Last time we chatted, we had just arrived in Spain, in a small town called Figueres, famous for being the birthplace of Salvidor Dali. Of course we took a couple of hours out the next day to visit the Dali museum which is not only full of his original works but was designed by him as well. Gareth has always been a Dali fan and while I knew some of his works, I didn’t know just how much of a creative genius the man really was. Paintings, sculptures, drawings and art installations, including some awesome revolving 3D holograms that he created. Truly amazing.
We’d arrived in Figueres from Toulouse without Jane’s help so we were now more confident in our ability to get us to Barcelona in one piece. When we had Jane we were able to avoid paying tolls on motorways as we could take the secondary roads. It made the journey a little longer at times but much prettier also, taking us through sleepy little towns and along curved country roads instead of the monolithic highways. Without her guiding us, we now had to take the motorways so we could follow the signs. We knew that there would be tolls, but we had no idea just how many, or how much it would cost us! All up we paid close to 50 Euro (about $80 AUD) in tolls between Toulouse and Valencia! With me at the wheel and Gareth being map master for the day, we arrived safely and well ahead of schedule, getting in early in the afternoon.
Barcelona is a huge city with loads of freeways but we made it to our hotel without getting lost and with only a little stress as G wrestled the gigantic map we’d picked up at a roadside stop. We stayed in the Eixample area which sits about 15 mins walk from the centre of the city and is also the gay hub of Barcelona.
As we wanted to experience some of the local nightlife, we also now had to get used to eating late. Eating at 10pm is considered early so we did as the locals do, had a mid afternoon snack, a siesta in the early evening and headed out for dinner after 10.30pm most nights we were there. Being the weekend, we hit the bars and clubs quite hard and had several very long walks home at dawn.
During the day we continued to hit the shops and bought heaps of clothes (especially me) which had the additional benefit of saving us from doing any more washing. Bonus! We also saw the various buildings designed by Gaudi, the Sagrada Familia, La Pedrera and ‘The Magic Fountain’,
which I really loved.
The fountain has several light shows all designed with different themed soundtracks, just like the Bellagio in Vegas but better, I thought. There was a movie soundtrack one with the theme songs from E.T, Titanic, Star Wars and Superman which was great, but my favourite was the Disney one. No surprises there for any of you I’m sure.
After more than a week in France, we now also had to get used to Spanish rather than the French we had grown quite comfortable with. We both found ourselves ordering something in a shop or restaurant and saying “Sil vous plait” instead of “Porvivore” and “Merci” instead of “Gracias”. We both knew how to say hello though, or at least we thought we did. For the first few days, whenever we’d enter a shop and were greeted by the shop assistants, after the initial “Ola”, they would always speak to Gareth in English but speak to me in Spanish. It was puzzling to us both… Did I look Spanish? We didn’t think so but just couldn’t figure out why. After about 4 days in Spain, I actually listened to G when he greeted them back and was amused to hear that instead of “Ola”, he was saying “Holler”. I think he watches too much Tyra!! No wonder they knew he didn’t speak Spanish! The funny thing is that he always thought she said “holler” on her show because of her large Hispanic audience who speak Spanish. Naturally, we have gotten a lot of enjoyment out of that and now have several “Raise the roof, give up for Tyra!! HOLLER!” moments each day.
A large part of our day has continued to revolve around food – what we would eat, where and what time, and we have managed to find some great restaurants that serve very yummy tapas and great big jugs of delicious sangria. Unfortunately we had our dreams shattered at one of the restaurants though. When the sangria came out they hadn’t stirred it properly and there was about 2 cms of undissolved white sugar sitting in the bottom of the jug! No wonder it tasted so good!!
Spain also wins bonus points from G as when his phone roams to a new network, the network it lands on a majority of the time is “movistar”. He insists they know who he is and I just tell him “Holler!”
After 3 nights in Barcelona, it was time to start moving towards our last stop, Madrid and we chose Valencia, down the coast a couple of hours as the mid point stop for us. Again with no Jane to keep us on track, we finally found our way out of Barcelona and hit the motorway towards Valencia. We got to the city ok and we’d printed out the directions from Google maps so we should be right, right? Well, we would have been had there been any signs anywhere but as Valencia seemed to be completely devoid of signs, well the ones we were looking for anyway! Even though we were following the directions, the streets had moved or been renamed and we quickly become lost with no idea of how we would find our hotel as we also didn’t have any maps on us. Jane, we need you!! After a stressful hour or so and a little bit of luck, we stumbled across one of the streets close to our hotel – I recognised the street name from the directions we had – so parked the car and kept following the directions on foot until we found the hotel.
First thing we did the next morning was to find our local AVIS office and rent another tom tom. Finally we had Jane back with us and were once again ready to safely, happily and quickly head to Madrid knowing that we could depend on her to get us there stress and argument free.
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