Spain

Buenos Dias, or Buenos Aires as Tub keeps saying to people.

No train for us today, we are flying from Rome to Madrid. As soon as we got to the airport we were scammed for 140 Euro, just to remind us how good the trains are. The travel agent booked everything for us and we didn’t have any reference numbers or anything for this flight so we couldn’t check in online. When we got to the check in counter there was a big sign saying that you mustn’t check in more than 2 hours before departure time. I thought that was a bit odd but we were bang on 2 hours so we joined the queue. 

“Can I have your boarding pass please” said the lady at the counter.

“Wrong way round.” I said, “You are supposed to give us the boarding passes. That’s how it works.”

“Not with this airline.” she continued, “If you don’t book in online then you get a 70 euro fine.”

“But we couldn’t book in online. We didn’t have a reference number.” I explained.

“Well you are fucked then aren’t you.” she said. And she was right. 

“Join that queue of angry people over there, pay your fine and then come back and I’ll print you a ticket, it only takes 2 seconds. If you’d got here 10 minutes ago I could have told you the reference number and you could have used that machine there with nobody at it to print a boarding pass for free. But now its less than 2 hours till take off. Have a nice day. Oh and we don’t accept cash, only credit cards. Oh and there is a surcharge for using credit cards.”

Otherwise it was a very nice trip. It’s a budget airline but they don’t charge you for the air which is nice. They are also more tolerant of smoking than some airlines I could mention. They didn’t bat an eyelid when a woman lit up a fag as we queued on the tarmac to climb onto the plane. To be fair she did move away from everyone else and went to stand next to the engine.

When we got to Madrid they shat all the passengers out of the back door of the plane which seemed somehow appropriate.

Intercontinental

This hotel is the fanciest place we have stayed so far.

When we checked in they apologised for not having a room with twin beds available.

“Would a king size bed be ok?” she asked.

“It would be perfect. We hate twin beds.” Tub replied.

“Really?” asked the receptionist, “But your travel agent has requested them for you.”

Well that explains all of the cunt and shunt beds we’ve been putting up with.

Madrid

Madrid is really beautiful. All of Europe is pretty much the same but every city has something that is its trademark. For example if you wake up in the gutter next to a canal you could be in Amsterdam. If there is a whore on a bike smoking weed then that pretty much confirms it. Madrid’s party piece is wide roads. Almost everywhere the roads are really wide.

We went for a wander and looked at the place.

Then we had lunch.

And had another look.

Then we got in a lift down to tourist information but decided it was all too hard so we went to the room and watched BBC One for the rest of the day. Well you can’t sightsee all the time and Eastenders was on.

Tuesday

We are going to put a bit more effort into it today. Lets start with a bus tour!

A footie stadium.

Real Madrid play here, as opposed to Fake Madrid who play down the road. They have the fountains divided up between the football teams here. If they win then they all go to their favourite fountain so they can be on TV.

The architecture in Madrid is wonderful, but that’s pretty much true of all of Europe. Maybe its just that the rest of the world is actually shit.

Ok. Train station time. 

In we go… WTF?

They have turned half of the train station into a greenhouse.

We are here to book seats to Barcelona for tomorrow. If you don’t book then you can’t go on the fast trains. Its the difference between 2.5 hours and 9 hours, although looking at the state of some of the people in the ticket office this could take a while.

With that out the way it was time to visit The Museum of Ham.

Then the vertical garden.

And some other shit.

This is the queue for the lottery.

I think the guy who is begging here is targeting the wrong audience. There was a guy outside the supermarket who was doing quite well. Tub had a handful of change when she came out and chucked it in his tin rather than put it in her purse. Nobody seemed keen to handover their lottery money to this dude though. Alternatively you can just set up a stall and wait in the pub over the road.

This is a statue of a bear. He seems to be sniffing a large mushroom for some reason.

And here is a statue of Christopher Columbus farting.

Sometimes being lazy is a good thing. We are arguing with the removalists because they’ve got to take a piano down 4 stairs, but this is how they do it in Madrid.

Ok. Time for lunch then back to the fancy hotel to drink Cava and watch Eastenders again.

We are fitting in to the Spanish lifestyle quite nicely. Except we don’t get back up again from our siesta.

Barcelona

Well it took a while but it’s finally happened. Today I woke up wishing I could go to the office for a bit. Maybe not a full day, but we’ve hit the point where we don’t want to be on holiday any more.

“Let’s go home.” said Tub.

“We haven’t got a home.” I reminded her.

“Ok. Lets go to Barcelona instead.” she decided.

Fast train. You know the story by now.

Yup, 300 kmh and a free telly program.

So poor old Barcelona didn’t get us arriving in the best of moods. Tub very sensibly declared today to be a bridge day so we found a club about an hours walk away and headed down there. Wikipedia has been a great source of information on this trip, its pretty much all we have relied on, but whoever wrote the review of Barcelona did them no favours. “The pickpocket capital of Europe”, “Watch out for scammers, they are everywhere”,  “Middle aged women hunting in packs will steal your wallet.” Actually it turns out we were on some site called Wikitravel but nonetheless we arrived terrified and with all our money hidden in a sock.

With everything hidden in the hotel safe and wearing a cologne called “Don’t Rob Me, I’m a Local” we headed off to bridge. If you are scared of being robbed then Barcelona isn’t for you. Everyone is on roller skates, bikes, skateboards or bumping into you as they run for the bus. After 10 minutes Tub was just holding her bag out and shouting “Take it! Take it! Just don’t hurt the kids!”. The only people we weren’t afraid of was this bunch of tossers.

After a bit we realised that all of the pickpockets, master criminals and kidnappers are on holiday as its the off season here.

I wasn’t all that keen on going to bridge but Tub was keen enough for both of us.

“I don’t like going to a club in a country where I can’t speak a word of the language. I come across as a complete idiot.” I said.

“Tub looked at me and said “Do you really think that if you spoke perfect Catalan they would think you were any less stupid?”

The frankness of a long marriage.

They tell it like it is in Barcelona.

Bread-in-a-welly is quite a delicacy too.

We played bridge. It was a really nice club and finally after 3 months we won!

10 Euro prize money! Gangsta! (it was 20 Euro to play).

On the way back we found this awesome giraffe.

We thought he might rob us, so we ran away.

Tomorrow, no tourism for us. It’s a day off.

Thursday – Barcelona – One Country Left – 2 More Cities

Fuck me dead. We are so close to the finish line, we have to keep going. I couldn’t get Tub out of the room until 11am and that was on false pretences. I told her we’d run out of wine (I had a bottle hidden in the bath).

So off we went for a trip to the seaside. Barcelona is on the coast so we headed down for a quick look.

It’s another very beautiful city.

We went to the shopping centre.

And met Santa. And Santa. And Santa.

He was 3 foot tall, covered in gold and needy, like Kylie Minogue.

Outside they had boats.

And Dumbo was in town looking for his mum.

Tub spotted this Muslim guy bending down to pray and before you knew it we had 2 pairs of orange sunglasses.

Now our random day took an interesting turn. We spotted a cable car.

Follow that car!

So off we went to find the end of the rainbow. Our mission was restored and our lives had a new found purpose. Well mine did, Tub didn’t seem to give a shit really.

We tracked the cable car to the top of a hill and tried to get up to it. Now I’m no expert on tourism, but if I build a cable car I might put up a sign or two so people could find it. We tried 3 times to get up this fucking hill to spend money on the cable car. One of the problems was our lack of Catalan when reading the maps. We incorrectly translated “Here is the toilet” as “You are here”. Anyway we found some really beautiful bits of the city as we stumbled about.

Tub said “Bollocks to this. I’m not going any further.” and sat down on a rock. Just then a bunch of kids came running down the hill and she bounced up embarrassed and tried to look like she was committed to walking to the top. If the kids hadn’t come to my rescue we would never have found this.

The cable car!!!

We were vaguely amused.

The only thing was…

It was the wrong cable car.

What kind of city has TWO cable cars???

We could see the one we wanted to be on as we went up. Oh well. Lets go to the top and then come back down.

But… at the top was the most amazing castle we’ve seen on the whole trip, Castell de Montjuïc. We nearly didn’t get off the cable car when we realised it was the wrong one but luckily we did because this was really worth it.

It was a great day, with clear blue sky everywhere and we found ourselves in this place we hadn’t looked for that overlooked all of Barcelona.

Oh. And it sold beer.

It was just unbelievable.

If you look at the end of the gun, you might spot something familiar.

In 1877 Edward Lukstoff of Austria build a 220mm Howitzer in a completely confined environment under a clock tower in Vienna. Just as he finished constructing the gun a seagull appeared from within his lunchbox and sat on the end of the muzzle. Everywhere in the world seagulls are in charge of guns. Except in America where any fuckwit can get one, even if they can’t fly.

You will notice that the end of this gun is unattended however.

And that is because these two dickheads were arguing about whose turn it was.

The photographs don’t really do this place justice, remember, it is on top of a mountain.

Madrid had sent them a sculpture that fits in nicely.

Remember that we are just accidental tourists. We hadn’t even tried to find this place. Well it turns out that this paradise in the sky has only recently been in its current form. For most of its time this castle was used to either bomb the town of Barcelona to keep it under control or was used as a torture and extermination camp.

So basically we wandered around Spain’s version of Guantanamo Bay looking at the nice view.

It was an awesome view.

Oh, and it turns out I am really tall for an 18th century man…

Enormously fat for a 19th century man and about average for a 21st century tourist.

So back down we go in the cable car, which had this sign…

No forcing the doors open when up in the air – check

No food or drink –  check

No pissing out of the door of the cable car – only applies to Europeans

Seriously. I’ve pissed on the odd private girls school in Pymble in my time but I didn’t need a sign post to tell me it was wrong.

We wandered back down through the graffiti ridden streets of Barcelona in search of a 4pm lunch.

We found a great place. Unfortunately our English was a bit off today and we didn’t get the famous chicken pie in a white wine sauce that we thought we had ordered.

It was a great little place and by being lost we found ourselves in with the locals who didn’t know how to rip off tourists properly. We got the 10 Euro lunch which was 3 courses with coffee. Tub asked for red wine. “RED WINE. YOU MOTHERFUCKER”

But had to explain herself more slowly.

“Vino.” she said.

“Si” said the waitress who clearly didn’t.

“Pronto” said Tub.

“?lo que vino color usted quiere?” asked the waitress politely.

Tub pointed at the red table cloth and international relations were resumed.

“Ah. Vino Tinto. Hijo de puta.” said the nice lady as she walked off.

We guzzled as much of that bottle as we could but I have to confess we left a little drop behind. The forgotten soldier.

When Tub paid the bill it turned out that wine was free. You could have fucked me with a feather. If I didn’t already love Barcelona this was the event that brought a tear to my eye. All 3 of them.

On the way back we ended up in La Rambla – which is simply beautiful.

It has fantastic little side streets.

As Happy as a Rabbit Hour!

Fuck your restaurant etiquette. I’m sitting here and I’ve brought my own chair.

Does anyone remember Mini Europe. What a day that was. Barcelona doesn’t even want to be part of fucking Spain let alone Europe so they do their own thing here… Mini Palestine.

So finally we wandered back to our hotel. This was in our street, just a few doors along.

Barcelona is pretty sweet.

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The train doesn’t leave until 5:30pm so we’ve got most of the day to kill in Barcelona.

A quick look at the art work…

And off to the zoo.

“Tickets please!”

We haven’t been to a zoo since we were in Ho Chi Minh City earlier in the year. Zoos aren’t the most politically correct places any more so they usually try to point out all of the good things that they do. Ho Chi Minh didn’t really bother with that. They didn’t even discourage people throwing stuff at the animals. The crocodiles copped the worst of it. They were sitting quietly in a concrete enclosure with no water pretending to be logs with cigarette packets on their heads. Anyway, Barcelona was a bit better.

Here is Tub getting to the front of the queue for the fish show. She was pretty excited.

And here is the start of the queue of kids that she had pushed out the way to get there first.

I couldn’t take a picture of all of the kids. Nowadays if you pull out a camera in front of a group of 5 year olds they drag you to the police station quicker than you can say Jimmy Saville. Anyway, I’ve already got loads of pictures of kids on a USB I bought in Holland, so I’m fine. I was hoping to get some with school uniforms on, but anyway.

In we went to the show.

The dolphin is the smartest fish in the sea, but not smart enough to wear a disguise. It happens to look a lot like the tuna fish which is the tastiest fish in the sea, hence the reason why so many dolphins run away to the circus.

However far more interesting than watching a shiny skinned labrador fetch sticks was watching the real stars of the show – humans. The queue went up the back of the theatre and when you left you went out of the bottom at the front. Easy really since they put barriers up to make it hard for anyone to get it wrong. Tub was first in and sat near the front in the middle. Shortly after came a kid about 6 who sat right at the front looking very excited. Then his mother arrived and stood at the front so nobody else could see. Finally dad arrived but not from the top, he climbed the barrier so he could get in before all of the school kids. Now normally dickheads like him get away with it, but this time Crowd Safety came over and grabbed him by the arm and made him join the back of the queue. It was a thing of beauty to watch, especially as he was quite tall and she was only a small girl. After a few minutes Crowd Safety was back, this time to take on the mother. She refused to sit down because the stone steps clashed with her Armani jacket and was eventually sent to the back where she met up with her delightful husband. Both of them having completely forgotten that they had a child. He seemed pretty used to this, the poor fucker.

Most people are growing tired of Victorian zoos with captive animals in small cages but I wonder how the animals themselves feel. Do they think – “Sweet. No more starving and fighting for my life now, I’ll get 3 square meals a day!”

I wonder if they discuss it with each other.

“Hi. I’m pretty sorted now. Nothing for me to worry about.”

“Oh, that’s nice. And what sort of animal are you?”

“I’m a dolphin. That’s what is says on my enclosure.”

“Are you sure? You look very small for a dolphin. I’d say you were more like a sardine.”

“Oh, what’s in a name. Apparently I’m in the 12pm show. Now that I am under the protection of the zoo, I can live a long and happy life.”

Je suis un Rock Star.

Day 4. Going well. The one I call Danny DeVito may be on to me, he has noticed that I don’t swim much. I may have to kill him before he tells the others. I will wait for my moment.

Always face the audience when performing son. They love it.

Peacock, coming through! Excuse me! Double busy!

No, I’m a real giraffe. Who told you otherwise?

Flamingos and two kinds of wild rats. Don’t tell the second ones they are rats though, they think they are related to the hippos.

If you look closely you can just make Tub out in the camouflage.

Philip! We are coming!

(Thanks for lending us your kid George!)

Next and last country, France. If you feel that your country/race/religion/tennis club has not been adequately insulted on this website then please act quickly. There isn’t much time!