Being Bored in Beautiful Bern

I’m sitting on the train leaving Bern.  Two men just got on the train carrying assault rifles and placed them in the luggage compartment.  They are, of course, members of the Swiss army.  Welcome to muthaflippin’ Switzerland, b****es.

DAY ONE

Actually, Bern really isn’t as interesting as the event articulated in my opening paragraph would seem to suggest.  Breakfast at the hostel was good, though quiet.  I was staying at another official HI Hostel, and I have to say it was a very similar experience to the last one.  It seems to me that HI Hostels are primarily occupied by older generations trying to feel young by entering a place designated ‘youth’.  They bring the youthful feeling of the places right down, though – I met plenty of older people in Lisbon particularly that managed to keep the hostel atmosphere lively, so I thin it is mindset far more than age.

(As an aside, my ticket was just inspected and, for the first time ever, the guy actually stamped my Eurail pass.  Um… what?)

The one benefit of a HI Hostel, though, is that they do decent breakfasts.  Well, actually, that’s not true of all of them.  But it was true of this one.  In that it had bircher muesli (I’m easy to please).

For certain reasons that I’m not sure I will communicate here, I had revived motivation to complete my PhD application.  For those not in the know, I have been putting together an application to complete a PhD at St. Andrew’s university in Scotland.  All the excitement had made it very difficult to find time to work on it, but I was adamant that I would have it finished before leaving Switzerland.

But I didn’t want to spend my first day in a new city writing a PhD application.  I also needed money, since Switzerland likes being a pain and not taking up the euro.  I had some GBP left over from England, and concluded that I wouldn’t be spending too much, so I could just use that and save having to change any euros.

Swiss banknotes are plastic (I think… they certainly don’t feel like paper) so much closer to what I am used to.  Then there’re the coins.  From sf5- down, you use a silver coin in the expected denominations (though sf0.5 is written as ½ on the coin itself).  You can also get denominations less than one, which I dubbed Swiss Franken Cents (hurr hurr hurr).

I walked up the hill to get some money.  The bank I went into was huge, but had very clear signage so I was able to find the exchange desk.  The clerk couldn’t speak English, and I can’t speak German, but she was clearly used to bumbling English-speakers wandering in, and pointed to an instructional sign written in every language under the sun, took my money, put it inside some kind of official counting machine (which counted all four of the notes I had given her!) and gave me sf108-.

Armed with cash, I left and decided to go to the bear pits.  Bern means bear.  Bears are popular.  They are the heraldic animal, and there are paintings and statues of them sort of everywhere (at least in the old town).

Bern is a really pretty city, and it isn’t just me who thinks so.  The whole old town is a UNESCO heritage site.  Which sounds rather excessive for a series of chain stores, fast food outlets and entertainment complexes.

After wandering around trying to find a bridge across the River Aare (not sure how to pronounce that – I’ve been saying “Aaargh” very dramatically) I found one.  It had barbed wire along the edge.  You know, to stop people jumping off.  Maybe they should consider something like that on the Storey Bridge (I’m kidding, it’s stupid).

The bear pit was right next to the river.  Seeing a bunch of tourists goggling down around the pit, I got excited – the bears must be doing something interesting!

The bear pit is exactly what it sounds like.  A pit.  With bears in it.  Four of them.  Only you couldn’t see them because they were sleeping.  Turns out all the tourists were just having their photos taken with a large plastic model bear, put there just for that purpose.  Weirdly, I read a couple of signs, one saying that the bears in Bern don’t hibernate because it’s not cold enough and there’s plenty of food, and one saying that the bears might be hibernating if you couldn’t see them.  Well… I couldn’t see them.

Disappointed, I noticed a large hill in the distance.  I didn’t really know what it was, but I decided that I would go there because otherwise I would feel like I wasted the day looking inside an empty pit.  On my way, though, I saw a sign pointing towards an animal park, or a zoo, or something. 

(Another aside – the train is passing a powerplant that is spewing thick white smog into the sky, which is literally turning into the chain of cloud that I’ve been able to see out the window for the last five minutes or so).

I got to the zoo.  It was alright – you could see flamingos and ducks and donkeys for free, but then I reached a paid-for section and couldn’t see the point.  I’d already made up for the severe lack of animal in the bear pits.  So I went toward the hill.

To get there, I was walking through suburban sprawl.  To be honest, it was nice to get out into spaces after being cramped up in tight, winding, busy cities.  There was quite a bit of snow lying around, and I regularly took detours to walk across a particularly settled-looking section of snow.  Unfortunately I had no-one to enjoy the snow with, so it just ended up with me looking silly taking very big stomps on tiny patches of snow by the side of the road to get a nice crunch.

Then it started going uphill.  I had assumed that the hill would be some kind of nature park or something, but the houses continued up the hill as well.  About halfway up they stopped continuing and it became more clear footpaths.  There was a layer of ice over the paths, which were very steep.  Luckily I had come prepared with some spiky straps that I put over my boots.  From that point I had no trouble with slipping, except when the straps came loose and I lost a spike.  I didn’t fall over, though.

I kind of expected there to be a castle at the top (I can dream, can’t I?)  Instead there were a series of restaurants and a large sledding track.  I didn’t have a sled, so just watched the toddlers being dragged around by their parents.  Bern seems to be a city filled with young families – I saw so many babies and toddlers in my time there.

Walking a little further, I came across a view of the alps.  Wow.  Wowowowowowowowowow.  It was like a 360 degree panoramic postcard.  The mountains had a painterly quality to them, making them feel ethereal.  It was stunning.  So I left to go back to the hostel.

I tried to do some work on my application that night, but kept getting sidetracked.  I booked myself in for dinner at the hostel, concluding that this would be an opportunity to meet a few new people.  It wasn’t.  I had a silent dinner, booked my next couple of hostels and went to bed.

The next bit’s a little… gross… but I’ve made a conscious decision with this blog to discuss all aspects of my travels.  You may want to skip this bit if discussions of awkward bodily fluids aren’t really your thing.

The fact is that males have certain… evening functions that they are unable to control.  Not really wanting to have a wank in a hostel shower in order to relieve tension, wet dreams can become a bit of a problem.  At home I have managed to develop a kind of system whereby I wake myself just in time to get to the toilet, interrupting the flow if need be with a nearby tissue.  This saves on the painful process of having to change sheets late at night.

But in a hostel the toilets are on the other side of the building, and the last thing you want to be doing is stumbling through a dark room, clutching at your doodle surrounded by people who are probably wide awake because of that one guy who snores.  But you also want to avoid the awkward conversation where you go to the front reception and ask for new sheets because you spunked up the last bunch.

I’m going to be honest with you, I haven’t got any real solutions.  If anyone has a suggestion, I’m all ears.

DAY TWO

I woke up that morning to discover my towel was missing.  I had left it hanging up to dry next to another towel, which had also vanished.  They had both been present when I went to bed.  So, having been in Lisbon, Madrid and even Barcelona, the first time something is stolen is in Switzerland.  Go figure.

I worked on my application until about 11am, but at that point I felt a little like I was intruding on the hostel staff and their cleaning, so went out for a bit.

(Another brief interjection – just changed trains at Zurich station.  Oh my God.  54 platforms!  That’s total insanity!)

Well, I started off in the old city.  The plan was to be out just long enough for the cleaning to be done, around 2pm, then head back and finish my work.  As an incentive I planned to go to Grindelwald an Jungfraujoch in the alps the next day if I managed to finish my work.

Walking around the old town I was distracted by a sign pointing me towards the Bern Historical Museum.  I had three hours to kill, a museum would be smart.  I had kind of left in a rush, so was wearing my slippers rather than boots, so an inside activity was certainly preferable.

Well… I stayed in the historical museum until it closed at 5pm.  They had a floor dedicated to Einstein (with a crazy mirrored staircase going up to it) and it was really interesting, outlining his entire life, theories, discussing the first and second world wars (Einstein was an activist for peace and a Jew) and including information about Jewish faith and Swiss history.  It seems that the idea that Einstein was not very good at school is false, attributed to the fact that German and Swiss results are measured in the opposite way from one another (that is, in German 6 is the worst, while in Switzerland 6 is the best.  He got 6s in a Swiss school for most maths and science subjects.)

Upstairs there was a floor dedicated to the history of Bern.  There was a lot of information, but the stuff I mainly remember is that Toblerone was from Bern.  I also found the perspective of the two world wars from a neutral territory interesting, especially in regard to the Second World War.

It was back to the hostel, then, to do some more work and have dinner.  I failed to complete my application, unfortunately, so the trip to Grindelwald was not to be.  Instead I was intent on finishing the application once and for all.

The reason I failed to complete my application was that I met two Australian girls.  I had to strike up the conversation with them at dinner when I heard them speaking with an Australian accent.  They were about my age, and I was craving conversation.

They were leaving early the next day to go to Madrid.  They were very excited to get to a party city (sigh) as they had found Bern quite boring.  I expect from that you can work out what they were looking for in a city.  One of them in particular was extremely dismissive of museums, sights, and really any daytime activities.  I decided to make them feel guilty and uncomfortable by complaining about all the Australians I had met in Barcelona that had craved McDonalds and just gotten drunk all the time.  Maybe it was a little unkind (and certainly not subtle) but I am sick to death of coming across Australians who spend their entire trip hungover in bed and judge a city on how big the parties are.  Especially when all the other cultural groups I’ve come across have been so adept at mixing their cultural exploration with their nightlife activities (with the exception of that group in Madrid, but I will forgive them as it was Madrid and that was really the purpose they had come for that weekend).

I don’t want to seem a party pooper – in the right circumstances I really quite enjoy going out, and was put out that I couldn’t take advantage of Madrid’s nightlife due to fatigue – but really.

DAY THREE

To make a long story short, I did.  I had a quick walk around old town from 11-2, bought a new towel, bought a Bratwurst hot dog (yummy) and got right into it.  And finished.

I needed to reward myself somehow, so I went to the cinema to (finally) see Django Unchained.  My thoughts in a moment, but first, the way cinemas work in Bern is interesting.  Assumedly, as the old town is heritage listed, they can’t just build a multiplex.  The alternative that they went with appears to be to have the multiplex spread out over a number of single and dual screen cinemas all over the city.  My understanding is that they are all owned by the same organization, as each screen screens one film and one film only.  I had to find the right screen for my screening.

The cinema was packed.  I’d managed to find a screening in English with French and German subtitles.  There were only two screenings of the film that day – one at 2:30pm, one at 8pm.  Halfway through the film (for those who have seen it, the moment after Leonardo di Capri says, “Gentlemen, you had my curiosity, now you have my attention”) the screen went blank, the curtains closed and everyone started chatting and getting some snacks.  They had a fifteen minute intermission in the middle of my damn movie.  I found that a tad irritating.

Anyway, the movie itself.  Perhaps I had built it up for myself too much, or I am too much of a Spaghetti Western fan.  Having seen the original Django, a number of other Sergio Corbucci films, and considering the Leone westerns the best of the genre, I was hoping for something genre-defining, or at least mildly reminiscent of the great moments.  But… it wasn’t.  It was funny, it was entertaining, it had some great characters, the plot was reasonably well structured, but the references to spaghetti westerns were just way, way, way too obvious.  WAY too obvious.  I mean, come on – crash zooms?  That’s like ‘baby’s first spaghetti western’ kind of techniques.  I expected more from a supposed expert like Tarantino.  Where was the coffin containing a machine gun? (Ok, so machine guns weren’t invented at that point, but come on, in his last film Tarantino had Hitler killed at a film premiere by an American hit squad – I don’t think historical accuracy is his primary concern).

The references to films like The Great Silence were far too basic, revealing nothing about the genre, about America.  And any character who wasn’t a main character was a dumb caricature.  It wasn’t long before the racial thing got tired, too.

Anyway, I think that anyone who just has a passing interest in westerns rather than, you know, having actually studied them extensively for a year, will find an entertaining film, and that’s really all you’re supposed to expect.  I guess.

DAY FOUR

This isn’t a real day in Bern.  In fact, today is day four, and I’m sitting on a train writing this blog.  I’ll probably only be able to upload it in Rome, unless the Milan train station has free Wi-Fi.

I’m taking a scenic route through the Alps.  It’s snowing fairly heavily, so you can’t really see anything.  It’s pretty, anyway.

Well, that was the most beautiful train journey ever.  The carriage snakes its way slowly up through the Alps, tossing snow to the side as it goes.  And the snow gets thick.  People would take the train up to one of the skiing peaks and then ski down to the station again.  The sky cleared up and you got the panoramic postcard effect that Switzerland seems so good at.

Somehow, though, I seem to be unable to have a train journey without incident.  It started off pretty well – all of my tight connections waited for my train to arrive before leaving (the Swiss trains are a well-oiled machine – they have all the delays listed on their website with complete details of the reasons for the delay.  My favourite was “accident involving people”.)

On the train that would take me to Tirano, on the Italian border (actually, it’s on the Italian side) the train stopped a few stations short.  And turned off its engines.  I, not expecting there to be any troubles on a Swiss train, stayed seated.  Everyone else got off.

Fortunately the conductor noticed me and waved me off, indicating (he couldn’t speak English, I couldn’t speak German or Italian) that I should take a waiting bus.  As we drove down the mountain he pointed out what had forced this change – part of the mountain had collapsed onto the railway.

Just as it had between Spain and France, everything changed after crossing the border.  Suddenly things were brown rather than green, drivers honked and tried to hit anything that moved (and most things that didn’t, too).  The roads stopped making logical sense.

I had reached Italy.

TO BE CONTINUED

Only Lyon Pour Moi

After a bit of a rocky start, Lyon ended up being a fantastic city, mostly because I got to catch up with Astrid again.  Having a local to show me around paid off in spades, and I feel like I did a lot more and got a lot more out of the city than I would have had I been alone.  In fact, I ended up staying a little longer than planned, leaving Monday evening instead of morning, skipping my planned day in Geneva.  No big loss I say.

But it didn’t start well.  In fact, I think it would be safe to say it started horrendously.  And it started in Barcelona…

DAY ZERO

I’m going to include this day as part of the Lyon experience, though much of the time was in fact spent in Barcelona.  Certainly the start of the day was, as my alarm woke me at 7:30am.  I lay in bed for another half hour, thinking to myself that I would be able to wait a little before having a nice relaxed breakfast, checking out and heading off on the metro to catch the train at 9:38am.

This would have been perfect if my train had actually left at 9:38am.  Somehow my brain had jumbled up the numbers a little, so my train was actually to leave at 8:38am.  I realized this at approximately 8:03am, while on the toilet.

In a mad panic (I had told Astrid to meet me at a specific time so I NEEDED to catch the right train, and I only had an eight minute connection, so didn’t have time to catch a later train) I grabbed my bag, raced downstairs, skipped breakfast, checked out and powered to the metro.  The wrong metro.  I walked back up out of the metro and walked fifty metres or so to the RIGHT metro.

Waiting for the metro I counted minutes in my head.  The metro was due in 45 seconds, and with a minute and a half per stop I should be able to make it with maybe a minute to spare.

Well… two minutes later the metro arrived.  And then at EVERY SINGLE STOP it stopped for at least a minute.  It wasn’t long before I resigned myself to the fact that I had rushed and skipped breakfast for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

In Barcelona Sants I took out my laptop (glancing suspiciously at every decrepit old man walking past as I did so) in order to contact Astrid and check alternative train connections.  Thank God for free internet.

Now, a little information about the train I was to catch.  The train terminates in a town called Portbou, on the border of Spain and France (on the Spanish side).  It goes every hour.  Every two hours the train would go to Cerbere, the equivalent station on the French side.  These towns are both on the coast, by the way.  My connection was from Cerbere, as French trains don’t really go into Spain.  Every two hours, the train to Portbou goes one stop further, to Cerbere.  I needed to be on one of those, therefore the next train I could catch would leave at 10:38pm.

I basically just waited in the train station for two hours.  Eventually the train came up on the board.  I was a little surprised to see some writing (in Spanish) underneath the listing.  It said something about the French border and Cerbere – I just assumed it was saying that the train would cross over into Cerbere, and to remain on the train to cross the border.

I have to say, I was a little uncertain about this interpretation until I saw the train itself, which had Cerbere listed on it as the terminating station.  Awesome!

I think you can possibly see where this is going.

After the three hour ride (through Spaghetti Western country) we stopped at Portbou.  The voice said (in Spanish) that this was the terminating station.  The train’s information board said this was the terminating station.  Everyone got off.  I stayed on out of some vague hope that the train would move on, but it didn’t.  I got out and asked the grumpy lady at the ticket desk whether there was a train I had to change to in order to reach Cerbere, or whether that train would go there eventually.

I was informed that the French railway union had organized a strike for that day and that no trains would be crossing the border into France.

“Tomorrow there will be trains,” she said.

There honestly aren’t any words to describe the intensity and volume of expletives that ran through my head at that point.  I calmly nodded, walked outside and sat down to try and figure out what to do.  With the trains not running in France it seemed a little pointless to go there.  I had nowhere to stay and someone who would be waiting for me at the station in Lyon.  Surely there was something I could do?

Perhaps, I thought, the best option was to go all the way back to Barcelona.  I could stay one more night in the hostel, could send a facebook message to Astrid to let her know not to bother and leave it at that.  I would have to work out how to arrange my time in Lyon so I still got a reasonable stay – unfortunately I knew that the hostel would take the cost of my first night as it was too late to cancel my booking at that point.  Never mind.

It did feel awfully lame to be going backwards though.  And what a waste of a day – spending six hours on a train for nothing.  Perhaps I would find another option if I wandered down into Portbou.

Well, Portbou is a very small coastal town with nothing much to say about it.  It had a few little bars and things, but as it was winter there were no tourists.  I have my suspicions that it could become quite a popular spot in summer, as the view over the water was spectacular, and there are lovely walks through the Pyrenees.

In fact, it was a guide to one of these walks that gave me an indication of what to do next.  Looking at the sign it seemed to suggest that Cerbere was only a half hour walk from Portbou.  Portbou was surrounded by rather high hills, so it was impossible to see if this was the case, but given that I had the whole afternoon if it turned out to be a wild goose chase I decided to give it a go.

I started off up a path that took me along the road.  At the start there had been little signs indicating the walking track, but these soon disappeared.  It looked a bit as though I was walking up someone’s driveway.  It was steep and high, and I was carrying twenty kilos of gear with me.  And hadn’t eaten.  And my water bottle was empty because I had been in such a rush that morning.  Needless to say I was a little pissed off with my life at that point.

The path, as far as I could tell, appeared to go around to the side of a dilapidated house with a wire fence.  I started making my way around when a loud barking began.  So much barking!  There were in the vicinity of a hundred dogs (if that even is an exaggeration it isn’t much of one) behind this fence in this guy’s backyard on the side of a steep Pyrenees hill overlooking the coast.  All of these dogs had a great interest in me.

By the time I reached the top of the hill I was swearing and a little confused about which direction to head.  A sign indicated the walking trail, but at this point ALL trails were listed as heading to Portbou.  Obviously I was not interested in heading backwards.  I had decided that, at the bare minimum, I would cross be in France by the end of the day.

I could see a road on the other side of the hill, and as that seemed as good a place to head as any, I headed there.  The road led on to a tiny abandoned border crossing post, and I stumbled over the border into France at last.  Actually, it hadn’t taken as long as I had expected.  I quickly double checked that I had gone the correct way across the border (one side was in French, the other Spanish) before heading down the hill.  By now I could see a large train station, which I decided could only be Cerbere.  It was silent and motionless, as expected, but I held out hope that there might be a bus or something along those lines.

The walk down was very scenic, but to be honest I was not in the mood for scenery.  The town was completely silent.  I made a note of the tourism office (closed until 3pm) and any hotels I could spot, though I was half planning to just sleep somewhere on the hill so as to avoid the high cost of a hotel.

At a loss for what to do at this point, I decided to make my way to the train station just to get a look at it so that it would be easy to find my way there in the morning.  I was surprised to see a couple of people I recognized from the Spanish train inside the station.  As expected, other than those few individuals, the station was deserted.

I scanned the information on a billboard in front of the entrance to discover that some of the trains would, in fact, be running, albeit in a limited fashion.  It seemed to me that I had missed by about ten or so minutes the train that would have taken me to Perpignan (which was my next transfer).

Cursing (again), I got a waffle and soft drink out of a vending machine.  I needed something sugary.  As I sat, my attention was drawn to a large electronic train schedule over the entrance to the platforms.  The very first train listed was the one I had intended to catch in the first place, leaving at 3:27pm or thereabouts (I’m not about to remember every single train time, sorry).  Well, long story short, only some lines were affected, and my train to Perpignan was still running.  I was fairly confident the connection from Perpignan to Lyon would still run, as it was a TGV and I had a feeling they would not be affected by the industrial action.

Perpignan train station is famous for being designed by Dali.   I went outside in an attempt to see the influence, but to be honest, other than some squiggly numbers on the clock, it looks like pretty much any other train station.  In Perpignan I was a little worried I would have trouble getting my TGV ticket, as eurail only offers a certain number of reservations and TGVs are apparently notoriously difficult for pass holders to get seats on.

I had a little bit of French (you pick something up studying it for five years) but I wasn’t too confident I could communicate the complexities of my situation should it be called for, so I decided to wait for one of the booths marked with an English flag so that I could speak English.

The only problem was, the English-speaking booth had a woman at it that was taking forever.  I let a large number of other customers go past me in line before completely giving up and going straight to one of the French ones.

The whole ordeal ended with me ordering my ticket in French while the person I was dealing with spoke in perfect English.  I needn’t have worried about the reservation – in off season I guess there aren’t too many people travelling from Perpignan to Lyon, particularly tourists.

The TGV was nice and fast.  Other than that there isn’t much to say about it.

I got to Lyon at 20:50.  This was the time I had hurriedly given Astrid over Facebook sitting in Barcelona Sants that morning.  However, I hadn’t been able to access the internet since that point to see whether she would still be at the station or whether that was too late for her.  After a quick wander around the station I concluded that she had decided to stay home (she hadn’t) so I left for the metro.

Lyon’s metro is nice.  It’s quite small but it is very clear, with every single connection listed for every single stop.  It wasn’t difficult to make my way to the funicular (a cute little cable car that goes up one of the two hills in Lyon) and reach the stop indicated by my hostel.

This was where things began to go wrong again.  The hostel’s instructions indicated that I should take a path on my left outside the station (which I easily found) and walk down it, continuing down the hill for 300 metres.  Well… a short way down the path reached a roadway complete with intersection.  Two of the roads resulting from this intersection took off downhill.

To be fair, one of them was the obvious road to take.  Unfortunately I was not really thinking logically, so I went down the steeper one, which was the wrong one.  I didn’t realize this until I ended up at the metro station from which I had caught the funicular up the hill.  Whoops.

After some faffing about I went down the correct road and found the hostel.  Entering my room after checking in I discovered that there were two people already asleep in there.  So as not to disturb them, I put my bag down and looked for a bed.  Only they all appeared to be taken – every single one had a messy, scrunched up blanket, except for one, which had the blanket draped neatly over it.  Guessing this one must be free I started climbing into it.

The door opened and an Australian accent said: “Oh, you were sleeping in that one were you?”

He had arrived that night as well and had just made that bed.  I asked if any of the others weren’t taken.  We ended up having to get the receptionist to come up to tell us which bed was free (though he was only guessing as well).  Finally, I was in bed and ready to sleep.  I was worried about missing Astrid, but was sure we would find one another the next day.  All I needed was an internet connection.

DAY ONE

Breakfast was sugary cereals, baguette with spread and orange juice.  At least the juice was real, though I feel like they could have made a little more effort what with Lyon being the gastronomic capital of the world (and this hostel being the most expensive I had stayed in thus far).

The Lyon Hostel was the first official Hostelling International (YHA in Australia) hostel I had stayed in, and I’m sorry to say that other than the one in Madrid (at least you got a decent sleep here) it was the worst.  It was also twice the price of any I had stayed at previously (my next hostel in Switzerland multiplies that again by one-and-a-half).  There were two showers and two toilets on each floor (at least they were separate) and the toilets didn’t have sinks – these were in the rooms.  The place just felt impersonal, but not friendly and fun impersonal like St Christopher’s in Barcelona.  It was not a place where people tried to socialize, mainly I think because Lyon tended to be a stepping-off point for heading to other places.

Anyway, I got in touch with Astrid and we managed to meet at the Place Sant-Jean, outside an enormous church in the old town.  We started by going to the top of the hill (known as the prayer hill because of the church on top) where Astrid gave me a quick overview of the city using the fantastic view provided.

Knowing all about my inclination for all things ancient and castle-y, Astrid suggested visiting the ancient Gallo-Roman amphitheaters.  Despite being in ruins they make a very nice trip, and still have very strong acoustics.

To be honest, I’m not sure I can describe much more of the day in detail.  We wandered around old town (I’ve been doing an awful lot of wandering, it feels like), chatting about the end of her trip, the last few days of mine, Lyon etc.  She would consistently tell me that if I saw anything I liked we would do it, but I was quite happy to be led around by the expert.

Walking through the old town we did come across a museum of film props and miniatures.  We kind of looked at all of the models in the entrance and then left.  I had more important things to see.  Noticing some stands on the streets selling crepes, I vocalized an intention to buy a crepe at the very next stand we came across.  We never came across another one.

Lyon is a very pretty city, though I’m not sure I would have enjoyed it anywhere near as much had I been properly by myself.  The fact is that the hostel I stayed at, an official Hostelling International one (the equivalent of YHA) lacked the kind of social atmosphere I had become used to.  Perhaps I was making less effort, knowing that I would be leaving fairly quickly and that I had someone with whom to see the city with already, but my experience of the hostel was sterility.

By the way, for those wondering about the title of this blog post, Only is the name of the lion that is the mascot of Lyon.  Since Lyon sound like lion in French.

Luckily I wasn’t there long.  For lunch, Astrid took me to a street of restaurants called Bouchons – typical Lyonnaise restaurants that serve what she described as Grandmotherly fare.  This being France, Grandmotherly fare is a step above bangers and mash.  I had a fixed Menu Lyonnaise, which included an entrée of chicken liver cake (yum), a main of saucisson (French for sausage, though Lyon’s saucissons are not quite normal sausages, being much thicker and served in slices) and a dessert of chocolate fondant cake (literally the best chocolate cake I have ever tasted).  Oh, and some French white wine.  Which Astrid remarked was only just passable.  She has been tasting wines since she was quite young, so is a bit of an expert.  I nodded knowingly and downed it anyway, not really working out how it was different to any other wine I had ever had.

Then we walked around a bit more before it started getting cold and Astrid suggested we head to her place to drink something hot.  She rents a room (well, half an apartment really) from an older couple in a nice building a few streets from the Rhone river.  The drink we had was some kind of coffee-based thing with herbs in it… I’m not really sure what it was, but it basically tasted like coffee.  She had her computer out in her room, so I showed her Brisbane on google maps and she showed me photos of all sorts of stuff.  I had made a comment that the river was a funny colour (bright green) and she had said that she had a beautiful photo where it was brilliant blue.  She couldn’t find it, but the process of searching took us on quite a few interesting tangents.

By this time it was like 5pm, and suddenly we were painfully aware that we hadn’t seen everything.  So out we went once again.  I had mentioned that I needed to go to the Institut Lumiere (of course), but I didn’t want to drag her along to that.  Instead we went up the ‘working hill’ where they used to make silk products (you would not believe how long it took me to work out that Astrid was trying to talk about silk – “Textiles?  Cloth?”)

Then it started to snow.  Nice big clumpy bits.  Unfortunately it wasn’t enough to actually stay on the ground, but it was very visible and very appropriate.  And I got covered in it, which was the most important thing.

Anyway, apparently the big thing to do in France is to buy some bread, cheese and wine and just eat it, so that was our dinner (cultural experiences are pretty easy to do in France!)  With a lot of places closed at that point, we went to a shady little corner store and bought all the necessary ingredients, except the bread, which we found a real boulangerie for.

Back at the hostel, we went and found a table and had our feast.  The cheese was amazing.  The bread was amazing.  The wine was, according to Astrid, fine – I’ll have to concede judgment to her on that count, but I thought it was amazing (a whole half bottle of amazing…)

I had intended to leave Lyon fairly early the next day, just getting a quick look at the Institut Lumiere before heading to Geneva for the day, then on to Bern in the evening.  I asked Astrid about her plans and suddenly the day was rearranged to be another day in Lyon, hanging out with Astrid until her university class at 2pm, when I would check out the Institut Lumiere before heading off.  Astrid offered to keep my bags at her place, so we would meet there.

DAY TWO

I hadn’t really opened my bag the whole time I had been in Lyon, so packing was very quick.  Astrid walked out of her apartment just as I reached it and offered a further suggestion regarding my bags – her university was very close to the train station and had a left luggage area.  I agreed that this was a good plan, and off we went on a walk along the Rhone, up to a park that had a free zoo in it and around to the university.  In the zoo there were a bunch of ducks trying to murder one of their number.  They would bite its neck and then try to push its head underwater.  I actually thought I would see it drown, but it managed to escape and kind of floated off.

At the university, the baggage area was closed (“Bastards,” cried Astrid).  As a final option, Astrid suggested I leave my bags with her during her class, go to the Institut Lumiere, and meet her after her class finished and we would go to the train station together.  This worked for me, so with that decided we needed some lunch.

Astrid had another typical Lyon dish planned for me that day – tartine.  These are basically bits of toasted sourdough with various toppings, including pate, cheese, tomatoes – pretty much anything, really.  The place we went had one with foie gras.  Being in a decadent mood, I ordered it (Astrid had been craving foie gras the previous day, but today just had regular pate.  Sigh.)  Foie gras comes served as a big lump on the bread.  Apparently it is not supposed to be spread like pate – you eat it in slices as it is served.  Whatever, it was delicious.

Then we had dessert (Astrid asked if I wanted dessert, and I hesitated, not wanting to seem decadent if she wasn’t going to have one, but she wanted one anyway and my hesitance ended up making us both confused for a good minute or so).  Lemon meringue pie (well, technically citrus tart with meringue).  Astrid tried teaching me how to pronounce meringue in French, then I tried my new word on the waitress, but she just looked a little confused before saying, “Tarte au citron?”  She didn’t even say the meringue part.

(For those interested, in order to pronounce meringue in French, you need to make that guttural throat sound for the ‘ng’.  I thought it would be easy until Astrid started laughing at my every attempt.)

Astrid’s class started at that point, so I headed alone to the Institut Lumiere.  Which was closed.  Because it was Monday.  With three hours to kill, I wandered around the building, saw a couple of wooden panels from the Lumiere Brothers’ very first film set, Workers Leaving the Factory, and went to the toilet.

It may seem a little odd that I would mention a trip to the loo in a blog entry, but this was special.  The toilet was a modern-looking grey plastic structure in the middle of a large square.  Fixed to the outside was a set of instructions.  A light on the outside indicated whether the toilet was free, occupied, in its cleaning cycle or out of order.  Pressing the button caused the wall to become detached and slide aside, revealing the loo within in all its glory.  Once the door slid shut automatically behind me, a woman’s voice spoke in calm, comforting French.  Not having any idea if I was doing the right thing, I dropped my pants and did my thing.  Then I pressed the flush button.  The woman’s voice spoke at me.  Assuming I must have done something wrong, I pressed the button again multiple times with the same result.  Then I listened to what she was saying and realized that she was telling me the toilet would flush once I had left.

Outside again the door closed behind me.  I waited to see what would happen and make sure I had done the right thing (I’m a considerate guy – I don’t want the next person to enter to have to suffer my unflushed business).  I needn’t have worried.  There was a whirring, a buzzing, a splashing, a splooshing, and the light switched from ‘cleaning’ to ‘vacant’.

I still had a bit more time to kill, so I decided to have a tarte praline, perhaps the final typical Lyon fare.  These are basically tarts containing nuts and sugar syrup, but the syrup is dyed bright red.  It was very, very sweet.  Astrid later informed me that I should have had the praline brioche instead, and I chastised her for not telling me that sooner.

After we’d met back up it was off to the train station.  We had a coffee (well, a hot chocolate) and I asked Astrid how long she’d been learning English.  She responded that it was hard to say, as she had started watching movies in English quite young – particularly Toy Story.

“Yeah,” I said, “but you would have just had the French subtitles so that wouldn’t be all that helpful surely?”

“No,” she responded.  “No subtitles.”

That kind of dedication impressed me, but being Australian I had to get a jab in – “Well, I guess learning that way is easier with English.”

And then I left.

I was a bit down on the train ride, but was occupied with writing about Barcelona.  It was dark, so there was no view.  Really the only thing of note from the journey was that the conductor was the first ticket inspector I had come across who asked to see my passport.

I had timed it to have a fifteen minute transit time after arriving in Geneva before the train to Bern.  Well… the train was fifteen minutes late to arrive.  I raced through Swiss customs (they didn’t try to stop me) and got to the platform just in time to see the train leave.

No problem, I thought, the next train is in ten minutes.

That train apparently didn’t exist.  I found myself waiting for the next Intercity train, a wait of one hour.  That gave me plenty of time to be hassled by three separate (and really creepy) men for money.  I also felt a little uncomfortable about all the police I had seen around, as they looked very serious.  I should also mention that Geneva is the only train station that I have come across with no seats on the platforms.  It was not the most comfortable hour I’ve ever had.

Thankfully it was over in… an hour.  The train was to reach Bern at 11:30pm, half an hour before my hostel closed its check-in (it was another HI Hostel).  I was armed with comprehensive instructions on how to get there from the station – I was ready.  The first step was to go past the church and LOEB.

Leaving the station, there was no sign of a church or LOEB.  Erm…

I walked up the street.  I walked down the street.  I walked around the block.  Eventually I picked the most populated-looking street and just followed it.  Soon I spotted the LOEB sign.  Unfortunately it was across two buildings.  I walked between them.  I now had fifteen minutes left.

None of the streets had names from the hostel’s directions.  I was starting to panic, so moved to the street adjacent and kept walking.  Then turned around and went back.

Ten minutes.

A lady spotted me pacing, glancing at my notebook.  She spoke to me in German.  I blurted out, “Do you know where the youth hostel is?”

She did, and told me to go towards the federal parliament building until I saw the Casino, then go down the stairs and the hostel was at the bottom of the hill.

In a fluster I thanked her and raced off before realizing I hadn’t actually listened to a word she had said.  Seeing the casino, I vaguely guessed she had said something about walking to it and seeing some steps… so I walked towards it.  There were no steps, but there was a slope.

Down the slope I went.

Six minutes.

At the bottom was a sign with a symbol I really, really hoped was the youth hostel sign.

Five minutes.

Fortunately, it was.  Rounding a corner I saw the hostel.  With four minutes remaining I entered and checked in.

Boom.

And with that exciting finale, I suppose it is time for me to reveal that this story is

TO BE CONTINUED

The Rise and Fall of Barcelona

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS ADULT CONTENT THAT MAY BE INAPPROPRIATE FOR YOUNG READERS (the main offender is the last few paragraphs of Day 3).

When we last met, I had just reached Barcelona.  The move was a welcome escape from Madrid, and I initially reveled in the joys Barcelona had to offer.  But there is a darker side, both to the city itself and to my experience, and as time passed both these dark sides became more and more apparent.

DAY HALF

Barcelona does not start with the typical first day write-up because I didn’t actually arrive in Barcelona until quite late in the afternoon (3:30pm if memory serves).  The first task I faced was to get to my hostel from Barcelona Sants station.  The hostel was in the Plaza Catalunya, right at the northern end of La Rambla (for those not in the know, La Rambla is the big tourist street that borders the west side of the gothic quarter).

Barcelona Sants is a very, very large station, or at least it seemed that way when I first entered (the wrong way – a Spanish lady kindly directed me to the other side of the seemingly pointless balustrade).  There are thirteen platforms, all of which are entered from different points depending on whether you are catching a fast train, an international train, a regional long distance or a suburban train.  I had a vague idea that I needed to catch the train to the hostel, but then couldn’t work out how to get onto the platform – trains should be free for me, but all the ticketing is automated, so you can only get to the platform if you have an actual ticket.  Seeing a big sign reading ‘M’ I decided it would be quicker and easier to catch a metro.

The Barcelona metro has a very, very, very simple automated ticketing machine.  Basically one trip is two euros, and you can get a ten trip saver for 9.80 euros.  I got the saver, thinking that it was likely I would want to travel across the city quite quickly for various reasons.

Knowing Barcelona’s reputation I watched my pockets and bags very, very carefully.  Either the pickpockets picked up my wariness or there weren’t any in my carriage.  I didn’t feel unsafe like I had in Madrid, and nothing went missing.  The hostel was really easy to find – it was a place called St Christopher’s Inn, which had been recommended to me by Astrid in Lisbon.  It is worth mentioning something about St Christopher’s compared to the other places I had stayed at – it is a chain hostel, appearing in London, Paris, Brussels, Barcelona and many, many other places.  So far I had been avoiding chain hostels and had had reasonable success in finding places that breached my comfort zone, for better or worse.

St Christopher’s is not a place like that.  I booked it seeing that it offered private curtains and a power socket for each bed (both of which I had sorely missed in Madrid) and concluded that I was likely to get a decent night’s sleep there.  I was feeling really quite sick by this point, so sleep was high on my agenda.

Now for the flipside: St Christopher’s is not going to give you a cultural experience (for any given definition of that term).  It is connected to a bar called Belushi’s which is as close to an Australian bar as you can get (think something like a cheaper version of The Glen, for those who know it).  When I got there they were advertising an Australia Day party, for Christ’s sake.  Thank God I left before the 26^th.

Anyway, back to the story.  I went to my room as quickly as I could (the hostel staff speak English by default, making the process rather painless) in order to lock my things up and do some computering.  A girl was there trying to charge her phone or something.  In any other hostel I would have immediately struck up a conversation, but I was feeling a bit of austerity in this place and so kept clammed up.  It wasn’t long before she was asking if she could borrow my ipod charger – hers had been damaged by a power surge or something.  Anyway, long story short, it didn’t work, so she decided she had better go to the Apple Store across the street.  It all felt very normal.

She was Russian, and with the ice broken I started to ask the typical questions.  Typical questions asked, another girl entered – Ruby.  Ruby was an Australian.  More specifically, Brisbane.  Most specifically, Cleveland.  When I heard the not-quite-nasal accent I thought – no.  But yes.  The first Australian I had met on the road!

We went downstairs to the bar to have some dinner together.  The closest they had to legit Spanish fare was meatballs in tomato sauce.  I had a burger with fries and felt guilty about it (it was fairly inexpensive and tasted good though). 

Ruby had noticed some fliers advertising a flamenco and tapas excursion and suggested we try it out.  Her “suggestion” went something like this: “Oh my God, we have to do the Flamenco, I wanted to do it in Madrid…” (PS. She had just come from Madrid that day as well), “…but it was like fifty euros.  But this is only twenty-four!  How cheap!”

We all agreed it was very cheap, mainly because we didn’t have much choice on that front.  Trundling to the reception, we went to book tickets.

“What day should we do it?” (Ruby)

“Well, Friday’s my last day.  It might be a fun thing for me to do on my last night.” (Me)

The lady at reception nodded and smiled and somehow upsold us to do a cocktail class and club night straight afterwards.  (“You get four cocktails, shots and free club entry for only eighteen euro!  So cheap!”)  Luckily I had the common sense to change the day from Friday to Thursday, knowing there was no way I should be clubbing with a train trip early Saturday morning.

The Russian girl whose name started with ‘B’ had told us that the bike tour was worth doing so Ruby and I started to lay out our plans for the time we would be there.

DAY ONE

And so it began.  I ate some breakfast (real orange juice.  REAL ORANGE JUICE) and got ready for my bike tour.  And this is where it starts to get strangely irritating.  Waiting in the foyer for our guide, an Irish bloke came up and asked if I was there for the walking tour.  I said no, the bike tour.  Ah, he responded, the guide for that’ll be here soon.  He liked my camera and asked if I was doing video of all the bike tours around Europe.  I quite liked the sound of that, but as I hadn’t done any bike tours in Lisbon or Madrid (hence why I am still alive) it seemed a bit late (I still filmed the whole bike tour).

Our guide arrived.  He was Australian.  Ruby and I were joined by three others from the hostel.  All three were Australian.  We went to the other meeting point.  A girl came up to join us.  Australian.  The guide said there was a group of three or four others who had said they wanted to come.  All Australians (they arrived late like true Aussies).  In fact, I’m fairly sure there were only three people on bikes that day not from Australia – two Germans (who were together anyway) and a guy from Belaruse, which I’m only vaguely aware is even a real place.

At the time I was all like, “Hey, neat!  Look at all these Aussies.”  We giggled about all the weird s*** Europeans do, made snide comments about Barcelona versus Australian cities, paid out the cities each of us came from and compared anecdotes of drunken exploits.

Having said all of this, the tour was very good.  It was a ‘free’ tour, though the bike hire is five euro (if you have your own bike you don’t pay) and the guides live off tips.  The guide was fantastic, despite being Australian (he had lived in Barcelona for four years, and in Europe for eight or thereabouts).  The purpose was supposedly to cover the key Gaudi structures, but we started with a pleasant ride along Baceloneta, the beach (which was created for the 1988 Olympics using sand from the Middle East).

Our guide, who I’m going to refer to as Chris, even though I’m not sure that was his name, had majored in civic engineering and knew all about how cities worked and grew.  Barcelona was really built around three key events – the World Expo in the late 1800s, the World Expo in 1926 (or thereabouts) and the Olympic Games in 1988.  A lot of the statues and buildings are apparently supposed to evoke the ocean.  Because Barcelona is on the ocean.  What visual poetry and imagination they had!

We continued past the Olympic Village, which Chris told us contained one of the only cinemas in Barcelona screening films in their original language (the Spanish dub most movies).  This becomes important later.  Though not very important.

Barcelona has really nice bike paths that go from the footpath to the road in a surprisingly clear and ordered fashion (for Spain).  It was a little disconcerting when the bike path veered into the middle of the road, but it was quite safe and gave a fantastic view.  The only point that was a little nerve wracking was when all us cyclists had to take up an entire lane of a dual lane carriageway (this is apparently legal in Barcelona).  Well… let’s just say the bikes were not built for speed.  Chris warned us earlier to ignore any honking horns, since Catalunyan drivers are arseholes.  There was definitely some honking going on.

We stopped at the bullfighting stadium, which is now a museum.  There was still red paint on the floor where protesters had thrown it on people buying tickets.  In Catalan, bullfighting is now illegal.  As in, it was made illegal last year.  Hence why the ring is a museum.

Next we moved on to the Sagrada Familia.  The Sagrada Familia (or ‘Sacred Family’) is the most impressive building I have seen.  Ever.  And I only saw the outside.  AND it isn’t even finished yet.  It was designed by architect Whatever-His-Name-Was Gaudi, and is scheduled tentatively to be completed in the vicinity of 2024 I think.  The 100^th anniversary of Gaudi’s death, anyway.  The response from most people?  “Good luck with that guys.”

The building is rich in religious allegory, containing three separate facades representing the thingy, the Passion and the Glory (the thingy is the thingy where Jesus was born and thingy).  The thingy and the Passion have basically been completed (Passion not so much, but getting there) while the Glory is far from done.  In what seems a real s***ty move, the Anarchists of the early 20^th century burned Gaudi’s plans for the Sagrada Familia, representing as it did the Catholic institution, which of course Anarchists were against.  Still, the dude spent his whole life doing that.  Douchebags.

We moved on to some kind of apartment that Gaudi had designed.  It was alright.  Very curvy.  Then we went to the modernist trifecta (that’s not what it’s called – I can’t remember what it’s called).  Basically it’s three modernist buildings that reflect different aspects of modernism.  One of them was done by Gaudi.  It’s meant to look like a dragon’s lair, paying tribute to St George, who is the local saint.  The roof looks like a dragon’s back, the windows look like skulls, and all in all he did a pretty good job.  The one next to it is meant to look like a gingerbread house.  Go figure.

On our way back we went past the Arc de Triumf.  Yeah, they’ve got one of those in Barcelona.  Apparently not because of any particular triumph, just because they felt left out and were having the world expo.  The street leading up to the Arc used to be part of the wall that the EVIL SPANISH KING had built to prevent the poor Catalanian people from building their city.  At the first opportunity, the Barcelona city council smashed it down and replaced it with a really big boulevard.  There was also a castle that was brought down since it was constantly bombing the city.  Anyway, that’s enough history.

We finished in some kind of park, which was almost as good as the Parque de el Retiro in Madrid.  It had a really, really beautiful fountain.

After the tour some of us went with Chris to the Travel Bar (who arranged pretty much all of these outings) to get a one euro pint and chat.  He managed to rope us into a Spanish cooking class that night, and there I met some more Australians – Chloe, Ben, Andrew (not me) and Chloe’s sister.  A cool Argentinian chef took us first to the famous market on La Rambla (shut up, I’m writing this on the train so don’t have any internet to check names) and bought some fresh seafood.  They had crabs and lobsters lying on the ice still moving around.  Everyone took photos (I was a bit surprised none of them had seen a live lobster or crab before…)

Passing the butcher, the chef tried to gross us out by showing us the various things Barcelonians cook with – tongue, brain, liver, lung, cock, balls, whole lambs heads.  Most of the girls squealed a little before buying one of the SUPER CHEAP ONE EURO juices one of the vendors was flogging (as a “special price” for those in the cooking class).

We all trundled back to the Travel Bar through the narrow side streets of the Gothic Quarter.  A number of simple tapas were spread out, and we were shown the correct way of preparing them (grate a halved tomato into a thin slice of baguette, dribble with extra-virgin olive oil, whack on a slice of hard Spanish cheese, whack on a bit of meat – chorizo, salami or ham – and add either a cocktail onion or an olive.  Voila!)  I ate a lot of them.  Then Mr Chef prepared a seafood paella in a GIGANTIC curved frying pan.  Paella is made with Arborio rice, which, for those in the know, is the same kind used in Italian risotto.  The difference between the two is that with risotto you stir it constantly, creating a very creamy texture, while paella is left sitting and soaking, giving it a bit more crunch.

The seafood included shrimp, king prawns (unpeeled), mussels and clams.  The bar had been constantly serving us jugs of sangria, and I had been downing them quite enthusiastically.  We were then shown how to make Sangria (a third red wine, a third orange juice, a third lemon soda and eight counts each of rum and vodka.  Or if you’re Australian, fill the jug halfway with wine, juice and soda and then fill the remaining with spirits).  We drank some more.

Chloe was meeting a friend out later, but time began to get the better of us and it was soon an hour after the time she was supposed to meet.  We staggered off to find the bar anyway, walking down La Rambla and any seedy little side street we could find.  At this point it is probably worth noting that I had ensured before going out that night that I left anything valuable at home or had it hidden in a completely inaccessible point on my person.  There, I’m not totally stupid!

Unfortunately, one poor Taiwanese girl was that stupid.  There we were, staggering around completely lost and basically having given up on finding the bar when a German girl who had been at the cooking class ran around the corner, shouting out to ask whether we had seen someone running with a bag.  We hadn’t.  She stopped to let us know that her Taiwanese friend (also at the cooking class) had had her bag snatched and had gone running after the culprit.  A few locals were hanging around on the streets and vaguely communicated concern to us, and let us know that the police had followed the culprits as well.

A moment later the Taiwanese girl returned, glum, flanked by two plainclothes policemen (their disguises were fantastic – they looked like the kind of tough guys you would avoid in the street).

After making sure the Taiwanese girl had checked the police officers’ IDs (this was met with a ‘nah, duh’ glare) we let them take her to file a report.  I suppose they must be fairly used to these things.  I had, of course, already met the Korean who lost his passport, and this girl had been carrying her credit cards, passport and cash together in her handbag (in all fairness, surely she knew that was a bad idea).  Chloe’s gang told me, as we returned to the hostel, about their close encounter when a friend of theirs was pickpocketed the night before.  Unfortunately for the pickpocket, this Aussie was fast, and found the guy cowering behind a bin.  He got his stuff back – pickpockets aren’t looking for a fight.

Back at the hostel we all went to the bar and… played drinking games.  There I was, in Barcelona, surrounded by Australians, playing drinking games.  We played “Never Have I Ever” long enough for me to ascertain that none of the people I was playing with were virgins and that a number of them had been having sex in the hostel – and there I was innocently assuming the privacy curtain was to keep light out when people came back late at night.  The game kind of dissolved fairly quickly, as most of them tended to just use the game as an opportunity to flaunt all the crazy stupid s*** they had done (you know what I’m talking about – saying something crazy and then drinking to it yourself.  Showing off, basically).

The bartenders invited us out to a club, but it was 2am by that point and, as is often the case when I play Never Have I Ever, I hadn’t gotten very drunk, certainly not enough to make any really bad decisions.  So I went to bed.

DAY TWO

Wanting to take full advantage of being in Barcelona, and still really quite enjoying it (the cynicism that you may have detected in my descriptions of day one had not begun to take root at that point) I went online to find out where the Picasso Museum was.  It was in the Gothic Quarter, so I planned a trip to check out La Rambla, the Picasso Museum and the Gothic Quarter.  Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I am actually a really good navigator.  After beelining directly to the door of the Picasso Museum (those of you familiar with my experiences in Madrid will probably remember that by ‘museum’ they mean ‘art gallery’ it took me a while to work out where to go.  See, the Picasso Museum is sort of spread out across a block within the Gothic Quarter (which is complicated narrow streets lined by three-storey old apartment blocks) and it is difficult to work out exactly which entrance is the REAL entrance.

The answer was the one with the sign saying “TICKETS” pointing at it.

Unfortunately the museum was half closed (well, they said half closed.  Unless it’s a really small museum, I would say more like 80% closed).  Two sections were open, covering the very end of Picasso’s life.  I had the audio guide, remembering the mistake I had made in the Reina Sofia.  This time, however, having the guide was just as confusing as not having it, since it referred to Picasso’s history without explaining it (ie. I missed the beginning, so the end didn’t make sense).  So… yeah.  Picasso.  He did art and stuff.

Walking around the Gothic Quarter, I saw some Roman ruins by accident.  I then went looking for more Roman ruins and came across an enormous cathedral by accident.  This sort of thing is really only possible in Europe, where buildings commonly block the view of the surroundings and you can round a corner and suddenly see something big and famous.

There’s not much more to say about that – I went around, saw nice old buildings, then went back to the hostel.  I pretty much slept the whole afternoon until I was woken up by Ruby and the Russian.  Something I had neglected to mention: the day before we had bought tickets to the FC Barcelona vs Malaga game, mostly influenced by the Russian’s enthusiasm.  You could get 9 euro tickets, which I thought was pretty good.  Sure, they were right at the back of the stadium, but that commanded a fabulous view over the field.

One thing about the stadium is that it is the only stadium I have ever seen with a special booth for tourists.  That’s where I had to go to pick up my tickets.  I’ve got to say, it made me feel a bit of a… tourist.

Getting into the stadium required a full-on cavity search (well, maybe not that bad, but the guard certainly made me spread my legs and patted down my crotch).  The game was weird.  Malaga scored first (we were next to a bunch of maybe six people who were probably the only Malaga supporters in the stadium).  Then Barcelona was like, “Oh, maybe we should play properly,” before scoring twice in less than five minutes.  Then no-one scored until pretty much the final minute, during which Malaga scored again, ending the match in a 2-2 draw.  It didn’t feel like a particularly spectacular match.  The group of Americans behind us (clearly tourists are seated together…) had no idea what was going on, loudly professing their ignorance of the game’s rules. 

It was around this point that I realized that Barcelona had taken every single thing it had and turned it into a tourist attraction.  The city made it almost impossible to discover the ‘authentic’ Barcelona, because Barcelona is authentically fake.  It’s like an adult Disneyland.  Let’s be honest – as spectacular as the Sagrada Familia is, for example, it serves no real function other than as a tourist attraction (apparently it takes church services, but it’s tourist dollars funding the build, not the Vatican).  The football, a European passion, is something that blasé tourists go see because of FC Barcelona’s fame.  The tapas, the paella, that I had had, all dressed up to be tourist friendly.  I had very rarely seen a restaurant without an English menu.

Worst of all, I was playing into the touristy schemes.  I was doing the bike tour, the cooking class, was staying in a flashy chain hostel instead of a tiny family-owned hovel.  A week into my trip I had sold out.

(To be clear, I’m not suggesting that everyone in Barcelona is a tourist and no-one actually lives there – I’m just bitching about how hard it is to escape from all of the established tourist safety nets.  I am well aware that, had I bought my tickets somewhere other than a tourist information centre, I would have been sat with the passionate Spanish football fans, but I had naively assumed the tickets were identical wherever you bought them.)

Leaving the game we got to see a bit more of the authentic Barcelona – in the rush to leave we spied a man working his way through the crowd holding a pair of scissors.  I wonder how many got home without their purses that night.  Then, just at the hostel, two men were following two younger women.  When they saw us coming in the opposite direction, me holding a camera, they turned and disappeared off.

I went to bed that night intent on trying to leap off the beaten track the next day.

DAY THREE

Leaping off the beaten track began with rolling out of bed at 10am, just after breakfast had finished being served (in all fairness, the damn game finished at 11:30pm, so it wasn’t exactly an early night).  At first I was a little put out, but then I saw how I could use this to my advantage.

After my failure in the chocolate con churros department in Madrid, I resolved that today was the day.  I would have chocolate con churros before leaving Spain, god damn it!

This time I had a plan.  Instead of wandering aimlessly, hoping to find somewhere good, I would look up places online, choose one with good recommendations and then just go.  So I did.

The place was in the Gothic Quarter – again, close, but tricky to find.  Unless you’re me, in which case very easy to find.  Rounding a corner I could see it a little way off.  I walked up to the door…

…and kept going.  The place felt a little upmarket, I was feeling self conscious about not speaking the language and being by myself.  And there was no English to be seen.

But no.  I had had enough of all that.  I wouldn’t let Barcelona massage me into chickening out.  Back I went and, with only a brief pause at the door, entered.

The waiter smiled and waved at a seat.  Slowly taking it, I mumbled “Chocolate con Churros?”  He babbled in Spanish.  I sat down with a stupid, plastered grin on my face.  Seeing that I had no idea what he was saying, the waiter nodded and walked off (probably muttering “turista!” to himself).  Moments later I had a thick, steaming cup of chocolate and six churros (which were cold, having been taken from a display cabinet).  It was delicious.

Reveling in my newfound success, I mimed for the bill.  Actually, this was possibly the proudest moment of all, as I was simply not used to asking for the bill and had felt extremely nervous about doing so.  But it wasn’t long before I had paid and left.

How, then, to continue the success of that morning?  I was interested in climbing Montjuic, a kind of national park-esque thing on a hill that overlooks Barcelona.  Importantly there was a castle on top.  I like castles, but I knew I had to earn it, so I decided to hike it instead of taking the cable car or funicular.

The first thing you see when you walk down the huge street leading to Montjuic is the imposing National Palace, which houses MNAC, the Museu Nacional de Artes Catalunyan or something.  It basically contains art from Catalan, and I will go a bit more in detail later.

The second thing you notice is the Magic Fountain, which is supposed to put on a spectacular light show each night.  I say ‘supposed to’ because it actually didn’t.  It was broken.  They were cleaning it.  Something was not right, anyway, and therefore: no show.

For the small climb up to the MNAC there are a few options.  One is the stairs.  One is the escalator.  One is trying to climb up the massive fountain that trickles from top to bottom (I don’t recommend this method).  I started with the stairs before deciding that I could climb stairs anywhere, but an escalator in a national park was a new experience.  At least, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Despite intending to go straight to the castle before seeing what else there was, I ended up going in the opposite direction to start with and coming across the Olympic Stadium and other Olympic monuments.  They were big and impressive, but I have to say it takes more than twenty-five years to impress me now.

In the distance I could see the castle, a huge, imposing stone wall that cut all the way along the horizon.  Off I plodded toward it.  Only, it wasn’t a castle.  It was a cemetery.  Huge stone walls contained the bodies of thousands of people.  Even up close it looked like a damn castle.  Feeling a little ripped off (no disrespect to the dead, but they didn’t really appeal at that point) I kept going, discovering fantastic vistas over hideous industrial docks and airy forest areas.

Finally I came across what looked like a military base, so I started treading carefully until I came across a tiny massive intersection.

Yes, you read that right.  I was looking at this mass of roads, confused, when I realized it was a play area.  For children.  Concluding that no-one in their right mind (not even the Spanish) would build a children’s play area next to a military complex I continued on with a bit more bravado.  That is, until a rifle shot pierced the air, a bullet whizzing past my head.

No, just kidding.  No military complex.  Really.

What had looked a bit like a military complex was actually the very edge of the castle.  It stretched on for quite some way, but as it was more of a fort than a castle what you saw this far from the main complex was basically just crumbling walls.

The main square of the castle housed a number of cannons ranging from (at a guess) late 19^th century to the second world war.  They were all pointed towards the ocean, for what I suppose are very obvious reasons.

The castle itself was more of a large stone square surrounded by walls and stuff.  The walls contained barracks, and some of these barracks contained free exhibitions.  Well, two of them did.  One was an exhibition of photographs of the Catalonian president of the Second World War, or thereabouts, and the other was a photographic documentation of the uncovering of a mass grave perpetrated by the Franco regime.  The story was told vaguely through the true tale of a teacher who had promised to take his class to see the sea at the end of the year.  Unfortunately he ended up in the grave, and the remains of the promise lie in a booklet created by the students at the time imagining what the sea would be like.

It wasn’t particularly well presented, I have to say, but the subject was extremely moving so that didn’t matter so much.  I walked down through the (beautiful) gardens on the mountain, mind preoccupied by massacres and graves.  The whole place had a more somber air about it now.

I attempted, at this point, to follow the signs to the Ethnographic Museum, but failed abysmally and ended up at MNAC again.  Oh well, I thought, if they have an audio guide I’ll just do that instead.  They did, so I did.

The museum is divided up into four key sections: Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque, and Modern Art.  To see all the sections you need a full day.  To give you an idea, I was there for around three or four hours and had to rush to see all of the bottom floor (there are two floors) which got me half way through Renaissance, missing Baroque and (tragically) Modern Art.

The guide was very good, providing plenty of detailed information that I promptly forgot.  The Romanesque section is a series of gigantic model churches onto which have been carefully copied the frescoes (as in, they took the paint from the ancient churches and stuck it exactly as it was upon a model church within the museum) of numerous Catalonian churches from the Dark Ages and early Medieval period.  Many were very beautiful, most were incomplete, and I just kind of wandered through the space in a bit of a daze.  The gallery is so huge that it could hold hundreds of people while still feeling completely empty.

I won’t go into too much detail on the Renaissance and Gothic stuff, as they were fairly typical of art (and almost everything was related somehow to faith, God and Christianity).  The placed closed at 6pm, so I was kicked out just as I was about to move on to Baroque.

When I got back to the hostel, Ruby was there, mulling over what she had done that day.  Apparently she had been craving 'Western food' and so had gone to McDonald's for lunch.  Um... What?  That made me feel a whole lot better about my various touristy transgressions.

It was Thursday, which, if you have been following carefully, you will realize was the day of our flamenco show and cocktail classes.  We were shepherded to the dance, watched it (it was fun and lively – not a bad show, but almost certainly not totally authentic) and were taken to the Travel Bar for some tapas and paella.  I won’t lie – the tapas was awesome.  And plentiful.  I felt stuffed very early in the game, and plates kept coming out.  Some of our number were vegetarians, and others were allergic to seafood, so it basically fell upon me to finish up enough food for a small army.  I especially want to mention the mushroom soup.  So.  Good.

Feeling a bit ill and a lot tipsy (the bartender never stopped refilling our Sangria, and I never stopped drinking it) we moved on to the cocktail portion.  Most of the cocktails I already knew how to make – Pina Colada, Sex on the Beach, Mojito and Long Island Iced Tea.  We were able to drink them after we made them, but I could only finish the first two before I started feeling really queasy.  It was at this point that I took off my money belt and put it in my front jacket pocket to give my stomach a bit more space.

We raced off to the bar, leaving my Mojito and Long Island Iced Tea resting on the bar, as it was now time to go to the club (1am).  I specifically checked the name so I would be able to tell you all which club it was, but it’s been half a week now and I’ve forgotten.  Sorry.  It was on the beach, about fifteen minutes from the bar, and it was actually under the road.  You entered a large glass cabinet containing stairs leading down to the dance floor.  They had a cloak room, but when I heard that it cost two euros to leave your coat there I decided to give that a miss. 

So, how does a club in Barcelona compare to a club in Brisbane?

…Erm.  Pretty similar, really.  Maybe a few decibels louder, and maybe a few flashes crazier, but this place played a lot of the same songs (Gangnam Style, for God’s sake) and had a similar smoky smell and feel to a Brissie club.  Main difference was the bartenders were all in their undergarments and extremely attractive (the male in particular was extremely well toned).

Well, I danced, but I was pretty much sober by this point.  I think my queasiness may have been due more to overeating than overdrinking, and the brisk walk combined with the sweaty dance floor (and me still in my thick jacket, sweating the booze out) managed to squeeze the alcohol out of my system.  The others, though, seemed pretty drunk still.  They decided to climb up on the podium at one point, dragging me up as well.  In my effort to climb up I managed to tear my jeans just under the back pocket.  I now have two pairs of jeans with the exact same tear, so by the time I reach Bulgaria I will probably have icicles growing off my bottom.

By 2:30am I was ready to leave, though I was the only one feeling that way.  Fine, I could make my way back myself.

It went ok until I reached La Rambla.  Now, I had walked La Rambla a few times, both during the day and during the night.  Sure, it was touristy, but it had never felt dangerous.  A couple of beer fairies offered me cans of beer (they sell them on the streets – illegally of course) but once I declined they left me alone.

No, the problem was prostitutes.

The first hooker I ‘met’ came up and grabbed my arm.

“You want sex?”

“No, gracias.”

“Why you no want?”

There were any number of reasons I did not want, one being that I suspected that her hooter was probably a festering pit of black death, but mostly because prostitution is something I have absolutely no intention of ever having any part of.

With some effort I managed to shake her off and continued down La Rambla.  As I mentioned before, I was completely sober, so was completely aware of everything around me.  I managed to avoid most people (there were a lot of guys selling what I assume were drugs who would call out to me – “Amigo!” – but they didn’t follow).  I was maybe three quarters of the way along the street, hostel almost in sight, when I realized that walking directly towards me – taking up the entire street – was a line of hookers.

I moved to the side of the pedestrian street, hoping to avoid them, but one peeled away from the rest to corner me.  She looked exactly the same as the last one – in fact, the whole row of them could have been clones as far as I could tell.  She spoke in Spanish this time, so again with the, “No, gracias,” (though I may have gotten over saying “Gracias” by that point).

I took me quite some effort to shake this one off, and as she fell by the wayside she made a desperate grab for my jacket pocket.  I slapped her hand away and kept moving purposefully forward, feeling around my person to ensure nothing had been taken.

I realized my money belt was no longer around my waist.  Oh, no.  It had my travel money card, my English passport, 80GBP, the key for the lock I had used on my bag.  All that important stuff.  Then I remembered I had taken it off and put it in my pocket during the cocktail making.  It was still in my pocket.  Phew.

Fortunately there are no other incidents to report from my walk up La Rambla, but it was the start of a transformation of that street.  It would only be the next day that I would get any real understanding of what La Rambla was transforming into.

DAY FOUR

I managed to get up in time for breakfast this time.  Woohoo!  Not that I needed much.  The others I had gone out with had apparently returned around 4am, so were looking sick, tired, and hungover.  I actually felt pretty fresh, though I wasn’t entirely sure what I would do that day.

I actually spent the first part of the day checking train times and trying to work out the best way of getting to Lyon.  I had managed to get in touch with Astrid over Facebook and needed to give her an accurate time for my arrival.  As it turned out… Well, that’s for later.

I kind of just felt like wandering for this last day, as I wasn’t sure if there was anything that I really, really had to see at this point.  After walking a short way I started to crave the cinema, and remembering from the bike tour that there was a cinema with films in their original languages somewhere around the Olympic Village, I tried to make my way there.

The walk was a lot further than it had felt on the bikes, but once I reached the village I realized it had been turned into a shopping centre.  I assumed correctly that the cinema would be inside the shopping centre, and so in I went.

Well… the cinema was closed.  Spanish cinemas don’t open until 3:30pm (it was about 2:30 at this point).  I went to the supermarket and picked up some bread, cheese, meat and mushrooms for lunch.  As I went to the counter, a security guard (I assume he was a security guard) waved his arms in a not unfriendly way, babbling in Spanish.

My brain, having come to the supermarket specifically NOT to have to interact with anyone, kind of went “Blurblewurblewurble.”

Somehow I managed to communicate that I only spoke English, at which point the guard went “Ah,” smiling and nodding.  He seemed to consider for a moment, then gave up and waved me to a checkout.  By the time I left the supermarket the cinema was starting to gear up, but I couldn’t tell which films were in the original language (they all had ‘VOCE’ written next to them, which I thought must mean something like ‘dubbed’ but I guess I could have been wrong).  Anyway, I went back to the hostel, packed, had a lonely and somewhat safe final dinner of pork ribs (they were actually really delicious, but I still felt guilty about having yet another meal in the hostel bar).

Of course I walked up La Rambla to get back to the hostel, and the changes were really starting to kick into gear.  There were a lot of tourists now, with more English spoken on the street than either Catalunian or Spanish.  There were street performers setting up their stalls and the place was really starting to bustle.  I guess it was in preparation for the weekend, as it was Friday by this point.

When I returned to my room I was kind of surprised to discover two Germans chatting and drinking beer.  I had pretty much finished packing and, even though I really wanted to sleep, I stayed up a little while chatting with them.  Somehow I had lost my little lock for my large backpack (I think it fell inside the backpack and I will have to dig it out – I’m kind of pissed off at myself for losing it since it would have been so easy just to lock it to something instead of leaving it sitting on the bag in the safe) and the Germans found that incredibly funny.

They offered me a beer and I managed to froth it so that it overflowed.  They found that very funny as well.

“Who needs entertainment when you have an Australian,” is what one of them said.

Anyway, I was tired and went to bed.  I knew I would need to be up early the next morning for the train… but that tale is for next time, as this is now

TO BE CONTINUED