Everyone Deserves a Chance to Fly

“Take a message back from me. Tell them how I’m defying gravity.” -Wicked

So, we meet again. Well, Martin left this morning to go back to the U.S. and I got on a train to Barcelona and then to who knows where. We had a really great week, and saw pretty much anything and everything we could in Madrid. It was a nice change of pace to travel with someone who didn’t leave on a whim, and he was very good with my new insecurities, always reassuring “I’ll be right back” even for short trips to the bathroom (never mind he generally followed this with “unlike—”. I have a deplorable habit of not paying attention to much of anything if I know someone else is there to do it for me. For this reason, I never really learned where anything was or tried to decipher a map and would have been completely lost (actually, I often was) were he not there, so I put up with his chiding and silently cried myself to sleep every night. (kidding). Aside from seeing all the major monuments, museums, and parks, I also ate a truly impressive amount of pastry this week. No, I don’t intend to justify it in any way, just thought I’d throw it out there. And get this: I ran into Melanie, one of the girls I went to Morocco with. She was staying in our hostel the same days we were exactly! Small small small world. So that was fun, and she hung out with us the day we went to the Prado and gorged ourselves on McDonalds. (There were 3 hamburger specials there at the time: Canadian Cheese, Manhattan Burger, and Texas BBQ. If that is not an omen, I do not know what is.) We took a day trip as well to a little town called Escorial to see the mucho largo monastery there and have a look around. Then we came back, found a tasty indian food place, and that jerk treated me dinner. So after a lovely time I am once again going it alone with one week left of my eurail pass. It’s really hard to believe I’m almost out of this region of the world, that it’s been three months, or to know exactly what I’ll do with even less structure in my life after the 8th of December, but of course, this excites me as well. I’m currently trying to get to Zurich which I have yet to see, and meant to get out of Spain to at least southern France today, but the forces conspired to bring me back to Barcelona for one more night. Not that I’m complaining. This hostel has free internet access, kitchen, AND big screen tv with dvds. So yes, I will be staying in tonight, hopefully finishing Ulysses to exchange for Madame Bovary here at the hostel, and then watching movies. Do not judge me. I can feel you judging me. I am allowed to do this because I am in mourning over the fact that though Harry Potter is showing everywhere around me, I can find no place that shows it in english. So you just stop right there and shed a tear for me. Tomorrow, I have a ticket to….somewhere in southern france…starts with an M….not Marseilles…I wanted to go there, but it didn’t work out….I can’t remember the name, so you’ll just have to wait.

If you want to hear Martin’s side of the story, or just to get a decidedly more comprehensive idea of our itinerary plus more pictures than you knew was humanly possible (he may not have them up yet), you can check out his blog at http://offthebeatenpath01.blogspot.com/ and the pictures are here: http://community.webshots.com/user/mwalker05.