Verona Ventured, more than meets the eye in Barcelona

I decided to skip the second day trip to Venice, as I didn´t really feel there was anything left to do, sside from the glass blowing demonstrations, which I didn´t feel warranted an entire trip back to the city of islands.

So I spent the next two days just hanging out in Padova, moving from my hostel for the Saturday and Sunday nights to the cheapest hotel I could find. The only hostel in Padova has a lock out curfew of 11:30PM, which stunted most nights spent at the Highlander pub shack with Paul. Deciding that we were going to spend a good couple nights of the weekend hanging out in the pub shack area, Paul and I rocked up about 7PM on Saturday to the Highlander, only to find they were just beginning to set up. We left and found some kebabs for dinner; kebabs which had no less than three different types of sauce and a few other bits and pieces that differentiate from what we get at home. They were excellent, and by the time we got back to the shack they were able to start pouring drinks. We would alternate between Aperol Spritz´s, Corona´s, and in not to long a time, we decided to try the Bulmer´s. I´d heard of the stuff not too long ago from Ian, who described it as quite a nice drop, and this resulted in us cleaning the place out of every bottle within the next 48 hours.

We made friends with the bar staff, Albani (the Albanian), Angela (the hot chick) and a greek dude who was only there for the Saturday night. It was on this particular Saturday night that Greekguy, as he will now be known, was playing with the music on his phone along with Albani. They weren´t allowed to put on a stereo, lest they be fined for some reason, and so between the two of them, they piped out a tune or two on their phone during the quiet periods. At some point Greekguy started playing the Zorba dance, and tried to teach Albani the steps. If you´ve never experienced the Zorba dance, basically it consists of everyone linking shoulders, kick to the left, kick to the right, do a sidestep to your right, and repeat. The speed slowly increases until the end becomes a flurry of kicks and people tripping over. Albani just couldn´t get the hang of it, and Paul and myself offered to give it a try ourselves. Even in our semi-lubricated state we were able to work it out, and proceeded to scare the rest of the potential customers away from the joint for the next 5 or 10 minutes.

We also made friend with the Irish owner, Kevin, who was happy to provide us with a couple free drinks whenever we caught up with him. So not to look like barflys who just kind of cling to the one place (no matter how true that may have been), we were sure to change venues for about an hour each night, which involved walking up the road a couple hundred meters to another shack with some funky red couches, a venue at which Paul attempted a drunken pickup of a very attractive Argentinian woman. Unfortunately his attempts were not quite successful, but in his stout defence neither were those of several other potential suitors who gave it a crack themselves. It was after this little sabbatical that we returned to the Highlander and reclaimed our spots at the bar, and finished off our night there. This included Angela informing me through Paul´s translation that I had ¨very beautiful eyes¨ and also resulted in Paul prodding me about this for the rest of my stay in Padova. In his drunken state he also tried to convince me to go for her phone number, despite the fact I was leaving in two days and didn´t speak more than about two words of Italian. We tried to get Albani to put in a good word for me, but unfortunately nothing further eventuated. Still, being told you´re pretty by some hot chick is always fun, and no, she wasn´t just trying to sell us more booze....

On Monday I headed to Verona to see the sights, and a half hour train trip later and the same amount of walking time saw me in the heart of the place with a map and a few a few highlights circled. I started with the arena, which is a large old Roman amphitheater, which I was highly recommended by Paul to check out after my dissapointment at Trier. Unfortunately it seems I don´t have a lot of luck with amphitheaters, as this one too was being kitted out for some kind of opera, and there were plastic seats and stages being set up in it also. However, it wasn´t quite as offensive as the one in Trier, and there were still good sections where you could clearly see the structure itself, including one large wall piece which I think is supposed to be one of the main original parts. I wandered around and checked it out, and it was indeed quite impressive and in good condition, however I´m certain most of it has been rebuilt once or twice.

Next I wandered around the town a bit, had some lunch in one of the main squares, and then checked out some of the surrounding buildings and statues. I found another statue of Dante Aligheri (I´m not sure why I thought the on in Barcelona would be the only one around), and there seems to be quite a lot of monuments to him in the area. Eventually I stumbled across Juliet´s house (of Romeo and Juliet fame), where you can see the balcony that Romeo climbs up to see his girly (although I am skeptical of the authenticity of this balcony, considering R&J is a work of fiction), and there is also a bronze statue of Juliet standing in the courtyard. This statue is, like most old, weathered and kind of black, except for her right breast which is brightly polished from the hojillion tourists who come here to have their picture taken whilst groping said boobie for good luck. There were hundreds of people in this little courtyard, all queuing up to have a picture taken with the statue, and yes, I also followed this little ritual and will hopefully have some funkiness headed my way soon.

The entrance hall to Juliet´s courtyard is plastered with little love notes stuck to the wall with gum, and the gates also have quite a number of padlocks linked to it, all of which I´m assuming is to provide some kind of good fortune to a relationship. The whole wall of gum is actually pretty gross, and some of the more oblivious didn´t seem to realise as their would sit and rest their backs on said wall, and probably came away with some of it as a souvenier.

I left the throngs of tourists and checked out a small castle on top of a hill looking over the city. The walk up the stairs was quite an effort in the hot, humid weather, and whilst the castle didn´t seem to be open for inspection, the view from the hill was pretty cool, and allowed you to see over most of the city. I left this vantage and headed to one last museum containing Juliet´s tomb. There were some nice marble sculptures by some artist I´d never heard of, and I eventually made my way through the place and found the tomb itself, which consisted of a graffiti strewn room with an empty sarcophagus (save for a couple of lillies).

At this point I´d had enough of the town, having seen all I´d come to see and not finding interest in other of the locations listed on the map, so I made my way back to Padova, checked into the hostel for one more night and met up with Paul for a final drink at the Highlander. After a few drinks, I gave my goodbyes to the bar staff and received a farewell Aperol Spritz from Albani, organised when I´d meet Paul in Germany the coming Friday, and headed to my bed.

The next day found me up at 5:30AM to get the series of trains and busses to Milan Malpensa international airport, and I got back to Barcelona at about 2PM. I was quickly reminded of the Spanish work ethic as I waited over half an hour for my bag to arrive on the carousel. I found my way to the main train station, and transferred a small amount of clothes and essentials into my small backpack, leaving my large case in the lockers of the train station. In fact, I used the exact same locker I did last time, a moment filled with nostalgia and memory.

I had about 8 hours to kill before I was to meet Miriam at her hotel, so I used a few minutes of this to transcribe some of the more interesting sounding bars and pubs from my guidebook onto a small sheet of paper. It was during this that I found in the guidebook a cinema that showed English movies, and nearly losing myself in excitement, grabbed all the things I had together and high tailed it as fast as I could to said venue. I had been killing myself trying to find somewhere to see the new Transformers movie since I found it had been released, and this was my best chance so far. It turned out the movie wasn´t on for another three hours, having just missed the more recent session. I decided to fill some of that time by seeing Shrek 3 as a prelude, which was OK, but not really as good as the last two.

When the time came close, I excitedely found a good seat in the cinema, and to my surprise the previews and ads all happened before the scheduled time of the movie, rather than after, and at almost precisely 6:30 the actual movie started. It was pretty awesome, and seeing and hearing Optimus Prime in full live action was very satisfying. They got his voice just right, and whilst I think it could have used a bit more robot to robot fisticuffs and laser blasting, hearing many of the original sound effects and themes through the movie was very cool. However I think they spent way too much time dealing with people and the army, rather than just having robots smash each other around. There was no space stuff at all (aside from them crashing into the planet), and there should have been some more actual Transformer characters. I think what I´m saying is summed up pretty well in this comic, but no matter how much whinging is involved, the movie still kicked ass.

After this I headed to Miriams hotel and met up with her about 11, showed her around a few of the main night sights of Barcelona, and got some dinner. Yesterday we met up with a couple of her friends from England who had come over for a weeks holiday, and spent the day checking out the Sagrada Familia (I actually went into it this time, it was so-so), checked out Gaudis park, had a siesta and then met up for dinner and drinks later that evening. I don´t really have much to say, as I´ve already seen and described all there is to do in Barcelona, but it has been fun hanging out with another bunch of friends. The girls have met up somewhere today to go shopping (I respectfully declined), and after finding somewhere to do my washing, I´ll pack up my stuff ready to head to Freiburg and meet back up with Paul in the Black Forest tomorrow.

Pics of Monaco and Nice now available!