Spain

So this is it, our last European destination the Spanish capital. If you’ve read the pervious post you may have guessed that we were a bit over small town medieval Europe and just wanted to get to a place where the shops don’t shut between 12 and 5 and there’s a bit more going on than some stuffy 500 year old church.
We’d even abandoned an extra few days in another small town to get to the city earlier.

It was nice to be in a modern city again, especially one that has a history like Madrid’s (I know, it’s a bit of a contradiction ‘a modern historic city’).

We went on a walking tour of the city sights and a biking tour of the cities parks.

Modern art museum

Madrid as our last destination is essentially true but in the middle of the week we went and taught English to some Spanish people. As part of a 1 year course in the Madrid they had to complete 1 week of ‘Intensive English’. So about 20 Spanish people and 20 English people were herded into a bus and sent to a place (no cathedral) 3 hours from Madrid where only English specking was allowed.

It was a weird big brother type experience where everything was done for you eg the schedule for the whole week was laid out, breakfast, lunch, dinner, activities and you hardly went more than 1 km from the hotel (which was literally in the middle of nowhere). By the end of the week a few of the Spanish people were convinced that all the English speakers were paid actors and knew perfect spanish.

The basic schedule for every day was breakfast from 9-10 then 4 hours of speaking to the Spaniards (one on one), lunch for 2 hours and a wee break and then another 2-4 hours of speaking to the Spaniards followed by dinner at 9pm and drinking.

It all sounds very easy but constantly speaking for that long and all the free food and wine really started to take it’s toll and by then end of the week we were both totally stuffed and spent.

We were able to get a bit of time to ourselves and go for some walks in the countryside

We were pretty lucky with the group that we got, quite a lot of the Spaniards were our age and hopefully we keep in contact with them. Also the English (Anglos) speakers were cool to as well and the same goes for them.

After the week of constant broken English we had only one night back in Madrid and then a flight the next day to Rachel’s mum’s in Alexandria.

Bring on Egypt.

It’s been near 2 months of travel so far, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland and now Spain. And there has been a common theme in all these places, cathedrals. They are just everywhere in Western Europe and quite frankly we are getting a bit sick of them. So why you ask did we go to Segovia, the main attractions being a roman aqueduct and a massive cathedral? Well I don’t know… we’d read about it in the LP and it sounded good 2 months ago.

The Aqueduct is actually knida cool, no mortar or fixings and still standing after a few thousand years.

And yes the cathedral

the cathedral

the cathedral (at night)

the cathedral (at night)

Rach with her solid chocolate drink, mmmmm

Hey it’s not a cathedral, but a castle

Just for good measure another cathedral shot

And finally…… wow a cathedral

We were about to head to Avila, another small medieval town (more old streets and buildings) but unless you couldn’t guess the tone of this post we were a bit over it all so decided just to go straight to Madrid.

So before we even got to Barcelona we had to do a quick stop in Perpignan to drop off our rental car. Luckily for us (not) the whole city centre seemed to be full of diversion and one ways, especially around where we had to drop off the car. Anyway we made it through most of the mess (which included a broken French and hand gesture conversation with 4 different locals about where a petrol station was) and we could finally see the drop of point only to be confronted with a no left turn. Well that wasn’t going to stop us so we made the turn anyway, bad move, a speeding Frenchman came around and had to slam on his brakes. Ok so fair enough it was our fault but this guy went NATO and just started screaming at us from his car, hand gestures and feints to get out of his car, right in the middle of the road. After five minuets he must have got tired so just drove off, still making ridiculous hand movements. Gotta love the French

3 hours, a bus and a 2km walk later and we got to our apartment we’d rented for the week in Barcelona. We went and got groceries, not knowing where we were. We could have walked another 2 blocks to see one of the cities main attractions, the Sagrada Familia.

The next day was supposed to be jam packed but ended up being a bit of a slow day, which was my fault. On our way to the first thing we were doing, a bike tour, we got totally lost. Not once or twice but more times than I can remember, all I can say is getting a map should be on the top of your list when you get to Barcelona. After missing out on the bike tour we just aimlessly wandered around the city staying away from the main tourist tracks. We found ourselves out on the edge of the city near the hills where a interactive museum that we’d been recommend to go to was. Another thing that old people and kids go to, seriously where are all the people our age?

Ahh well stuff people our age, we know what we like and children’s entertainment falls in that category. The museum was easily the best interactive science museum ever. It took me back to when I’d go to our local science museum in Palmy.

Rach using a jet of air to float the polystyrene ball onto the hoop

Our next day was a bit more organized, we did make it on time for the bike tour. The highlight of which was catching out tour guide out when he spiel some false story but ringing the bells on our bikes until the whole tour group was ringing.

Sagrada Familia

The cubist/angled side

Nice little bikes all lined up in a row

We were in Barcelona for 5 days and not all of it was getting lost and hassling tour guides

We walked ourselves around Antoni Gaudí's buildings, just so Dr Seuss

I can’t decide if I like the style, they all look like they are melting

Not Antoni Gaudí's but every city should have a giant smiling lobster sculpture


We bought an English newspaper and sat on the beach for an afternoon.

Walked up one of the surrounding hills to watch the sunset

Saw the fountain and lights show, set to classical music

And on our last day got in just a bit more weird Dr Suess architecture by Gaudí



We really liked our time in Barcelona and probably should have stayed longer, ah well travels must go on.