Brendan Doms

Random British friends and I in a club in Madrid.

Andrea, Tess Fenn, and me in Barcelona. Crazy!

The blue coast of southern France, as it’s called, has its ups and its downs. The train rides all over were taxing, especially with transfers at Cebrere and Montpellier. I was realived to get on a plan again when this part was all done.

Marseille is essentially France’s Baltimore. It has a classy inner harbor area and then everything goes downhill outside of a few blocks away. It was hot and muggy. I probably wouldn’t return.

Nice on the other hand, is nice. The scent of lavender is in the air from nearby perfumeries, and you can hear the babble of a brook on top of the rumble of a waterfall and the roar of the ocean. It has a great light rail system, and is incredibly pedestrian, quaint, and modern all at once. More time there in the future.

Barcelona is beautiful. A city full of life and art and culture. It feels a lot more lived in than Madrid, and I think it’s awesome that I got to see so much of it. While there, a couple of crazy things happened. As I mentioned previously, I had an encounter with a pick pocket. I was walking on the street with four other people (one of whom was a guy bigger than I am) and I was approached by this seemingly crazy guy saying, “I like the black music. Do you like the black music?” I tried to ignore him and shoe him away, but then he grabbed at my crotch and got a hold of my belt. Adrenaline kicked in and moving at a million miles a minute my brain thought about hitting him, decided better of it, and concluded the best move was just to put distance between us. So I shoved him. He staggered back about ten feet, and then started cursing at me, but we just kept walking. I realized about 30 seconds later that he had lifted my sun glasses in the process. Luckily they were from Target, so not a big loss for me. The other thing is that I had a random run in with an old friend on the streets of Barcelona. Who was it but none other than Tess Fenn! She recognized Andrea and I before we realized who she was. I guess we just weren’t expecting someone else from Minnesota to be there at that moment.

Barcelona has been a ton of fun, and there’s a lot that’s happened in the past couple days, but I don’t have enough time to go into all of it right at the moment. There was shopping, the beach, Gaudi architecture, paella, and I nearly got into a fight with a pick pocket. More on all that the next time I get a nice chunk of time with the internet. And hopefully I’ll be able to put up some pictures!

Andrea has been an excellent host, and I can’t thank her enough for showing me around her city and letting me see what living here is like. It’s really interesting to actually get the inside perspective on the Spanish/Catalonian culture, the EU, work, and life in general in a foreign country.

Carli, my traveling companion for the next leg of the trip, has joined up with me successfully here, and we are going to be on something like 3 different trains tomorrow for a day of travel to Marseille. Next time I write, it will be from France!

Adios!

I finally got to Barcelona yesterday and met up with Andrea. It’s really nice to talk to someone who I actually knew before staring this trip. She lives in what I would describe as the hipster neighborhood of Barcelona. It is full of young people and art and cute little boutique shops. Carrer di Verdi feels just like a Spanish version of Valencia street in SF.

I’m extremely grateful to her for giving me a non-hostel place to stay: I can shower without flip-flops here, do laundry, and have a totally free internet connection (though both of the USB ports on her computer are blown out, so there will be a dearth of pictures for the time being).

Last night we ate pinchos - this food that seems to me like the Catalonian take on sushi. There is bread - much like the bread you would find when ordering bruschetta - and on top of that is placed all manner of things. There’s salmon or tuna with sauces, there’s goat cheese and fig, brie and hazelnut, ham and cheese, and I even had a miniature hamburger with some mustard. It’s probably my favorite new food so far.

Then we met up with some of her local friends at a plaza called Placa del Sol. There were just a bunch of young people drinking beer (Estrella, something cheap and local) and just sitting around talking on this flat concrete block.

Then something strange happened. Andrea got a a call from her mom, back in Minnesota. We were then informed of Michael Jackson’s passing. Although I haven’t been paying attention to the news at all, I suppose anything this major is bound to get to me quickly.

Well, I’m excited to see Barcelona and hang out with an old friend. Más pinchos, por favor!

I want to talk about some minutiae for a minute; there are things during my tavels that I’ve noticed that either make me feel like a foreigner or just aren’t quite what I expected.

One is just diet. Egyptian food was extremely bread heavy, Cyprian/Greecian was all about the meat, and Italian was carbohydrates in pasta form. Spain is the first place where I feel like I’m actually eating well-balanced meals consistently.

The bathrooms in these countries all have little quirks too. In Greece, there is a trash bin and signs that say, “The pipes can’t handle toilet paper, throw it away in the bin instead.” This made the bathrooms smell slightly, and felt kind of unsanitary. In Italy, there are little cords in all the bathrooms with signs that say, “Don’t pull this! It is for emergencies only!” And if you do pull it, then an alarm sounds somewhere. It’s like the Italians are acting like every bathroom is in a nursing home with the potential for someone to break a hip. Finally, in both Italy and Spain there is this second little half-toilet with a faucet and no lid. I really don’t know what it’s used for.

I finally get the European love for mopeds and small motorcycles. The streets are so tiny that maneuvering a car is an often difficult and sometimes impossible task. And having a smaller vehicle also allows for some creative definition of “the road” - I’ve seen several motorcycles hop onto the sidewalk and zoom through pedestrians in order to get someplace.

There seems to be a lot of leeway given to parking as well. I’ve seen a lot of cars in positions that block streets or driveways or create a second row - the kind of thing that would get you ticketed and towed in America in a blink.

And learning to cross the road in Cairo makes it so you can cross the road anywhere.

Traveling has caught up to me in a couple ways: the back of my neck is a darker brown than I thought my skin could get, my lip split from the sun and as taking longer to heal than during Minnesota winters, I have a blister on the botom of my right pinky toe - a place I’ve never had one before, I’ve lost a couple toiletries - including contact solution to stupid airport security during my first layover in Athens on the way to Cairo, and when I got to Egypt it turns out no one there wears contacts, and just today I noticed that I’ve lost a shirt - though I can remember the last time I wore it, I have no idea how it didn’t make it into my bag.

Still, I have been lucky enough to be fairly well-rested and healthy so far. That is certainly something to be grateful for.

My mom descibed Madrid as “the New York of Spain” and she couldn’t be more right. The exensive subway, sheer size, and large portions devoted to tourist shopping were just some of the similarities.

Madrid is the most expensive place I’ve been in terms of food and drinks, and the least expensive for clothing. It actually cost me more to eat lunch than it did to buy two shirts!

Also, it felt like half the city was under construction. Everywhere I turned there were cement trucks, fenced off areas, and people with hard hats. It kind of ruined the vibe.

This city is also the first where I’ve been approached by prostitutes. A lot of them. And the funny part is, to compare it to San Francisco, it’s not like they were on a side street of the Mission or Tenderloin during the night. They were in the middle of a tourist thoroughfare in broad daylight. Imagine a couple dozen women in too-short skirts taking drags off cigarettes right in front of the Macy’s in Union Square, and you’ll get the idea.

Unrelated to that, I actually met two girls from the Wellesley High School in the Madrid airport. One even works across the street from Coconut Thai, an old haunt of mine during college. And yes, she said, the construction on Route 9 continues. They were the youngest people I’ve met traveling - 18 and freshly graduated. They mostly seemed interested in getting straight to the drinking.

Then I had a tough time meeting people at the hostel in Madrid - the bartender was doing a poor job of keeping people around. Finally I ended up going clubbing with three British girls. It was a fun (but expensive) night, and I got to hear some “quality” European dance music. The techno version of Single Ladies just doesn’t sound right to my ears.

So yeah, big city Spanish style. Good time.

Last night was my final one in Rome, so I wanted to do something typical and low-key.

After accidentally running into the Montana girls from the hostel and walking around Campo de Fiori with them, I met Mike, a teacher from Chicago. We decided to set out and eat the thing that the Italians are most famous for: pasta. We found a nice hole in the wall restaurant, and it was exactly what you would expect. Mmm…tasty.

When we wrapped up he headed off to a pub crawl (which are advertised to tourists everywhere in Rome, a city with way more Irish pubs than it has any right to) and I headed back to the hostel. There I talked with Matt, a Brit who was fascinated by my Kindle. It sounds like it’s gotten a lot of press in the UK, but nobody has actually seen one. I wonder what is keeping Amazon out of there. Legal issues with the publishers? I can only speculate.

Well, Rome, thank you for showing me the good side of Italy. Caio. Until next time.