Venice Day 2 (Becky)

Not super eager to go back to Venice, we decided to hang out and relax on the mainland for the day. We played cards and Frisbee by the ferry boat landing, then Jeremy spent the afternoon reading while I went for a long walk towards the neighboring town of Malcontenta. In the evening, we confused our bus schedules enough to miss the bus until 8:45 and got to Venice after 9 for dinner. We hoped that the city would be more romantic at night, but instead it started raining. We hurriedly picked a restaurant with a reasonable vegetarian selection and had some good (but not great) pasta and gnocchi (AND they also didn’t give us any bread with the meal, boo). We then got a couple of gelato cones and headed back to catch a train that, just our luck, arrived one minute after our hourly bus connection to the campground left. .Eventually, though, we caught the last bus back and were exhausted when we finally got to the campground (an amusing sidenote: Jeremy fell dead asleep on the bus with his head rolling back and forth and hitting the window repeatedly, yet he didn’t wake up).

The jaded travelers go to Venice (Becky)

We had been hoping that the Saturday night overnight trains would be empty, since everyone is hypothetically out partying at fantastic Italian discoteques. Not our luck. Our train car was filled with an Italian couple and two guys, one of whom was listening to cassette tapes (!!) and kept dropping his Walkman on the floor. So of course, there was no foot room, lots of leg cramps, and almost no sleep. We arrived around7 am to the Mestre station, on the mainland across from Venice, and took a bus up to the campground we planned to stay at. The campground was overpriced, like everything in this area, but still a good deal compared to hotel prices anywhere near Venice. We set up our tent and slept until 2pm.

In the afternoon, we took the long bus-> train ride over to Venice. And the first authentic Italian attraction to greet us outside of the station was, of course, a Native American tribal band wearing full traditional garb and playing the pan flute. They were unbelievably popular, as if the tourists didn’t realize that they were not the least bit native to Venice.

We wandered Venice for a few hours. We made the mistake of eating lunch at the train station, then realizing that all there is to do in Venice is eat and shop. The size of our budget and our backpacks stopped us from shopping, so all we could do was wander around and wait until we got hungry enough to eat. The canals were nice and the whole boating culture was interesting, but I think we were generally underwhelmed with the city. Anyway, we got some gelato that wasn’t as good as we had in Rome, explored a few free museums that were themed by countries/regions (Taiwan, Ireland, North Ireland, and Russia), and then got food at the supermarket to eat back at our campground in the evening.

It started raining that night, so we ate our bread and cheese meal in the tiny section of our tent that is large enough to allow sitting up completely. We heard music and yelling by the camp's bar, so we headed over to watch a bunch of drunk Americans sing karaoke (and all sing along to a couple of songs we didn’t know, which made me feel very old and out of touch). It then transformed into a dance party where we danced to a few songs before heading to bed.

The rain overnight caused our tent to start leaking in a small area on one side. Not a huge disaster, but enough to make it impossible to sleep in about half of our extremely small barely-fits-two-people tent. Grr.

Ruins (Becky)

We headed out to see the Roman Fora and Coliseum on our last day in Rome. We started at the Fora, where the line was shorter, and then were completely confused by poor signage. The tours listed outside the gates weren’t available inside, the prices were different, and our 6 euro audioguide turned out to only work in the Fora and not the Coliseum. This all annoyed me to a high degree, but after some whining Jeremy convinced me to try to enjoy it anyway. It was pretty cool to see the ruins up close, but really hard to imagine what things looked like over a thousand years ago. And our audioguide was always frustrating me by making passing reference to historical events I knew nothing about. I couldn’t definitively tell you what anything was, but it was all impressively large, old, and half-destroyed.

About half way through the fora walk, I realized that our tickets (which allowed entry into both the Fora and the Coliseum) were no longer in my pocket. I panicked, emptied out my bag and my pockets, but found nothing. So, unwilling to buy another ticket, I sent Jeremy on to finish the tour while I walked backwards through it searching the ground for our tickets. I didn’t find them, but did manage to look awesome as I picked up trash all along the path, inspected it, and threw it back down in disappointment. Luckily, when we both arrived back at the ticket booth, our ticket agent remembered us and gave us new “free child” tickets to the coliseum, telling us “Now you are under 18 years!” Disaster averted.

We headed to the Coliseum next. It wasn’t quite as large or impressive as we had envisioned – it felt a bit like walking into the stadium for an American football game. The original wooden floor was long gone and had been only partially restored, so we could see down to the under-stage tunnels that apparently were used for transporting gladiators and animals and setting up stages .

After the Coliseum tour, we headed out to get some dinner, deciding on a small deli up the street for some delicious lasagna. And then it was already time to catch our overnight train up to Venice.

Do as the Romans do - yell at postal workers (Becky)

We had a slow start to the morning. I tried to use McDonald’s free wifi, only to find that they sent the password to a mobile phone (which I do not have). Instead, I spent a while at a net café, stopped at the supermarket, and met back with Jeremy at noon. We then ventured to the post office to mail postcards. We pulled number 250 and they were serving number 220, so we killed 45 minutes before eventually getting to the desk to send our cards. There is something strange about the post offices here – they seem to be a very contentious place. We witnessed many upset customers, one man who yelled what I assume were Italian obscenities at all of the staff, and the slowest processing in the history of all post offices. Everyone filled out a form, then waited, then filled out a form, then got upset about something, then filled out a form, then waited, then finally filled out another form and got a receipt. Even our postcards were individually weighed and metered instead of just stamped. It was craziness.

Anyway, after that we wasted more time shopping for clothes and replenishing my dying wardrobe (everything had been stretched, stained, or lost). And finally we headed to the Coliseum, but decided to take the Coliseum tour the next morning to ensure that we had enough time. So we took a long walk out to Vatican City instead. We explored the tiny city and all the religious sites, but unfortunately were there just as the Sistine Chapel was closing, so we missed that.

I had a tentative phone conversation with an Americorps job scheduled for 10:00 pacific (7 pm here), so we hurried back to the Internet café, where I had no email from the Americorps people. Oh well. It did give us a chance to read the gossip pages about Michael Jackson’s death, which we had somehow completely missed hearing about before this (being away from the internet and cable news so much is very strange!).

In the evening, we took a long walk back to our hostel to get a corkscrew, then drank a bottle of some sort of Italian wine that Jeremy could tell you more about. We sat outside the Coliseum with a few small groups of tourists doing the same thing, and again completely missed out on any Italian discotheques..

First day in Rome (Becky)

We caught the train from Ventimiglia to Rome, and it turned out to work perfectly to get us into Rome in the early morning. The train was an adventure – our second class seats were in small rooms like the trains in Morocco, such that you end up with 6 people in a room, 3 facing the other 3. No foot room, nowhere to direct your eyes, and unbelievable awkwardness. I deeply dislike whoever developed this mode of transit. Anyway, Jeremy slept for a while, and I slept for maybe 2 hours before we pulled into the enormous Roma Termini station. From there, we wandered without a map roughly in the direction that we thought went to the coliseum but didn’t (this may have been the first time in the trip that Jeremy was wrong about directions and I was right, so I would like to point it out and gloat a bit). We went to a small park at the north of the city, then worked our way back past to the Roman ruins and coliseum, killing enough time with sightseeing, crossword puzzles, and breakfast that we could then check into our hostel.

Our hostel was more like an apartment, with the two bedrooms loaded with 10 beds, only one bathroom, and the dining/kitchen area arranged with a small couch where our hosts slept. Our hosts overbooked the room, and it momentarily looked like we would have nowhere to sleep. Then we agreed to a cheaper rate to share a twin bed, and eventually we ended up having our own beds anyway and saving some money. Hurray. Once everything was sorted out, we made the box of Kraft mac and cheese that I had brought from home (using a Laughing Cow cheese instead of butter, which turned out ok but with cheese chunks), watched music videos, and napped for the afternoon.

In the evening we headed back out to wander past the Roman sites. In the ruins of the Roman Fora, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was being acted out for a small paying crowd. Yet you could watch for free from the walkway above the ruins, so we enjoyed that until our lack of understanding of the Italian language got us frustrated and we moved on. We tried to find the fabled Italian Discotheque scene, but failed miserably and wound up at a neighborhood Indian restaurant.. which closed 10 minutes after we bought a beer. The guys at the bar, who seemed to be regulars, invited us in broken English to stand outside the bar with them to finish our beer, so we did. They were an amusing bunch. An older man with maybe 8 teeth left in his mouth kept dancing, making jokes in Italian, and laughing heartily. Another man spoke some English, asked about where we were from, and gave us a lecture on the difference between the Italian language and the “Roman” language, which I think is a dialect/accent of the same Italian language, but I got confused. After that, the city seemed dead, so we headed back to the hostel.

More traveling (Becky)

Jeremy somehow turned off the alarm clock during the night, so we woke up an hour too late for the train we had planned to take towards Toulon, Nice, and eventually Italy. There was another train listed for an hour later, but when we got to the train station it wasn’t on their schedules. We found a nice English-speaking rail worker who explained that our train from Toulon to Nice was fine, but that the one to Toulon was later and was actually a bus. That bus was late, but we eventually made it to Toulon and then Nice, and then caught a bus to a town called Ventimiglia just inside the Italian border. Hopefully from there we will be able to find an overnight train to Rome… More updates soon.

Trains (Becky)

The next day was spent almost entirely on trains. We arrived in the early evening to La Ciotat, where we had stayed about a month earlier in southern France. We camped at the same campground as before and had some expensive French pizza. Not much excitement.

Casablanca, losing luggage, and Barca redux (Jeremy)

We wandered around the city all day. Casablanca was not as dramatic or as exciting as we expected. Instead, it was hot, quite smelly near the fishing port, and a bit boring for tourists. We found the infamous Rick’s Café (the one from the movie didn’t really exist, but an American came to Casablanca and started it since) but it was a pricey, bouncer guarded restaurant. There was also a large Mosque built right along the ocean, which was kind of neat. The highlight of the day was probably being hungry for Pizza Hut deep dish pizza and actually finding it. Very exotic.

The next day we had a flight booked back to Barcelona, so we made our way to the airport. Luckily, we noticed that there were multiple Casablanca airports and avoided walking to the closer, smaller, incorrect one. Instead, we had to take two trains over ~ an hour to get to the airport, where check-in and everything went smoothly. We were a bit stressed about weight allowance, because we had only purchases 20KG for both of us, and thought we would be really close. So we took a bunch of extra stuff in carry-on bags. When we got to the weigh-in counter, the bags still weighed in at 20.6 KG though, so we quickly took out a couple small items and came in under the weight allowance.

After spending the rest of our Dirhams in the food court and having an uneventful flight back to Spain, we got our new customs stamps and went to wait for luggage. This is where things didn’t work out so well.. The bags all came out, people took them, and us, another couple, and a few stragglers were left. In a minute, it was just us and the other couple without bags, so we went to the lost luggage counter where we filed our missing luggage report and were told that no information was available from Casablanca. The man was nice, and assured us that the luggage would be delivered either that night or the next morning, even though he had no indication of where the bags were.

So, annoyed that our plan to leave early the next morning was possibly nixed and wearing the one set of dirty clothes we had with us, we went to the hostel where we attempted to explain that the airport could be delivering luggage and book an extra night. Later that evening we happily got confirmation that our bags would indeed be arriving the next day.

We had some hours to kill before our bags arrived, so we searched out the Gaudi park with the famous lizard sculpture the next morning. We also did a bit of clothes shopping in the hopes of having something clean to wear, but ended up just catching the train back to the airport. There, we convinced security to screen us through to get to baggage claim ~half an hour before they were supposed to arrive. Once we got into the area, we saw that the lost baggage claim was closed, but there were some bags just sitting next to it. We checked out the carts and lo and behold, our bags were there! Woo! So we just took them, which elicited some concern as to their security, as no one asked to see any ID or anything.

We spent the rest of the night looking for a Laundromat and finally doing laundry and had our plans set to leave the next day back into France.

(Note from Becky: We had very different ideas about how to write about this chain of events - I thought that nearly losing all of our possessions and being delayed for a day with hardly any information from the airline was kind of a huge deal. Jeremy, on the other hand, was irritatingly optimistic. And Jeremy wrote this, so you get a very lighthearted perspective on a couple of cruddy days :)

Hot (Becky)

It was a hot day in Marrkech, again. Pushing 100 degrees Fahrenheit. We walked across the city with our big backpacks on in the heat and made it to the train station in time for the 1:00pm train to Casablanca. The train was supposed to be air conditioned, but it couldn’t fight the heat and our car of the train was just as hot as outside. The car held 8 people, and we were joined for most of the way by 6 guys who talked in a fast Arabic French that we couldn’t understand. They asked us if we spoke French, pointing to our French books, and we had to explain that we were learning French by reading Harry Potter. Awkward. Anyway, the train was hot and late and terrible. We got to Casablanca and got only a little lost finding our hotel, which was cool, comfortable, and had satellite TV in the room (only 10 channels, but worth it to see the French version of the Amazing Race)!! We also had an adventure looking for a pharmacy, then an optometrist to find contact solution, but no one had a kind that would cause Becky an allergic reaction, so we went back empty handed. On the way back to the hotel we walked through a market, where we got into a discussion with a man who had family in the US. Of course, he also had a nice shop with traditional clothes, and we got talked into following him there. I (Becky) hate arguing over prices and had no need for clothes anyway, but Jeremy got into some big negotiations with the guy and wound up buying a t-shirt. The sales person said essentially that Jeremy was a good guy and that Becky was a tightwad (he said “You are economic. You are like this!” and made a fist). And that was the day!

Marrakech again (Becky)

We decided to stay another day in Marrakech to relax a bit before heading to Casablanca. We walked to the supermarket to enjoy some low, fixed priced food and then went to the travel agency to buy tickets for our flight back to Europe. We had found tickets for only 50 euros total online from Casablanca to Barcelona, but the company for some reason didn’t accept US credit cards. So at the travel agency the price almost doubled to 80something, of course, but at least we have a flight arranged for the way home on Sunday.

Otherwise, we laid low for the day, hanging out at the Cyber Park, snacking on “La vache qui rit” cheese and bread, and watching American TV online. We also attempted to do laundry in the sink, which was a failure – our clothes came out just as dirty as before, and then had to be hung out to dry until late morning so that we could repack them.

Our hostel's owner had an adorable dog that ran around the courtyard and played fetch with us - hence this photo.

Leaving the desert (Becky)

Our drive home from the trip was chaotic, since the bad weather (storming again) had filled in riverbeds, created huge puddles , and caused several rockslides into the road. Our driver got into a road rage battle with the driver of a lunch meat and vegetable truck that almost took us off the road when passing us. Then we passed him, narrowly avoiding a collision, and he passed us, etc, until one of the women in our car yelled at him in a rapid mix of French and Arabic to stop endangering us all.

Otherwise, it was a pretty uneventful day. We drove for 10+ hours and got back late, forcing us to look for our new hotel in Marrakesh in the dark. We had to ask for directions from a kid who, of course, demanded money when we arrived. Arg!

The movies don't show all the camel poop (Becky)

Our tour stopped in an “authentic Berber Kasbah” where we met a guide to take us into the city. We had a nice walk through the countryside and gardens around the Kasbah, which were green and beautiful after the rain the day before. Then we went to a small room in the heart of the city that was the home of our Berber hosts. Our host gave us tea while his sister sat in the corner separating wool. She offered to let us try working with the wool, which involved rubbing two hairbrush-like paddles against each other with the wool between. Then, of course, our host transitioned into trying to sell us something. He showed us his family’s rugs, told us that they were the greatest rugs ever made, and tried to convince us to buy them. One of the other couples made the mistake of looking interested, and then spent an hour in price negotiation before eventually leaving empty handed.

We drove all day, which was pretty uneventful. In the late afternoon, we arrived at the edge of the desert and met our camels and desert guides. I was singled out for the last camel in the train, since it was apparently pregnant and I was the lightest of our travelers (although it seems like it shouldn’t be carrying anyone if it’s so pregnant that it matters!). Jeremy got the camel in front of me. We headed off into the sand dunes on the camels. It was quiet and nice, like the pictures of the Sahara that you see on postcards. They don’t, however, show you all the camel poo on the postcards!! We were on a pretty common route, and there was camel poo just everywhere. It definitely would not have been difficult to find our way back to the camp if we got lost in that area.. Anyway, after about 45 minutes of bumpy camel riding, we arrived at our camp. The camp consisted of several large tents and some carpeted outside areas, all along the side of a huge sand dune. And there was a small, portapotty sized tent that held the toilet.

(Let me take a break here to talk about Moroccon toilets, especially outside of the cities. They’re hella gross. They don’t have seats, but instead they have a hole in the ground that ladies have to squat awkwardly over. There’s rarely toilet paper, the floor is usually wet, and there’s normally no sink available for handwashing after. Yech.)

Several of the younger travelers decided to climb the sand dune, which was taller and steeper than we expected. For every step upward, you would slide half a step down into the sand. It was exhausting to get to the top, but when we did there was an amazing view of the desert and the sun setting behind the clouds on the horizon.

We headed back down to camp for a dinner of boiled vegetables and chicken (I am unbelievably sick of boiled vegetables, for the record, and plan to avoid Moroccon food for the rest of the trip). Dinner was cut short when we were swarmed by bugs who wanted our light. There were grasshoppers, beetles, and huge scarabs (1 inch or so in diameter) that would fly into people’s hair and food, causing general panic, the movement of the light, and the end of dinner. Our guides then took out some drums and half heartedly played a few songs with one of our fellow travelers who got incredible excited about drumming and singing with them. A couple of the middle aged guys in our group who got up and danced crazily, but the rest of us just sat around, tired and uncomfortable. We eventually bailed to our tent to sleep for the night, and slept remarkably well and remarkably buglessly until the roosters started crowing at 6 am. We were supposed to wake up for sunrise around 5:30, but it was cloudy and they let us sleep until the sky filled again with storm clouds and we took our camels back to civilization.

Drowning in the desert (Becky)

This morning, we woke up very, very early to meet our 3-day tour into the desert. We met eight other travelers and our driver at 7 am (after sleeping very little as our riad’s neighbors were up into the wee hours of the night talking loudly and revving the engines of their mopeds) and headed out in a mini-bus without any real explanation of our destinations or plan for the day. This turned out to be a trend that would continue, since our driver didn’t ever tell us where we were when we stopped, saying only “ok. Take picture. 15 minutes” in four languages.
Even without good explanations, it was still beautiful to see what I assume are some of the most famous sites in southern-central Morocco and the Atlas Mountains. We stopped at several Kasbahs along the way that were filled with overpriced tourist goods, but that gave a glimpse of how Moroccan life may be outside the tourist areas. At one of these stops, we successfully, although awkwardly, managed to bargain the price of a necklace down from 200 dirhams (about 20 euros) to 40-something (about 4 euros).

We stopped for lunch in a town that was filled with movie studios, nice hotels, and a cinema museum. We were told only that it was “for lunch and pictures of Kasbah. 1.5 hours,” but I am pretty sure that this is the Kasbah that we had heard about before – the site of filming for several Hollywood films set in Arabic countries. The lunch was quite expensive by Moroccon standards – about 5 euros per person for a small dish, compared to the two sandwiches, fries, and drink that we got for the same price in Marrakesh – and we were pretty sure that the driver got a hefty commission for bringing his tourists to this particular lunch spot, but so it goes. We sat with a Korean girl who had big plastic glasses that reminded me of elementary school and was traveling alone for her “20th anniversary,” which is apparently a Korean tradition to travel around age 19 or 20 before going to university. Her father demanded that she take a long trip and “learn the world,” even though she had planned to only travel to France for a few weeks. She proved to be the assertive person that we have needed throughout our trip, going to ask for the check, then bringing it to the counter to pay for it when we were unsure if we should wait for a host or not (she told us that “Koreans never wait. We have other things to do”).

Anyway, after the meal we had 20 minutes for wandering the area. I should mention, at this point, the weather throughout the day. In Marrakesh in the morning, it was warm and a bit cloudy, but not much different than it had been for the last two days. At each successive stop, though, it seemed to get cooler, windier, and darker, as we climbed into the mountains and apparently into a new weather pattern. So as we wandered after lunch, the clouds finally broke – with about 20 seconds of drizzle, then an out and out downpour. We joined several other tourists under a thatched overhang (one saying over and over “ha, it never rains here. They say it never rains”) and were dripped on for several minutes through the uneven thatch roof. Then finally our driver returned and we ran in the downpour to our bus to continue on our journey. We drove out of the rain in a half hour, but then stopped again for “beer if you need it. Not at hotel. And pictures. 15 minutes.” The rain caught up with us, and the downpour began again. This pattern continued at ever stop for about 3 hours, before we finally got stuck in the rain for good. It rained and stormed for the rest of the drive, creating massive puddles in the winding mountain roads. We plowed through them much too quickly for my taste (Jeremy was asleep, so I guess he didn’t mind), coming way too close to a lot of steep drop-offs into the valleys below. Yet we somehow survived and made it to our hotel. The power was disconnected (presumably from the storms), so it was charmingly lit with candles throughout the hallways and one candle outside each room. And that is where we are now, waiting for dinnertime and relaxing to the sound of the rain pouring into the ravine outside our window and typing until the computer battery dies.

Snakes!!!!!! (Becky)

Hot hot hot! That’s the best way to describe this day. We tried to find a travel agency that would book a flight back to Europe (we found a very cheap one online, but the system messed up processing the card, so we decided to go the travel agency route instead). But, of course, it was a Sunday, which apparently means that things will shut down even though it’s not a holiday here. So no flight yet. But it did give us an opportunity to explore the touristy district on the west side of Marrakesh, outside the city walls. It has wider streets, prices quoted in euros, and no real indication that it isn’t just a town in southern Spain. We did manage to find our first supermarket in Morocco, and went wild with the cheap (and haggle-free!!) prices, buying several bottles of water and a bunch of packs of wafer cookies for less than the equivalent of 3.50 euros.

We then headed back towards to city, in search of a park where we could get out of the hot sun, stop sweating for a few minutes, and relax. We tried one called Majorem Gardens, but the 3 euro admission fee was a bit steep. The next park on our map was closed off, and the next had no shade. Finally, we found the “Cyber Park,” which was really cool. Full of shady trees, a fountain, and benches. Plus, it had a bunch of free Internet kiosks throughout the park, where neighborhood kids came to play games, read, and do whatever else kids do on free computers. We sat there for several hours, doing crosswords and protecting our recently purchased cookies from scores of demanding multilingual kids.

That evening, we headed back to the central square and the market area. The square was filled with performers, henna artists, food shops, games, and pretty much anything else you could imagine. We took a few pictures, but then were accosted by a man who claimed that we took a picture of his cobras and demanded money. We didn’t have much with us, but gave our last 10 dirhar coin to him to avoid conflict. But he wasn’t done. He brought Jeremy in for a nice and close picture of the cobras, then draped another snake around his neck before he could protest. They said “picture snake! Picture snake!” and didn’t remove the snake, so I finally took a picture of Jeremy looking pretty awesome with his snake friend. And, of course, they demanded more money, which we didn’t have, so we had to flee quickly into the crowd.

We later went into the market and successfully haggled for the first time to get a change purse for half the price we were offered. This was followed by the cheapest, most watery ice cream we’d ever purchased and a couple of glasses of fresh orange juice before heading to bed early to prepare for our early desert trip the next morning.

Marrakech (Becky)

Our train arrived in Marrakesh at 8:30 am. Still half asleep from the fitful night of trying to sleep on tiny couchette train beds, we wandered towards the city. We had only a vague idea of where we were going – the name of the central square and directions from there, so we followed signs with the name of the square. We ended up next to a tower that we thought was the square (it wasn’t. at all), and got all turned around in the nearby streets. It was here that we were approached by a guy in a blue shirt who led us into a tourism office to tell us about camel tours. We eventually managed to break away and headed out again with the camel tour flyer in hand (this is the company we ended up booking the tour with a few days later), only to get lost again in the busy, narrow, overwhelming streets. Eventually, the guy in the blue shirt popped up again, trying this time to sell us a hotel. We eventually managed to get through to him that we had one already, and he insisted on calling the owner and leading us to the place. We tried to refuse, but couldn’t do so politely, and ended up following him the actual square, which was filled with vendors and tourists. He left us there with our directions, and we got lost again (of course). Another guy promised to help us find the place, without charging us, so we reluctantly followed him for a while. Then the guy in the blue shirt popped up again! Out of nowhere! It was bizarre. The other guy warned us that the blue shirt guy would charge too much commission for camel tours, and the blue shirt guy talked rapidly in Arabic to everyone he saw, and we were too tired, dazed, and overwhelmed to do anything but follow the two guys down a narrow alley. Luckily, this was actually where our hotel was, and both guys left without demanding anything.

More Madrid (Becky)

On our second day in Madrid, we explored the city a bit and headed to the Reina Sofia art museum, which houses a bunch of Picasos, Dalis, and other modern art. It was a great way to spend an afternoon out of the hot Spanish sun. There was also an exhibit called something like “Are animals human,” which consisted of a number of art pieces and videos based on a bear and rat that hung out together. They napped, they chased each other around, they went on roadtrips.. It was very amusing.

After that we spent the evening enjoying free card games and drinks with the other travelers at our hostel, and went to bed relatively early (for Spain, meaning that it was before 2am) so we could wake up in the morning to start heading for Morocco!!

Madrid and pub crawling (Becky)

We woke up relatively early to catch the train to Madrid. It was a long, uneventful ride. In Madrid, we bought food and cooked up some delicious vegetables and pasta while talking to some travelers from Australia and Southern California. We decided to join them on a pub crawl of Madrid, which cost 10 euros to join other hostellers at bars and get 4 free drinks. The bars were all very different – the first had a frat party feel and played 90s pop music, the second was basically a dance club (Jeremy and I were the only ones who couldn’t dance much at all..), the third was a laid back American style bar, and the fourth was a late night dance club that was open until the early hours of the morning. We’d had our fill by the last club and headed home relatively early from the last club, at around 4am..

Oh, Valencia (Becky)

I got back from the States early Monday morning and we hopped a train to Valencia (after wandering Barcelona a bit and enjoying some cheap 1 euro pizzas). In Valencia, we got lost as usual, but eventually found our hostel tucked next to a church in the older part of town. We bought some (cheap!) fresh vegetables and pasta to cook in the hostel’s enormous kitchen and settled in to finish some work on the hostel’s spotty Internet connection, chat with the other travelers, and watch Miss Congeniality on the hostel’s TV (exotic travel at its best!).

The next day we took a free walking tour that circled the city’s highlights. We saw Valencia’s largest church, which was built on top of the site of an old mosque, which was built on a church, etc, until you get to the ancient settlement that was recently discovered beneath it all. There’s a portion of the square where the old settlement is exposed under glass so that you can look at it from above. Pretty cool.

Our tour guide also led the tapas tour, which travelled the city for the afternoon getting tapas (Spanish appetizers-as-a-meal) and drinks at 3 restaurants. The price wasn’t bad, so we joined on. We met a bunch of other young travelers from Canada, Holland, Austalia, and the UK, and were relieved to speak English for a while with other people who were travelling the same way that we were. Plus, the food was very good, although all vegetarian tapas options consist basically of potato, cheese, and garlic.. We had a couple of sangrias at each place, which caused us to be a little tipsy by the time the tour finally disbanded after 6 pm. I then did some laundry nearby (getting terribly lost on the way home from about 2 blocks away..) while Jeremy took a marathon nap that overlapped the hostel’s two evening events – a flamenco dance show and a pub crawl. So instead we went for a late night walk to explore Valencia a bit more, and spend a while enjoying the long park that runs through the center of the city where a river used to run before it was re-routed around the city to prevent flooding.

And we forget to mention - there was also a beautiful fruit and vegetable market with delicious oranges, as seen here!

Jeremy's solo travels in wine country (Jeremy)

The next day there were some more celebrations and a parade route of some kind set up (We think that the team was coming back to Barcelona), but we needed to get to the train station so Becky could take the metro to the airport before the trains stopped running. Becky and I said our goodbyes and she went to wait out the next few hours at the airport before her early flight, and I returned for some sleep before catching a morning train back to France.

So my plan for the time when Becky was home was to go do some wine touring, lay on the beach, and maybe go somewhere else exciting. With the first goal in mind, I had booked a train back to Bordeaux, France. In turned out that the train booking service in Barcelona was far and away ahead of any of the French services we had used. After a bit of figuring out which counter we needed to be at, we asked the right person how to get from Barcelona to Bordeaux and he pulled out a fancy little pamphlet with the various connections, which days they run, which type of train they are, and whether they require reservations and just highlighted where to make transfers and told us which train we needed to reserve at the next counter over. We followed his directions and 1.50€ later, I was able to get to Bordeaux. Compare that to the French system of only looking up the fast direct trains, and then charging 22 euro booking fees, and you’ll see how much better this is. The pamphlet also had return journeys planed out, so I knew how to get back, at least from any town near the train route between Bordeaux and Barcelona.

I got to Bordeaux the next day, and checked into my overpriced hotel (I thought traveling solo would be cheaper!) and planned to go to the tourism office first thing the next morning to figure out what I could do and see. There, I realized that while there were lots of things to do in Bordeaux city, there wasn’t much in the way of chateaux tours, which is what I was looking for. So I found an information clerk who spoke English and she explained that there was a medieval village called Saint Emilion just down the train line that had lots of wine touring options available and was even hosting a philosophy festival that weekend. I hustled back to the train station and caught the next train out.

Saint Emilion was very cool. At the center of the Saint Emilion wine appellation, the town was a medieval fort with many buildings carved out of solid rock and large open caverns all throughout the city. I wandered around and toured the cellar of one winery in the town which was more cave than cellar with moss growing overhead and many creepy corners for things to be hiding. I eventually found the tourism office and booked a spot on a bus tour of the wine region with a stop at a chateau with wine tasting. I continued exploring for the next couple hours and tried to understand some of the philosophical presentations going on (something about globalization and distinct cultures, and whether these are good/bad/opposing things), and then got on the bus with a French couple, an Indian-American couple and our multilingual tour guide. The tour proceeded in both French and English, which was cool, because I could compare my understanding of the French version with the English version (my French skills are not up to snuff…). We learned all about the various soil types, quality rankings, grapes grown, and history of St Emilion. We saw the chateau owned by the late Mr. Bic (of pen fame) and some other famous wineries that restrict their visits to professionals. Eventually we made our way to Chateau Lavallade, a chateau in the upper tier of quality, St Emilion Grand Cru. There, we met the owner who gave us a tour of the vineyard, cellar, wine-making facility, and tasting room. It was very interesting to get a bit of insight from a real winemaker on how the environmental conditions interact with the grapes to inform decisions to which grapes to use, and how much of each variety, etc. We concluded the tour with a tasting of three of the their four wines, two red wines made with the traditional mix of Merlot, Cabernet Franc, and Cabernet Sauvignon grapes from different quality vines and soils, and one rosé that was made from a byproduct of the red wine production that is siphoned off to provide a more concentrated final product. All of them were pretty tasty (that’s official wine talk).

Going home with a couple bottles of wine, I made vacation talk with the Americans and got invited to go to University of Chicago if I ever want a business degree. The woman was a professor there who had gone to Cornell, so we compared France and upstate New York notes. I caught the train back to Bordeaux, made a picnic dinner and watched English CNN news to make for a day.

It turns out that I should have gone out drinking instead, because that night, Bordeaux was playing soccer for the French title, which they won. The next day, there was a big celebration downtown and lots of people out and about. A bit wined-out from the previous day, I explored Bordeaux and found a cool public market (anyone need some socks? – I’ve got a hook up for 2 pairs/euro!) where I tried dried kumquats (not very tasty) and some other dried fruit like kiwis and mangos (very tasty). I also frantically had to figure out where to stay that day, because the campsite I was planning to call did not have a connected number and I didn’t have a back up. So I looked around online and found a campsite in Arcachon, a quiet beach town near the Atlantic, west of Bordeaux. I called them and they said that they had plenty of spots, so I decided to go there in the afternoon.

I arrived in Arcachon, google maps directions from the train station to the campsite in hand, and realized when the last street on my directions did not exist that I was once again lost. I backtracked to where I had seen camping signs before, and followed the car route in a big circle ending up not too far from where I got lost. Apparently, google maps have a road connect through a forest that it actually doesn’t connect to at all, so that was helpful. Anyway, I made my reservation for three days in French and found a nice little tent spot. The next few days were quite relaxing, as most of the time was spent on the beach, browsing the small shops, looking for internet, doing laundry, etc. And that’s where I am right now. I just extended my stay by two days, and have a train reservation back to Toulouse on Friday with the plan of attending an alternative electronic music festival there before taking the train back the rest of the way to Barcelona on Sunday.