Heading Home

It's now 7:17am in the morning here in Madrid. We are heading home today. Our flight leaves at 1pm. I'm sad to know that our europe trip is over and that in a couple of days, we will be back doing the same thing that we did before we went on the trip. It will be nice, though, to have clean clothes again. Now only a metro ride and about a 15 hour plane trip till we get back to California.

-Ed


MADRID

Madrid was a nice city. We didn't have much planned. We stayed a block away from the famous "Gran Via" and "Puerta del Sol". We headed to the palacio real, crystal house and walked around a park. I bought stuffed bull for Kirby. Ate kahbab at a restaurant .... Where Ed fell in love with the cashier there. The next day we took 3 different metro trains to the airport. There were hookers all over hotel and we were propositioned by many.

Madrid airport was huge and security was very tight. Ed and I made it through security very easy... Rui on the other hand was hasseled. At the checkin line security hasseled him they demanded to see all the receipts from everywhere he had been through out Europe. Something we did not have... eventually they let him through. Apparently I appear to be a local as the security guard came up to me and said "traveling with Japanese friends eh"... "I responded oh there chinese".... his reply " There all the same"... "I busted up laughing".

Inside the airport gate... We suddenly hear over the loudspeaker "RUI XU please come to the gate immediately".... Rui gets taken by security and is led off.... 20 minutes later he is returned to us apparently he was forced to go through all the security checkpoints again... because he's from China. This concluded our time in Europe.

BARCELONA
It was not easy getting to Barcelona....

We had to book a plane from Milan rather than from Vencie. So we took the train from Venice to Milan. At Milan we had to take a bus shuttle to the airport... since Ryan Air doesn't fly out of Milan's main airport it flys out of orio airport. At the airport we checked painlessly. We boarded our plane which looked like the "low class" section in the movie Soul Plane. The entire plane was filled with soccer hooligans from Germany... apparently there was some big match.... They were chanting soccer chants the whole time at the top of there lungs. The flight attendents threatened to call the police if they didn't quiet down, and the pilot came out asking the same thing. This only encouraged the soccer hooligans to shout louder. The pilot himself appeared to be drunk and flew like it as well. I've never been in a plane that took off so steaply and landed shaking the wings back and forth. We made it safely to Girona airport.

Girona airport is about an hour a way from Barcelona. This was one of Rui's planned cities. So instead of taking the Barcelona Bus which takes us directly to Barcelona (1 hour ride).... Rui decided that we should take the Barelona Bus to the city of Girona then take a local train and then Barcelona metro... this took about 3 hours. We arrived at our hotel... where Ed tried to speak spanish... he has the worst spanish I have ever heard... EVER!

We went in search of a restaurant and found a nice place... which is where we realized Barcelona is cheap. 10 euros for a 4 course meal including alcohol. I had a very good lager.

We managed to see everything that barcelona had to offer... at the moment I don't remember the names... but any major attraction in Barcelona Ed and I at least saw it. Rui was lazy one night and went to sleep/picked up a hooker...