Wild Nights on the Mediterranean
9:28 AM, 9-10-06
Barcelona—wow. What a city. This place could challenge Dublin’s Temple Bar for night life (& partying). At least, I suspect it could. It’s really impossible for me to say since I didn’t actually leave the hostel during my first night there. Instead, I partied with a bunch of Aussies, kiwis (New Zealanders), and Canadians. I used most of the day to relax, exploring the city only a little. The evening was spent buying beer (the hostel sold liter cups for two euros during happy hour) and socializing. Kabul hostel definitely falls under the broad category of “party hostel.” After about seven, the large common room is filled with people drinking and carousing and generally having a wild time. I suspect one reason accounting for this extraordinary party atmosphere is the inordinate number of Aussies. The irony, for me, is that when I was in Australia, I didn’t meet any. But now, you go to any bar while abroad and its like 50% Australians.
It’s been nice to have some English-speakers to talk to, even if their speech is a bit slurred from all the beer. The thing about staying at a party hostel, though, is that it’s really kind of difficult to get to know anyone well. This is especially true if you’re not there for very long, as I was. I’m all for a bit of partying, but in my experience, it’s the time spent going around together and talking one-on-one or in a small group that really helps foster friendships while abroad. It’s much tougher to facilitate this in party hostels. For example, I only remember the names of a few people from that night, maybe three of the ten I met. I remember nationalities and faces, to a certain extent, but I’m sure that in a few more days, even that will fade.
Now then, after a wild night, I wasn’t nearly as hung over as one might expect. My body even had the crazy notion to wake me up at 7:30—an idea that my mind thoroughly rebuked. I decided that the day would be for R&R, even though I’d managed to recover nicely from the previous night. I wasn’t going to worry about seeing any specific sights or doing certain tours or anything. I was just going to walk around and take in Barcelona (and maybe take a little siesta in the afternoon.)
Barcelona is a beautiful city. I wouldn’t go so far as to place it on equal ground as Sydney (my favorite city), but it certainly had some similar qualities. Being on the water helped. The architecture was also quite nice, with the towering gothic cathedrals and narrow streets. I spent some time walking around the smaller streets where locals give, which provided a nice view of ordinary life in Barcelona. I spent about two hours strolling around, mostly down by the water. It’s amazing to have such beautiful beaches next to a major metropolitan city. I know this isn’t uncommon, since roughly every major Californian city has a beach, but it’s still nice. Even most of the cities in Oregon have beaches, but they lack the year-long sun to make lounging on them a desirable thing. Barcelona’s beach was a bit rocky for my taste, but it still made for a nice walk. I tried to steer myself back through the city to come back to the hostel, but that failed utterly. Evidently I just lack the part of the brain that lets people navigate with maps. I’m like flipping it upside down trying to decipher where in the heck I am. Eventually, I conceded to being unable to find anything and instead wandered back to the oceanfront to walk around.
The afternoon found me asleep, resting contentedly in the now-air-conditioned hostel. The day I arrived, the air conditioning broke. (A nice welcome to a hostel with 90 degree temperatures). Once it was back on, though, I was determined to bask in the cool glory of the AC. This made sleeping in the hostel actually tolerable (it hadn’t been a problem the night before because I had drank so much—err…I was so tired—that I slept without disturbance. My siesta was interrupted frequently by the coming and going of people in my room, but it was still fantastic. I woke up refreshed and then headed out to a small restaurant to recharge my computer and get some writing done. It felt really good to crank out a few pages from my novel, as I hadn’t really had much of a chance since leaving Scotland.
When I returned to the hostel, it was time for some dinner. Actually, it was time for some beer to be followed by dinner. I hung around the common room, talking with people and doing a bit more writing. The Kabul Hostel served dinner for free, a price that makes all food very good. The meal was actually quite good: broiled chicken with some potatoes. I spoke to a French girl named Estelle who was living in the UK and just down on holiday in Barcelona for the weekend. It made me think how great it is to be able to take a two-hour plane trip and suddenly find yourself in the Mediterranean. I suppose in Oregon we have California to visit for sandy, warm beaches, but then it’s like a two-hour drive just to get to the airport—kind of defeating the point. I considered doing a Pub Crawl, but decided I couldn’t spare the money and could spare the hangover. Besides, the train I needed departed at 8:45 the next morning, meaning it would be another early morning and early night. Honestly, one day in Barcelona was enough for me. I wanted a place to relax and that’s exactly what I got.
I headed out for the train station the next morning, wielding the metro like a master. Only guess what—the guy at the hostel, who had told me which place to go to, had in fact told me the wrong place. Fortunately I was very early for the train and had time to sort out where I needed to be and where I needed to be was only about ten minutes away. Incidentally the place I had ended up was right next to the police station and I met an officer who was very obliging, despite my broken Spanish. I made it to the train station with time to spare, but my problems were not over.
On the train, I kicked back and relaxed, ready for the four-hour train ride to Montepillar. Only when the conductor arrived, he looked at my ticket and heatedly told me several things in French that I didn’t understand. The gist of it was that I had to go sit in the train’s café. I thought to myself, “fine, I wanted to eat anyway.” I was under the impression that something was wrong with my eurail pass and that he would come up and try to explain things when he had time. Well he didn’t come. Instead, I was apparently supposed to sit in the café for the remainder of the journey. Not necessarily a bad thing except that it was crowded and the stools were uncomfortable. I did meet two interesting people, though—an American photojournalist working out of Spain and a professor from a private Californian college who was leading some students around Europe. The professor explained to me that with Eurail, they’re now requiring you to make reservations at the train station. This is apparently most common in France.
I was basically like, “what the hell?” It kind of defeats the point of the Eurail Pass, as far as I’m concerned. The idea of Eurail—I thought—was you’re able to hop on and off without the difficulty of making reservations or buying tickets in countries where you don’t speak the language. Apparently they do this for trains that are highly booked. What’s more is that they make you pay a small reservation fee, between one and ten euros, in order to reserve your spot. Grrr. I was pissed. But you see, I’m also very clever, and already I was devising a plan.
I transferred trains at Montepillar—after waiting in a line for fifteen minutes so I could make a bloody reservation. Now for my cleverness. You see, I’d noticed that people don’t really check the Eurail passes very closely. And now with the reservation ticket, I figured they’d barely glance at it. For those that don’t know how a Eurail works, basically you have slots in which you write the date of the day you travel and then you can travel an unlimited amount on that day. Once your day is spent, you move on to the next. Ah, but earlier that day I had filled out my Eurail pass in pencil—something I don’t need to tell you is quite erasable. Indeed, no one—conductor or train ticketmaster—marked or stamped my Eurail pass for that day of travel but instead checked my “reservation.” Meaning, once I do a bit of erasing, I will have traveled yesterday from Barcelona to Marseilles for all of 1.50 euros.
Now you might be thinking this is dishonest. Well, it is. BUT! It is only through their ridiculous modification of the Eurail process (this reservation thing apparently has begun in the last year or so) that I was driven to dishonesty. If they’re going to make me pay for reservations after paying for my six hundred dollar Eurail pass, then I’m damn well going to get my money back somewhere, and that somewhere is a few free days of travel.
So I arrived in Marseilles, satisfied at the cleverness of me. Only, Marseilles was not exactly as I expected. I’d enjoyed the picturesque coastline for the leg of my journey between Montepillar and Marseilles, but upon stepping out of the train station in Marseilles, I was immediately confronted by a sense of squalor. Squalor might be too harsh of word. Still, there was garbage and graffiti aplenty. I dismissed this as a consequence of being near a train station and set about finding my way to the hostel.
We know from past blogs that finding hostels—nay, finding myself in new cities—can pose quite a dilemma for me. I was going to be smart this time, though. Even though I did not have a map or travel guide for the area, I had downloaded several maps onto my computer. What’s more, I’d researched matters before arriving and I planned out my path to the hostel. I didn’t realize just what exactly this path to the hostel would entail. First I got onto the metro, which thankfully was near the train station. That was easy enough. Then I left the metro and found the bus I needed. Still, we’re doing well. I found the stop that I thought I needed and then departed the bus. Well, here’s where things begin to go wrong. You see, the hostel had been unclear in their direction on which bus stop you needed to get off on. I found myself in the midst of Marseilles (which I now realized was dirty beyond just the train station), not knowing where I was and with only my computer to guide me. Well, I didn’t very well want to stroll around with my computer out in my hands so after wandering around for about fifteen minutes (fifty-pound backpack in tow), I resigned to check my computer.
Only to come to the conclusion that I had no idea where the hell I was. I wandered more, trying to orient myself. At one point I thought I had a good idea (though later realized I was going in the complete opposite direction). Eventually, I found a bus stop for the bus I’d gotten off on and waited patiently. I studied the bus maps until finally locating the place I wanted to be. I’d gotten off two stops too late because of the hostel’s unclear directions. Awesome. The bus driver, however, was very helpful, drawing me a map of the area and showing me exactly where I needed to go after getting off on the correct stop. This set me down the right path and over an hour after arriving in Marseilles, I found the hostel. (I should mention that there’s only like, one hostel in Marseilles).
Despite my comments about the dirtiness of Marseilles, the city really is beautiful. It’s beautiful in the general sense. Resting over the blue waters of the Mediterranean, the city is surrounded by lofty cliffs. These give the city a very romantic feel, despite the filthiness at street level. What’s more, the driving in Marseilles is crazy. I don’t know how they don’t all just killed each other. There’s not actually any parking in the city apparently. Instead, there seems to be some kind of “liberal” parking philosophy, the gist being, park wherever the hell you want even if there’s not space. Entire streets were lined with cars, half of them parked over the sidewalk and the other half on the road level. Motorcycles whizzed by, passing into other lines even as traffic approached from that direction. I can’t imagine being a bus driver in the city. Trying to steer a bus through Marseilles seems on the level of trying to bobsled at ninety miles an hour while blindfolded with obstacles in the course.
I didn’t have a reservation at the hostel and got stuck in a twenty-bed dorm. Fortunately, only about seven or eight of the beds would be filled by the end of the night. I got settled in the hostel and took a much-needed shower before coming upstairs for a delicious (and more importantly, affordable) dinner. The hostel had its own bar and cook, though the facilities were nothing on the level of Kabul Hostel in Barcelona. I had pizza with fries and a salad, but they tried to shortchange me the salad. Well, I wasn’t going to have it! When you’re a backpacker, all food is precious, even that leaf of lettuce that sometimes comes on the side of dishes. The cook refused to make a salad (for whatever reason) and the waitress offered me a tomato. A tomato? I guess I was supposed to eat it like an apple or something. I like tomatoes, but not like that. Instead, I bartered for another serving of fries, which they begrudgingly accepted.
Before and during dinner, many people joined the table I was at. Soon we had a whole gaggle of people from all over (and who, thankfully, all spoke English!) Three Aussie guys—Taz, Chaz, and—another, I forget his name. Two Irish girls—ah damn, there names are gone too. Two Scottish girls, Alison and Michelle. (You can guess by my spotty memory who I spent most of the night talking to), a Belgium girl, Katie, and then another American, Pete. So we had a pretty even distribution among the most of the major English speaking countries. As for England, meh.
I won’t get into each person’s travels (this blog is long enough already), but eating together quickly evolved into going to the beach at night and drinking wine. This, it would turn out, was one of my best nights since arriving in Europe. Everyone was totally cool and each person had their own respective bottle of wine. One of the Aussies and I, even accidentally created our own toast, which would become to recurring toast to anything funny or fantastic for the rest of the night. This is probably one of those things where “you had to be there,” but the toast was:
To Euro. Or more aptly, “Two Euro.” It began with him handing me a bottle of wine. With another bottle in his hand, he said, “Two Euro.” I looked at him funny and was like, “what?” He repeated it, still to my confusion. I was confused because I had the impression he was saying “To Euro” as in like “To Europe!” The truth was that the bottle of wine had cost two euros and he just wanted me to pay him back for it. When I explained my confusion, everyone thought it was great and soon it caught on. I’m sure the other people on the beach were wondering why everything twenty or thirty minutes we would chime together, “To Euro!”
We told jokes and shared travel stories. Eventually we played a game called “Never Have I Ever.” This great thing about playing this game with strangers (who are drinking) is that they will either not remember what you say or else you’ll never see them again. The idea of the game is that someone says something they’ve never done and if you’ve done it, you drink. Over the next hour, I learned much more about some of the people than I ever would have wanted to ☺ Then we had the brilliant idea to go swimming. Such brilliant ideas come when you’re on the beach, intoxicated, under an almost full moon, and in the Mediterranean.
The water was warm, the night was not. Splashing and the throwing around of girls commenced until everyone was in the water and thoroughly soaked. It was fantastic. The only tragedy was that if we weren’t back to the hostel by 1AM, the hostel would shut us out. And no one really wanted that (except maybe Katie, she’d brought her sleeping bag down to the beach). Begrudgingly we returned to the hostel, but the festivities did not end there. We stayed outside on the patio area for another three hours (still drinking wine) until eventually the numbers diminished and everyone retreated to their beds to sleep soundly and wake up dreadfully early.
Tags: Barcelona, beach, Europe, France, Marseilles, Spain, Travel
gregbilsland
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