Experience The Adventure

Heading to Spain, from Lauterbrunen via France on Busabout. 2 days later….

Went out in Nice, those bars were rather small. Went to Wayne bar, it was too busy, so went next door. There are a lot of Canadians out now, they´re everywhere. Next day headed out on busabout again.

BARCELONA

Went to center point hostel, and they were really helpful with giving people maps, schedules and everything.

-the beach, fyi man made
-university
-picasso museum, neat -not the hugest fan
-city hall / state gov building, i want to see a protest
-Franko’s castle on Montjuic, great views
-Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia: eccentric, strange
-La Ramblas and the street performers: fruit lady, garbage can skunk, ?box, tree man, fighters, dancers, etc
-The market just off La Ramblas. It was really good for fruit bowls.

I met a few American girls on the Fat Tire bike tours and they were really nice. The tour was really good, 7pm and there was only 4 of us. Our guide was a little crazy, and I did have to stop for a break in traffic at some red lights he went right through. The bike tour covered:

-Barri Gotic
-arch de triump
-Parc de la Ciutadella
-Gaudí’s famous Sagrada Familia
-Port Vell and the
-Barceloneta beach and a stopover for sangia

Interesting Facts
Barcelona is the capital of the Autonomous Region of Catalunya and Catalan is the national language. It was first settled by the Romans in 15 B.C. and was later ruled by the Visigoths, the Moors and the Franks. It is now the industrial center of Spain and is one of its most popular cities for tourism. It was host for the Universal Exhibition of 1888 and the Summer Olympics of 1992. Catalunya has a population of over 6 million people, of which almost 4 million are in Barcelona.

On the bike tour, we had some lady come and ask for money while we were on tanning chairs sipping Sangria. She did a little dance, begged a lot, tried to take all the drinks. Then did some more dancing, some slow weird dance with her arms flailing all around her, while she was making clicking sounds with her mouth. When we would not give her anything, she spit on the beach, the walk away and went boohooohooo. Made the gesture with her hands and eyes, boohooohooo. Crazy lady. I never saw the naked tatoo guy who walks around the city, or his mini twin, or the crazy polish dancer. Apparently Barcelona can make its own laws, and its legal to walk around naked.

Afterwards, we went out for Gelato, sooo much gelato that day, and coffee, then we all wandered around for a while. We were in the central area, and some local lady on a bike stoped and asked, what are you looking for? It could not be another repeat of Greece, she was asking the girls. Stamps. Yes, looking for stamps at 1am, hmm. She said, find them tomorrow, get out of this street. It really didn´t look that bad. On the way back we found some odd “contemporary art”, heads, bodies and other metal sculptures on a walkway closer to our hostels.

The next day I had to change hostels and went to Center Ramblas just off La Ramblas which is the main strip in the city. I had a shower back at the hostel, and came back where a scantily clad girl was laying. I said “You´re 3 minutes late.” Apparently, she doesn´t come late. And she wasn´t the cuddling type. So we had to get things sorted. Apparently they place 4 girls and myself in a 4 bedded girls dorm, so they moved the new girl to the mixed dorm and I stayed there. Makes sense right? The other girls, 2 from Vancouver and one Irish sure weren´t shy. They came back right after me at night, and had no problems changing right there. I was looking away trying to give them some privacy, and they just laughed.

In the evening I met Tessa and Ellie, two sisters from the bike tour, and we went to go see a flamenko show. It was really neat. Hard to describe, the closest and easiest it to read what the crazy lady above was doing. Every time I thought of the crazy lady dance during the show, it almost made me laugh. We stopped for some Tapas at a nearby restaurant afterwards. They were really good, sausages, potato & meat balls, and potato & meat sticks. Most Tapas seem to be sea food, or really just any kind of snack. There were tapas of, get this: a bag of potato chips. Whats wrong with these people? potato chips?

On to Valencia!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 28th, 2007 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.