Whirlwind

After my 19-hour odyssey, I decided I needed to rethink my plan for defeating jet lag as it now appeared that staying awake until 11 or midnight Central European Summer Time was no longer a viable option. So, I decided instead to shower away my transatlantic journey and lay down for a bit. An hour and a half later, I awoke in dire need of sustenance and with a greater curiosity about my surroundings, so Sarah and I decided to head downstairs for lunch. Our apartment complex consists of a series of 13-storey towers connected at the bottom by a very American-looking mall, something that reminds me of downtown Chicago. Except that a much larger percentage of the population speaks Spanish.

I was delighted to learn that the denizens of Catalonia enjoy a good sausage as much as I do (also reminiscent of Chicago) as my fiancé and I sat down at a restaurant called “Frankfurts”. I ordered a Spanish sausage and Sarah and I split an order of what I am learning is one of her favorite dishes, patatas bravas or bravas, for short. Basically, they’re deep fried chunks of potatoes topped with just the right amount of a spicy mayonnaise concoction. I think these would go over extremely well in the states, perhaps in a fast-food-restaurant-style eatery. I recommend them highly should you ever see them on a menu somewhere.

We walked around a bit more and decided to meet up with Sarah’s classmates for dinner in Barcelona. Lunch and dinner are both taken a bit later here, so we boarded a train at 8:30pm (20h30 for those keeping score in the European system) to head into the city. Our suburb is a roughly 20-minute commuter train ride from the heart of Barcelona and the rail station is a five-minute walk from our building, making the commute relatively pain-free (or at least no more difficult than the one I was used to in Tampa Bay). The metro system, I could tell, was going to take a little time for me to grasp and the city at night looked like a bewildering maze. But we made it to the restaurant, where for a mere 12.50 € each Sarah and I enjoyed a veritable feast of tapas with toasted bread slathered in tomato, ham, chorizo, and a variety of other delectable menu items topped off with a flavorful sangria. I knew then that I could easily get fat living here for any length of time.

After dinner and conversation with Sarah’s new classmates, all parties decided to hop back on the metro and head out to a club. My betrothed lead me down a half dozen corridors into the commuter catacombs beneath the ancient city and it was all I could do to keep up. Even at 2am, the hallways were packed with travelers, most of whom looked to be college students shuttling to destinations unknown. We arrived at the last stop and walked to the club only to discover that it was somewhere neither of us wanted to be. Realizing that the regional train back to suburban Viladecans was no longer running, Sarah and I boarded one of the night buses that shuttles the rest of the populace around once the reasonable have gone to sleep.
I could quite probably write an entire post on the journey from Placa Catalunya back to our apartment complex, but I will leave much of it to your imagination and instead tell you that after an hour and a half, a change of buses and a phone call to our roommate we finally arrived home utterly exhausted. But I had a great big smile on my face.