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Sorry for that subject line. I just thought the “Cheers from Tangiers” from the last email was catchy.  Don´t think this one works quite as well.  Anyways, as you may have guessed by now we´re in Barcelona, Spain. After our last email we took the ferry to Spain, spent a few days in Sevilla, a day in Cordoba, and then took an overnight train to Barcelona.

As it stands right now we´ve been in Barcelona for 4 days and we´re staying through Tuesday morning when we´ll head up to the Catalan Pyrenees (mountains).

So that´s the boring logistics. The fun stuff is that we´ve been having a great time. Sevilla was beautiful. We stayed in this completely beautiful hostal just a few minutes from the Cathedral. We got to tour the Plaza de Torros (the arena where they have the bullfights) and just spent a lot of time enjoying the city and drinking sangria. It´s a wonderful city and we really loved it.

We did run into a few small challenges. we had my Jansport (the little backpack)
swiped at a touristy type plaza. Total stupid American Express commercial move where I put it down to take a picture, looked up and it was gone. Fortunately the only thing that was in there was a frisbee, and the guide book. Really the only thing of value was the digital camera cards with all of our pictures from the trip up to that point(the camera was
in my hand). So needless to say we have a new snazzy spanish backpack a new copy of
Let´s Go (the guide book), and Harry Potter and Hemingway to read on the trains. It´s really no big deal and if this is the most that goes wrong on this trip we´ll be doing ok.

Tuesday we went on to Cordoba with the plan of taking a morning bus to Cordoba, leaving our stuff in a locker at the train station for the day while we toured the city and taking the overnight train to Barcelona. Of course I didn´t bother to buy tickets or anythign and didn´t realize there were no seats (or more importantly beds) available. But after asking like 5 different gate agents 10 different times to see if any had opened up, we got lucky (just before we gave up to spend the night in Cordoba). So it all worked out and we had a really nice day in Cordoba.

So we´ve been spending quite a bit of time in and around Barcelona. It is a very lively and beautiful city. Las Ramblas is the main pedestrian street through downtown and it´s a wonderful collection of cafes, street performers and Gaudi architecture. We´ve been touring churches, and lots of buildings that were designed by Antoni Gaudi. He´s to Barcelona what Frank Lloyd Wright is to Chicago. His buildings are everywhere and very interesting.

We went to La Sagrada Familia this afternoon. It´s a huge church that they started construction on around 1880. Guidi himself estimated it would take 200 years to complete and 120 years later only 8 of the 12 bell towers and 2 of the 4 facades have been constructed. They haven´t even started on the insides yet, they can´t because it doesn’t have a roof. It is very beautiful, but very different from any other cathedral I´ve ever seen. It´s definitely a modern cathedral.

The trip so far has had a nice pace. We´ve really felt like we´ve been on vacation and not constantly touring. It also helped to spend a day at the beach a few days ago. We daytripped out to Sitges, about 40 minutes outside of Madrid for some good Mediteranean beach life. And we´re planning on spending our last day in Barcelona at the beach near the Olympic village.

I´ve got a very romantic day planned for us tomorrow. We´re going to go to mass in the morning, a light lunch and then watch some guys stick swords into the neck of a bull. Certainly what every girl dreams of for her one year anniversary, right? Oh well, can I help it if they only have bullfights on Sunday and it happens to be our anniversary?

Anyways, so upcoming highlights from the trip include the Catalan Pyrenees for some hiking in the mountains, down to Toledo and then on to Madrid before heading home.

Hope all is well with everyone.

Erika and Michael-John
Barcelona, Spain