We put our bare feet upon the red rock soil...

In an attempt to organize the mass of files on my computer, I stumbled upon this blog that I'd typed in a word document last summer, while Kelsey and I were globe-trotting in our 2009 European Misadventure. We would often write things down and never get around to posting them, though I'm glad we spent every second trying to soak it all in rather than freaking out about finding internet all the time (we only did that some of the time). This post claims to be abridged but is actually pretty verbose. I blame all of the Jewish screenwriters I've been exposed to for my love of wordiness. Anyhow, here's a little blast from the past:

--
Now that we’ve essentially reached our halfway point, let’s catch up in a rather abridged fashion. Shall we?

One week ago I reluctantly left Vejer. My homestay mom packed me a snack for my bus ride and my teacher, Alejandro, gave me two mix cds. The ride to Cadiz was spent holding back tears because I know I won’t have a chance to return to Vejer soon enough.
Upon arriving in Cadiz, wandering around trying to find the bus stop for my ride to Madrid, my mom called me to tell me that Kelsey’s flight from Philly to Madrid had been cancelled due to storms on the east coast, which would delay her trip about 24 hours.

And I thought it was always sunny in Philidelphia.

After cursing God and all things holy for about 10 minutes (read: 2 hours) because it seemed that, yet again, I was being ass raped by air travel and because I wanted so bad to just go back to Vejer for that extra day though I knew I couldn’t, I decided to suck it up and board my bus to Madrid. The ride was long and monotonous, with roads bumpier than Kentucky. The only thing that kept me sane on this sleepless night was Ale’s chill flamenco mix. In Madrid I wandered around, found a hostel, saw a few sights, read some poetry in a park, and enjoyed three things I hadn’t had in two weeks: a private bathroom (I’d been sharing with 5 people), dependable wi-fi, and air conditioning. The next morning I took the metro to the airport to meet up with Kelso and our adventure began.

We were running a whole day behind, so we decided to try to book an overnight train from Barcelona to Milan, skipping the south of France in order to catch up. The bad news was that train was full, so we had to re-route on an overnight to Geneva, Switzerland and cut out Italy all together. We were both bummed, but there’s always next time.

After a few hours in Madrid we hopped our first train to Barcelona. We stayed in the first hostel we saw when we got out of the train station because we didn’t want to carry our shit. Luckily, it turned out to be pretty nice. After that we took a stroll down La Rambla to see the luster from the city lights on the coast at sunset, and then, after a few wrong turns down dark alleys in an attempt to find a place suggested to us by our buddy Waldo, decided to turn in for the night. But not before a tiny debacle concerning leave-in conditioner and Duff beer.

I’d like to take this moment to express how much I hate Catalan. Just get over yourself and pick a language - French or Spanish. Quit acting like you’re so damn special, Catalonia. Don’t tease me with the prospect of understanding only 50% of the population.

The next day we went straight to the beach first thing to let the Mediterranean waves kiss our feet. We could have sat in the sand all day, but instead we bought a reggae CD from some buskers from Chile and Paraguay, and shared some sangria at a sidewalk café near the coast where we could watch the palms blow and talk for a few hours.

Whoops, we lingered too long. It was almost time for the train to Geneva and we still hadn’t seen any Gaudi, so we took the metro to La Sagrada Familia, picked up our luggage from the hostel, and after being sent in the wrong direction by a well-meaning ice cream salesman, ran until we got to our train.

The train was so booked when we made our reservation that Kelsey and I had to be separated, but I was fortunate enough to be placed in a sleeper cabin with a chick from California who had also been separated from her companion, and he just so happened to be on the same train car as Kelso! So they switched places, and all was well. After catching some shit about switching places from the grumpy train attendant, we embarked on a nine hour journey with two amazing ladies from New Zealand. Kath and Jen are both fifty-somethings who left their husbands and grandchildren to go train hopping through Europe for a month on EuRail. They gave us Swiss chocolates and told us stories of their journeys. They were utterly hilarious to the point that I could never dream of translating it to blog form.

So that puts us in Geneva, where they don’t use Euros, public bathrooms cost money, and swans have snooty French accents in my mind. We cleaned up as best as we could at a bathroom in the train station, wandered through the streets, drank from the fountains of youth, climbed to the top of the North tower in the St. Pierre Cathedral, fed ducks and swans peanut butter crackers in Lake Geneva, and took a million pictures of things that weren’t anything important, but just looked cool. After just a few hours of this, we hopped yet another train to the smaller town of Fribourg, known as “Western Switzerland’s hidden treasure.” And oh boy, it is.

My friend Roger picked us up at the train station in his brother’s fancy-shmancy Mercedez Benz and sped through the Swiss country-side to his home in the village of Giffers...

--
Apparently this is when our prepaid internet access at the cafe ran out, our train arrived at its destination, or I just grew weary of typing and decided to look out the window at the premium countryside.

BUT WHAT HAPPENS IN GIFFERS?!?

Roger, the overly gracious host, feeds us - A LOT. His brother with a revoked license drives five people in a tiny convertible with one window missing down winding roads in the middle of a storm to a castle. We drink hot chocolate. We sleep, and we skip town. It's abridged, people. Abridged.

It's more than a year late, and the stories have all been told and re-told in hookah bars and awkward situations since then, but I couldn't really stand to have this document sit in a rarely accessed folder on my desktop unopened any longer. I apologize for being a bad blogger.