Trains, Plains and Spain...

To continue with our adventures in Spain...

While still in Santiago, Emily and I went to Viejo Ciudad (the old city) to celebrate the Solstice. The tradition is to jump over a fire three times to keep the witches at bay. Emily did. I didn´t. Eh, I kinda like the witches. Anyway, it was interesting. There was a really cool band with bag pipes and drums, plenty of beer and chorizo (spicy sausage). Oddly enough, the best meat I´ve had so far was the chorizo. And, you all know how I feel about meat. We only stayed until 3am since we both had to give our talks the next day. Ugh. It was really hard giving my talk. I´ve done better, but overall it wasn´t bad. My audience was totally out of place though. I think they just stayed to be nice, since mine was the last talk of the session and totally unrelated to any of the other talks.

On to A Coruña... after Santiago, we headed north up the coast for a brief stint in A Coruña. It was a lovely city and we saw a lighthouse supposedly built by Hercules. We just stayed the one night though and then caught a train to Bilbao (north east). The train ride was 12 hours, so we slept and read a lot. We ran into a few friends from the conference on the same train. They were heading to San Sebastian (east of Bilbao, near the border of France). We met our friends in the food coche for coffee and a snack. Bad idea. You see, in Spain, the trains separate. No one told us the train was going to separate at some random, obscure station. So, while we were having coffee, we went to San Sebastian while our luggage went to Bilbao. It was horrible. We didn´t get to San Sebastian until 9pm and then had to rush to catch a bus back to Bilbao. (An 1.5 hour trip). We had somehow managed, in our broken Spanish, to get the conductor to call the train station in Bilbao to hold our luggage so it wouldn´t go to France. But, by the time we arrived in Bilbao the office holding our luggage was closed. We made it back to our hostel without luggage, and we hadn´t eaten since ¨lunch¨ (3 pm). There were no vending machines in the hostel and the attendant was unsympathetic. We had nothing to do put go to bed. In the morning we woke up and retrieved our luggage, showered, changed clothes and brushed out teeth! We were new women. So we decided to tackle Bilbao and do some sightseeing. We went to the Guggenheim museum... it was closed. Damn it. So took a 20 minute subway ride to Gaxtcho, a little town on the coast. We thought, "oh well, we´ll just take a walk on the beach and see a cute little town". Once we arrived and stepped out of the subway station, it poured. It was like the perfect storm the entire time we were there. We were trapped under the awning of a little store (closed, of course) for 30 minutes. Wet, tired and hungry we made it back to the subway and headed to Bilbao. Once we got off the subway in Bilbao, it started pouring again. We were hopping from awning to awning trying to stay as dry as possible. We had gone roughly a half a mile down the main road before we realized we were going in the wrong direction. We had seen a statue (huge landmark!) at the end of the street which was close to our hostel. Hmmm... it turned out that the same statue was at the OPPOSITE end of the street too. Damn it. I dídn´t like Bilbao. We headed for San Sebastian, leaving Bilbao and it´s bad voodoo behind.

San Sebastian was absolutely beautiful. It was much smaller than Bilbao and more "quaint". There was a lovely beach just next to the heart of the city and the "old city". A cute park and "boardwalk" (but marble) overlooked the beach and the sunsets were amazing. We partied it up the night we got there to relieve the stresses of Bilbao. The next morning we got up early and slept off our hangovers on the beach. It was hard to sleep though since the people watching was ultimately entertaining. Topless women, anywhere from 20 to 80 years old, naked kids running all over the beach and hairy, speedo wearing men. It was very interesting. We tried to hike up the mountain to see a huge statue of Jesus that overlooks the town, but it rained. C'est la vie.

Today we had an 8 hour train ride to Barcelona. We didn´t leave out seats. I´m exhausted and hungry. We tried to go out to dinner, but ordering food is like playing the lottery... sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. I lost tonight. I´m too tired to try again. Maybe I´ll get a hamburger out of the vending machine over there... or just crash in my flimsy bunk bed and pass out. (Side note: I´m definately the oldest person at this hostel. I think the average age might be 20!).

Anyway, I have to finish up. It's about 900 degrees celcius in this computer room and I'm becoming delerious.

Hasta la vista, baby!
Sara