A Sign

I gave directions today. In English and to Americans. They had four days to spend in Barcelona and wanted advice on where to go and what to do. I was able to give them ideas and directions and tips. It was rather a quiet, but big, moment for me. I didn’t have to think about it and I felt comfortable giving them tourist tips and information on how to navigate the metro and Sants Estacio – the big train station. It was an appropriate sign as I start my final week in Spain.

I don’t know if I can say I have mastered anything at this point. I still had one of those moments earlier in the day when a clerk said three or four sentences in rapid Spanish to me and while my mind whirled with the possibilities of what she could possibly be saying to me, in the end I was blank for definition. I had nothin’. It’s a surreal experience of sorts – like one part of my brain pays attention and tries to decipher words and sounds (it's almost like listening to a piece of music) and the other is taking a short out-of-body experience looking down at myself smiling with incredible interest at the clerk but without one ounce of understanding. There’s always a slight pause at the end of what they say to me, before I start up with some alternate version of my spanish pronunciation of what I am attempting to do. And so the dance goes.

I have had a bit of down time in the last few days. I caught a cold. I was hoping to be impervious while on vacation, but I think everyone brought whatever they had from wherever they were and then shared it all on the Barcelona metro for the holidays. It was their special secret santa gift. That’s my theory.

The weather has actually started to get a bit colder, down in the mid to low 30’s at night and a high in the 50’s mid-day. Which for most of us wouldn’t be an issue, but the apartments in Barcelona don’t always come with central heating. Becca has two portable space heaters to help take the chill out. I actually migrated into the main living-futon-clad-dining-kitchen-room and shut the door to the front room to help be more efficient with heat. But a low-30-degree room can wake you up in a hurry when you go in to get your clothes in the morning.

I wouldn’t let feeling a bit dodgy keep me from exploring, however. Yesterday I ventured to Girona. It’s northeast of Barcelona on the river Onyar and about 45 minutes travel via the fast train toward Paris. It had been some time since I had been on one of the wonderful european trains. It made me think of the movie “The Tourist” with Jonny Depp and Angelina Jolie. A good movie, if you haven’t seen it. I tried to imagine myself as a woman of intrigue on the train, but think I may have fallen short while sniffling away and blowing my nose from my cold.

It was New Years – I seem to have a pension for venturing out on days when services might be limited. I boarded the morning 9:25 and the train tunnels turned into tracks through industrial and graffiti-ed Barcelona, turned into small outlining villages, turned into small farms with low-lying morning mist hugging the fields, and eventually presented into bigger farms. The coastal flatland began emerging as rolling hills, which began to grow into small mountains with quaint castles or villages on top, and within 30 minutes I could clearly see mountain ranges that had distinct timberline separation. There was pastoral farmland with ancient outer buildings whose walls were made from a mix of stone, brick and plaster from forever ago next to fields with solar farms, and somehow it all fit together nicely.

The train rolled into Girona and again, I realized I had only done minimal research. I had read enough to know I wanted to find the main cathedral and the walk-able stone walls that circled the old town. A lot of the old city is still intact from when the Romans built it. Parts of the wall are the old Roman road from Tarragona to Rome.

I debarked the train with a number of people, one of which was a very nice gentleman named Wayne from Australia, another solo traveller. We found ourselves wandering the Girona streets relatively early in the morning after New Years Eve and agreed to be tourists together for the next few hours. It made it fun and fascinating in that he was a professional stonemason, so he knew all the history of how romans towns were built and the engineering mind of how it all stays together. We both agreed it was quite humbling as we walked upon streets dating back to the Romans and our own streets in our respective hometowns seemed to crumble on an annual basis.

We saw the main cathedral whose nave boasts the widest gothic span in the Christian world. They didn’t allow any pictures, so I have nothing to show of it, save a brief recording on FB of the church bells. It was a breathtaking.

From there we found the roman wall and walked the edge of the old city (photos below). From the wall we could see the Pyrenees mountains in the north. We ended our time at a local café before he caught his train back to Barcelona. I had several more hours before my train departed and I spent them all wandering though back alleys and up and down tiny, tiny stone stairways and hard-to-actually-call-them-roads-roads. There was one point where I was walking one of the roads when I saw a car was coming toward me. If it hadn’t been for a nearby doorway 6” deep that I squeezed myself against, one of us would have had to go backward (!) There was a moment when neither of us was all that sure I could 'suck it in' enough! But, in the end it was a brilliant day start to finish. Girona reminded me very much of the little hill towns in Tuscany.

Today was filled with life maintenance and a long walk down to the gates of the Barcelona Zoo and back to stretch my legs. It was warm enough in the sun for people to laze around the park and picnic and visit under the palm trees.

Tomorrow……another adventure!