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My next few days in Spain are quite nice. We spend quite a bit of time with Kara's two cousins (a middle aged chef and his 19 year old son) who are both really pleasant and love corny shows and movies. The drama for Kara is how miserable her mom was while they back packed all the main tourist attractions of Europe over the month. Her mom wore an ill fitting mens' backpack, got heat stroke multiple times, got a bad cold, ran out of money, and couldn't handle the stress. While I think it's crazy that Laurie asked to travel that way, I think it's just as crazy that Kara thought it would work. So Kara was trying to get her mother to stop complaining about all the bad things in hopes she would be able to focus on the good parts to remember the trip fondly.
Once Kara's mom left we switched to a hostel. It was quite large with a balcony bar. It had a vending machine with ham flavored Lays, which was funny to me because obviously this nation loved it's ham. We had a four person female only room with riquety metal bunk beds. We had planned on going into the night life only I was jet lagged with a cold and Kara had a cold as well, so we elected to just chill at night. Not to mention I still hadn't quite adjusted to carrying my back pack, the heat, and all the walking...not that I wasn't enjoying it but I was a bit tuckered out by the end of the day. Kara loves to walk, and will avoid paying even a dollar for public transport no matter how much weight one is carrying. So we walked ALL OVER the city. One day we went to an outdoor market that had beautiful things, and lots of hippy clothes and sunglasses that said Ray Berrys. We had lunch at a very cultural hole in the wall where you order fried sardines and a serving of cheap beer. You eat it standing against the wall, and throw all trash (including fish parts) on the ground atop the huge piles of dirty napkins. We also went to some glorious parks where people sun bathed in their underwear. And we made it to her cousins' apartment that had gorgeous (but invasive) parrots all over the trees that they competed with the pigeons for with endless squaking. At night everyone in their neighborhood came outside as the heat subsided and children played in the playground until quite late.
Something quite tempting for me was all the metropolitan shops like TopShop, where there was a girl with a gorgeous My Little Pony tattoo. I was tempted to spend but luckily shopping didn't interest Kara very much. But I did love seeing all the gorgeous sandals everywhere.
On our last day we got tickets with our Eurail passes, that my parents had purchased for both of us, to Barcelona. We waited for the train in the park that had black swans and performers. While we were lying around on the grass something turned on in my backpack, which made Kara and I very excited when we thought my backpack had a built in back massager until we realized that wasn't what it was... We also took a couple pictures with these giant baby head statues.
The train was a nice ride. They played a chirldrens' movie as we went across the country where I saw gorgeous little towns with amazing old buildings and fields with beautiful peasant boys carrying things across their shoulders.
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