Fun: Sweet Espana
[Spanish photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/segarsluke/sets/72157624436229273/]
I like Spain. Actually, I think that everyone does except maybe for the Dutch folks these days. Out of all of the countries in the world, I know more people who have studied abroad in Spain and come back awestruck than anywhere else. After having been there, I think there’s a good reason for it.
Going to Spain is something like drinking from a cultural fire hose, and there’s no way you’re not going to get wet. Our journeys took us to what may be the most noticeably cultural place in Spain (Barcelona), as well as some smaller places around Spain that were equally awesome.
Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain and is plopped down in the northwestern corner of Spain on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. We took a lengthy train ride from Geneva to Barcelona (receiving our first and second intra-EU passport check along the way) and checked in to one of the best valued hostels we stayed at throughout our trip (the Alberg Pere Tarres). Our first day we reserved largely for the (topless…surprise!) beach — our coastal batteries were a bit drained from all of the time in the mountains. The next day is when we did most of our exploring, and we were starting to show the signs of seasoned travelers: we decided to rent some bikes to travel across the gigantic city instead of trying to walk the whole thing. Biking in Barcelona was great — we were able to push ourselves to get to the majority of the landmarks we wanted to see…something that would have been utterly impossible without the bikes.
We started off biking towards the coast and checking out a lot of the scenery that missed by riding the metro the day before. We got to see a lot of stuff, including:
One of the entrances of Park Guell. The park's pretty popular.
We also tried tapas one night, which were delicious but not particularly filling. We tried something like 9 different dishes (none of which was terribly outlandish by American standards, except for maybe squid) that beat our mass produced pasta recipe by a long shot.
We didn’t want to spend our entire trip twisted in the chaos of a bigger city, so we picked a random mountain town and hopped on a bus to get there. The town we picked was a dinky village named Olot that was conveniently located right in the middle of the Zona Volcanica de la Garrotxa, a volcanic national park about an hour or two outside of Barcelona. Our primary mission in the park was to find a cool hiking trail, and the lady at our hostel pointed us to a great (but looooooong) hike that we could do in a single day. We spent most of the next day walking on the trail through some volcanic craters and the surrounding forests — it was a great hike, and there was actually a church that was built in one of the craters along the middle of the trail! I can’t imagine that it got a whole lot of attendance…
It was O-lot of fun!
Girona was one of my favorite places of the whole trip. The only reason we even knew about Girona was because it is the closest town to the Ryanair airport that we were flying out of later in the week. The town was much smaller than Barcelona but had an equally stunning amount of charm. We stayed in another terrific hostel there and spent most of our time wandering around and enjoying the sights. Girona had a lot of history to it — much of the town seemed almost medieval, which was very different from the big-city feel of Barcelona and the mountain town of Olot.
Girona at sunset. This place was one of my favorites.
In retrospect, Spain and Switzerland are the top two competitors for my favorite countries, and for very different reasons. I’ve never been to a more beautiful, more exciting place to be outside than Vevey, Switzerland, and Spanish culture somehow reaches out and grabs you as soon as you set foot in the country. Ahh, discovery.