Julia’s Journical

Lindsay and I spent 2 weeks in Barcelona. With a trip in-between to Granada. Our first week this is what we got up to:

Sangrada Familiara was only about 4 blocks away from our hostel.

It is rather magnificent! And constantly evolving.

Another day we decided to do a walking tour from our book of walking tours. 10 minutes into the tour we found a nice side street and made up our own tour. It was seriously hot and we enjoyed the cool little streets and looked in the numerous stops.

We wound up in the Gothic quarter. Where we sat briefly to enjoy the music of a busker and the cool shade created by the large church.

I looked up at one stage and saw this creepy thing:

We had a poke around in a church called St Jordi. Instead of having little prayer candles they had electric candle things.

It just looks really weird. To *light* a candle you put a coin into the little money box.

The giant golden thing looked like it had ET faces on it

See them? They are the swirly things going around the sun looking part.

The courtyard of the church was really pretty, there was a fountain with cold drinkable water pouring out of it.

This was my favourite part of the fountain.

The residents of the courtyard were complete gooses.

That night we met one of our room mates. He spoke no English, and we speak no Spanish. But he was urgently trying to communicate something to us. So Lindsay passed him the laptop, open to google translate. And the Spanish man typed in this:
“prótesis de pierna” which in English means, prosthetic leg. He then pretended to scream in fright. We worked out he didn’t want us to wake up in the morning and see a leg lying on the ground.

The next day we went to the train station to book our tickets to Granada. While waiting in the line I spotted some girls who were obviously backpackers having a little bit of a freak out. I saw they had Eurail timetables with them, so I went over to offer some assistance. They were both Canadian and quite distressed. They had planned on catching a train to Milan, but had found out that the trains to Milan went once a week only. So far they had only used one trip on their Eurail pass and were still new to the game. I gave them the suggestion of catching a ferry to Rome, and then from their catching the train to Milan. We gave them directions to the ferry terminal and to Rome once they arrived in Italy. They had some other questions about how the Eurail passes worked and places to stay. They were so thankful that we had helped. I hope they made it to Milan ok.

We booked out tickets in Spanish! We were so proud of ourselves. Lindsay is really good with languages, which is useful. Leaving the station we decided to head in the direction of a hill with a nice building on it. Along the way we spotted this Miro? sculpture.

Turning around from the sculpture we noticed these trees:

Gum trees! I was so excited I was picking up leaves and sniffing them. (home sick much?!)

The pretty building we had come to see was covered with scaffolding and thus not as pretty.

But the view was pretty fantastic.

As was this busker.

Can you spot Sangrada Familiara?

Its such an epic building.

Walking back down through lovely gardens we found some bougainvillea which is fast becoming my favourite flower (vine? plant?).

The next day was Lindsay’s birthday and we were catching the train to Granada in the south of Spain. This was the longest train trip I have ever been on, we had a load of food with us because we had a knew the trip would take 11+ hours. The train zigged-zagged through Spain.
We left the stormy skies in Catalonia.

And passed through the interestingly named coastal town of:

We arrived in Valencia, where the train stopped for ages, then left the station, heading in the opposite direction before stopping again due to an accident on the train tracks ahead.
We passed through another town and or city. Stopped and changed direction (thus the zig zag).

At one station the carriage in front of our carriage and the engine behind our carriage pulled away. Our carriage was left standing next to a train station that looked very abandoned. The carriage was packed with unconcerned Spanish people, obnoxiously loud Americans boasting about their knowledge of the Spanish people, and English couple then Lindsay and I. NB: it was Lindsay’s birthday and by this stage we had been on the train around 9 hours. After freaking out for only about 30mins, an engine arrived, picked up our carriage and off we went. The engine was pulling only one carriage, so we were going pretty fast. The country side around us changed quickly too.

From pine trees:

to hills covered in rows of Olive trees.

To sweeping fields of grain maybe?

And then 12 hours after leaving Barcelona we arrived in Granda. It was a 30 min walk to our hostel/hotel. We found an arabic restaurant and tried to have a celebratory dinner for Lindsay’s birthday.