BCN
After spending the night in our lovely Best Western hotel room in Nice, Nicole and i took a 13 hour train ride to Barcelona, Spain. Getting from Spain to France was a ridiculous hassle. For some reason the computers in French train stations don’t connect with the computers in Spanish train stations. After trying multiple times in Paris to get a ticket we finally got one out of Nice and took the scariest and bumpiest train ride through the Pyrenees Mountains.
Barcelona was a blast. Our hostel was perfectly designed for meeting fellow travellers. We hadn’t been at the hostel more then 20 minutes before we met two New Zealanders and a man from Iowa. After asking the Kiwis multiple questions on The Flight of the Conchords we played a game of Celebrities and then headed to a cowboy bar. Cowboy bars in Spain are much different then cowboy bars in Calgary. For one thing, there’s not really anything cowboy about them. For another, they actually play good music! At the bar we met a gigantic group of Irish college students who told us about their post-retro-political-rock-punk band (which later turned out to be a lie).
One of the best parts about Spain is the siesta. This amazing invention is more then just a occasional nap to the Spanish. It’s a way of life! Many places actually close down after lunch for two hours so the employees can go home to take a nap.
After a busy morning of sightseeing, Nicole and i returned back to the hostel for our siesta and found our two roommates there for the same reason. Post-siesta we introduced ourselves and made new friends, this time from Poland. I hadn’t realized how much i didn’t know about Poland until i actually met a Polish person. I didn’t feel bad about it, though, considering all they knew about Canada was Celine Dion and Bryan Adams. We spent the rest of our time in Barcelona together hanging out and sharing cultural secrets.
What surprised me most about my conversation with our new friends was how much we had in common. With over 7000km of space between us and a very different cultural history/background/language, i was shocked to realize we had such similar tastes in tv, movies, music etc…
Meeting fellow travellers has been such a highlight on this trip so far. Sure, i can learn about another culture from its architecture, its museums, its pamphlets and postcards. But nothing beats the first hand accounts from actual live people with personal opinions and subjective insights. Delightful.
