Slowly, but steadily I am falling behind on the stories that “have to” go onto the blog, so this is the first attempt to catch up again. But more good stories to come soon! The first one is from 2 weeks ago already! When Martin was visiting Barcelona and him, his brother Magnus, who lives here, and I went driving around Barcelona. I took my second day off from school (1st was “the day after” Sitges) and we went about 100km north of Barcelona to see some old traditional Catalan towns and the volcano’s. Yes, volcano’s. In Spain! :-) Who would have thought! Well, not me at least. But they are there. Old, not working (forget mental images of lava-streams and a hot boiling crater) but still volcano’s.

First stop was a little village called Besalu. Lovely little town. Quite deserted on the Tuesday we were there, as we seemed to be the only tourist in the little village. But we had a nice walk around the town, saw the big almost roman looking bridge and had a typical and lovely but heavy Catalan lunch (sausage, beans & fries) and were ready to climb the volcano! There is many volcano’s, but we picked the one that was suppose to be the nicest and had a little church in the crater.

And nice it was. The walk up the volcano wasn’t as hard as expected, the woman from the tourist office scared us a bit with the details of the climb: at least 40 minutes and so steep that basic rock-climbing could barely be avoided. It turned out to be much easier. The walk up just took about 15 minutes… max. With stopping for photos along the way. The view from the edge of the crater was quite nice with indeed the little church in the middle of the crater. We went down for a look, took some pictures, enjoyed the silence for a moment and the it was time to head back and surf our way down the crater.

After the visit to the volcano, we drove down to a little town on the Costa Brava, had a coffee and drove home to have the best dinner yet during my stay here! It wasn’t that fancy, just a plate with tapas, but it was so nice! Nice ham, nice cheese, nice bread, everything was really! A perfect was to end a great day! :-)

Besalu bridge		Climb up the volcano		The crater		Proud @ the church

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For some reason I am not able to handle the air-conditioning systems in planes… Because going home for 2 days last weekend didn’t just give me the pleasure of seeing my family, animals and godfather again, but also left me with a sore throat for 5 days… At times it’s ok, but on the flight from Barcelona to Amsterdam the airco was set to almost freezing temperatures and I even though I have flown a lot over the years, I have never figured out how to deal with that…

Maybe the cold and dry air just pushes you over the edge when already being a bit sick when boarding the airplane… because drinking lots of water to keep the throat wet doesn’t seem to help much… And on the way back to Barcelona it wasn’t so bad… and not just because I got upgraded to business class, but mainly because the airco wasn’t set to extreme cold temperatures… Again, I guess…

But it wasn’t all bad on the plane! Because if there is one thing I love when flying, it’s turbulence! And especially on the way back there was a lot when we were flying over the Pyrenees. The flight becomes less boring and somewhat of an amusement park ride. It wasn’t close to my best flight ever: flying back from Basel in a huge storm in a small 2 propeller plane and being buckled up all the time, never even seeing a stewardess in the path and being shaken up like a cocktail in a high quality cocktail bar for over an hour! :-)

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Even though I am not much of a carnival person anymore, used to be quite a good Zorro in my days, but that was many years ago, I still enjoyed the carnival in Sitges very much! We went there with almost the entire class and had a blast! Our teacher Pepe had drawn us a map on the board in class to point out the place to go and to avoid. And that worked lovely! After a few cocktails we avoided the most touristy places and went to eat paella and drink good red wine at a little restaurant the locals would go. Great fun, although I can imagine our group slightly annoyed the other customers more and more the later the evening got…

After the restaurant we went back to the touristy boulevard to watch the carnival parade. Again, really fun!! Although we never expected the parade would take over 3 hours… and as it started around 2300, we were dancing, drinking and laughing on the side of the parade until way into the night! And some point we even got part of the parade, when our whole group was doing the lawnmower! :-)

When the parade was finished we went to a bar for some more drinks and at around 0400 we ended up at Burger King and a Whopper meal has never tasted so good as at that moment! An hour later we decided it was enough and time to go home. And the going home part proved to be the worst event of the day… that was just horrifying… first standing over an hour in a 250 meter cue at the train station, then the pushing to get in the train station and train and finally getting home just after 0700…

Even though I had been up almost 24 hours and most likely still a bit drunk, I was seriously considering staying up another 2 hours and going to class (which starts at 0900). I stayed up until 0800, but then I started feeling a bit tired and also figured I would be the only one in class that day, as the whole class decided to skip classes, and I wasn’t going to handle 4 hours of 1 on 1 Spanish in my tired/drunken-state, so I went to bed as well. A smart decision, as I ended up not feeling my best for the next 2 days…

So, except for the horrible train ride home it had been a great night out with the class! I am very lucky to have met such a fine group of people! Only I am definitely getting to old to party until 0700 in the morning, that’s for sure! ;-)

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I am Dutch, according to my passport, but I just failed miserably at the National Habituation Test. Scoring a 4.7 out of the possible 10… and you need at least a 5.5 to pass the test. The test is made for foreign people who want to become Dutch citizens. They are required to have some basic knowledge of Dutch language, people, customs, history and culture. Good thing, as I think it’s important to have this basic knowledge to integrate in our society and so to have some idea about the country they are about to go live in.

But then, seeing and doing the test… it proves to be quite stupid. If I am not able to successfully pass the test, how in heavens name will any foreigner pass the test?! Well, I have been away a lot the last couple of years, but that shouldn’t be a valid reason. Because why should I know in what week a pregnant woman needs to go to the doctor? Or that I can’t ask gay people who are bothering me with their behaviour that they go do their thing somewhere else? Or how long it takes to travel from Amsterdam to the east of Holland by train??? Strange stuff…

My test result

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Last weekend was suppose to be a relax weekend. All weekends from now on are going to be quite busy. Either with people visiting, me going home or other stuff. So last weekend was one of my few relax weekends left in Barcelona. I thought. Because after class on Friday we were waiting outside of the school with the class to go to the gym, when somebody tapped me on the shoulder… I turned around and all of a sudden I am looking at my brother!!! :-)

I was totally stunned… I knew he was coming to Barcelona for a visit but he wouldn’t come before the first weekend of April… And now he was all of a sudden there, with his girlfriend Ana from Madrid… I really thought I saw a ghost! I was just so stunned! :-)

Well, apparently that was the plan of my brother all along. I had told him that last weekend would be one of the few weekends I hadn’t already planned things, and he clearly took advantage of that with surprising me like that! So instead of me relaxing, we went around town to see some of the famous sights, had tapas & paella, I got to practise my Spanish a bit on Ana and we walked A LOT! So all together it was a great surprise and absolutely worth giving up my relaxing weekend for! :-)

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The lovely weekends go by quickly in Barcelona and without an Internet-connection it’s sometimes a bit hard to keep up with the events. But have found a new and improved Internet connection last Sunday, so it should be at least a bit easier now to keep up.

From the 16th of January until the 19th, Mette was visiting and it was a really fun and great weekend! :-) As mentioned already we went and see the football, took the tourist bus around town for 2 days to see most interesting attractions and sights, ate tapas, drank cappo’s at Starbucks, did the tourist walk through Camp Nou and the FC Barcelona museum, and… showed Snoop around! :-)

Mette had brought our “foster child” and travelling friend Bunnysuit Snoopy to Barcelona as well. Well, how could she not… Ever since we found him, abandoned in the bushes close to St. Kilda in Melbourne, Australia, we took him on our travelling journeys and made pictures with him. Unfortunately his website is down at the moment, but if I get to it, I will try to get it up again. Especially now we have some new fun pictures of him:

At Montjuic		At Starbucks		At Sagrada Familia		Being naughty

At Parc Guell		Snoop Dog		At Camp Nou		Watching football

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