Home > On Tour > Jungle Adventures > The Europe Tour 2000-2001 > Barcelona, Spain
	Barcelona, Spain Valencia, Spain <<<   Madrid, Spain >>>   The first thing I did after arriving in Barcelona was to hit breakfast with Renee and Rachel, then hop in bed for a few hours of sleep. I awoke later and called Renee to see if she wanted to go out and see stuff. She was feeling sick and said she would call me later if they did anything. But, SHE FORGOT TO CALL WHEN THEY WENT TO HARD ROCK. hehehe Sorry just had to add that in since I picked on her about it all week! :) The next day, we went in to see some of the city, starting at the Sacre Familia, a really cool church that has been under construction for 70 years and is expected to be under construction for the next 50 years. It is incredibly detailed in the style of Gaudi, who designed much of Barcelona. You wonder where the term gaudi (ie too highly ornamented, kind of ugly, etc) comes from?? This style is it. His styles, although really cool and interesting, are really kind of crazy and in some ways just ugly. Check the pictures section soon for examples. After leaving the church site we walked down another street to see some more of the buildings he designed. From there we entered the main shopping area, and here I am with the two shopping queens of the earth. So we're in a shop when we lose the other guy who was with us, Ariel. We looked all around for him but could not find him. We came up with the crazy idea that maybe he went to the internet cafe, since he was talking about it earlier. We made it over to the internet cafe and scoured the place finally finding him on the very back row. From there we walked around a little bit more, visited a cathedral in town, buddied up with a human statue, then walked down to the coastline to check out that area. beautiful. From there, we took the metro back into the town center, went to the internet cafe for a little while. Then did a bit more shopping. From there we went to the strangest grocery store ever (they only had snack foods and no drinks or other food) before returning home. That night we all jumped in a huge bed and watched a movie before going to bed. It was a fun day! Wednesday, we got an even bigger group together to go down to the aquarium. Although it is of course based around kids learning, we still had a bit of fun. The aquarium was huge and housed almost every type of sea creature known, from cute and cuddly seahorses to mean and scary sharks. From the aquarium we returned to the hotel for a nap before heading up to the Olympic Village (remember the olympics were here in 1992 I think?). To get up there from the hotel looked like a short walk on the map, but it turned into a lot of stair climbing to get up the mountain! Luckily there were a lot of escalators for those of us in the lazy bunch! We walked all over the Olympic mountain, seeing the stadium (we got there just too late to get to go inside), the building gymnastics were in (the same building we would play in), the torch, and a few other things. We were going to walk over and check out the castle nearby, but were all too tired and it was getting dark (plus it was quite a walk!). So back to the hotel we went. I don't think there are any more stories from the evening. Thursday was load-in early, followed by a show that night. The first time we have done a one-day load-in in a long time! We did just fine, including a two-hour power outage due to generator problems, and were plenty ready for the show which, again, opened to a small audience. Friday morning, I got up early to have breakfast with Renee and Rachel since Rachel was leaving this morning. After that I went back to my bed for a little while, then spent the rest of the day doing nothing in particular. The next few days were shows, followed by a pretty quick load-out. There was one unfortunate incident during load-out involving my head. I was up at the top of a grass hill behind the loading area checking on something, then ran back down towards the trucks. I was running at full speed down the hill when I suddenly felt a sharp pain in my head as I fell backwards to the ground. I had run into a piece of thin wire holding a tree up and it caught me right on the forehead, leaving a nice abrasion. I'm very lucky I had not been either 6 inches to the right which would have put the wire under my nose, or 18 inches to the right which would have put it at my neck. Of course I didn't get too much sympathy for the bloody mark on my forehead. Instead I got a multitude of jokes involving working at 7-11 and other Indian pasttimes. The next morning, I got downstairs kind of late to get on the bus. The busses were not present yet, so I had to wait. When the busses did arrive, one of the bus drivers decided he was bored and needed to make himself important. So he decided that no bags were allowed on his bus...no carry-ons, nothing. One of the Spanish guys on tour was trying to carry on a very small suitcase, and he got in a HUGE fight with the driver that involved a whole lot of yelling. Finally everyone just disregarded the dumbass driver and carried bags on. And this was the start of our hellish travel day to Madrid, Spain.