The Best Little Boar House in Barcelona, or, Dos Días de Damocles

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We got the 4 p.m. high speed train (called a TGV train) out of Brussels to Lyon Wednesday. I didn't think our pass would cover the entire cost of the high speed trains, but luckily I was wrong. Don't mind making a happy mistake once in a while. The only thing we had to pay was a €3 reservation fee for each ticket. It was overbooked, though, and only one ticket had a seat number. The other was for what amounted to standing-room-only in between cars. Jay lost the coin toss and got stuck there. Next time, I think he wants to do best-of-three Rock Paper Scissors. He's better at that than me.

The train made several stops on the way to Lyon, so the fact that Jay couldn't have a seat was probably due to there not being one seat number open for the entire ride. He was able to sit with me throughout, though he had to shift around a bit. During one of those shifts, we moved around a bit at Charles de Galle Airport outside Paris. A lot of businessmen were getting off planes and catching the train home. I put my bag above me in the rack to make room as the train got more crowded. After I did that, Jay asked me to do the same. I lifted his bag and put it on the rack, but the toss disloged the bottle of wine we jimmied into a pocket of his back. The thing smahed in the isle, and a carfull of French businessmen broke into a loud nasally laughter for a good five minutes. I have no idea what they were saying, but they were having a good time with it. I picked up the glass, and Jay and I laughed about it for the next two days.

Other than that, the ride was calm and Jay didn't have to stand with the cattle in between cars. We got to Lyon at 8 Wednesday night and wandered around the neighborhood looking for a place to stay. The only places near were hotels that wanted €100 for the night, so we asked one of the guys behind the desk at a hotel where the hostels were. He directed us to another part of town, so we had the job of trying to figure out the Lyon Metro, hiking that neighborhood, which is across the Rhone River from the rest of the city, and finding a place before dark.

Jay lost his camera in Brussels somewhere -- that's why there aren't any pictures yet; if I can get my disposible film cameras developed straight to CD, there will be some soon -- so we missed the greatest photo/video we could have gotten on this trip. When we walked out of the station in Lyon, there was a man outside on the street going nuts on someone at the other end of his cell phone. Gestures, hopping, yelling in French, the whole nine meters. I have no idea what his problem was. Jay assumed he was checking the time and temperature.

We got the metro down pretty quickly, and after hoofing it around a bit, we found a bar with an English guy and an Irish guy watching the Europe Cup, which is like the World Cup but just for European teams. They told us about a place up a nearby hill we could stay at, so we watched the rest of the championship game, had some food and trekked up the hill.

The place -- the name escapes me now -- had a really magnificent view of Lyon, which is a small city situated at the juncture of two rivers, the Rhône and its tributary the Saône. It has a couple of beautiful cathedrals and about 175,000 French people. It was incredible at night, looking down from the hostel on the hill to the city, it's old and new buildings and the rivers. It's too bad we only got to stay there for a few hours -- literally, we checked in at midnight and were gone by 7 -- because it was a nice place and had that spectacular view.

We got back to the train station by about 8 to catch a TGV train to Avegnon, then a regular train across the Spanish border to Portbou. Well, there was another train strike Thursday and no train was going to Portbou. We made it to a small town called Peregnon, about 50 kilometers north of the border, where we were to change trains anyway. No train was running from there to Portbou. The train line set up a bus to run in place of the train so we weren't stranded there.

But the bus ride was a fiasco. The back roads we took were narrow, like one lane narrow -- mountainous, bumpy and very windy. The upside is we had some stellar views of the Pyrenees Mountains, some of the tan castles and châteux on the hillsides, and the Mediterranean Sea. A lound banging noise was coming from the underside of the bus through the whole ride. I had a bottle of wine in my bag -- the one that survived the trecherous train ride from Brussels -- and we thought for about 45 minutes of the ride that my bag was flying everywhere and the bottle was going to break all over everyone's stuff. I ran up to the front of the bus once I realized this and tried to explain to the driver, who spoke little English, that a bottle of wine was about to ruin everyone's luggage under the bus. A woman helped translate, but the driver said I had to wait until the next scheduled stop at a train station. A couple bumps and turns later, it sounded like the bottle came loose from its strap and was just rolling around the compartment.

We got to the next stop 10 minutes later and the driver opened the compartment for me. Turns out, my bag had barely moved from where I laid it and the bottle was still strapped firmly in my bag. The banging was coming from another compartment full of tools for changing tires and doing other random roadside maintanence. I took the bottle anyway, given our recent track record with wine, and the driver seemed more concerned with me drinking on the bus than with me saving everyone's baggage.

The bus dropped us off at Cerbère, France, a tiny town in the mountains against the border with Spain, and we had to fend for ourselves as far as getting the last five kilometers to Portbou. The bus driver gave us the number of a local cab company, wished us luck and sped of into the sunset. There were 17 of us needing to get to Portbou, five of whom spoke English, 10 of whom spoke French, and two who spoke French, Spanish and English. One of the more skilled linguists called the cab company, but they couldn't accomodate us all at once. We needed three cabs; they could only send two.

The man who ordered the cabs talked some random man with a car into taking four of us across the border for €20, which was €5 cheaper than taking a cab. So Jay and I and a married couple from Minnesota piled into this little car and rode with a man named André. The bus dumped as at Cerbère at 730 and the last train from Portbou to Barcelona left at 835. Everyone was worried we'd miss the train, but we got to the station just before 8. The rest of the people at Cerbère got there 10 minutes after we did.

There was a bar in the station, so after all the stress of the day Jay and I thought it would be a good idea to decompress with a beer or two before our train borded. There were two people besides the bartender there, and one of them, a local man named Angel, was absolutely thrilled with the fact that I had a rubber chicken tied to my bag. He was also thrilled that I could speak Spanish with him. He was pretty loaded when we got there, signed the chicken and made everyone else in the bar who was local sign him as well. Johnny Longnecker now has three tattoos from the train station in Portbou. Angel gave us his phone number and made us promise we'd call him when we pass back through on our way to Italy. We might, we might not. Angel made me trade my t-shirt -- I think because I bought it in Boston -- for his jacket, so I may just call him to return it. I honestly had no choice on the trade; earlier, he offered me some of his quiche and when I told him in Spanish I wasn't hungry I thought he was going to cry. Turns out I was hungry after all.

We caught our train to Barcelona and sat near the folks from Minnesota. They're both accountants and are out for a couple weeks in Europe. They had just come from Paris when we crossed paths on the bus to Cerbère. In Barcelona, we caught the metro out to our hostel. It's a three-building compound in what seems like a wildlife habitat on the outskirts of the city. The road from the metro stop to the hostel was narrow and windy up the side of a hill. It was nearly 11 pm when we got there. I walked along the edge of the road and saw a small black animal coming up the side of the hill to the pavement. Before I could figure out what it was, I saw a large black animal coming up behind it. One huge fat wild boar and all her little boarlets walked onto the road. Mamma wasn't happy to see us and followed us up the road for a while, but fortunately she wasn't hungry, but we both thought it would come after us for getting to close. She trailed slowly to make sure we didn't turn around and make a second pass.

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Photos

Wild boar
This fine looking sow was our welcome wagon to Barcelona.

Barcelona
This is part of the cityscape along the Mediterranean Coast in the eastern part of Barcelona.

Barcelona
This is a nearby, but looking north along a highway.