The yellow country? I don't know, Spain just struck me as being very yellow...
Barcelona
Ahhh, Barcelona. City of the sun, good food, and wonderful sights. And oh so close to Morocco (sort of). We'll just ignore the train station for now. Barcelona was really beautiful. We arrived at midday, quickly found a youth hostel, and figured out the metro. On an interesting note, this was the first country in which we were lacking language capabilities. We managed quite well. We spent a lot of time sightseeing, and also discovered an absolutely delicious restaurant in Barcelonetta-thanks to our guide book, they really knew how to eat. Let me elaborate on this. After essentially starving for the first part of our journey, we finally ate in Spain. The supermarket (Sorli Discau) was cheaper-the chopped beef was really weird, but the bread was good-and so was this restaurant. To start off, we shared a bomba-some sort of potato croquette creation-very good. Then we had squid with garlic, fried sardines, and enormous pieces of toasted garlic bread, with lots of white stuff smeared on it. This prompted lots of discussion. Could it be? No, it couldn't! Yes, it really was lard. And it was very good. And I'd like to point out, that we ordered everything in our negligible Spanish. Making up languages is a good talent. The food was absolutely delicious, and so filling.
Ok, a new topic. What did we actually see? Well, Gaudi's cathedral, of course. An interesting story: we were walking down the main street ( I think Las Ramblas) trying to find the old town, which Eugene and I found the night before. We kept on walking and walking, thinking we surely would finally find it. Eventually, we ran out of street, and after consulting a conveniently placed map, found out that we had walked in the wrong direction. But it wasn't our fault, it was cloudy, actually raining, so we couldn't orient ourselves by the sun. So anyway, we ended up seeing Gaudi's cathedral instead. We also saw all of the other sights, which were lovely. I won't go into detail about those. We made the requisite visit to Montserrat. Can we say major GRS sight? It was nice, nonetheless. We also missed the hourly train by one minute. We saw it come from the gondola, but just couldn't get on it time. By the way, Barcelona had a severe lack of public bathrooms. Bad....
And next, the youth hostel!
To be mentioned: doing laundry for the first time-it didn't dry for three days. I'll have to put some pictures up of us drying them at the train station. But also, we met the North Carolinan lady, and her daugther. Source of many famous quotes including: "I love Japan, van Gogh loved Japan, I'm an artist", and "Are you all Japanese?". Ok, just because you don't believe Eugene is Japanese, doesn't mean that I, the blatant European, am Japanese.
And finally, the train station!
Why was the train station so interesting? Well, we had a small problem getting out of Spain. We also had a big problem in the international train line. We waited and waited, and finally it was our turn, but they wouldn't let us buy a ticket out of the country! So what was going on? After much effort, we finally found someone who spoke English, who told us the French were on strike. Oh no! We couldn't leave until a day after planned. We didn't really mind, but it was disconcerting. So back into the train line, where we made plans, and drew pictures on a little piece of paper indicating where we wanted to go: ie. manana il tren para Port Bou per 3 (stick figures). Yes, very funny, but it worked. So all was fine. Or was it? We returned on the designated day, to go to Port Bou. After a lovely day at the park, which, I fell in love with it (and a house there), we came back, but no train. The departure time passed, back into line. Our train wasn't running because of the French strike. We had to wait for the later one. So, out came the laundry and the books for a few hours. And we were off!
Port Bou
Now what exactly is Port Bou. It's a small fishing village in Spain near the French border. We wanted a day of relaxation by the sea. We certainly got it, because there wasn't much else to see. We were also the only guests at the hotel. So we sat on the beach all day, bought food for the long trip to Italy and relaxed. And starved. We hadn't saved enough money for food. But after pooling our coins, we were able to afford some more heavenly tuna fish (in olive oil)for the trip, and unfortunately, some tuna fish with vegetables. Cat food might have been a better word. We were disappointed. But Yoriko and I discovered rice pudding, which became an obsession. And so we continued, caught the train to Cerbere (with every other backpacker in the world) and went on to Italy.
And what was that about Morocco?
Nothing really. Fumi, Eugene's friend, showed us pictures from his trip to Morocco. It was beautiful. So we wanted to go to, and almost did. To make up for not going, we took lot's of pictures in front of palm trees pretending we were there. Oh well, next time.
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