Well…here we are, in Spain.  But before I tell you about Spain, I must first tell you about our ironic last day in Bulgaria.  I had all these photos loaded up and ready to post here on the blog as a sort of visual montage to the year, and, of course….the internet went caput!  Also, our water was out for part of the day.  Doesn´t that just go with the whole year? Hahahaha!  So, when I can get internet on my own computer, I will upload my photo montage for you all.  Until then….Espana!

 

So we arrived here on Friday afternoon and promptly rented a car.  I should say here that I am not so into the car-rental-in-a-foreign-country thing.  But we did it.  The actual renting part was easy.  It was also easy to find the fantastic townhouse where we are staying (which belongs to friends of Marks parents and feels like a mansion compared to the flat where we have lived for the past year…we thought about just getting jobs here and moving in, changing the name from Villa ***** to Villa Drake), and everything was going really perfectly.  Too perfectly in fact.  So we continued on our merry way, setting things up, showering, etc.  Then around 10:00 pm, we headed out to dinner–they eat really late here.  And that is when the perfection ended…

 

Turns out, we dont know how to use reverse on the car.  We had parked in a dirt lot and walked around a bit and decided we would go further down to eat, but alas, we could not get out of the dirt lot.  Mark must have tried 80 times to figure out the reverse.  He was sweating and doing the nervous laugh.  Then he was getting a little grumpy.  I just kept saying, “There must be a trick to this”, which I am sure just totally helped the situation.  Clearly Mark knew there was a trick.  He perhaps did not appreciate me telling him this little fact 15 times.

 

Finally he got out and….imagine this!…pushed the car backwards while I turned the steering wheel.  Yeah.  And thats how we got out. It was a classy move.  This meant that we had to now limit our parking to only places that we did not have to back out of.  Go ahead–try that sometime.  Find a place to park where you never use reverse.  Now try it in a crowded beach community.  Good times.

 

So, needless to say, our perfect day did not end so perfectly.

 

On day 2, Mark figured out reverse first thing.  And yes, there was a trick.  We wont go into it here.  The we headed out to explore.  On both Saturday and Sunday, we pretty much strolled around little towns here on the beach and laid around in the sun and swam in the sea.  Oh, and ate delicious food…sangrias, paella, fresh fish, shrimp.  All delicious, and not a cucumber anywhere to be seen.  We live the life of kings here!

 

Today we are in Barcelona.  We drove all day to get here and we arrived in enough time to do some walking around.  This is a beautiful city!  And the weather is perfect, warm but not scorching. You dont actually need to see anything here, you can just cruise around and look at the buildings all day.  They are amazing!  But tomorrow we will indeed tour around and see the Picasso Museum, the Sagrada Familia, some Gaudi work, and of course, the Olympic Village from the 1992 Olympics (you know what an Olympic freak I am!)

 

There are many more stories to tell, but I have to do it bit by bit.  We cant get our computers to recognize the internet where we are staying (and frankly we dont want to waste our whole vacation trying) so we are bound to internet cafes…and you know how those go.  So, this is all for now.  More later!

 p.s.  I know there are apostrophes missing which is SO unacceptable for a teacher.  But the keyboard switched modes while I was sitting here (it did it all by itself I am sure…I touched nothing, NOTHING, I say), and now I cant figure out the apostrophes.  I will edit later–forgive the mistakes for now.