Hello again everyone. Now that I have a weekend at home in Lisieux, without traveling or living out of a backpack, I can finally catch up on the blog and update everyone about the christmas holidays and the january adventure to Biarritz.
Last time i wrote about my mom coming to visit me in December. That’s pretty much where this blog picks up from, as mom and I were in Paris visiting the city a few days before her flight back to the U.S. Since I was already in Paris with my mom, Cecil was able to meet me there by taking a direct train from Lisieux. So on Friday the 19th, after giving hugs and saying goodbye to mom (in Paris of all places!!!), Cecil and I got on the bus to the airport and before long we were on a plane heading to Barcelona!
The plane ride started out being a pretty interesting experience. We flew with Ryan Air, which is known for being an incredibly cheap (for lack of a better word) airline. Sometimes they offer 5 euro tickets for a one way ticket between major european cities, with the taxes eventually costing more than the actually flight itself! While we knew it was a budget airline, we didn’t realize just how ‘budget’ it really was until we experienced it first hand. First of all, according to the website, the only piece of luggage that you are not charged for is a small carry on. So obviously with the idea of saving as much money as possible in our heads, Cecil and I decided to cram a week’s worth of clothes and toiletries in a bag not much bigger than a backpack. Suffice it to say I regretted this decision later on in the trip. Also while Ryan Air tickets claim to take you from Paris to Barcelona, “Paris” is actually code for Beauvais, an airport about an hour and a half bus ride from Paris, and “Barcelona airport” similary turns out to be located about 90km from the actual Barcelona city itself. So what you may save in cheap airfare ticket prices, you make up for in airport transportation, luggage fees, and wasted time waiting in lines, buses, and small airports.
We eventually made it to the real Barcelona about 11pm at night. I had taken a couple semesters of spanish in college, but since it had been so long and since french came much easier for me, I wasn’t really up to the challenge of understanding where to go to get to the metro stop, or which one to take to get to our hostel. So I asked a local who was buying a ticket literally ... “donde.... metro....billeto (taken a french word billet, meaning ticket, with an extro ‘o’ at the end in hope to make it more spanish and thus understandable to him). He smiled at me and told me in very good English which subway to take. I felt kind of like an idiot, but at the same time I was relieved to discover that we wouldn’t have to rely on my pigeon archaic spanish to survive in this ciy. In fact we learned that English is spoken pretty regularly as Barcelona is a popular city for U.S., and English expatriates.
Anyway, we stayed 6 nights in Barcelona in a youth hostel on the outskirts of the city center. The main reason we chose it was because it cost 10 euros a night to stay there, and in Europe, that is too good to be true. But it turned out that the reason for the low price was because there were 10 people to a room, it was located a good 15 minute train ride away from the city center, and since it was located in the hills outside of Barcelona, we had to hike up a hill to get to it! We were really tired the first night since we arrived there pretty late, but instead of being rewarded a good night’s sleep, we were blessed with a full mariacha style brass band playing music for the some function that was taking place right below our window. Suffice it to say, we didn’t enjoy the hostel that much that night, or even the remaining nights, as our neighbors were pretty noisy sleepers, we had to wake up by 9:30 every morning so the staff could clean the rooms, and because every day to get into the city we had to take a 20 min train ride, and coming back after a long day of exploring, the train ride and the hike up the mountain to get to our hostel was always awaiting us.
But as for Barcelona itself, I thought the city was unlike any other city I have been to. The style of many of the houses was very unique. Several of them are built asymmetrically with unusual curves and spectacular colors, - a unique architectural movement called Modernisme and mainly attributed to the revolutionary artist Antoni Gaudí and by Barcelonese painter Pablo Picasso. It makes sense then, that Barcelona has a pretty big art vibe to it. Cecil and I didn’t go to any museums during our stay here (partly because we prefer Impressionism to more modern art) but we still admired Gaudí's works that you could find simply by walking around the town or through parks. While I won’t recount what happened each day, I will list some of the things that we did during our week long stay that we enjoyed...
- Climbed Mont Juic (‘Hill of the Jews’), took pictures at the top looking over Barca.
- Went to the beach DAILY!!! Since there was much more sun and warm weather compared to Normandy. Even still, Cecil and I were pretty much the only swimmers.
- Walked down the famous La Rambla, a pedestrian-only strip full of street performers, human statues, pet and flower stands, and artists! (we were told to watch out for pick pockets).
- One day we decided to do two different activities; since Cecil liked aquariums he decided to go see the Aquarium of Barcelona with a cool underwater tunnel where sharks and other sea creatures swim all around you. I on the other hand, being completely obsessed with soccer (I should say football now, being in Europe), paid to have a tour of one of the biggest and well known football stadiums in the world - Camp Nou, the stadium of the world famous soccer club FC Barcelona. I got to sit in one of the 100,000 seats, touch the grass, see the team’s dressing rooms, all the things that make soccer fanatics like myself go crazy!! :).
- We saw the Sangrada Familia (from the outside, since it cost 10 euros to go see a freaking church ... what a crime! hehe). This is an immense structure designed by, of course, Gaudí. Unfortunately he died before the 18-tower church was close to being completed, but many people make the touristic pilgrimage today to witness the work-in-progress until it’s finished in 2026.
- I caught up with a very good friend of my Dad’s, Roger who lives in Barcelona. Roger and Dad were very good friends in their 20s, and it they moved to England together. Roger was the best man at my parent’s wedding, so it was really cool to meet up and have a drink with him in Europe of all places!
- We had Christmas dinner at Roger’s place and had a nice time talking with some of his partner and his Barcelona friends (in English and pigeon Spanish).
- On our last day, we took a train trip to a small beach town called Sitges located 30 minutes outside of Barcelona. We wanted to spend our last day on a nice sunny beach without crowds of people, so we walked from the train station to the beach and were suprised to discover a really nice secluded sandy beach with hardly any people on it at all! We quickly found out after an old man came into view around a big rock on the beach COMPLETELY NAKED, and another middle-aged man laid a towel out beside us and started undressing that we had discovered the only nude beach in Sitges. Several other locals came to bath and bask in the sun in their birthday suits through out the day, one woman but mostly middle to older aged men. Cecil and I sighed and said to ourselves “Oh Europe,” but it didn’t bother us too much, and just became a funny story and experience.
For the rest of the time we spent a lot of time under the sun (in December yayyy) swimming, covering ourselves with sand, picnicking with sangria on the beach, and learning some Spanish/Catalan words at the same time. All in all, it was a nice break away from rainy Normandy. But now I am glad to be back in Lisieux and back to teaching.
Jan 30th - Feb 1st
Biarritz! We decided to get out of normandy on this weekend, and so we scrummaged around online and found a train ticket for only 15 euros to go to a city called Biarritz. We had never heard of Biarritz before, so we looked it up on google map and discovered it was at the complete bottom left part of France. With that much ground covered and for only 30 euros round trip, we both were convinced this was the next adventure for us. It turned out there was a slight catch. The reason the train tickets were so cheap was because the train left Paris at 11:00pm, and instead of being a sleeper train where the chair reclines or they provide you with a bed, it was a BAR train, meaning that the chairs didn’t recline.on a train that is a bar and a train à la fois. took a night train from paris at 11:00pm and got in to Biarritz at 6:30am. We didn’t print out the directions for the hotel in which we were staying, so we actually walked the wrong 3km into town towards the beach in the complete darkness of the early morning. While are legs and backs were quite tired and we were really cold, the long directionless walk turned out to be a blessing, as we made it to the beach right as the sun was rising. I think it was the most beautiful sunrise I have ever seen (granted I am not alive at that hour on most mornings to witness many sunrises, but still it was awesome being able to see such a blend of pinks, oranges, reds, and purples, while standing on la Vierge sur la Roche on the atlantic ocean. Once we found our hotel later in the afternoon we crashed for the rest of the day and only made it out for pizza that night for dinner. Sunday, being our last day before returning back to work, we took the time to explore the city. We walked through the small little surfing town and found most of the centre-ville to be full of ritzy shops, high-end clothing stores, and casinos. Most of the people of Biarritz were well dressed, bundled up in fur coats and showing off their wealth. But every once in a while a local decked out in a wetsuit, surfboard in arm, would occasionally stroll through the city barefooted towards the water. Leaving the city behind us Cecil and I made our way through a pretty coastline trail towards the Lighthouse for a picnic and a magnificent view looking back across the Biarritz Beach. After lunch, we hiked down to the beach to join the other dogwalkers and beachbums, skip some rocks in the atlantic, and admire the talents and tricks of the many surfers riding the world-famous Biarritz waves back to shore. Finally, we ended our day walking along the beach (in the rain), grabbing another pizza at our favorite restaurant, then waiting for the next night/bar train to take us back to Paris and then Lisieux by Monday morning, ready for teaching.
Time for some photos! I will talk about the February vacation trips to Amsterdam, Nice, and Italy soon, and describe more about teaching in the next blog...
BARCELONA
BIARRITZ
