Everything, Nothing, and I'm a Middle Child

In brief, check out the pictures if you haven't seen them:

Barcelona

Zaragoza

Madrid

Bilbao

We loved our trip. In Barcelona we stayed with friends - the ones you see in the pictures. Vicenc cooked us paella - mmm. He is by far one of the best human beings I ever met. He is kind, sincere, humble, loving, gentle ... and if all goes well, he should be a daddy by tomorrow! I hear his wife, Shannon just went in to labor...

In Zaragoza, Hector very generously opened his home to us and made himself completely available to us. He gave us a guided trip around the city. We probably would have found it boring if it hadn't been for him. And Krisia - she came and joined us in the touring. Funny story: we decided to have Chinese for lunch one day. BAD IDEA. Everything was fried, we were so sick by the end. One of dessert options was pineapple, so, naively, we picked that to have something "fresh". It was STRAIGHT from a can. One slice on this pitiful plate. Krisia took a picture it was so pitiful. At least the lunch was cheap...

Then we went to Toledo. I cannot rave about Toledo enough. The city is beautiful and the people are wonderful. And if you use Fodor's instead of the Lonely Planet, we know where the bingo hall is :-) Okay, so Fodor's is a bit tamer than Lonely Planet ... a bit more "middle class traveler". It actually tells you where to find a bingo hall. In Spain? You're in Spain and you have a hankering for BINGO? Whatever. We thought it was hysterical and then ... it was there. The bingo hall! So, that explains the bingo picture in Toledo. (not that you've seen it yet - sorry)

Madrid - enh, we started out by walking into a museum exhibit that turned out to basically be pornography. No, that's too gentle. It WAS porn. Period. That seriously pissed me off. Sorry, I know that's not a nice word, but I was. Anyway, there were better cities.

Like Bilbao. The Guggenheim ROCKS as a museum. Now there's a museum that knows it's all about the presentation. And the old city was fun, the food was great, Krisia was there, and so was a Mango outlet. I couldn't resist, but Mark and Krisia will both attest that I was in and out in 30 minutes at most.

Or San Sebastien - another beautiful city. It was cold, gray and oh-so-perfect. We walked along the boardwalk from one side of the city to the other. It was beautiful - very picturesque. I think it's how I imagine European cities when novels say they went to "summer" somewhere. Which makes sense because that is apparently what people have been doing there for 200 years or so.

San Sebastien has both the coolest and worstest bathrooms. Coolest: translucent (but not transparent) sliding doors conceal the sink area leading to both the men's and women's toilet. If you stand at the mirror and do anything you give the people outside (us, as the case may be) a show. Mark did a whole puppet show for us :-) It didn't have soap though. On the other side of town, we went for tea & waffles (dessert waffles). Worstest toilet: this tiny space COULD have been used effectively. Instead they placed the toilet paper roll on the wall next to the toilet that was so close to it that in order to get the TP you banged your arm against the big metal cylinder containing the TP like 4 times. Huh? Then when I washed my hands, with soap, but sorry this was still unforgivable, the faucet was wrong for the sink, so I banged my hands against the sink. Grr. And the women's toilet was out of TP, whereas the men's had extra... I stole the extra from the men's. Anyway, frustrating. We laughed.

By the way, don't try to watch "Out of Africa" in a language you don't understand. It makes no sense whatsoever!!!