Europe 2009, part 6

Saturday, May 9, continued

• Dinner at a neighborhood restaurant recommended by our landlords. Food (chicken and seafood paella) was good, not great. Service was bad, not so-so. For the first time I can remember, I didn't leave a tip.

Sunday, May 10

• Delicious ham and cheese sandwiches at the neighborhood cafe that has WiFi.
• Walk to the cathedral, sit on the steps in the sun and listen to a couple excellent guitarists play Spanish music.
• Remain sitting in the sun and listen to a 12-piece band (mostly brass and woodwinds) play traditional music while people formed a big circle in the plaza and danced. The main "voice" in the band was something that looked like an oboe at one end, a trumpet at the other, and a clarinet in between. I'd call it a bass oboe. It made a wonderful sound.
• Metro to the base of Montjuïc, the old Jewish quarter of the city, which is a big hill overlooking the city. We're not able to walk up the main street, as we had planned, because a car expo has taken over the whole street. Nevertheless, we find a workaround, or I guess I should say a "walkaround," and make it up to the top (the operative word being "up"), where we sit in the sun again and listen to a talented guitarist play Spanish and Brazilian music (Bossa Nova is big in the tourist haunts of Barcelona).
• After a short rest at the apartment, we get a bottle of wine from a nearby bodega and some carry-out food from a nearby restaurant. The restaurant doesn't normally do carry-out, I think, but when we explained that smoking was a problem, they made an exception. The food was excellent: tomato bread, a garlic omelet, a variety of grilled sausages, potatoes, and a green salad. Sweets from the bakery around the corner rounded out the meal.
• Counting from last night's paella through tonight's carry-out, this was the best 24 hours of food we've had since landing in Spain.

Monday, May 11

• Metro to the train station and buy tickets for Girona. You remember our fruitless attempts to do this a couple days ago, right? Well, today we succeeded. A friend back home had sung the praises of Girona, but we were still torn between going there and going to Montserrat, a hilltop monastery about the same distance outside the city. Well, the friend back home had preferred Girona to Montserrat, and a woman Mary Ellen chatted up in a bar (yes, a woman Mary Ellen chatted up in a bar) agreed. So "yes" to Girona, "no" to Montserrat.
• We board the train around 9:20 and arrive in Girona around 11:00. The best things about the train trip? It eventually ended. And we both had seats . . . most of the way. And no fistfights broke out as people jostled for seats.
• Girona's train station doesn't have a tourist information desk -- a strange thing, it seems to me, for a town that relies so much on tourism. We spend 10 minutes looking for signs that might help us figure out which bus might get us from the station to the historic area. We finally give up and ask someone which bus we should take. She doesn't know, but she does know that if we turn left at the corner we can walk to it in 10 minutes. And so we do.
• The tourist area is MOBBED with people who have come to the flower festival. Long lines of old people shuffling into the various buildings where the flowers are displayed. We're not much interested in joining the shuffle, so we enjoy a beverage in an outdoor cafe while we plan what to do next. From our table, we spot some carnations arranged in a circle on the cathedral steps. And we realize this is one of main displays of the "festival." And that makes our decision easy: We're getting out of here. So, back to the train station and, after a 2 hour ride, we're back in Barcelona. This time, we both have seats the whole way. Hurray!
• A strange thing about the train to Girona. The return ticket is "open"; you can use it anytime within 15 days after you purchase it, which means, basically, that it is a 15-day advance purchase. The ticket for the outbound train can only be bought the day you want to travel; no advance purchases permitted. I'm sure this makes sense to the people in Barcelona, but it leaves me befuddled.
• Dinner was carry-out from the same place we got the wonderful sausage and omelet yesterday. Today's order was "grilled meat" and "grilled vegetables." They were, respectively, "barely edible" and "tasteless." Maybe we were just lucky yesterday? Unlucky today?

Tuesday, May 12

• One of our best days in Barcelona, during which we don't try to accomplish anything at all.
• We bought some bread and cheese from neighborhood bodegas to go with our left-over wine from last night and Mary Ellen packed a picnic lunch and we headed for the boardwalk. (Left-over wine? How in the world did that happen? Obviously, I'm falling down on the job.) An hour walk there through the old part of town, at least two hours enjoying our lunch, looking at the Mediterranean, checking out the all-but-naked bods on the beach, and stretching out in the sun with eyes closed, before an hour walk back. Nice work if you can get it. Supper at an outdoor cafe where we had such good tapas a couple nights ago. Not so good tonight. Maybe we were just lucky then? Unlucky now?

Wednesday, May 13

• Our landlord is coming at 11:00 to check the apartment and return our security deposit. Before that we have cafe con leche and some pastries "para llevar" from a bakery around the corner and then check e-mails at the nearby WiFi cafe.
• The landlord doesn't come at 11:00; his father-in-law comes at 10:45. He does a quick once-over to make sure that we didn't break any windows and that we didn't pack the keys in our bag, hands us our security deposit, and by 11:00 we're in a cab headed to the airport to catch flight 6187, which our ticket says leaves Barcelona at 13:55 and arrives in Washington at 19:35. Our cab driver is very helpful and is determined to get us to the right terminal. (She explains, with much feeling and at considerable length, that there are several terminals spread over a large area and that two old Americans like us with all our bags would never make it from one to another. So she'll stop at the terminal that she thinks might be ours but then I should run in to make sure that's where we belong. She'll wait for me, even though cabs aren't supposed to park there. Turns out she guessed pretty well, but we were still a very, very long walk from where we needed to be, so she drove us the rest of the way. And for this great service, she charged us only about half of what we were expecting. May she live long and prosper. And may her offspring revere her unto the 10th generation.
• So we're at the airport iin plenty of time for our 13:55 flight. Except when we check in, we're told that the flight isn't at 13:55. It's at 12:45, and we should start hiking toward our boarding area right away. And, by the way, the flight is not just going to stop in Madrid to pick up more passengers. It ends in Madrid, where we'll have to change planes before continuing to Washington on a different plane. Once in Madrid we race from our landing gate to our boarding gate, thinking that the Washington plane is taking off momentarily. When we're almost there, we double check the departure board and see that we've got almost 2 hours before takeoff. In sum, nothing on this flight went the way we expected it to.
• We eventually board and Mary Ellen notices that the ground crew is very interested in one of the jet engines on the right wing. She prays, "Please, God, don't let this delay us." I pray, "Please, God, if they've got any doubt, don't let them say 'Oh heck, it'll probably be OK."
• We arrive at Dulles 8+ hours later.