Thursday, August 17, 2006

Hi, it´s us in Spain. So now we need to get you caught up on our time here on the continent. First, there was our flight, which was the day before all those people were arrested in the UK, so we got here without a hitch.....let´s see what happens when we try to leave. Anyway, we got great sets on our budget flight with Ryanair, because we told the staff that we were flying with our three small children, and so they let us preboard (otherwise it´s first-come-first-serve on these cheapo budget airlines).
We rented our car and were happy to be driving on the right side of the road again.
We stayed in a campsite with Eurocamp (which isn´t really camping, it´s more of a hotel suite in a tent, except you don´t have a washroom, which is only a problem for those of us that are middle aged men who need to use the washroom multiple times during the night). Anyway, lucky for us quiet time in the campground started nice and early......midnight. But it´s all good, because you can´t actually get dinner until 8:30-9:00 pm in Spain.
While in that campground, we had a couple of adventures. On the first night, Rob had an urgent call to make to one of his students. The campsite provides a phone service and no calling cards are allowed. The price quoted was 1.33€/minute. It seemed a bit expensive, but given the convenience of making the call on site, we decided to go ahead. After a rather brief call, we were informed that the actual price was 60x what we were originally quoted!! Needless to say, we did do some negotiating with the campground around the bill, but given that they held Diane´s passport, we were not as successful as we would have liked to have been. In the end, the call cost almost as much as the stay in the campground. We have been using calling cards successfully ever since!
The second adventure involved our laundry. Rob and Aviva went to go do the laundy and there were some interesting communication problems. We asked for wash, dry and fold through mime and french, and the next day she handed us a pile of unfolded wet laundry. As well, when Aviva and Rob dropped the stuff off the lady wrote down ´secado´.Aviva kept asking what this meant in her own mixture of french and mime, and the woman kept answering "si, si secado". (Diane later informed us it meant ´dry´.) Oh and of course one of our bags of laundry was also missing. We retrieved it and are all fully clothed at this time.
On our first full day on the costa Brava, we went to the beach. Aaron and Noah made a city in the sand. Aviva Rob and Diane took siestas (when in Spain, do as the Spanyards), and we all played in the Mediterranean.
The next day we drove to Figueres to see the Dali museum. This building is the weirdest we´ve ever seen. There are giant eggs on the roof, statues of people with baguettes on their heads, and an old fashioned submarine guy. The art inside was equally weird. He made an installation of a living room, which when viewed from above using a special lens was actually a woman´s head. He also liked to paint his wife, Gala, a lot, especially with one breast showing.
After the museum, we went to a hotel and had our third mediocre dinner in Spain (athough the best of the three at that point). On the plus side, the place was very fancy and nice looking, and the ice cream was excellent for dessert (oh, and that´s where we made the previous blog entry).
Our food exprerience changed dramatically the next day. We moved on to Zaragoza. On the way, we used our most important rule in travel dining. Never eat in a place that speaks English unless in an English speaking country. We stopped at a hole in the wall stand where they served take out roasted chicken and bean salads (we chose not to get the salad with roasted snails in it). We bought a mess of stuff and took it to a picnic stop on the side of the highway. With one mini fork with three tiny prongs for the five of us, and 50 fingers, we gorged ourselves on one fabulous meal (that by the way, was far cheaper than the crappy, tourist-trap junk from before).
Then we got to Zaragoza (try pronouncing that, but remember that the ´z´is pronounced ´th´). There we had our first try of tapas. It was so cool. We just told people we were from Canada, and they told us what to do. In one place we had potatoes and eggs (sounds boring, but it was out of this world - except Aviva and Rob didn´t think so). In the next we had garlic mushrooms. And in a third bar we had tomatos with goats cheese, etc. You go to different bars for different foods. We had fun, but didn´t finish eating till 11 (when in Spain....).
We stayed in a gorgeous hotel. This was a big leap, more like a hotel suite in a hotel and with washrooms!
The next day we moved on to the Basque country, which is really called Euskadi in their language. We stayed in Bilbao, but hung out more in San Sebastian, a gorgeous resort town. We headed straight to the beach and played in the fabulous Atlantic waves. Diane lost one side of her bikini top, and Noah noted that she was like Dali´s wife, Gala. On the first day at the beach, there were some gun shots. Or so it seemed, to Aviva. It actually was fire works during the day (a bit odd). There was a big festival there,with boat races and bands. It was so crowded, and it was a bit hard to get pinxtos (tapas in Euskadi). But we managed to have an awesome meal squished in with all the other Spanyards.
The next day the festival was still going on and there were tons of buskers, including 5 siblings doing acrobatics. We went on a hike that day, up one of San Sebastian´s mountains overlooking the harbour. We went pretty far up, but not as far as Jesus, who was at the very top, with a lightening rod attached to his back. Later that evening, when it was actually dark, they had fire works that were quite impressive.
By the way, we stayed in an Etap hotel in Bilbao. Rob and Diane describe the rooms as looking like what we would imagine a bedroom would look like on a train, but at least we had beds, showers, and toilets.....something we no longer can claim to have.
We are now camping outside of Madrid, in this beautiful town near El Escorial. The night we got here, since according to Aviva we´d been couped up in the car driving for 5 hours straight, while Rob, Diane, Aaron, and Noah were eating in this terrific, elegant restaurant, she was running around jumping up and down outside, getting her ya-yas out.
Before going to dinner, Noah had a bit of a melt down about constantly having to eat tapas "I can´t stand tapas. I´m sick of tapas. I don´t want anymore tapas!!...."By the way I´m starving". To which Aaron replied "You need some tapas".
We were supposed to have a bungalow here, but it was not ready yesterday, so we´ve pitched our tent. Only problem, it rained last night, so even though we could have a bungalow now, we can´t put the tent away.
It rained this morning so we came to this cyber cafe (although, as Noah points out, there´s no cafe part to it). And hopefully we´ll get into town soon. We´ve been drinking lots of cafe con leche, so perhaps the fact that there´s no cafe here is a good thing.
Talk to you soon. Love,
RANAD
sorry no photos, no one has SD ports in Europe we shoulda brought our cable.

No comments: