Enfin!

Alright everyone, I'm back! I'm sure there haven't been that many people anxiously waiting, but I'm finally making my next blog post! Sorry it's been a little while, I've been away or busy the last week or so. And warning - THIS POST MIGHT BE A LITTLE BIT LONGGGGG.

New Year's Eve at 11 AM I left on the train from Nîmes to Port Bou, Spain, where I had a little time to wait before going to Barcelona. On a side note, I've just learned that AM means "ante-meridian," which in Latin simply means the sun hasn't crossed the Prime Meridian yet, and PM is of course after the sun has crossed the Prime Meridian. Which means that neither AM nor PM hold any relevance unless you're exactly on the Prime Meridian, in Greenwich, England. So from now on I'll just say "in the morning," "in the afternoon," "in the evening," "at night," or "long after I should have been asleep." Anyways, as I didn't pay very much for my train tickets (32 Euros), the trains were slow and stopped just about everywhere between Nîmes and Barcelona. I had almost two hours in Port Bou, which is entirely too long to be there with nothing to do, as there's just about nothing to see. The train to Barcelona was packed with people going to party in Figeres or Barcelona.

On getting there (at the Estacio Sants) I noticed immediately how nice the metro system was, which I took to the Placa Catalunya. I found the Hosteria Grau, our room number and entered the room to see my parents for the first time in four months, which was awesome. New Years Eve we spent walking around checking out the city and looking for some place to eat, which was hard as most places either has a specially expensive New Years Eve menu or were packed. Eventually we found a tapas bar farther from the popular part of the city, and sat down to eat tapas and drink cerveza. Now I have to take the time to mention how it is to be able to order alcohol in restaurants with my parents. I'm actually not going to take that long to talk about it, it was just weird at the beginning. And now I appreciate Europe even more for giving me a right I think I should have along with the right to die in a war if I were drafted, which is obligatory. Enough said. So we finished eating at around 11:45 in the night, long after my tired parents who had traveled a long way should have been asleep. But no, because we stayed out for a little bit to see people lighting fireworks off all over the place in the streets and spraying cava (Spanish champagne) once midnight hit. But soon after we hit the sheets, and although that was relatively early for New Years Eve, didn't get up until 11:30 in the morning on New Years day.

That day a lot of monuments were closed, so it was spent doing a lot of walking and looking around. We went to the Park Guell, a park commissioned by a man named Eusebi Guell and designed mainly by Antoni Guadi, like many other things in Barcelona. Really cool mosaic benches and other things, which you can see if you check out my picture page. Afterwards, we walked around the waterfront and then returned to the hotel before dinner to open the bottle of wine that I brought for my parents, which was given to me by my friend Benjamin's grandfather.

January 2nd we started the morning by going out to breakfast in a cafe near the hotel. The highlight of that was when my dad ordered hot chocolate and it turned out to be exactly that; it was as if they took a bar of dark chocolate and heated it up on the stove, adding maybe a spoonful of water. After that we took the metro up to the Montjuic area and looked around the Poble Espanyol, which is a walled artisan village built for the 1929 World's Fair to show the various styles of houses in the different regions of Spain and to show/sell art. Then a quick look at the old Olympic stadium and an exhibit of paintings and sculptures by Joan Miro. We returned to the hotel a little earlier, then went out to a longer and very conversational dinner.

January 3rd was our last day in Barcelona and a rainy one, so we did some more stuff inside. We toured the Palau de la Musica Catalana, a music house that was built in 1908 and is really beautiful. Then we passed by the Sagrada Familia, a gigantic church that I believe was started by Gaudi and is still being built today. Then, something that no real soccer fan can miss in Barcelona - Camp Nou, the stadium of FC Barcelona. My dad and I went and took the tour of the stadium and the museum there. It's kind of ironic I took a picture of the chapel inside the Barcelona stadium but not the famous Sagrada Familia. Oh well... We finally got out of the rain and had our last dinner in Spain of struggling with the language barrier, although many people in Barcelona did speak English.

The 4th of January we woke up a little earlier and caught a cab (two cabs actually, as the first ripped us off and dropped us off at the wrong place on purpose) to the train station. A train up to Perpignan, where I was relieved to be, because I can communicate a million times better in French than Spanish. We rented a car there and attempted to drive to Carcassonne via the Port de Pailheres, which is a major Tour de France climb, and was unfortunately closed due to too much snow. But we eventually got to Carcassonne and our small bed and breakfast (Le Grand Puits) inside the old, beautiful fortified city. Because it is not exactly heavy tourist season now, we were some of the few people there and it was really nice to walk around the city at night when it was lit up and there was almost nobody else. My dad has the nicer pictures of the city at night, which I'll post when I get a hold of.

We drove back to Boissieres on the 5th, and my American family met my French family. We went out to dinner that night, which took about three hours with all the eating and conversation. Sunday was another rainy day, and we hung out close to my home here, touring my small village and the towns of Calvisson, Sommieres, and Villevielle. Yesterday was slightly nicer, so we went south to the town of Aigues Mortes that I've already written about, then through the Camargue marshes to Saints Marie de la Mer, which is a town with an annual gypsy migration festival of about 50,000, and the city of Arles, where Van Gogh lived and painted for many years. Arles also has a Roman amphitheater, which is bigger but less well-maintained than the one in Nîmes that we will see tomorrow. Today I showed my parents the Pont du Gard, after which we went to Avignon. Avignon is special because it was once the home of Christianity in Europe for cause of political turmoil. The popes moved there around the early 14th century and built an enormous palace, which is a cool thing to tour. Then to the neighboring town of Villeneuve les Avignons to see a view of the Palais de Papes and have a coffee before the drive back.

So now here I am, tired after writing all this and ready to go to sleep. Long enough for ya?