off again

lightning round

OK, so, a quick recap. A few days ago I flew with my mom from Marrakesh to Madrid, where she got on a flight back home and I caught one to Tel Aviv. Before splitting up, though, we had a day in Madrid, went downtown, found a veggie restaurant and then wandered the streets. We accidently ran into a big anti-Israel demonstration there, which was more upsetting to me than I expected. More and more as this trip has gone on I feel like I can't think about anything but what's been going on in Israel and Gaza - and that's before I got here. Anyway. 

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The flights all went fine, blah blah. Because of the cease-fire I was able to go stay with my aunt and uncle on the kibbutz for a few days. It's in the Negev within rocket range so it was not always clear that that would be possible, and I feel very lucky that it was...since I flew in the morning after the cease fire people keep saying "couldn't you have come three weeks ago?"

The kibbutz is so small, peaceful and quiet. I wasn't there when there were rocket alarms and everyone had to go run to their safe room, of course. It's strange to be in a place that's in some ways so much calmer than anywhere else I've been yet and in other ways a thousand times more tense. It's great to be staying with family and real people again instead of bouncing from one rented bed to another. But it's also very hard to be here right now. Or maybe ever, I don't know. This is my first trip to Israel as an adult, and I had no idea how I would feel being here or how I would see it. I still don't know - I have been so emotional but I can't even interpret my own reactions.

The next day, after a nice tour of the kibbutz and its factory, my aunt Julia drove me all around on a zionist negev tour. First stop Revivim, one of the first kibbutzim in the Negev, which has the original settlement from the 1940s preserved and set up so you can tour it from its original stage as an agricultural research station, first basically just a cave, then some shacks and trenches and a stone lookout tower.

Posters - what's inside a grenade, and how to throw one.

This cave was where the original settlers lived, then became a makeshift hospital.

In case guns in caves don't do it for you, this place also has 2 airplanes and some creepy statues with clothes falling off.

To think that anyone came to this place and thought it was a good spot for agricultural experiments is completely insane in the first place - and then it worked??

After that we saw Ben Gurion's desert home (simple) and panoramic desert lookout (gorgeous.)

The final stop on the tour was this amazing house belonging to Julia's friend Tal and her family. Tal's husband Rodney is an architect and he designed and built this place completely with his own two hands out of found materials from the local area. I've never seen a house like it. It's built out in the middle of nowhere between two nature reserves, and they have wireless internet, but they don't have running water.

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After that I came back to Tel Aviv and have been hanging out with a few of my many lovely cousins.

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And, you know. Walking around downtown Tel Aviv. Watching the inaugeration. Talking about politics and life stuff. Watching the speech again. Sitting around by the beach some more, soaking up the sun and half-assedly trying to take pictures and think of how to blog this as a regular travel destination which is not what it feels like at all.

I don't want to get political here and I don't know if I could even organize my thoughts enough to do so if I tried, anyway, but the war and everything else has really been consuming my mind and making it hard for me to think of what I can write instead. I guess all I can say right now is that it seems different from here than it does on TV. And I'm learning a lot, and I'm glad that I'm here. 

migrating south for the hell of it

This will have to be a superquick post as I'm in an internet place which is about to close - this morning was the last in Sevilla, took a whirlwind tour through the Real Alcazar and the Cathedral - then on to the bus station to hop an afternoon bus to Tarifa, where we're getting the ferry to Tangier tomorrow morning.

Tarifa is a very small, mostly closed, fairly sketchy little beach town with lots of dreadlocked hippies here to do drugs and windsurf. Wind and ferries seem to be the only businesses around - there are also wind farms all around the countryside. This is also the closest point of Spain to Africa, and it is so, so, so close. The other shore and mountains look so nearby that you could swim it - it's a 35 minute ferry ride so I know this is a little deceiving, but seriously. It's all misty mountains and small little twinkling lights which look like a little town across the strait - actually Tangier, which is supposed to be a total pit of a city. I can see Russia Africa from my house hostal!

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Tomorrow the plan is to take the morning ferry across and then a five hour train to Fez. I will try my best to get internet tomorrow night but I have really no clue how easy or hard it will be in Morocco.

I don't even have time to upload most of my pictures right now, which blows. So here you get a random collection of the ones that uploaded first.

"save" the world, etc.

Sevilla has a ton of recycling bins which are all painted and decorated differently, obviously some kind of city project like the painted cows on the street or globes in Chicago - but so much better because these are actually useful things for people to throw their plastic in, not just decorative. I approve.

In our wanderings, my mom and I ran into this velomobile parked on the street. I took some pictures and then its inventor, Ricardo, who was hanging out nearby, came over to open it up and show us how it works. It's basically a reclining bicycle with a car type body around it - you pedal to push it forward but it also has a rechargeable battery for headlights and stuff. He says it goes up to 60 km/hour and he rides it all around the streets of the city...

Since pretty much everything was closed, after having coffee we went to walk around the big park which is left over from an exhibition Sevilla put on in the 20's.

One of the buildings has a bunch of tiled maps of Spain, including one of Sevilla, which shows something I think is very weird. Look at the compass - all of the city maps for this place are turned 90 degrees so that North is on the left side instead of the top. So confusing and bizarre! I am really offended by this for some reason. It's hard enough for me to find my way around with my crappy sense of direction without people changing which direction North is. Not fair.

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Tomorrow we're going to spend the morning here in Sevilla, then head to Tarifa, on the coast, in order to catch the ferry to Morocco on Thursday morning. I wish I had more time for southern Spain, but still - CANNOT WAIT.

recap time

Wow, I finally got a computer which is working right and enough time to make a real post, and there's so much to catch up on. (Although I'm still having trouble figuring out how to type an apostrophe without copying and pasting.)

Item One: Went to Sintra. This is the only picture which was still on my camera when it came back from the dead:

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Sintra...land of blurry cars and MYSTERY. I think I'll leave it there.

Item Two: Natan left, I spent another day walking around Lisbon by myself in the rain. However, this time I was prepared. I had Natan's umbrella which he very nicely left for me, I rolled my jeans up so they wouldn't touch the ground and soak up all the puddles, and I wore flip flops instead of my soggy old shoes and socks.

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This worked perfectly in the sense of ending the day with dry clothes for once, but it was a little hard on my poor cold feet.

Item Three: My mom flew in and met me in Lisbon! She was luggage free due to airline issues, as usual, but otherwise well.We went down the waterfront and then to some parks and things, waiting for our night bus to Sevilla.

Some people scratched graffitti all over this cactus.

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After sun set we went and looked at old trams and elevators and things...

Then it was time for the bus.

Item Four: Night bus to Sevilla. Dudes this bus is RIDIC. First, they take away your food. Then, they were playing a horrible old Marlon Brando movie dubbed into Spanish really loud until midnight so you couldn´t sleep. And at midnight, they pull over at this random rest stop and the bus driver makes everyone get out for half an hour and sit in the rest stop. The only explanation either of us could think of is that this is a total scam to make you buy dinner there. Anyway eventually they let us back on and we dozed off for a bit until getting into Sevilla at the pitch-black, everything-is-closed-and-there-are-no-taxis-or-local-buses hour of 4:55 am. Anyway, we stumbled through the streets half-awake to our hotel for tonight, where the kindly front desk guy let us doze off again on some couches in the lobby until it was actually morning...

 Item Five: The sun came up and hey, we´re in Sevilla!

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It is very orangey and nice and full of gift shops that sell fans. It is also, seriously, closed down for today AND tomorrow because Christmas is apparently still going on. Give me a break, how can every single freaking day be a holiday? Don´t people here ever go to work? Lazy asses! By the way, I want a job in Spain.

And now I think I shall go back to the hotel and zzzzzzzz out while my mom frantically calls around trying to find her lost luggage and get it forwarded here.

the four food groups

OK everyone, guess what I did today! If you guessed "Got to a new city then wandered around doing nothing in particular," then you are catching on to this blog. Spoiler alert: this is pretty much all I'm going to be doing for the next month too.

Last night I was in a shitty mood because I didn't have a real dinner and was tired of all other human beings and out of money and stuck at a train station waiting for an overnight train which I knew was going to make for an uncomfortable night. To console myself I literally spent my last euro on a bag of spaghetti-themed gummies.

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This may not have been making good choices.

Well, anyway, the many trains thing came out fine and Natan and I arrived, tired and lost but not too miserable in rainy Porto this afternoon. After a shower, change of clothes and some CNN-watching I went out to explore. Porto is small, dudes. It's really ridiculously pretty, but most everything is closed today (on Saturday afternoon right after Christmas??) and a lot of places look boarded up and closed for good. Compared to Madrid it's so quiet and tiny and empty. That's not a bad thing. And like I said, seriously ridiculously pretty all around.

If you don't believe me, below is the inside of the mall. It's like disneyworld.

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I went into this mall because my hands were super dry and I wanted to see if I could find a store with lotion samples I could steal. Success. However, weirdly, the lotion I used is scented with hemp. So now my hands are not dry, but they do smell strongly of weed. I guess that's OK?

There are soooo many goodlooking pastries around here that I am paralyzed with indecision every time I see a shop window and end up not getting any. Pics to come. For lunch I had a tuna sandwich, one of my main sources of nutrition so far on this trip. 90% of the restaurants/cafe/snack bars around here have only one non-ham-based item on the menu, if any, so for almost every meal so far I end up eating either potatos, falafel, or a tuna sandwich. Potatos...falafel...tuna sandwich. Repeat times a million. And now, spaghetti gummies. It's a miracle I don't have scurvy yet. (Just kidding, I also eat fruit from the markets, I'm not going to die of malnutrition.)

Back to what I mentioned earlier about CNN watching for a second. I watched about an hour of coverage of what's going on today in Gaza, which was mostly the same tape on loop of people being carried to hospitals and rockets in the distance, constant repetition of the death count and statements from both sides explaining how they had no choice about their actions. This is so insanely fucking depressing that it's hard for me to write a lighthearted blog post about the weirdness of traveling today, but anyway, I did my best. Everyone in Israel please keep safe.

ciao for now

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Another cold but gorgeous day in Madrid. I went to the botanical gardens, which are huge but currently sad, brown, and dead, in order to see the exhibit which is up there about medieval engineering. VERY cool, tons of models of medieval ships and bridges and aqueducts and water wheels and all kinds of stuff. Some of them move and work. Also highly informative how-to videos for things like casting a bell or whatever other medieval-style work you plan on doing in your spare time.

Not to mention a giant dreidel!

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So after that Natan and I stood freezing our asses off in line for half an hour to get into the Prado. (It later turned out that the line was actually just for the special exhibit and to see the permanent collection we could have walked right in. I don't want to talk about it.) Luckily there was entertainment in line in the form of two little girls playing with jump ropes. One of them was doing OK. The other, over the course of HALF AN HOUR, only managed to even get the rope past her head about one time in ten, and actually jumped over it exactly three times. Hey you guys, I finally found the one person on earth less physically coordinated than I am! Awww, hang in there, cute little girl who sucks at jump rope.

The museum itself was great, more manageable than I thought it might be, and I was very impressed with these super detailed little gallery guide books they were selling, with tons of color painting reproductions, for only one euro apiece. I got four of them to read later - Bosch, Velasquez and two on Goya. These will come in handy tonight because I'm about to embark on a 14-hour-ish train journey to Porto, and I have nothing else to read.

In fact, I didn't bring a single book on this trip with me at all.

Now, OK. As many of you know I am obsessed with books and in a good week will read one or two a day. But at the end of my frenzied packing and getting ready for this trip, I was basically incapable of making even simple decisions, like which books to take. So I didn't bring any. (SMART.) I've been stealing Natan's but now his stash is running low too. Uh oh...approaching critical levels of no reading material! Emergency!!!!!

Next post will be from Portugal, unless of course everything goes terribly wrong.

:)

All the museums and and big stores are closed today, so I thought it would be a good chance to walk around the parks and paseos and, you know, enjoy the great outdoors or somethng. It's a perfect winter day here - cold but sunny and beautiful. A lot of people are still around everywhere, mostly couples and families with little kids. The first park area I went too felt too crowded for me to really enjoy. Also I realized that I desperately needed a cup of coffee.

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So after walking around a bit, I went back to the main streets in search of a Starbucks. Let me explain: I realize that looking for a Starbucks in Spain is almost the epitome of American lameness (second only to looking for a McDonalds for dinner) but I swear I have a good reason. All this traveling has left me so peopled-out and exhausted. I didn't remotely want to sit in a smoky little cafe and drink coffee, or at an outdoor table in a crowded plaza. I wanted to be alone with my coffee and my book and a park bench out of sight or sound of any other human beings. I need to be ALONE sometimes, dammit!

Anyway...eventually (and it took an hour or two) I managed to fulfill my quest.

yessssss.

OK so after I got some of that antisociality out of my system, I did some more wandering in parks and streets, until I walked into this internet cafe just now. It's not a day that really lends itself to good blogging stories. I talked to no one except a barista, I did nothing but walk and read and take some pictures. It was wonderful, though. An ideal vacation day.

It's funny because Madrid, of all of the places I'm going on this trip, was a total afterthought. I originally really wanted to travel farther North in Spain from Barcelona, but ended up here instead because of the realities of limited time and inconvenient train routes. I love it, though. I don't know how much of this has to do with the place fitting my mood or just being the kind of place I like - or whether it has to do with coming here a week into the trip, when I'm in the perfect moment of being used to traveling but not yet tired of it. In any case I'm feeling happier and more comfortable here than I have anywhere yet, and sorry that tomorrow is my last day here, at least on this leg of the trip. But no worries, I'll be back.

the day before christmas

Wandering around Madrid today it's seemed less like a terrifying shopping day and more like a Halloween party. There are masks and wigs for sale everywhere, and tons of people (adults and kids) are wearing them. People in Mickey Mouse and Spiderman costumes are everywhere handing out balloon swords. A small child with a balloon sword actually stabbed me in the stomach as I walked past him - so watch out, the little ones can be vicious. There's a lot of music playing, and a ton of street performers.

On top of the characters I recognized (Yoda, drag queen, human statue) there were some weirder ones. Like this guy with cat face paint who sat in a garbage can u ntil someone put money in his hat, then opened the garbage can, screamed, and shook the hand of a small child. Everyone in the crowd cracked up every time. Bizarre/adorable.

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Tonight Natan and I FINALLY managed to get together all of the necessary ingredients to celebrate The Chanukah. In fact we celebrated the first four nights all at once (and said the prayer four times and everything.)

Happy twenty-fourth day of December, everybody.

let's try this again

So I finally figured out where all the tourists are: Toledo! We got off the train and immediately everyone whips out their cameras and starts taking snaps of the train station (above.) Granted the train station was awesome, it was still very funny.

It turns out that Toledo was a great place to go because it has lots of two of my favorite things, Visigoths and archbishop's capes. (I did not know either of these were my favorite things before yesterday.) Unfortunately it also has lots of two of my least favorite things, swastikas and Santa Claus. Oh well, you win some you lose some.

So the first place we went was the two still existing ex-synagogues from when Jews used to live here in ye olden days along with Christians and Muslims. Both are museums now. (In the pictures above, you can see a model of old Toledo with the Jewish Quarter buildings.) This is clearly a big stop on the Israeli tour of Spain because we ran into tons of them yesterday. Actually, the synagogues were very cool. Of course going into them was the only time except for airports & train stations that I've had to go through serious security here, but, well, yeah. There were several gift shops selling tchachkes for all three religions mixed together, kind of like monotheism disneyworld style or something. OK, but seriously - there were swastikas spray painted everywhere which kind of diminished whatever heartwarming quality they might have been going for. I should mention that every time I've been outside Barcelona or Madrid on this trip I've seen a ton of swastika graffitti but Toledo was the worst. Lovely.

Then naturally it was time to go into some of the many, many, many churches around. First was the 13th century church which contained the museum of Visigoth culture, which I wasn't able to take pictures of. It was awesome though. They had a bible written in Visigoth! And shit tons of belt buckles. Visigoths heart Jesus and belt buckles.

Then I had some coffee and marzipan cake.

Next on the tour was the main cathedral, which contains a huge gold thing which apparently is officially called a "monstrosity" although I would really call the whole thing a monstrosity, or maybe an insane baroque nightmare. This place was seriously bananas to the point of obscenity. But very interesting. The best thing they had, though, was a room full of the hats & capes worn by archbishops of the cathedral dating back to the 1400s - seventy of them, like six hundred years old. And they were in PERFECT shape. All totally embroidered in gold and beaded like crazy. But just perfect condition...I couldn't believe it. I was thinking about how at the museum I was looking at these dresses which were just a hundred years old or so - and high quality, and cared for, and they're just disintegrating and absolutely shredding to bits. 

I was not supposed to take pics in the cathedral at all but I was sadly unable to control myself. I had to do it really fast while hiding from the guards so the quality is not tops.

So I went and found a security guard and tried to interview him about the robes. I managed to figure out through the language barrier that nothing special is done to conserve them, they just hang there (on wooden posts basically), no special climate control or anything, no one's job is to take care of them. Amazing. Seventy of them!!!

Like always, but even more so with this post, you can see the rest of the photos on my Flickr.

tomorrow I'm so sleeping in

This was a long day. By that I mean, a good, but LONG day mostly spent walking around the old city of Toledo. I ended up with tons of pics and Flickr is taking ages to upload them tonight, like it's making me upload them one at a time and it's after 11 pm and I've been up since like the crack of dawn (or seven AM, whatever) and so far it's only managed to get twelve of the 70-something photos I took today, and I'm way too tired right now to stay up long enough to do the rest.

I have no idea if the sentence I just wrote even makes sense.

So to sum up: Toledo was very interesting, I am very exhausted, long recap post to come in the morning, good night everybody.

happy chanukah, sort of

So far Natan and I have done a terrible job celebrating. He ate a donut, not even a jelly donut, and I ate a potato omelette...or as I prefer to call it, an egg-flavored latke. In my defense it was swimming in oil. But we are working on improving for nights 2 through 8. Maybe even with a new hastily-purchased gift shop chanukiah. Stay tuned.

This morning we took the high speed AVE train to Madrid (pics of the Madrid train station above, nice right?) and dumped our stuff at the new digs - a budget hotel instead of a hostel this time, OH LUXURY. The main nice thing about it is that there are so many fewer people around, which is truly relaxing. Also the walls are not lime green. Also, there is a minibar! Granted the minibar has nothing in it, but that´s even better, because it's now an empty refrigerator in which I can store my cheese.

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I'm not sure why, but Natan felt that it was "weird" that I was sitting on the floor taking pictures of my cheese in a refrigerator. This is his reaction:

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Anyway, so on the train I had a chance to read the Let's Go book's entry on Madrid, which is funnier than you might expect. The person who wrote it has some kind of major, MAJOR hate-on for Gran Via, devoting paragraphs upon paragraphs to how awful it is, full of McDonald's and neon signs and crowds of shoppers and cars and it's a terrible terrible terrible hellhole of a street and how you should avoid it at all costs. So of course our hotel happens to be off Gran Via, so after reading all of that, I was shocked to get off the Metro and discover that Gran Via is....a perfectly normal street. No, really. It's pretty much exactly like any other big shopping street in a big city. Huh? Possibilities: a) the blocks that I walked on were not the evil blocks. b) the evil only comes out at certain times of day. c) Let's Go is not always 100% accurate.

So despite being in an awesome new city full of bars and clubs and super exciting nightlife etc., being the boring person I am, my big plan is to...go upstairs and watch TV. You see, this TV gets CNN, and at some point CNN is likely to show Obama, and I NEED MY OBAMA/POLITICS FIX SO BAD YOU GUYS. I am like in withdrawal after the last week. Maybe they'll even say something about the Blago story! God I am such a dork I even embarrass myself sometimes.

tomorrow: maybe a quick trip to Toledo before everything closes down for Christmas?

last day in Barcelona

I wandered down to the waterfront area, which is very Navy Pier-esque in its tourist-centric, huge-mall-having way, but still nice. For some reason tourist traps never seem as awful to me in other cities as they do at home. I was thinking that maybe tourists to Chicago are not such dumbasses as I usually assume for going to Navy Pier. Maybe I'm the dumbass for being unable to appreciate it, or for thinking that what I'm doing here is any more worthwhile.

I bought a lighter jacket at a discount store, because I don't feel like hauling my big wool coat and boots to Madrid with me tomorrow. It's already warm enough here that the coat is overkill and in the sunlight a long-sleeved T-shirt is all I need. So goodbye to the winter gear. Supposedly the places I'm going are only going to get warmer from here on out, here's hoping that's true!

Sorry for lame-ish blog two days in a row - I'm in the middle of dealing with some major school headaches right now and it's eating up all of my available internet time. Hopefully this will all be resolved shortly and I can go back to giving the blog the time and attention it deserves.

tomorrow from Madrid!

lazy Saturday

not much time or many pics to post today, so this will be a short one. I slept really, really late, then went to Park Guell, then wandered around some more and made a lot of difficult international calls to work out logistical stuff and went to a supermarket and an H&M and blah blah blah boring things like that. And now there are two very anxious young people behind me desperate for me to give up this computer so they can check their facebooks for another hour, and because I am so nice, that's exactly what I'm going to do.

the mountains

 

Here is a timeline of selected moments in the history of the monastery of Ripoll, about two hours north of Barcelona at the beginning of the Pyrenees, as copied from the brochure I picked up there.

880: "Wilfred the Hairy founded the monastery." (This was just his English name of course; in French, he was called Guifre. I cannot report what he called himself in any other languages because my brochure is only in English and French.)

1032: "Consecration of the New Basilica."

1428: "Earthquake. Big Damage."

15th-19th Century: "Great Misfortunes."

In all seriousness, I loved this monastery and I thought it was amazing. These incredibly huge stone walls and barrel vaults and all of that, but I don't know, I loved it.

Another feature of the monastery is the funeral monument of Count Ramon Berenguer III. After admiring this, Natan and I headed to Snack Bar Ramon, which I can only assume is named in tribute (?) and which is also, like the monastery, cheap and amazing. There were a lot of other people in there but all of them were old men smoking like 5 cigarettes, at once, apiece. I'm pretty sure I have lung cancer now after being in there for an hour. (Side note: everyone smokes inside everywhere here and it is SO DISGUSTING.) The menu didn't seem to contain anything non-meat based...for example, under the heading ¨"vegetarian food," the options were hamburger, ham, or sausage. However I managed to convey an order for a tuna sandwich, confirmed with hand gestures for making a sandwich and a spare loaf of bread as a prop, and lo and behold a tuna sandwich arrived! I also got a beer for one euro which I think is cheaper than anything in history.

The downside of this excellent lunch was that we had to eat in absolute silence because all of the old men in there were glued to a TV broadcasting some kind of event where they were picking groups for the playoffs for some soccer thing. Natan tried to explain it to me but I didn't really get it, also I don't care. Basically it was this man sitting at a very long desk with a very enormous trophy drawing names out of a hat. Thrilling TV let me tell you!

Aside from those two lovely attractions, absolutely everything to see or do in the town of Ripoll was closed. Ripoll is also a tourist destination...I guess...although FAR less spiffed-up than Tossa was. It doesn't seem nearly as prosperous either. The whole town, to be honest, smelled really bad, like exhaust and I don't know what. There was grafitti everywhere and tons of cars and just kind of general ugliness...I don't know how much of it was the season though, it reminded me a little of how Madison goes through a brown and ugly stage after fall but before there's snow on the ground. Just climbing a hill a little way above town, the air suddenly smelled good again.

One more thing, overheard this morning in the hostel kitchen...

Grown man, speaking very seriously:¨"But it's really just his spongy body that gives them that square shape - if he took them off, they'd just be pants!"

the sea

Wandering around lost last night I finally found an Orange (cell phone company) store, which was perfect because I am in posession of an Orange cell phone with prepaid minutes, but with the sad drawback that no one can remember its PIN number so it doesn't work at all. Earlier the Orange people had said that it was not possible to get the PIN back and that we'd have to buy a whole new card and lose all the minutes that had been paid for, so this is what I went in to do.

Unfortunately, no matter how I tried to explain the whole forgotten PIN situation to the very glamorous and very not-English-speaking woman working there, she just stared at me like I was a moron. The fourth time into my incompetent broken Spanish explanation of what had happened, she rolled her eyes, grabbed the phone out of my hand, punched like six keys and handed it back to me with a new PIN number and working perfectly. I think that this was a situation where my obvious idiocy really worked in my favor, because apparently she just decided that I was far too much of a loser to have successfully stolen someone else's phone, and gave me a new PIN against company rules to make me go away so she could close up for the night. Win!

This morning Natan and I went to Tossa de Mar, a small tourist town on the coast, supposedly an hour and twenty minutes away by bus. This estimate does not include the time it takes when your bus breaks down halfway there. But no worries, we got there eventually, and despite Natan's complaints that I must have chosen a shitty place to go because we were two of only four people on the bus, it was actually really beautiful & nice. It's interesting to be in a town whose only business is clearly tourism during the lowest of the low season, mid-week in December. Except for the bar by the bus station the town was essentially deserted, with most businesses closed for the season and only a few other people walking around on the streets. What was extra strange about it was that the weather was beautiful, sunny and not cold - it was a perfect day for walking around the castle, lighthouse, old cobbled streets etc. - really picture-perfect and yet we were the only ones there.

We finally found a restaurant that was open for lunch, and we were the only customers. The obviously bored owner hung out at our table and talked to us constantly. He kept taking pictures off the wall and bringing them over to point things out. The before shot of Tossa: his grandfather sitting on the ground, making a basket for fishing, when no one ever came here on purpose. Then the pictures of Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra from when they came to Tossa in 1949 to shoot the movie "Pandora and the Flying Dutchman" and singlehandedly invented the tourism industry. Every other building here now is a hotel.

The castle and mountains and views of the sea are gorgeous. I was grateful the whole time that there was no one else there, except for a small crew of guys putting up what looked like a big nativity scene in an old half-destroyed church. There were cats chilling out everywhere all over town. Natan made fun of me for only taking pictures of cats and funny signs while he got snaps of the majestic stuff. What can I say, cats are cute.

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On the bus back to Barcelona, I realized that this was the first day I've been relaxed since September.

being in the church is supposed to feel like being in a forest

Sometimes it's hard to know when not to take pictures. Today I was standing in front of the Sagrada Familia and thinking, there is no picture that I can take here that will be better than the first five images that come up in a google search. The light, angle, etc. wasn't particularly good, and I'm not that great of a photographer. But it still felt too weird to stand there holding my camera and not snap it; so here is the result.

Going to really famous places is always confusing to me. There's the competition between what you expect to see and what you do see, and what you think you should feel and what you do feel. I came to Sagrada Familia with sky-high expectations - it was one of the things I was really looking forward to seeing - and as usual was a bit lost when I got there. Don´t get me wrong - it's a beautiful, amazing place. But half of me wishes I never knew about anything until seeing it myself.

Up on the tower, my heights thing kicked in and I got really, really shaky. I really didn't expect to have that kind of reaction, but something about the bright sunlight outside and dark little staircase inside and long, long drop to the ground really got to me. I pretty much clutched the railing all the way back down.

After a whole morning and afternoon of being a nice, obedient tourist and following the walking tour to all the Gaudi sights, I needed some alone time and took a long, random walk around nowhere in particular on my own. I started thinking that all the trees here look very Gaudi-esque. Or do all trees everywhere?

cold and rainy (but with palm trees)

On the left: adorable sheep chess set. On the right: horrific outdoor pet store that will haunt my dreams. According to Let`s Go the pet store stalls are world-famous. In NIGHTMARE world. They are full of horrible little birds cheeping their lungs out. They also sell pigeons.What kind of person would BUY a pigeon?? That would be an amazing combo of stupid & crazy.

The map I brought makes it look as if the downtown/old city part of Barcelona is pretty large, when in fact everything is right next to everything else. Because of this all morning Natan and I overshot every destination we tried to get to and ended up in a different neighborhood entirely. No problem though, since our whole goal was just to walk around and see stuff...which stuff in particular was not so important.

There is an awesome food market right by where we´re staying, with all kinds of parts of meat and fish I had never thought of before. Also fruits and veggies and cheeses and mushrooms and all kinds of olives...the seafood was all alive and wriggling. Abe, wish you were here. It´s been raining all day, so otherwise I´ve mostly been stepping in puddles while trying to take pics of things. It´s been wonderful. (that last sentence was not sarcastic, it really has been.) Everything is beautiful and interesting, but expensive. I made Natan walk around for hours looking for a cheap place for lunch then and ended up paying $9 for basically fast food because I was about to die of hunger. WHY ARE MY DOLLARS WORTH NOTHING. Oh well, I guess I´ll just be broke forever, no biggie!

In back of the gothic cathedral. This is the face Natan made when I said I was going to take a picture of him; he says, "I look best with my eyes closed." Then he took a picture of me where I am glaring at him, because we´re arguing about if, in the first picture he took of me, my face looked fat. I know, I am so charming. However I post these lovely portraits in the interests of accuracy.

Although Barcelona is obviously very touristy it still feels chill and relaxing right now, not so overwhelming or full of people. This may be related to the fact that it's winter, low season, the middle of the week, and pouring rain, but still. And everyone has been nice to me despite the fact that I am incompetent at life and can never understand them.

Last but not least: the bathroom stall which is doubles as a hall of mirrors. Genius! But also sort of disconcerting!

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what day is it? and who am I?

first stop, Barcelona....

You may ask why of all the worthwhile things to take photos of here, I instead have four pictures of my hostel room and its tiny tiny terrace. The answer is that by the time I got here, after 24 hours straight packing and 20 hours traveling coming right after a week of finals craziness, I am so fucking exhausted that I can barely focus my eyes. And now that I´ve used up the last of my energy writing this post, I am going to take a very, very long nap. More updates tomorrow

p.s. that bag of trailmix is my dinner. I know you´re jealous.