So long, Spain

Granada

I made port in Algeciras. I was waiting at the bus depot when a policeman approached me and asked for my ID. I handed him my passport. He then asked what was in the bag, referring to Plucky's black travel bag which he then bade me to open. I don't think he was really expecting to see a guitar. :) It's funny how Plucky attracts attention.

The bus took me in the early afternoon to Granada where I arrived once again with no plan and no contacts. And it was Easter Sunday. After my previous night’s accommodation in Tangier I was dreading the run-around. I found an information booth and spoke with a really helpful girl who recommended me a hostel in town, gave me a city map (for free - they sell them but someone had left theirs behind) plus directions, saving me having to search on (and pay for) the internet. Miss, you deserve a tip.

Pass the Plucky

Oasis Backpackers was the opposite of my previous night's experience. Firstly they had space. 16 Euros - next to the bar with no windows, but the bar closes at midnight. Hey, the price is right. Wifi internet is free. There's a rooftop balcony chill-out area. Hot showers. A fully equipped kitchen. Free (donation based) walking tours thrice daily. It was so nice to be back in a country where you didn't have to argue for everything and where people didn't lie to you by default. Long live western society, despite its flaws. I took the tour, which was run by an enthusiastic university student. I learnt about the history of the city, walked through the gypsy quarter, took some nice pictures. Alhambra, Granada's most famous attraction, was sold by the city into private hands a few years back. Now you have to pre-book your tickets (sometimes up to several months in advance) which cost €14.30. Apparently 8'500 people visit Alhambra every day, which works out to €44'365'750 being funneled into private hands each year instead of the local government. What a stupid decision that was. I ended up being lazy and frugal, so I never went.

Alhambra

Being a bit worn down from my recent travels, I used the backpackers as a bit of a chill-out space for almost a week. I wrote blog, played guitar on the roof, cooked some nice food, lived cheaply, drank a lot of kalimoxto (bambus) and got up to silly business (see vid, below). Batteries recharged, I was ready again once more for the road.

Master chef Marco explains what to do with old pasta scraps.

Toledo

The bus photobombed us

I made contact with Vicki, a previous couchsurfing guest who was living in Toledo. She put the good word out and organised a couch for me to crash on in Madrid with her friend Laura, a (non-couchsurfing) friend of hers. It's great having contacts.

I took the one-hour bus journey out to visit Vicki in Toledo for a day. We had lunch with her workmates and strolled through the small hilltop town. Toledo was once upon a time famous for its armouries. This is reflected in the wares of the souvenir shops which populate the old town (read: tourist zone). Even full sets of armour are on sale. A non-functional but cool-looking longsword would go for around €200 (I don’t remember exactly).

Things to do in Toledo

Madrid

I didn’t get to see much of Laura and her flatmate while I was there (we went for tapas once), but I washed their dishes and left the obligatory bottle of Hendricks, tonic and cucumbers. The crashpad was awesome, and muchly appreciated. I only really had one day to explore Madrid and caught up with my friend Thomas who I’d met at the backpackers in Granada. We checked out the main sights, the park, the palace, found a lookout perch over the city and had lunch at a friendly bar somewhere. I picked up my things at Laura’s and took the metro out to the airport, flying off to see my girl in Croatia again.

Budapest

The flight didn’t go direct to Zagreb. The cheaper option was a €60 flight to Budapest followed by a €30 train ride to Zagreb (return ticket which, oddly enough, is cheaper than a single - the return portion of which I was able to pass on). The catch was that the flight arrived at around midnight and the train left at 6:15am. I left my prepaid airport-to-city transfer ticket in the airplane, so my alternative plan required waiting for the first train to the city at 4:22am, then somehow transferring to the correct train station using the Budapest metro. I achieved this by wandering into random unlocked offices at the train station and finding someone who understood my hand-signals at 5am. I made it, but not with a heap of time to spare. I stole what sleep I could in the four-hour train journey and arrived at the Zagreb train station, tired but happy to see a certain familiar face again.

To the South of Spain

It was time to continue my journey south. I sought a means of transport to Montpellier and Pédy showed me the French carpooling website covoiturage.fr. I found a ride with a French guy keen to practise his English who was going to visit his girlfriend in Montpellier. We split the fuel and I paid him €20, roughly half the price of the train. Thus:

Rideshare - Lyon to Montpellier: Win!

Montpellier

I'd sent around eight couchsurfing requests and was invited to stay with a fifty-year-old guy for the weekend. After being surrounded by people around my own age for most of my travels, I thought I'd try something new. It ended up being a fairly quiet weekend. He showed me around the main attractions of the town and we went for a quiet beer on St. Paddy's day.

The highlight of the weekend was meeting up with a saxophonist via couchsurfing and jamming in the park. We were joined by a random trumpeter and made some noise. Good times.

Jamming / The trumpeter, the saxophonist and my host

Sunday morning rolled around and I felt the need to move on. I could have taken a bus, but decided on the more exciting option of hitch-hiking. hitchwiki.org gave me some good tips and a good location to start from, and I was off. It worked like a charm. I was picked up and set down four times, waiting a maximum of ten minutes at any given place. My hosts included: a dentist; a non-English speaking Brazilian monther/daughter who gave me sweets; an English guy in an English car (steering wheel on the right) and a van of environmental activists coming home from a demonstration. Therefore:

Hitch hiking - Montpellier to Barcelona: Win!

Barcelona

I spent all up around ten days in Barcelona. This was very much a different experience to my first visit, when I'd come with Moni over Easter a few years back. Back then I'd only seen the touristic side of the city and become frustrated with the place. This time I was staying with Jorge, an old friend I hadn't seen since high school around fourteen years ago, and his fiancée Anastasia. They welcomed me into their flat where I crashed on the couch. We shared meals and shopping, went out, and explored the city together. Anastasia didn't speak English and I didn't speak Spanish so it was a week of language exchange for both of us. I actually learned a fair bit of Spanish.

Cityscape / Anastasia (left), friends (middle), Jorge (right)

Also on my list of people to catch up with was Florenci and Pip who'd I'd met on the Sri Lanka trip. They were both living in Sitges, a small nearby coastal town. I managed to catch Florenci in the middle of his busy schedule when he came into Barcelona for a rehearsal/radio interview. I tagged along as their official photographer, and spent the day in a radio station recording studio.

There was a short interview which along with the recordings formed a show for the local cultural channel and aired later on that evening. The show was also put online, here. The music they made was weird, in a good sense. It doesn't really belong to any genre, but if I were trying to categorise it I would say it was a playful form of experimental electro dada. Here's what I mean. :)

Tired and exhausted, we went back to Florenci's place in Sitges for the evening. His flatmate cooked us a wonderful dinner. Croissants on the balcony for breakfast.

Plastic Lego thingies! Reunite! / Breakfast time

I managed to catch up with Pip for a coffee and a chat amidst her also busy schedule and spent a few hours exploring Sitges. Apparently I took a wrong turn and ended up down at the little beach where the nudists play. I parked up safely around the corner and played my guitar in the sun.

Since Jorge and Anastasia studied during the day I tended to have quite a bit of free time. Some of this I managed to spend with other couchsurfers in the area. I met a girl doing her thesis on the perceived image of Barcelona and peoples reasons for travelling there. I went to a language exchange in the park and a night out drinking. Good times all round.

Sagrada Familia. Just because.

Finally it was time to move on. Next stop: Valencia. Since the hitch-hiking had gone so well previously, I opted to try it again. I found the starting point on hitchwiki.org, rose early and set on my way. The result:

Hitch hiking - Barcelona to Valencia: Fail!

Sadly, things didn't quite go as swimmingly as I'd hoped. First, I got on the wrong train. Actually a fairly easy mistake. You see, I was to board the R4 (in the direction of Sant Vicenç de Calders) and get out mid-way. Unbeknownst to me, both the R2 and the R4 had an end destination of Sant Vicenç de Calders, and of course I got on the wrong one. That little mistake cost me around two hours of daylight.

My second problem was slightly more significant. In Spain, nobody stops. One hour after arriving at the gas station I was picked up by a French couple. French, not Spanish. They set me down at another gas station where I was not so lucky. I waited six hours with my thumb out, and caught nothing. It was astonishing. I felt invisible. If someone had space in their car they avoided eye contact and pretended I wasn't there. If their car was full they'd smile and shrug 'Sorry'.

Sun up / Sun set

The police stopped to checked my ID. It felt strange to be considered a public menace. The third time they drove by they waved and I waved back. The sun set and it became dark. I told my couchsurfing host I wasn't going to make it. I took a break and ate a pasta dinner at the autogrill. The trucks started pulling in for the night. One of the drivers said that he was going to sleep now but if I was still there when he woke (at 4:30am) he would give me a ride to Valencia. Nice guy.

Just-in-case hero / Overpass

After six hours waiting another French couple stopped. Thank god for the French. They only could drive me ten kilometres but hell, anywhere was better than here. The driver was a legend. We pulled into the destination gas station and he gets out and walks up to some random guy paying for his gas. He asks if the guy can give me a ride to Valencia. The guy looks me up and down, shrugs and says 'Okay'. I was in awe. The new driver is a professional volleyball player coming back from a meeting with his surgeon in Barcelona, about to have surgery on both his knees to sort out his 'jumper's knee' syndrome. I impart him with my knee surgery stories. He goes out of his way and drops me just off the motorway around forty kilometres out of Valencia. It's midnight. It's the eve of the 29th of March, a general strike across all of Spain. I considered my prospects of hitching another ride to be around nil and just started walking along the road to see what I could find. I found a hotel, drank a beer and checked in. Thirty Euros well spent.

My mission the next morning was to find Sagunto and from there a train to Valencia. I walked for about an hour along the road, over the motorway, through the orange plantations, across the train tracks and into the quiet sunny town of Sagunto. Trains were actually running, just not so frequently. I rolled it into Valencia and made it to my host's place around the same time as he finished work.

Valencia

What great times. I lucked out with my couchsurfing host, a flaminco playing cardiac surgeon who'd just recently started hosting people. He lent me a rusty old bike which (after a little oil) was simply the perfect thing to have for getting around Valencia. I think the coolest thing about Valencia is the big park running through the middle of the town which used to be a river, but in 1958 or so it flooded so badly that they decided to reroute the river around the city and convert the whole thing into a big park. So now there is a pedestrian and cycling highway running straight through the middle of the city. Combined with the number of cycle lanes and the lack of hills, Valencia is the perfect cycling city.

Balcony view

One of the first things I tried to do (as per usual) is to get in contact with the local couchsurfing scene. I was in luck, and what ensued was the most crazy and social time I've had so far on the road. My host finished work and I dragged him along too. Crazy memories include playing volleyball at the beach, guitars in the park after dark, crashing a random birthday party, visiting to local bars and clubs, jamming at 6am after a long night out, riding bikes everywhere.

I had originally planned to stay for two nights, but my host and I got on well and I ended up staying four. I eventually made contact with Rosie, a good friend from NZ who by pure chance was in Malaga on a field trip. I organised a night bus and went to say Hi.

Malaga

You definitely notice the difference in the architecture as you roll into Malaga. The buildings start being white and box-shaped. In hindsight you might say it was more Moroccan. Rosie was staying with some of her fellow students in a cheap little hostel so I joined them. After couchsurfing and staying with people for so long it was nice to have my own time and space. Evenings were spent drinking Bambus/Kalimotxo/Jote with the guitar on the rooftop balcony. We explored the castle on the hill and the beach, but I felt little inclination to do much else. It was a relaxing two days.

Also happening across Spain were the Easter parades. Was quite the eye-opener. No it's not a KKK procession, it's the Pentients paying for their sins. The 'hoods' belong to the Roman Catholic charitable fraternities and often include the notables of the town. There were also parades of purple costumes. The only mild irritation is the huge crowds shuffling slowly through the streets and the late night noise of drums and trumpets.

No black people were harmed in the making of this celebration. 

According to my grand plan I was to continue on to Portugal, the next logical stop being Porto. But after seeing the distance between Malaga and Porto I thought otherwise. Rosey piped up and suggested that I just skip across the gap to Morocco. Screw it... why not? :)

So... where was I? Oh, yes. I remember now.

November 2008:
Things returned mostly to normal. Hosted a few couchsurfers, jammed a bit, dnd'd a bit, worked a bit. Kind of a bitsy month.

December 2008:
Ah yes, December. There was the iLogs winter event to speak of. Same deal as every year (every year being third time running). Arrive Thursday evening, get completely shit-faced until around 4am, stumble to the hotel and rise early Friday morning completely unable to function (or even look half-way functional), ignore a few hours of blabbering and company goals and wait for morning tea. This year it was chicken. I don't remember what the project presentations were about, but I remember that morning tea was chicken. It was good, too though last year's pizza was much better for recovering from a hangover. Then there's a few hours where you can go back to the hotel and sleep for a bit, followed by bowling and then the main event in the brewery across the road. We ate, we drank, we got drunk, we had deep philosophical conversations to the background of blaring music which would be forgoten the next day. There were speeches. There was dancing. There were many feeble attempts on the brewer's daughter/barstaff. Glasses were broken. Vomit of unknown origin was discreetly deposited behind the buffet and just as discreetly cleaned up by the aforementioned daughter. Drunken workmates were found asleep on the toilet, pants around ankles and unresponsive to door-knocking, speech, shaking, toilet-flushing or having water poured over their heads. Yes it was, as I shall put it, the fulfillment of the Austrian dream.

New years 2008 was spent in a small region in switzerland called Obersaxen. Some friends of Alex and Claudia had rented a batch and wanted some more people to fill the remaining spaces, so we answered the call. We were there all told for three days (two nights, over new years eve). The whole place was covered in snow, so ski lifts were operating. It was the first time during the whole winter that I'd actually made it to the snow (as opposed to vise versa, which was the case for most of the winter). I didn't really have the drive to go skiing though, so I joined Moni and walked around the tracks in the area. We hired a sled for a stretch and experienced the dangers of sledding first hand. Great fun. The rest of the time was spent eating and playing games. Bang! was quite cool if you ever get a chance, and there was this weird german one called Killer Bunny or something where you try to grow rabbits and kill off your opponents. It made no sense, as the winner was more ore less determined randomly based on which cards you picked up, and the main part of the game was more of a mildly entertaining distraction. I got in some penguin-style belly-sliding goodness too. Great fun.

And that's 2008.

January 2009:
Another 'bitsy' month. A bit of this and that. Highlight was having wisdom tooth pulled. It was voluntary/preventative, and I only have one of them. Took a full ten minutes of twisting and wrenching, but it was nothing like my previous ordeal, and it came out clean. I got to keep the tooth too. :) That reminds me, the dentist who did my root canal sent me another bill last month for another 50 franks. I have no idea what for, but I paid it just to shut him up. It had a lot of little details on the bill like "First 5 minutes" and "Last 5 minutes"... I guess he must have forgotten those on the original quote, huh?

Febuary 2009:
I have announced my resignation. Yes, I've had enough. Januray and Feburary were entirely dominated by support. Bugfixing if we were lucky. Unfortunately providing third-level technical support for an application that nobody from our firm had ever had anything to do with, it didn't rate very high on my 'impressed' score. I spoke to my boss about my work dissatisfaction, but nothing was (able to be) changed. My incessant complaining about my work situation had evidently bothered Alex enough to mention that his work was hiring. I updated my resume (with the gracious help and encouragement of Moni) and sent it in. It took around a week to complete the two job interviews, and had a confirmed job around the first week of Feburary. I relayed the news to my boss, got him to sign under the dotted line, and it was all done. The new job starts in June.

March 2009:
Bitsy. Everything and nothing. A lot of dnd it seems. One of our Changeling gamers Zahid announced his departure and threw an 'Abscheids Apero' (farewell party). Was cool.

April 2009:
Spring! As soon as the weather started showing signs of becoming warmer, everything exploded into spring mode. Even I was jumping around like a spring lamb. That winter had been the longest, coldest, unrelenting, depressing winter I've ever experienced. The snow seems to have started in October, and just didn't melt. Well it melted enough to become ice and then refreeze. And if it actually started to disappear, new snow would replace it just in time to destroy the hope that had begun to grow in your heart. No I did not like that winter. Right now I am sitting on my balcony with the shade cloth deployed, and liking it very much. I check how my basil and parsley seedlings are going every morning, and have just noticed that my lilly is sprouting again. Hooray for spring!

The great part I have noticed about changing jobs, is it gives you the reason to blow all your holidays. The only hard part is deciding what to do with it all. Well for a start, Moni and I went to Barcelona for a week. I'd been adamant that I wanted to try couchsurfing, however I was blind to the fact that it was easter weekend, and also that Barcelona is a popular destination over easter. That meant I had no chance for couchsurfing, so we arrived in BCN with no accomodation booked and spent most of the first day looking for a place to stay. We did find a place in the end, but it was out in the suburbs and it had rained on us.

The next morning we headed into the centre and found ourselves a youth hostel until after the easter rush. We checked out some restaurants (one was bloody fantastic, I have to say), ate a lot of tapas, bought some t-shirts, and visited the regular tourist stops one might expect to avoid if one lived there. My experiences there lead me to believe that Barcelona has two main cultural inspirations. Soccer, and a fellow named Antoni Gaudí. Soccer is a well known sport where two teams of gentlemen attempt to put the same ball into well guarded nets, using only their feet. Fantastic stuff. Gaudí was an architect who designed a lot of stuff in Barcelona, and finished some of it. His masterpeice was Sagrada Familia, a church which is still being built. They're still building it because it has to be built using donated money, which they don't have much of. As tourists they let us donate 11 euros each to go in and see what they'd finished so far. We thought we would go to the roof, and were helpfully informed once we were inside that you have to donate a further 2 euro to take the lift. That, and that using the stairs is just plain illegal. I staged an altitude strike right then and there.

On Tuesday night we had our first success with couchsurfing, and a couple volunteered to host us. I was astonished at how much effort they put into us, and a little embarrassed. Normally I do something with my guests like cook a meal or go for a beer, but Miquel and Eva really took us under their wings and showed us around. We had lunch together at a restaurant in the country somewhere, then we were driven to the hills and we went for a walk. On Wednesday evening we went to the beach, and were driven around 100km north to Girona for dinner. It is also old with a castle-like inner city, but is out of the way of tourists so has retained its charm. At points, Barcelona felt like an amusement park in comparison.


Thursday we bid our farewells and took the train into Barcelona. We had lunch in a park in a sunshower. Moni did a rushed fly-by of some of the shops along a street called Diagonal (because it is), and we headed the airport, spread our wings and flew home.