And Then…

The next morning we were up and on our way to the train station to buy our seat reservations for all of the trains we would be taking in Spain. We waited in line for almost an hour, falling back on our standard time-killing games: 20 questions and the Alphabet game where you name a category and then try to come up withsome thing for every letter. Ex.: Songs; All My Life, Baby Got Back, Can’t Touch This…you get the idea). When we finally got up to the ticket window the guy wouldn’t sell us the seat reservations because wedidn’t have our rail passes with us. Grr! (The most annoying part was that when we went back the next day with our rail passes the guy didn’t even ask to see them! Double grr!) Moving on. We walked over to the zoo, which is known for its albino gorilla. But it was 15 euro to get in (that seems ridiculous, right??) So we contented ourselves with looking at postcards of the albino gorilla instead. There is a really nice park right in front of the zoo so we walked around a bit and found a bench to sit and have lunch. We were sitting on the bench in this order: me, Allison then Megan. Just as we were finishing our super-awesome lunch of PB&J a guy rode past us on his bike and stopped just past the bench and asked me something in mumbled Spanish/Catalan. We were all turned looking at him trying to figure out what he wanted when all of the sudden I heard Megan yell “No, no, no, no F**K! No,no, no, no!” I turned to see two guys walking away with her bag and her chasing them. As soon as she dropped the F-bomb the guys just gently set her bag down and walked off. The guy on the bike was gone too. The scary part was the guys with the bag were about 3 steps away form their bikes…and if they had gotten on there would have been nothing we could do. Luckily, Meg got her bag back and everything was still in it and safe. We heard a few other stories of people almost getting pick pocketed…but if you show any resistance they seem to just drop it. I guess there is another, easier, target just around the corner. It isn’t worth it to them to possibly get caught. But our hearts were certainly in our throats,I can tell you that. And anytime for the rest of the trip someone would come up and talk to us we all 3 instinctively held our bags closer. After a lot of freaking out and calming down we made our way over the Picasso museum. The line was about 40 minutes…nothing compared to our saga 3 1/2 hours inline at the Vatican. I found the museum interesting. I was surprised by how much ‘regular’ artwork Picasso created. I knew that he was a very talented realistic artist along with his more known abstract style…but that definitive style was really a rather short period at the end of his life/career. We were also a bit shocked by one room showcasing Picasso’s apparent ‘Porn Period.’ I am not kidding, these drawings were completely inappropriate and…just…dirty. Next on the agenda was to swing by and see the Cathedral. As we rounded the corner we saw, not the cathedral, but stories of scaffolding and advertising banners hanging from them. Apparently the church is under construction…so we didn’t really get to see it. (Which is probably ok since I am still feeling a bit churched-out). As we continued our walk back to our hostel we ran across a HUGE outdoor market. There was every kind of fruit, fish, candy, vegetable, cheese etc. that you would imagine. We stocked up on some fruit and veggies and then ran back to the hostel to drop it off before heading to our… Spanish cooking class. It wasn’t exactly what I expected (it was more of a demonstration than a class). But it was neat to get some history on Spanish food and learn some tips. We made Sangria, Tapas, Paella and Gazpacho. Good stuff. Then we met up with our Portuguese-Barcelona friends from our first night in town and went to a couple of places to hear live music. We heard some really amazing singers and again loved their choices of American music to play “Ride Around Sally.” “Johnny Be Good,” “We Didn’t Start The Fire.” Last day in Barcelona. We planned to get up early and see a bunch of stuff. But after breakfast we all admitted we felt like crap (we just couldn’t shake the colds/coughs) so we went back to bed for a few hours. Then we got up, had lunch, did some laundry…and left the hostel around 4pm. (You can’t be a super-tourist everyday.) First stop, La Sagrada Familia. A massive church tha thas been under construction since 1882 and probably will be for several hundred more years. It is a pretty impressive sight. It’s really cool to walk through the church and see the construction work that is still going on. I feel like most of the amazing churches we saw were finished hundreds of years ago. It was neat to see that there are people who still care enough about this to be building one now… Then to Parc Guell, a famous Barcelona park with these awesome benches designed by Gaudi. As we were getting ready to leave the park we saw our second randomly-walking-around-naked guy. He was just hanging out(excuse the pun) by the staircase…sort of lurking really…he was a bit creepy. Then it was dessert and dinner (just the way Grandpa taught me) and to bed because we had an early morning. The next morning we were up and out of the hostel by 6am. We took the metro to the train station and then the 4-hour train to Madrid. And I think that’s where I’ll end things for now. Still to come: Madrid, Malaga, Barcelona again, Venice, Munich…and back to the Borgo. We’ll get caught up soon. Blessings, KNL