Today we reach a milestone. It is Day 201 of the 2001 Odyssey, and it is beginning to feel like we’ve been on holiday for a little while now. Well, we are still thinking of it as a “long weekend”, but when we think about the number of days, it is pretty impressive we’ve made it this far without strangling one another…*grin*

Coming to you again in the wee hours of the morning since the net is at it’s cheapest then. Costs 200Pts ($2 AUD) for 33 minutes during the afternoon and evening, but the same price for 3 hours between 5am - 8am. Of course, there are some perils and this morning walking down La Ramblas, I had to fend off a couple of transexual prostitutes would wanted to know if I’d like to perhaps spend my pesetas some other way. I was awakened this morning, not by the alarm clock, but by some drunk guy screaming like he was being murdered at 4:30am. It’s an interesting city…

Went to La Sagrada Familiar (a really big cathedral) the other day. It is covered in multi-coloured ceramic shards and is a really weird thing to look at. It costs 650Pts for students, but really, not overly worth it, since what you see from the street is what you see inside. It is a work in progress and nowhere near completion. At the time it was started, the designer (Antoni Gaudi) estimated it would take 200 years to complete. They’re not very far through, as it turns out, and the fee you pay is largely just to see scaffolding and climb the towers. Good view of Barcelona though, and it does help you to see the detail up close, so it’s possibly worth it for some people (Di appreciated the closer look), but a pair of binoculars from the street could probably save you

We did get our money’s worth playing Di’s favourite game - “Stupid Shoes”. This is a game she likes to play in airports and national parks, and basically it just involves looking at people’s inappropriate shoes and laughing. Hey, when you’re a traveller, you have to get your amusement cheap…

The shoes some people wore to climb 350 steep circular steps inside dark spires were impressive in their stupidity. Stilleto heels. Wooden clog-style scuffs. Plastic strappy sandals that cut through skin. It was hard to pick a definite winner there, to be honest.

The other thing that helped get value out of it was sitting and listening to all the guys (read: stupid prats) that were trying to impress girls by passing themselves off as appreciating architecture in a profoundly intelligent way. One guy from the US was telling two girls in a particularly animated and repetitive way how Gaudi had no formal mathematics training and had just thought of ways to make sure it was self supporting and stood up. Apparently he did this by “thinking out of his head, if you can believe it!”. No! Thinking out of his head, you say? Gosh, and there’s us going around thinking out of our forearms… Our SPOTD of the day, without doubt.

Di went out on a limb last night and decided to eat beef, since she was craving a steak. I declined and went with the pork chops which are probably no better, but at least I’m not going to be going around yelling “Moo! Hahaha! Moo!” like Di in a few years. Her reasoning was that a little bit of beef would not hurt, and by the time she gets to that level of illness, they will have discovered a cure. Ever the optimist…*chuckle*

If you’ve been reading these properly, you would realise we are not supposed to be in Barcelona at the moment, but in Rome by now. We, er, changed our plans. Looks like Rome is even more expensive than here, and we managed to change our flights so that we are now going there tomorrow instead, and then to London on the 3rd September.

Those dates took quite some time to organise since when we rang the airlines here, we were told that every seat on every flight was full and we could not get out of Rome for another two weeks. After dealing with the good folk of Iberia and Qantas in Spain (possible mottos: “Although We Say We Speak English, We Actually Speak It As Well As You Speak Spanish, Which Is To Say, Not Enough To Be Useful”), we ended up coming to the internet cafe, buying a phone link for less than it costs to call Madrid from Barcelona, and called Cliff, our Travelshop.com.au guy at home who just sorted it out in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. Yay!

Today, we’re going to go for a bit of a stroll around a section of town we’ve not seen yet. The “Let’s Go Western Europe 2001″ book probably describes it as something completely opposite to what it really is - the area of town we are in now is apparently what Spain is really like, but it is the area of town which could best be described as the ghetto where the Pakistani and Indian populations are located. Very few Spanish people that we can see. Prices are generally about 20-30% inaccurate.

Then again, the book is written by Harvard students on their vacations, so the accuracy of travel adventures written by Uni students is always going to be in question…*wry grin*

Categories: Travel, Odyssey 2001