A taste of Spain

Madrid was our first stop and the first chance to find out how limited our Spanish was. When we arrived at the airport it was after a 36 hour unscheduled stopover in the airport in Buenos Aires airport´s departure lounge complete with protests that effectively closed the airport and the equivalent of the armed offenders squad in response. So we were stoked to get to Madrid. The first mission was getting onto the subway and heading to the right stop. Luckily the lady at the ticket counter spoke English. We pretty much found our hostal without any drama, only to find that they had canned our reservation, despite our anxious phonecalls from the Buenos Aires airport waiting lounge that we were still coming. A bit of a worry in a city with fully booked accomodation!

Madrid was great but we headed to Barcelona in a couple of days time to get a taste of the coast. The country from Madrid to Barcelona was awesome…really arid in most part but lots of irrigation to grow barley and citrus. Lots of old villages too, including the odd castle.

Barcelona was truly the bee´s knees. We found a pretty modest hostel right in the middle of town and took the city on from there. We were about four stories above the main drag, which started to ignite around midnight. Probably the best thing were the markets about 200m from our hostel. They had some of best fruit, fish, meat and everything else you could think of. The highlight was definitely the peaches, which were sweeter and juicier than anything from Hawkes Bay – hard to believe we know, but true. The only setback was that everything was so damned expensive. Che managed to blow NZ$20 on 50g of cured pork…. which he made last for a week despite it smelling a little funny towards the end. We also had a mean vegetarian lunch there…. until a pigeon shat in it.

Time not spent salivating in the market was spent seeing the sites, like the aquarium, the central park and even found a spot on the beach (despite all the great grandparents getting a tan in just their speedo bottoms – male and female – taking up the best spots). The main sites were definitely the Gaudi sculptures and architecture. Having not seen anything like this before we were pretty stunned and impressed. The crowning piece was the Cathedral, which is still underconstruction, about a hundred years on after it was first started, and will probably be one of the wonders of world when completed…. it´s that good.

From chilling at Barcelona we caught the train back to Madrid we had another quick look around before taking our chances again with Aerolineas Argentinas… this time to London. Surprisingly we made it to Gatwick, only a couple of hours late and having received a meal...that´s tops.


The view over Barcelona from a park designed by Gaudi was pretty impressive.

Clearly one of the coolest sea horses in the world...at Barcelona´s huge aquarium.