Lovely Lunches and White Flamingos.

When we left Sevilla on a train at 10PM, it put us in Barcelona at 8 AM the following morning. The cars we were traveling in were segregated by gender, so we each stayed in a four person with others. Overnight I met my three roommates, Diego, Angel, and José Antonio, mid-30s, early 20s, and 15, respectively. They were very neat, and didn't speak more than 5 words of English, so my 5 words of Spanish didn't get me far.

I pulled out my journal and sketched a map of the US to tell them where I was from, and then led them on an overview of our 6 country trip itinerary to tell them where we were going. They seemed pretty impressed and I even managed to get a picture of them all with my camera. It was a fun night.

I managed to steal about seven and a half hours of sleep before we hit Barcelona, and from there we had a moderately open-ended plan. We had been intending to hop a night-train from Barcelona to Milano, but we found out one day in advance that it only runs three days a week, and its schedule didn't match with ours, so instead we decided to use our time-tested "pick a train, any train" method to work our way around the Mediterranean and head for northern Italy.

With this in mind we did a little shopping (including a cool new soft drink I'd never seen before that tasted EXACTLY like a Granny-smith apple) and then got a mid-morning train out of Barcelona headed up the coast towards France. Our local train stopped last in Portbou, a tiny town on the coast that serves as an exchange point into the French rail system. We found (to our delight) that we were trapped in this tiny coastal village for a little under two hours, and we made the most of the time.

Portbou 


We walked down from the train station through town to the water, stopping at a local bakery to procure some pastry and a Kinder-Egg for 80. At the water we found a gorgeous stone pier that extended into the tiny bay on which the town was built, and used that as our lunch spot. It was one of the most wonderful lunches we've done, with sunshine all afternoon and great food that we'd found in Barcelona that morning.

Kinder! 


After our lunch, we climbed back through the down to the rail station and took the shortest train of our travels to date, a 4 minute connector between Portbou and Ceberé, the corresponding French town on the other side of the border. There we had another hour-long wait for the TER that would take us all the way to Avignon. We made the most of this time as well, cleaning up in the bathroom and resting. I took a brief dash into town to look for Orangina and ran across some men playing bocce, but I had forgotten my camera so I don't have a picture for you of one of France's most charming past-times--the game from which horseshoes is probably derived.

After Ceberé we headed out again, this time for Avignon. On the way we enjoyed the countryside and noticed more flamingos than I expected to see in France -- all of them white, which 80 says is a sign they aren't getting enough shrimp. I don't know enough about Flamingos to know the difference, but I thought the only pink ones in Florida were plastic, so apparently I'm a little misinformed! We found ourselves waiting on the platform at the Avignon station just as the sun began to set. It looks almost mystical, doesn't it?

 



From Avignon we caught a connecting train that put us in at Nice very, very late that evening, an adventure that will probably be related in the next update ("Well, isn't this Nice?").