Barcelona III

My last day in Barcelona started off with good intentions.  I wanted to wake up early and go see the inside of the Sagrada Familia.  However, in instead woke up around 10am and decided to just make it a lazy kind of day .  I also didn't really want to spend the money as I was trying to avoid taking more money out of the ATMs.  Anyhow, I woke up, had my customary croissant and espresso breakfast, got a fruit salad from the food market.  I enjoyed the creek Gaudi walking tour so much that I decided to do the other one the company offered, the Old City tour.  I luckily had the same tour guide, and it was once again great.

I'd like to take this moment to share with you a Catalan tradition that I learned from the walking tour.  Instead of Santa Claus at Christmas, they have this log with a painted on face.  The log shows up about a week before Christmas, and the children "feed" the log every night, just like we leave out cookies and milk for Santa.  All week, the children feed the log, so the log is theoretically getting pretty backed up.  That log needs to go!  So the night before Christmas, the back half of the log is covered in a blanket, and the children sing a Christmas song in Catalan while beating the log with sticks!  The next morning, hopefully the log will have crapped out of a bunch of gifts and they'll all be under the blanket.  They literally beat the poo out of that Christmas log.

There is also traditionally another figure in the classic Catalan nativity scene.  There's Joseph, Mary, and the baby Jesus......and a shepherd with his pants down in a squatting position.  His name in Catalan translates to "the shitter".  The idea is that he giving back to the earth that which was provided to him, in an endless cycle of bounty.  You can buy your very own pooping shepherd in many of the tourist shops, and sometimes you can get one that looks like someone famous, like the Pope or Queen Elizabeth.

Right now I'm sitting on the airplane in Dublin, waiting to take off for Boston.  Dublin has the distinction of having a US customs checkpoint here, so Ive already cleared customs.  I know you were worried!!!!  :). It's kind of cool because you get off your arriving flight (from Barcelona, in this story) and you proceed directly to the U S immigration center in the airport.  If you've checked a bag like I did (I was tired of hauling that thing around, plus I bought some liquids in Barcelona), then you had to sit and wait while they got your bag from the other airplane.  Then they call you up to a desk, ask you some questions, and scan your boarding pass.  A picture of your bag pops up on the computer screen, you confirm that it's yours and then hopefully you're on your way.  

I'm headed to Providence for a few days to hang out with the lovely Suz, my oldest NYC friend.  Then I'll head into Boston for the night and stay at Kera's.  I'm having dinner with Steph and Camille, two friends from grad school.   It's going to be a grand few days of catching up with old friends, and then it's back to Austin.

Barcelona II

Barcelona has been better!  Last time I blogged, I was feeling pretty tired and unmotivated.  I'm still both of those things, but I've made myself get up and go do stuff.  

I met up again that night with the Brit and we went and saw the Magic Fountain.  This thing is so cool!  It's a giant water dismay with music and colored lights that was building for one of the World Fairs in the 1920s.  The giant fountain is level, but you can climb the these stairs behind it waaaaaaaay far up, all the way up to this art museum and look down over it.  It sounds cheesy, but it was pretty impressive.

The next day the Brit and I met up again to go be beach bums.  We headed down to Barceloneta and picked out a nice spot and just basically laid there like beached jellyfish for a while.  The water was so gorgeous and turquoise, and the temperature of it was perfect.  We took turns going into the water and watching our stuff.  It was just a wonderful Mediterranean time!  We got lunch there and then said goodbye, as he had to go catch his flight back to London.  I was kind of sad, as he ended up being an excellent sightseeing buddy.   In addition, he totally hooked me up with bottles of shower gel, shampoo, and sunscreen that came with his hotel room, all stuff that I was just about out of and was trying to avoiding purchasing for my last few days.  Haha!  After that I wandered over and took a ride on this cable car that goes way up high above the city.  It drops you off in a park, and then I took the bus back downtown to the city center.  The bus passed the giant futball stadium and the Olympic stadium, so it was cool to briefly see those things.

This morning I woke up with the intention of going to do the tour of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia, but I showed up and the queue was around the block and I went NOPE!  I should have gotten up earlier, and will try again tomorrow.  So what I did instead was go and roam around a neighborhood I hadn't been in yet, which ended up being full of cute boutiques and vintage stores, and getting some more juice from the giant market.  I also took in a free walking tour of some of Gaudi's highlights.  The tour was so good that I'm planning on catching another one tomorrow, of the Old City.  And now my evening consists on drinking Estrella beer and eating Toblerone  chocolate with my roommates.

Anyhow, that's about it for now.  I haven't been very exciting in Barcelona, sorry readers. I was telling one of my roommates that I haven't felt very cultured in this city, and she said that her dad likes to say that you can get more culture from sitting in a coffee shop in a new city for an hour than going to a museum. If that's the case, then I am the most cultured person ever! :)

Barcelona

So far, Barcelona is nice.  I don't know if I'm just tired from all my travels or hot or what, but I'm having a hard time getting motivated to do much.  I have a lot of time here so maybe that's it.  Anyhow!  Here's what I've been up to so far.

The first day was pretty much consumed by the camera fiasco and not a lot of sightseeing was done.  I DID spot a couple of Gaudi buildings only way back to my hostel, so that was awesome.  They're so interesting looking.  His buildings all look like they are made of wax and are melting.  They're quite pretty.  So my hostel this time around is the Sant Jordi Diagonal and it's pretty typical.  Dorm room, kitchen area, common room, blah blah blah.  The only thing different about this one is that I have male roommates this time around.  They don't do single sex rooms here.  At first I was like, oh great.  However, the two girls in my room have been the noisier, messier ones and the three guys have all pretty chatty and considerate.  That first night I just cooked myself some instant risotto that had been hanging out in my backpack since Italy and called it a night.  

Yesterday I woke up early and went down to the beach area to catch a free walking tour, but only two of us showed up so it was cancelled.  The other guy was this British dude, so we ended up hanging out for the rest of the day,s editing the sights.  We went up to Park Güell, a giant park filled wit neat little architectural things and Gaudi's house.  After that we strolled around for a while, got lost for a bit, and found a little sandwich and gelato place for lunch.  When we were done we hit up Merct de la Boqueria, this giant amazing food market.  They have fruit, veggies, seafood, met, poultry, olives, candy, juices, and more!  Its all pretty cheap and it's just fun to look at roam around in.  Once that was over we split up to rest for a bit, and then met up later to get some dinner.  I had this really tasty veggie paella and some sangria.  We kind of stumbled on the restaurant accidentally, and it was all locals, which was nice.  When we were done eating, we went over to look at Sagrada Familia at night.  I hadnt see  it yet and WOW, it is just beautiful.  Im going to go do the tour of it in the next few days.  Then we went down to the beach, Bareloneta, and just strolled around until 1am and then I headed home.

This morning I hauled myself out of bed around 10am and went to a giant flea market, the largest in Spain.  You know how I love flea markets!  This one was just ok.  It was.....well, a flea market.  It didn't have the antiques and charm of the Paris one.  It was mostly just junk and cell phone accessories.  I got of of there pretty quickly. Afterwards I just roamed around for a bit, hit up Boqueria for lunch (a veggie pastry, a fruit salad, and some fresh coconut pineapple juice, all for about €5).  It started raining so I came back to the hostel to hang out and figure out a plan.  I don't really know much about Barcelona or its neighborhoods, so I'm going to spend some time online right now figuring out where I want to explore because in feeling sort of unmotivated and clueless right now.  Late the Brit and I are meeting up again for dinner and maybe to rent some bikes and roam around on those.

Idiot

I am an idiot. Listen to what idiotic thing I did today.

I flew to Barcelona and feeling pretty smug on ethe flight because I'd employed my stuffed raincoat pockets trick again to get more crap onto the plane. My backpack was in the overhead bin, and my raincoat was under the seat in front of me. When we landed, I exited the plane, took the shuttle bus, got onto the subway, OH MY GOD WHERE IS MY RAINCOAT. I LEFT MY RAINCOAT ON THE PLANE. In the pockets of the raincoat were two pairs of shoes, my entire collection of clean of underwear, my electricity converter, AND MY CAMERA. I thought I was going to die right there. Six weeks of pictures gone. I got to my hostel, told the desk clerk what I'd done, and he called the airport for me and spoke to the in Spanish. Miracle of miracles, my jacket had been turned in and would be waiting for me to pick up.

So, I got back on the subway, and then the shuttle bus, and finally got to the airport again. I asked the lady at the info desk where I should go, and she was like, go down there and turn right. So I went down there but there was no where to turn right. So I asked her again, and she's like, you go into where it says Arrivals. I was like, you want me to go in the area that says NO ENTRY? And she's like, si. So I think this lady is crazy and I go ask someone else. This guy says the same thing. Go in the place where everyone else is coming out of the secure area. I was like, am I going to get arrested?! And he goes...here's the kicker...."This isn't your country. We don't do that here.". I wanted to be like, well, no one has flown airplanes into your buildings either, but I kept my mouth shut.

so I did what they said. I went against the flow of people exiting the secure area of the airport and not a single soul asked me what I was doing. No one stopped me. I went right on in and went to the easyJet desk, got my raincoat, camera and underwear intact, and went right on back to the hostel. I will never say a bad thing about easyJet again. The end.

Lisbon

Portugal was gorgeous!  Lisbon was the one city that I came into knowing practically nothing about it.  No monuments, no museums, nothing.  The hostel that I booked, the Living Lounge, had come on the recommendation of a friend of a friend, and it was.....well.   This year it was voted the #1 medium sized hostel in the WORLD.  That should tell you how the hostel was.  When I booked it months ago online, there weren't three nights of dorm rooms available, so I opted for my first night in a private room and the two following nights in the dorm.  The cost of living in Lisbon is so low that my private room  there cost the exact same as my eight bed dorm room in Paris.  It seemed like an affordable luxury.  Each room in the hostel had been decorated by a local artist, so they all had different themes.  My private room had a giant mural of a ship and red furniture, while my dorm room had a lomography theme and pictures everywhere.  The lobby of the hostel had antique furniture and a really lovely fully stocked kitchen.  A local chef came to the hostel and cooked dinner each night at 9, which you could buy into for €10. I arrived a little late to figure out the area and find food on my own, so I joined the dinner.  I was able to drop off my laundry with the desk clerk, and for a small fee it was washed, dried, and folded overnight (which was a lifesaver because out of all of my clothes, the only things I had that were clean we're a pair of underwear, my AirBerlin socks, and a shirt I'd washed in the sink the night before).

The next morning, I woke up early for the free breakfast of homemade crepes and to go on the free walking tour.  The chef from the night before was the guide, and he lead us on a four hour tour of Lisbon.  What a pretty city it is.  Everything is so colorful and sunny.  Some of the buildings were painted in bright pastels, but most of the buildings are completely covered in brightly painted tiles.  Some of the tiles date back hundreds of years, but unfortunately a lot of them were lost in the great earthquake in the 1700s.  Most of the tiles follow patterns from before that time, though.  Also the streets and sidewalks are also made of black and white rocks places into mosaic patters.  There is just so much detail with the aesthetics going on all of the time.  We walked around the city center for a while, and then hopped on one of the vintage trolleys.  These trolleys are the actual public transportation system, and not just fixed up for the tourists.  There's also a small subway system for longer travels.  The trolley took us to a massive outdoor flea market, where you could wander around and look at cheap handmade stuff and antiques.  

After that, the guide led us into the Alfama district, which is the Moorish area.  The streets are so narrow and winding that cars can't drive there.  Sometimes you would see a scooter, but rarely.  To use a map to find your way is useless, because the streets are so curvy and change names at every intersection.  There are giant grand churches and temples mixed in, but everything is so close to each other that there are no plazas in front of them and the beautiful facades just butt up right against the backs of houses in front of it.  When the earthquake happened, it was a holy day and so lots of people were inside the churches and couldn't get out in time and died.  Something like 50,000 died.  After the earthquake, it was decided that all new churches constructed would have a plaza in front, and that's how you can tell the age of e churches in Lisbon.

Our guide led us by a small shrine covered in Barbie dolls and wedding decorations, and told us it was for Saint Antonio, the patron saint of weddings or something like that.  All donations that were placed in the plate in front of it were gathered and doled out once a year to poor girls deemed "worthy" to help cover the cost of their weddings.  Praying to Saint Antonio could apparently help you find a husband or wife, so this one cute girl in my group was like "Well I need all the help I can get!" and she dumped a TON of change into that plate, hahaha.    She told me later that in her area of Canada, there is a "man drought" and it's something like 3 or 4 women for every man.  Totally average dudes will come up to women in bars and stuff and go, "Hey, want to buy me a drink?". I was like, come to Texas, we'll find you a nice southern boy.  ;)

After roaming around the tiny corridors of Alfama, we came to a little cafe that served local specialties.  I wanted to try something new to me, so I ordered the sardines.  Out came four pretty big sardines, heads and tails and all.  I just picked them up by their little silver heads, scraped the meat off their tiny bones, and put their little fish skeleton on the extra plate.  They were good!  Salty.  So for €10 each, we got our entree, some veggies, soup, bread, olives, vino verde (green wine), sangria, and espresso.  Good deal!  Since we're talking about food here, let me mention the hostel meals.  They were also €10, and came with the entree, soup, salad with honey dressing, bread, dessert, and wine.  I had the hostel meal every night.  The first night it was seafood rice with prawns and profiteroles for dessert.  The second night it was this fried Cod and onion dish with chocolate mousse for dessert.  The last night it was this veggie ravioli dish with lots of fan veggies and strawberry creme mousse for dessert.  They were all sooooo good, and it was fun eating with all of the other people in the hostel all of the nights.  Some of my favorite meals of the trip.

The second day, I decided to take the tram to a neighborhood on the outskirts of Lisbon called Belem.  There were some lovely monuments I'd heard of and wanted to see, as well as a free modern art museum.   The museum was awesome and had a great collection of Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Jackson Pollick, Andy Warhol, etc works.  I also strolled around and had these little custard tarts that I'm totally forgetting the name of right now.......  They are to Portugal what gelato is to Italy and macarons are to France.  I had like three of them from this famous bakery that was celebrating 175 years of service.  The whole time, though, I'd been fighting the inevitable.  This whole trip, sun allergy and sprained ankle aside, I'd managed to stay pretty healthy.  However, I could feel a cold coming on.  I went back to the hostel and laid down for a bit, watched some Mad Men that I was behind on, and joined the dinner,  and that was it for my time in Lisbon.  I really wish I had scheduled more time there.  It's such a pretty place, everyone is so friendly, and the Euro goes a lot further there than elsewhere in Europe.

Right now, I'm on my last easyJet flight to Barcelona.  Thank goodness.  So far on this flight they have gone up and down the aisles with a cart of food and drinks you can buy (no free drinks and peanuts on this carrier, no sir), a cart with perfume, sunglasses, toys, etc, and now they're giving us the hard sell about donating to their charity.  Maybe they should do that one first next time, because I don't see anyone dropping any coins into the donation bag.  That €7 packaged sandwich must have cleaned people out.

Barcelona is my last stop in Europe, and I'm a little worried about the pickpocket situation there since it has the reputation of being the Pickpocketing Capital of Europe.   It seems like almost every traveler I've encountered has a story about something that has been stolen from them there.  I've been a little lax with my belongings so far, but I'm going to have to step it up in Spain, I guess.  After almost six weeks of travel, I'm wearing down a bit and I'm excited to enjoy my last week here, head to Boston for a few days, and then home to Austin.

Language

I've spent a lot of time thinking about languages lately, I guess because I've been pretty much dumped into the middle of a whole bunch of them. This is my first time being in a place where Englisb is not the dominant language (I'm excluding Mexico here, sorry Mexico), and it's a little disorienting sometimes. So far on this trip, I've been around English, German, Italian, French, and Portuguese.

The hardest part of this whole trip has been each and every time I cross into a new country. I have a little freak out moment where I worry if I'll be able to navigate myself to my hostel using he public transportation. Will I understand the signs? Will people be able to help me? Will I be able to get people to understand that I need help? It's daunting!

Before this trip, I knew the basic pleasantries in a few languages. Hi, bye, please, thank you, do you speak English?, etc. I could say those things in Spanish and French, and that was it. German, forget about it. English was so widely spoken in Switzerland that it was like the German language didn't even need to exist. In French, I can still say only those things and that's about it. In Italian I think I can get by quite well if I need to. I can't have a full on conversation, of course, but I can handle myself as a customer, ask for directions, give directions, deal with numbers, etc. but Portuguese? Its intense! It's the one language where I didn't know a single word before I came here. I had to look up "hello". It's similar to Spanish, but then completely different as well!

I guess one of the benefits of all of these languages is that they've kind of given me a bit of security. In most touristy areas, people who want to sell you something or convince you to come into their restaurant or just otherwise hassle you will often approach you in English, because they can tell you're clearly not from around these parts. I've found that if I throw out a Bonjour or Ciao to their Hello, they mostly leave me alone. Before, I was just a rich American walking around. Now, I've maybe created a bit of uncertainty in their minds. Maaaaaaaybe I'm European, ad therefore not as much of a sucker, so maybe they should just move on to another target.

Paris III

The flea market in Paris?  Pretty awesome!  One of my roommates and I went to what is considered to be the largest antiques flea market in Europe!  It's a serious maze of little corridors on the edge of Paris, and it's full of little booths.  They have furniture, clothes, jewelry, creepy dolls, art, accessories, and just about everything you can think of it.  Most of it is pretty vintage and retro, and there are some amazingly expensive treasures in there.  We wandered around while eating some Nutella and banana creeps, and I ended up with a really pretty old silk scarf.

After that, my friend and I parted ways for a bit, and I headed over to look at the Arc d'Triomph and the Champs Élysées.  It was raining off and on, so eventually I just headed back to the hostel to rest up a bit.

That night, we went to a restaurant that I'd heard of before a d really wanted to try, Chartier.  The place is a century old, and is famous for serving good French food for fairly cheaply, fairly quickly, and in a beautiful place.  The night before we'd attempted to go there and the line was down the block.  This time, it being a Sunday night, the line was shorter, and we were inside within 15 minutes.  They try to fit as many people in and as possible, so we found that we were sharing a table with another couple of people.  The waiters there either don't speak English or pretend not to, so we were pretty much on our own with the menu.  But oh my god, it was so good.  I ordered escargot, mushrooms in sauce, and green beans in sauce.  In France, the snails are cooked in their shells and served to you that way, unlike in the states where you get that funny dish with the holes in the top.  To get them out of their shell, you must use these tongs to hold onto the shell, and then use a tiny fork to dig that buttery, garlicky little delight out.  It was sooooo good!  For dessert, we decided to just feel lucky, so we pointed to two things on the menu and hoped that they would be amazing.  They were!  One was a sort of mousse cake and the other was a chocolate parfait kind of thing.  We also finished off a whole bottle of rosé.  After dinner, we wandered around Montmartre for a bit.  We ended the night at a candy stand in front of the Moulin Rouge, where we sat for a bit and ate our sour gummy Eiffel Towers.

The next morning, I had a little bit of time to go look the Notre Dame church, and wander around Les Halles.  I had a quick lunch of a crepe and an eclair, and then had to grab my stuff and head for the airport.  EasyJet, we meet again.