I now know what a pig feels like when being roasted. I should have known that San Sebastian, being right on the coast, gets comparatively mild weather. Bilboa on the other hand is in the interior, and boy do you feel it. I got there at about 3pm (I won't get started about how it's impossible for me to get up early in San Sebastian for some reason), and I was literally greeted with a blast of hot air. My small keychain thermometre and nearby public digital temperature readouts both showed about 45 degrees Celcius. Having been told by both my [View Full Entry]

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The original plan for the day was to visit Bilboa. That didn't happen, in good part due to a bit of a lie in. Hence, it's been another very lazy day. I did make my way up Mount Igueldo, albeit by funicular, and enjoyed some pretty spectacular views of the town. You really see just how packed the beaches are when you look down and behold what looks like an army of ants crawling all over the place. I made a point of visiting Eduardo Chillida's "Peine de los Vientos" (Comb of the Winds). The sculptures are interesting, but don't really [View Full Entry]

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Spent my first proper day in Donostia (more commonly known as San Sebastian) today. Actually, I kinda slept half the day still recovering from my Pamplona experience, and even after getting up, I didn't do much. I basically just wandered Gros (the name of the district to the east of the river in San Sebastian) and one of the beaches (Playa de la Zurriola). The beach supposedly has some surfing, and I was contemplating picking up a few lessons until I saw that the "waves" were a little small....even for a beginner. Aside from that, I've just been in this internet [View Full Entry]

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My adrenal glands better be in top form, because I'm going to be banking on them tonight. The story starts last night really back in Barcelona. I remember lining up at Quinze Nuits at about 9:30, and it was 10:30pm by the time we were seated. Dinner really was good, because by the time I bid adieu to my new friends, my watch read 12:30am. I still had to do laundry, and there were a few problems with that. One involved me forgetting a map of Barcelona in a pocket and having to repeat a rinse cycle. Another involved the washing [View Full Entry]

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Got up really late again today. There´s just something about Barcelona that inspires laziness and seduces me back to my nocturnal schedule. I did drag myself out eventually though, and up quite far to Parc Güell. I´m kind of thinking that I should have visited the Gaudi museum, just to get the slightest inkling of what the man was like, because his creations are just out of this world. My head spins trying to imagine what the place would be like had he actually finished it (Parc Güell was originally meant to be a cutting edge urban community, but the project [View Full Entry]

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Slept in embarassingly late today, in good part because I was out rather late last night. I went out with a couple of people I bussed in with, and didn't get back to my room until 3am, and I left early. Two of the girls had picked up Spanish....tourguides and were in the mood for some dancing. After the four glasses of sangria and glass of champagne I had polished off, I had the wisdom to call it a night. I was still a bit tired this morning (or afternoon rather), and was sorely tempted to just jump on the bus [View Full Entry]

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Today was truly a travel day. The bus ride from Nice to Barcelona was scheduled for 10 hours, and that's under the best of conditions. We didn't encounter the best of conditions. We did get to see a furniture truck reduced to a pile of ash - literally. Apparently, wooden furniture and diesel fuel burn pretty well together.... That kept the highway a nice parking lot for close to 2 hours. The stopover before that in Avignon was nice, but short. I was surprised to see that Avignon's walls are almost completely intact. I was also surprised to see the size [View Full Entry]

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The original plan was to spend a day in Aix-en-Provence. That pretty much went down the drain last night when I went on S.N.C.F's (French train company) website. A return trip from Nice to Aix would have run me almost 60 euros. I really shouldn't have been surprised; I knew train travel in France wasn't cheap, and that the Côte d'Azur regional trains are merely exceptions to this rule. Hence, having no three hour (per direction) train trip to look forward to, I let myself sleep in today. I needed it, as one of my dormmates almost matched the record I [View Full Entry]

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I woke up rather late today at 9:30. I was actually very tempted to just go back to sleep or down to the promenade and vegetate all day. In the end though, the "gung-ho" part of my travelling personality won: I'm only in Nice for 3 days, and I'm not going to be stopping at Avignon. In other words, this is it for the French Riviera. Thus, I hauled myself to the train station and got on a regional train to Monaco (€6.5 return). The minute you get out of the train station into the area around Port Hercule, it becomes [View Full Entry]

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Today was one of those days where you just roll with the punches. Our guide on the bus coming in warned us to take the 10:30am train out of Riomaggiore into La Spezia to make sure we make the 12:00 bus pickup. All 17 of us were extremely responsible and got there by 10:15am. You've gotta love Italian scheduling though. The 10:30 train was first delayed by 20 minutes, then 30 minutes, then cancelled. The 11:00am train was then delayed by 30 minutes, 45 mintues, and finally 50 minutes. We actually started calling Busabout to tell them that everyone who was [View Full Entry]

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