tissue paper bomb fight between the host parents and the exchange students, then a nice lunch back at our new found home, the mountain restaurant. 

Around three o'clock that afternoon it begins...... HAILING I mean come on, give us a break here! Yup, quarter sized hail balls clattering all over the place. Luckily at this point we were already eating inside, but we could not believe the weather!!!! It was insane!!!!

After the lunch was all wrapped up we said our goodbyes and Roman and Ana Maria drove Quinn and I to the train station where we had to catch the train to Quinn's house, where I would be visiting for the next three days. Everything went smoothly from that point on! That visit is going to have to be another blog post because that was a lot to soak in at one point and my brain needs a rest before I can bang out that much English at one time again. It's easy to switch between the languages but grammatically, I literally have no idea where I am at! 

Hope your weekends all went a bit more smoothly than mine and I can't wait to tell you all about the Banyoles chapter of my trip which was probably one of my favorites! :) Have a great day! See you very soon!