Nottingham to Barcelona

Robyn and I were to meet at the train station in Nottingham, about two hours from Manchester. However, on arriving I had a distinct feeling we weren´t going to meet there. I spent a semi-frantic, mostly just irritated, fifteen minutes of prescious time looking for Robyn.

Decided something definitely happened.
Decided had to get to East Midlands airport, which isn´t conveniently located anywhere near Nottingham train station) very soon.
Hailed taxi: an option that is always available, but one you never concede to very happily because it means all the other cheap alternatives have, for whatever reason, been disregarded for a very expensive--albeit convenient one.

Arrived at East Midlands airport to find Robyn, who had been delayed and rerouted several times due to a freak accident involving a semi-truck and a telephone pole on the only road out of the little town in which she lives. That is her story, she´s sticking to it... and as for the taxi ride, which cost me an amount that will never be disclosed, those are the breaks.

The flight to Barcelona, more accurately Girona--an hour and a bit outside of Barcelona--went swimmingly enough. We eventually located the place we were staying, after navigating the streets of a city constructed with octagon-shaped intersections. That may sound unimportant, but it means you actually go in three or four different directions to turn one corner.

Barcelona wasn´t bad. I use that term, both boring and anticlimatic, when explaining an amazing city like Barcelona because our experience there was mostly marred by two things:

- the expectation of Paris in the near future
- the fact that our host was violently ill. The term violent could never be more appropriate.

Needless to say, we were anxious to move on. Although we did enjoy the sun and cloudless skies of Spain, and we know we will be back to Barcelona to fly home, making it all the easier to leave.

But we´ve heard nothing but good things about Barcelona, and our experience there was far from being a negative one. It was an embarassing shock to realize that, yes, they do indeed speak Spanish here and English is not spoken as frequently as we had been told.

Those experiences must have been of the Spanish-resort vacation types. Neither one of us speaks Spanish. Neither one of us attempted to prepare for the language barrier either. But we did manage to find our way, eventually.

My journal, Day One: Barcelona, reads:

Got lost trying to find place because of Robyn´s map, or lack thereof.

It looked like some minimalist artist´s interpretation of Barcelona, more accurately--three blocks of Barcelona. It was so bad it was funny. We´ve consistently found our lack of preparation for these trips comical, and fortunately so, comical right away. Neither one of us minds being lost; again, fortunately because we have been a lot.

My journal, Day Two: Barcelona:

- found park and first "Spain feeling" in front of water falls, monuements and palm trees.

Sunny and warm, but Spaniards wearing scarves and winter jackets.
Everyone has a dog here.

At the end of Day 2, we miraculously ran into a group of English blokes that we had sat in front of on the plane over. This is miraculous because Robyn and I were wandering in the truest sense of the word, because Barcelona is a city with a population of approximately 3-4ish million, and because we didn´t talk in detail, let alone plan to meet these guys.

We went for dinner with them and discovered they were a group of seven English men in the Queen´s service visiting Barcelona for a couple days to say goodbye to two of their team´s members. But they were wonderful because:

We were lost.
They were distinclty English, meaning familiar, amongst millions of Spaniards.
A couple of them spoke Spanish fluently.
And they were a lot of fun--as are most military men who are holiday-ing from The service.

We spent the night with Rich, Richie, Gethin (from Wales, hence the name), Chris, Iain, Fitz and the seventh (forgotten his name) English guy with a lazy eye and a cold.

Taking the long night that lasted until 8am the next day into account, Robyn and I slept until noon and then caught the train to Paris early in the evening.