Spain!

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Spain was both AMAZING and not so amazing. We arrived in Madrid and it was hot, red hot. After a time consuming consultation of our map, we guesstimated which street we were going to walk down to find our out of the way/ not so out of the way hostel. Upon arrival we discovered that the bed sadly sank in the middle, on the upside there were 7 other beds to choose from.

The day after we arrived, we went on a free walking tour which took approximately 3 hours. It wasn't great, and I think what annoyed us the most was that they incessantly tried to sell their other tours. Which were not free. In saying that it annoyed us, let me clarify that we are not against paying for the tours, but that we don’t agree with being taken on a substandard tour which they use to promote more informative (paid) tours. Highlights of this tour included: "here is a plaza", "here is a terrorist monument" and "here is a bridge that people traditionally like to kill themselves off". A highlight though was that we found a vegetarian felafel bar called Maoz. YUM!

The other tours were a Civil War tour (which our free tour walking guide said that she also did but she hated doing it - which didn’t instill too much confidence in how good it would be), a tapas tour and a pub crawl.

After the free tour we decided to walk to the other side of town near our hostel. Here we found some spectacular architecture and stunning gardens. During this self-guided tour, we embarked on an epic mission - to post some mail. We spent 40 minutes attempting to communicate with a person who spoke no English at all. It might be at this point of our story that you come to the realisation that we indeed did not prepare AT all for Spain and didn’t learn any Spanish (we make the decision to come to Spain during a drunken night in the UK). On the flip side however, no one had prepared for our arrival either. Appears that most people in Madrid don't speak any English! You can well imagine how frustrating our week was....

That night we partook in the tapas tour and the pub crawl which were, once again, average. The tapas tour had potential because I thought I would be given pointers in eating vegetarian here (Spaniards don't 'do' vegetarian), however the guide only explained the meaning of tapas and how its traditionally eaten (shared). It was organised so that you moved from place to place where you ate, had a glass of sangria and moved on. We then went back to Plaza Major and went on the pub crawl. That was ok, we got to drink some horrible sangria from a bottle and showed Spain our sick dancing skillz. The drinking establishments we visited were obviously tourist night spots and were inhabited by other inebriated travellers (and Spaniards with the master plan of picking up a drunken chick). Considering our troubles communicating with people in Spain we committed the ultimate travel faux pas and enjoyed spending time with other English speaking travellers. We ended up leaving the last venue and took ourselves out for a drink on the corner of a busy intersection. It was midnight, still warm, and people were out to party - let the people watching commence! In terms of both drink and food, the tours were value for money, but we probably would have preferred to have figured it out for ourselves.

Madrid was a very clean city and everyone had dogs (my sorta town!). The street entertainment was interesting - the most notable being a man in a stroller with his face painted like a porcelain doll making high pitched squeaking sounds. There were also a lot of headless men wearing glasses walking around / reading the paper.

The following day we felt very sorry for ourselves (note to self: if you think at the time of drinking the bad sangria that you are going to feel terrible the following day, for the love of all that is holy DON'T DRINK IT) so just chillaxed until it was time for Edguy. Before we went to the concert we went back to the rad vegetarian bar for dinner and walked it off to the venue where the concert was to be held - Sala Heineken in Plaza de Espana. We lined up for about an hour before we went into McDonalds and procured some McFlurrys. We couldn’t really speak to any of the other Edguy fans because of the language barrier, but the atmosphere was electric. The opening act was Kottak (fronted by the lead singer of the Scorpions) who had a pretty awesome set. Then the show was on. Edguy had arrived. We were about eight people deep from the front and the crowd was nuts. The set was mostly from their new album, which I hadn't heard much of (it was released during our trip) but they still played their classics. The dialogue between songs from the band was mostly in English which we discovered that many people around us didn’t understand. Or they didn’t get Tobi's sense of humour. I bought myself a t-shirt and a hooded jacket and left the most incredible concert of my life extremely happy! I am so glad that we made the (drunken) decision to book it.

The following day we woke to discover that both of us were rather unwell. Nick obtained food poisoning from dinner and I had a horrific cold (which ended up lasting two weeks) and lost my voice entirely. I think the voice was the outcome of the concert though!

We then moved onto Barcelona. Our transport options were to either get an 8 hour bus or a 3 hour train ride. Easy answer - and thus commenced our first Euro-rail trip! We also saved quite a bit of time and money. Poor Nick wasn’t well at all, so I am glad we chose the quicker option. It was a decision between the quicker option and taking him to hospital, but Nick wanted to carry on. In hindsight considering how sick he was, I am not sure if we made the right decision. We arrived and thankfully our accommodation was the main strip, La Ramblas. We were there for 2 days but as we were both so unwell we did not do a lot. The only thing worth noting was that we walked to La Sangrada Familia. It was a hard walk for these two sick kittens (one sick kitten in particular - poor Nick)... and we arrived to find it was closed! The outside, though, is magnificent and the varying modes and the different styles of architecture which cover several centuries are just amazing.

After a two day stay in a hostel, eating ice-cream and paella, we left for Ireland to meet up with Naomi and Chris in Dublin.

Peace out

NJ&NJ

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