Spain

I'm a little behind on the posts.. Sorry, I did warn you.

Our first taste of Barcelona was at 10pm after a 5 hour train ride on a vintage spanish passenger train. But our couchsurfing hosts were great. They met us in front of MacDonalds

We quickly became familiar with the architech Antoni Gaudi. His enormous Cathederal, Sagrada Familia has been under construction for 100 years already and has another 40 to go. Unfortunately he won't be able to see it completion as he was run down by a horse carrage 90 years ago. His projects, scattered throughout the city become very easy to spot.  We wandered past the marina; a home to hundreds of million dollar boats, and found a sign pointing out the 1992 Olympic Village. We made it halfway, but decided it wasn't meant to be done on foot.

The next day we had a bit of difficulty getting a train to Madrid, and so killed a few hours in the National Art Museum. It was interesting, we saw a few more Gaudi pieces and a few Piccasos, among others. We eventually caught a train to Madrid, but were stopped by a security guard from catching our train to Malaga.  In protest, we decided to spend the night in the train station. Except, it turns out that Madrid has the only train station in Europe that closes at night, so we actually spent the night huddled up for warmth in a hotel court yard. Not even a nice hotel, it was a crappy night.

We finally arrived in Malaga early the next day, and found our way to the resort that Robyn's mom book us into. It was beautiful, but un-prepared for our arrival. We slept on some chairs by the pool until our room was ready.

The following week blurred together. We found a nearby grocery store and stocked up, saw some of the local towns, got a touch of food poisoning, and did alot of sleeping. It was tough to leave the luxury, we've spoiled ourselves.

We struck out for Gibraltar, and found the rock after a four hour bus ride. It wasn't a beautiful place, but it was very interesting. We walked across the border into the English colony from the Spanish town, Lalina. Walked through the most laxed customs office, and right through the middle of a runway. During a hike to the top of the rock, we found a sign reading "Do not feed the Apes", we checked over our shoulders and quickly turned back to town.
It was a neat place, but mostly just a stop-over for home-sick Brits during their spanish vacations.. very over priced.

The next stop was Sevilla.  We bounced between a few hostels before finding a fairly nice hotel who offered a double room at a 40% discount (I guess we've been looking extra pathetic lately).  Sevilla was beautiful, our first stop in Spain that wasn't baited for tourists.  We found some impressive old world architecture, and some picturesque neighbourhoods scattered throughout.  On the south side of the river is the rotting carcass of Expo '92.  It was a huge complex, and had some very interesting new age architecture, but most of it was abandoned and dilapitated.  It was almost nastalgic, despite the fact that I'd never been there before. 

We left Sevilla via highspeed train to Madrid, spent another sleepless night in the airport, and caught an early flight to Rome.  

Ready for the next leg of our journey.

More to follow