Spain!!

April 6th, 2010

I woke up as the pilot told the flight attendants to prepare for landing, and soon were were in Spain! When we landed the Charge song came over the loud speakers and everyone started yelling and hooting. I've never seen that before on an airplane!

I don't know if all of you know, but Spanish is not the first language in Barcelona. It's actually Catalán which is a mix of Spanish and French. All the signs were in Catalán and then in Spanish and we realized this was going to be a little harder than we thought. The guy that stamped our passports spoke to us in Spanish and also where we asked how to find the bus into Barcelona, but it's Spain Spanish so it's a little harder to understand. When we got on the bus we both fell asleep again and when I woke up we were in the center of Barcelona. The first thing I saw was the biggest cathedral I've ever seen in my life. The bus stopped shortly after and when we got out we wandered for a while before asking directions to the train station. A woman pointed us in the right direction and on our way there we saw the Arc of Triomf of Barcelona. It looks nothing like the real one. It's Spanish style. It's a reddish color with crowns on the top and it only had 2 legs, not 4 and it's much smaller than the one in Paris.

After we got some good pictures we bought our train tickets to Sitges, the place where my uncle's good friend Celia lives. She agreed to let us stay for 3 days while we explored Barcelona. A worker in the metro came up and asked us where we were headed and then he told us exactly how to get there. nothing like London where no one knows anything about anything. So we got on that train and switched trains in Sants Estació but we missed the first one so we had to wait half an hour for another. The train ride to Celia's is 1/2 hour but the train passes right by the sea. I gasped when I saw it and Valeria turned around and we both started laughing we were so excited.

When we got to Sitges I called Celia and she came to get us at the train station. Her house is a 5 minute walk from the station and 5 minutes from the beach! Sitges is a beautiful little town and the sky was blue and sunny so Val and I were happy to be in Spain. When we got to Celia's we met her husband Alfred. His first language is Catalán but he speaks Spanish with us. He's very hard to understand because he has a very deep scratchy voice, but he's just a sweet, sweet man. Celia is very lucky. She showed us our room and got us both a drink called Vermut. It's a sweet martini...which was interesting. Then she got us a glass of her favorite red wine. It was only 3:00 in the afternoon! She made us lunch after that while we looked at pictures of their travels and their wedding. I didn't know my uncle had given her away at her wedding so that was fun to see. Our lunch was steak, rice and wine. It was so good, and we decided to take a "siesta" afterwards. It was supposed to be a 20 minutes siesta because we had bought return tickets to Barcelona. We planned on going back that night, but because of our long night at the airport it turned into a 3 hour siesta. We woke up just before dinner and instead decided to get on the internet and plan our next day while Celia prepared dinner. They eat dinner here at 10:00 at night, so we went to bed right after. Celia told us that there was a space heater that we could turn on if we were cold, but we had to charge our camera batteries so we froze instead. The next day Celia asked us if that's what we did....she knew us all too well. "American style!" she calls it. Freezing to charge our technological devices