Catching up on the past week in Spain

I've been a little back-logged with my blogging...busy having too much fun. But, I've finally caught up!

August 8, 2009

Up at 6 am again today…for some reason I am having the worst time getting over the jet lag! I’m either sleeping til 4 pm or up at the wee hours of the morning. Godd thing I don’t really have anywhere to be.

Today was a pretty productive and eventful touristy day. We saw the Gaudi house, which was very cool. It’s craz how different Gaudi’s style and architecture is to everything else in the city.

After the Gaudi house and a horrible tapas lunch, we headed into La Rambla to check out all the shopping Barcelona has to offer. The actual street, Las Ramblas is like Fisherman’s Wharf on crack, I would NOT suggest going there. However there are some amazing side streets that have really funky shops and art galleries. My favorite was Carrer d’Avinyo. Unfortunatey, we got there during siesta as everything was closing but it was still fun to window shop and wind through the ancient streets.

We decided to join the Spaniards in siesta-ing and head down to the beach for a snooze. It was everything but relaxing…great people watching, lively with kids frolicking and people playing live music and futbol. And then there’s the Indian dudes selling AGUA, COLA, FANTA, CERVEZA, BEER? (And probably any and all illegal drugs you can imagine). They walk by every ten seconds yelling over and over, and in the ten seconds there not in your ear you have the miniature Thai ladies trying to massage you. All in all, it’s an eclectic experience. I think I’m going to have to find out where the locals go to sun bathe and relax…

We headed back to El Born for dinner at UDON, a Japanese noodle bar. For some reason we’ve been eating a lot of Japanese food on this trip. I think it’s a safe bet and the highest probability of having vegetables on the plate!! After dinner we headed back to Crepes el Born to meet up with our new friends, Rodrigo and Eduardo (Eduardo is the cute one who’s name we didn’t get the fist time). We sat at the bar drinking Estrella and eating crepes... I mean really, does life get any better? Rodrigo ended up not charging us (it’s definitely a nice perk having bartender friends) so, we promised to take him out for drinks and a day at the beach next week, I’m excited because he knows where all the secret non-touristy beaches are!!

We’re home early tonight (1 am). Have to be up early for a flight to Bilbao in the morning.

August 9 – 13, 2009: Bilbao y San Sebastian

August 9, 2009

My adventure to the Basque country began with a 6 am wake up call to catch a 9 am flight…Kara and I have become pretty confident with the Barcelona public transportation system and felt that we could walk through the city with all of our bags, find the train station (by the way, it’s not the same as the metro station but they’re both called “Passeig de Gracia Station”) and just hop on a train to the airport- simple, or so we thought…Have I mentioned that it’s hot in Barcelona? Even at 7 am, it’s excruciatingly hot and humid! By the time we get down to the Passeig de Gracia station (after dragging all of our bags down the stairs) we are both dripping with sweat and out of breathe.

Bree: “Necesitamos dos billetes al aeropeurto”
Gate Agent: blank stare
Bree: “El tren para el aeropuerto?”
Gate Agent: You need the other Passeig de Gracia station up the street about 5 blocks, abierto!

At this point, it’s already 7 am (our desired destination time to get to the airport on time for our flight) so we have to book it up the street to the other stations. We see cabs along the way but, decide that we can do it, we’ve already suffered this far. We make it to the other station with a few minutes to spare before the train departs. However, our train number is #1 and our platform number is #2…somehow we screw this up and end up on platform #1. A few minutes before the train comes I realize that everone else on the other side of the tracks has baggage and there’s no-one waiting on our side. Back up the stairs, back down the stairs, finally on the train. I think this is why I don’t take public transportation in real life…it’s way too stressful!

We actually made it on the flight on time and had a less than D list celebrity sighting on our flight…One of the guys from Playing for Change was sitting near us. He’s a reggae performer from Amsterdam and somehow I recognized him from having seen him in Austin at SXSW, random.

Finally in Bilbao. It is so beautiful and the weather is amazing!!! It’s only about 65 degrees – really nice change from Barcelona. I was extremely shocked by everything in Bilbao. I only made plans to spend a day there because I didn’t expect much and I actually loved it. There is an aura about the city that is extremely peaceful and the people are so friendly. Unfortunately, we were really only there for the day on Sunday and everything is closed but, it was still nice to walk around and take in the quaint views of the city. The highlight of the day was the Guggenheim (which was open thankfully). Kara’s favorite part was the perrito that is in front of the building- It’s this GIANT dog made out of flowers which I found personally kinda creepy but, for some reason she was obsessed with it.

The Guggenheim is a very impressive building. I think what’s most impressive about it is the backdrop it’s set in…It’s an ultra-modern building set in an old, perfectly manicured, Basque town. I really liked all of the exhibits as well. Everything was larger than life art installations. The two main exhibits were Richard Serra’s “Matter of Time” and all of Cai Guo Qiang’s permant works.

Kara and I ventured up to the top of the hill overlooking Bilbao for a traditional Basque dinner. Partly because it was the only thing open and partly because we were trying to be adventurous and take in all of the local culture. The dinner itself we pretty good- we got a white bean stew and a whole local fish that they de-boned for us at the table, yummy! What was disturbing about this restaurant was the décor, there was a leg of lamb sitting on the table behind us (and I’m pretty sure they actually cut the meat from there if you order lamb) and it was as if they had just cut if off the lamb outside with fur and hoof still in tact. I mean, I guess you know it’s fresh but, I found it quite odd…Needless to say, we didn’t order the lamb.

August 10, 2009

I had the BEST night’s sleep I think I’ve ever had in my entire life last night. Air conditioning is my friend.

Kara and I decided to treat ourselves to sleeping in, massages and a little shopping in Bilbao before taking off to San Sebastian. Again, I can’t say enough good things about Bilbao. It is just so quaint! Great shopping, nice people just a very friendly place to be. After a full day of tooling around, we were pretty ready to get to the beach though! An easy 1 hour bus ride and we arrived in San Sebastian.

San Sebastian is quite possibly to most idyllic town I’ve ever set foot in. All of the beautiful pictures and post cards do not do it justice! It actually reminds me a lot of Santa Barbara and maybe I have such warm and fuzzy feelings because of that, I don’t know. Either way, all I know is that I definitely want to go back there and quite possibly spend the rest of my life there!

We happened to be in San Sebastian during La Semana Grande which is like Fiesta (in Santa Barbara) on crack! The city was completely packed with tourists and locals spilling out into the streets to watch the nightly fireworks and enjoy all of the street festivities! Kara and I started our festivities with dinner and a bottle of Sauvingnon Blanc on the beach at a Fusion restaurant (shocker). After dinner, we just decided to meander through Old Town and see what sort of trouble we could stumble upon. It wasn’t diffucult considering Old Town is probably a 1 mile square of cobble-stone streets and there were probably 100,000 + people out and about. We walked right in to a bar called Mendaur which turns out to be the backpackers party bar. We immediately made friends with a group of Australian surf instructors who live in San Seb and a few Ciprianna’s later it was magically 4 am! The bars stay open until 4:30 during La Semana Grande but, don’t worry if you’re not done with your beer they’ll give you a to go cup for the walk home, brilliant!

August 11, 2009

Due to the to go beer cups at 4 am, we were pretty worthless all day today. We actually only got out of bed once and that was to crawl down the street to find a kebab shop.

We finally left the hotel room around 9 pm and out of half laziness and half not wanting to be adventurous with our food choices given our current state, we opted to go back to Txi Tao (the restaurant from the night before). I think this was our 4th Asian meal in 7 days here in Spain, still it was delicious!

Like clockwork (or déjà vu) the fireworks started going off just as we exited the restaurant. We decided to venture to the other side of the river after dinner but, ultimately ended up back in old town…it’s hard to resist when the fiesta is going on and the crowd is pulling you in.

We ended up at a different bar on the same street as Mendaur. After being harassed by random locals asking Kara, “where did you buy your eyes?” we turned to our new Aussie friends who bailed us out and ended up being a really fun group of guys to hang out with. The trade off was that we would go to their beach the next day to play volleyball.

August 12, 2009

Finally, a full day of relaxing on the beach! We spent the morning at Playa La Concha, the main beach in San Sebastian. It was pretty uneventful but, so strikingly beautiful and relaxing. We headed over to Playa de Zurriola in the afternoon to meet up with the Aussies and try to play some volleyball. Unfortunately, us travelers didn’t think this through as no on was prepared with a net or a ball so, we opted for some swimming and body surfing instead. Playa de Zurriola is a great beach with much better waves and more lively people than La Concha…it was a great day!

The Aussie’s invited us to join them for some free “pie-ella” but, we decided that free paella was not the authentic Spanish meal we were looking for for our last night in San Sebastian. Kara and I were on a quest to find the best and most authentic pinxtos we could. Mission accomplished. The bummer is that the pinxtos bar was overflowing with locals and nobody spoke a word of English so, we were too intimated to try and compete. The good news is that they had a sit down restaurant adjacent to the tapas bar…it wasn’t quite as thrilling but, we had a very good meal nonetheless starting with Iberios mixtos (which we thought were an assortment of tapas), wrong! Literally the translation is an assortment of Iberian products and what that is is a HUGE plate of raw meat…kind of like a salami and prosciutto platter topped with foie gras. It would have been an Atkins dieter’s dream meal! We topped it off with a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine, oops!

The plan was to take it easy after dinner since we had to get up the next day to head back to Barcelona. An “easy” night in San Sebastian during La Semana Grande means no hard liquor but, still staying out until 4 am. It actually turned out to be a very amusing evening. After dinner we stumbled upon the Plaza de la Constitucion where there were live Basque bands and performers, tons of singing dancing and cava! I wish I had known the words to any of the songs or how to dance along but, it was really fun just to be a spectator. It’s amazing how the Spaniards carry on with their lives, kids or no kids…I mean, there were families with toddlers out at 2 am carrying on…the Spaniards really do have a passion for life that’s contagious!

August 13, 2009

Managed to get up pretty early this morning to head out despite last night’s festivities. Kara and I were on a quest for some real breakfast. We sat down at a smoky local joint and waited for about 15 minutes only to be ignored. Can’t a girl just get some coffee??? We finally decided that we should just head to McDonalds which was on the way to the Europcar office anyway…we were keeping our fingers crossed for breakfast after 11 am. No such luck but, I tell you A quarto libre con papas is pretty damn close to and egg Mcmuffin! It’s funny because I find myself doing a lot of things here I would never do at home like taking public transportation and eating fast food…it’s not so bad.

After the Micky D’s feast we trekked over the river to Europcar. Good thing we got there right before siesta time. They handed us over the keys and we were on our way to Barcelona (or so we thought). We get in to the car and Kara says to me, “you know it’s stick right?” Hmmmm I hadn’t really expected this but, how hard could it be?? I did drive Dana’s Hyundai in college and only stalled a few times. 20 attempts to get out of the parking space and about 5 stalls later, I realized there was no way we were going to make it out of the Europcar parking, much less back to Barcelona. So, we turned the car in and quickly began devising plan B and C. If Kara didn’t have a flight on Sunday morning, we’d be in a motor-home with the Aussie’s headed down the coast on a surfing trip but, alas we opted for the more predictable route of hopping on the 4 pm train back to Barcelona.

August 14, 2009

Back in Barcelona. It has certainly been an adventure having Kara here with me for the past week and a half!! But, I’m actually getting excited about having a little routine again and starting class on Monday.

We had a pretty relaxing day. Just hung out at the beach all day and then had dinner in Le’Eixample (my neighborhood here). We’re now back at the apartment enjoying our last night in the sauna…I’m really excited to move to the new place with a/c tomorrow!!!

I can’t believe the adventure in Spain has only just begun…My next tasks, besides learning Spanish:

1. Learn how to use my fancy camera
2. Take more pictures
3. Learn how to update the blog with pictures