Megan Annabelle Barcelona

We rolled into Barcelona from the South of France, late at night. Because we were so hungover from our night in Antibes, we hadn't printed our directions to our hostel, woops. After a half assed attempt at finding our way we hopped in a cab and headed to Centric Point, its Friday night and the hostel is going off and we are sharing with 10 other guys and girls. We are ashamed to say we went straight to bed with our ear plugs in (after a sneaky big mac of course).

Thanks to the big mac we were so onto it, we got up early on the Saturday and lined up with all the retired poms and got on our 2nd bus tour weeeeee!

This is what we saw...

A street with Sagrda Familia on it.

Us rocking our bright blue tour ear phones

Aftert the tour we went in search of a tapas bar a waiter in Juan Les Pins recommended, and we actually found it! Oh god it was so amazing and where I first discovered the spanish omelet.

This is Las Ramblas or La Rambla (not sure if they are the same st or different) we were constantly lost in Barcelona.

Some sweet street art

Sangrias on the rooftop terrace of our first hostel

This is that Gaudi design house thingy, it was about 100 m from our hostel

Day 2 of the bus tour and we actually got off and looked at stuff, this is us heading to Sagrada, by far the finest church I have ever seen it is ridiculous. Inside it is designed to look as if you are in a forest. It will be finished in 2030 and I shall be there

Inside the church the windows are all coloured to represent different light, cant remember what this was but Gaudi wanted it to fit into nature rather then the normal saints represented in glass.

At the Park Guell, this shot took 4 different sets of tourists, 3 failed attempts by us on a timer, we finally got it though. Behind us is Gaudi's house.

Ohhhhhh look here we are hiring bikes! We love our bikes.

This is us cruising the beach on our cruisers... the beach was sweet cept for all the tits (note from Annabelle: before you boys get excited that also includes 70 year old grannies sitting around topless playing cards!) and homeless people.

Case in point, one rambling drunk homesless lady who ranted for 10 minutes at our restaurant before deciding it must be nap time on this footpath. Belz loved her and thought what a sweet spot that was for a nap, she contemplated going in for a spoon.

This is us buying our meds, over there they don't have pharmacies as we have them. You just get a bottle and fill up on whatever you want, it is SO AMAZING!* We got 4 bottles of happy pills each.

This is us at Mount Tiiiiibiiiidaaaaabooooo (Tibidabo) it was creepy and windy. We hung out at an empty 60's theme park and climbed to the feet of Jesus.

And us by the creepy ferris wheel.

It was super good times in Barcelona, main highlights were the tapas, the bike riding, the gothic quarter and our hippy hostel. Basically just go.

* This was actually a sweet shop called Happy Pills. What a novelty it was.

Trapped on the rainy riviera...

Our sojourn on the French Riviera got off to a rocky start. The stormy weather from our last night in Cinque Terre stalked us all the way to Juan Les Pins (next to Nice and Antibes on the South Coast of France) although to be fair, it was pretty nice weather when we arrived and we immediately started with the 'I wanna live heres'. We headed off to our tre-chic hotel (yes hotel, high rollers!) - think 70's frenchy french hotel room where the lady spoke not a word of the English and the room was decorated in 18 different shades of pink and mauve - and dumped our gears. We went for a gander to check out the haps in Juan Les Pins, chose an outdoor kind of restaurant but embarrassingly settled on BURGERS for dinner ... but MY GOD what a burger. We had heard the French love meat and we love that they love meat because we were in enormous frenchy burger heaven....
So day one went well but on day two we woke up to rain - and not just pitter patters but torrential, outrageous, gushing rain! We felt so ripped off and mad at life but attempted to go out for another gander - we had to buy umbrellas but were soaked regardless so headed back to the room. It didn't take long before we had full blown cabin fever and there was only so much emailing/skyping etc we could do so we came up with ways to entertain ourselves. Entertainment game #1: rig up a camera using sellotape and some kind of clothes rack/rail and take high five shots of ourselves jumping on the bed. Testing....

Looking good. Is the camera on?....

Check! HIGH FIVE EXTREMO!

After that we were buggered so thought we had better risk death and head back out into the rain with our new sky blue and hot leopard pink brollys to get some supplies. Entertainment game #2: The street nearest our hotel was conveniently packed with delis, patisseries and meat shops (Megan's dream career - owning a meat shop) so laden with three days worth of supplies we headed back and ate it all in about five minutes.

Given that we had to go back to the patisserie every day that we were in Juan Les Pins I think it's fair to say Megan has a crush on macaroons (Megans note: HUGE bordering on obsession). That night we headed out for cocktails and dinner. We were ranted at by a crazy french lady with scary teeth and gumboots, had ANOTHER burger (oopsies) and our cocktails had uber decorations so we were happy...

... and finished it all off with crepes and gelato. mmmmm

We crawled home, took photos of how enormous our guts were (not kidding - haha) and passed out dreaming of a sunny tomorrow and BAM it was rainy again (so day trip to Nice) but the day after that was somewhat of a stunner. We hit the beach and paid mega bucks for a sun lounger but we were scared the water was poo water (because of all the super yacths moored out in the bay and it smealt like farts) so we never actually got in.

(Megans note again: notice Belz lost an arm in war/jumping high five shots)

After a day in the sun we thought we would head to Antibes to check out the village (filled with Brits, Aussies and NZers who work on the yachts) and get a feed and drinkies. We started out so fancy free and full of hope...

(Megans final note: this is ACTUALLY how we made our way to the bar)

But then drinkies were accomplished and food.... not so much :). We hit an Irish pub full of the previously mentioned non-french folk and and after many a vino the idea of dinner was a distant one. We made friends with some French dudes celebrating their friends b'day - hence the Moet sipping (read: drinking from the bottle) in the photos below. Randoms walk through the bars selling anything from watches and hats to roses so we scored some sweet flora as well.

After no food, a night on the vino vino and an early start to catch a ten hour train ride to Barcelona life was NOT peachy. Luckily we had the foresight to prepare for such an event and consumed another 18kg of pastries and cheese (we had bought the day before) on the train...mmmmm frenchy fatties.

Captain Planet visited Cinque Terre

Hello friends!

As it is literally pissing down here in the South of France we are getting all blog updates sorted before more adventures begin.

We have just left Cinque Terre after spending 2 days there and my lord what a 2 days they were! Earth, Air, Fire and Water all greatly impacted our trip, making us feel like we were stuck in some crazy captain planet episode. I never saw that hottie ginga Wheeler though. After a productive trip of crafts and snacks on the train....

...we arrived at Riomaggiore (the first village) in the arvo and spent our remaining day asleep on the beach (getting rid of our hangovers).

Above: The view from our room out across the village and us having a relaxing vino in our apartment.

Our lovely hostess lady had told us there was a few musical offerings that night in the village over so we busied ourselves with getting ready and started to make our way to Manarola. As we were approaching the edge of our village we looked up at the hill after Belz had remarked on the distinct smell of bonfire (as she wanted to go hang out at said bonfire) what we saw basically made us accidente in our pants:

http://amy-in-italy.blogspot.com/2009/09/riomaggiore-fire.html - this has some better pics.

We admit we did kind of freak as it was right by our rooms, but after running back to get passports etc and with a bit of a wine buzz going we thought better to be in the town over then here and worrying so off we went. The food was amazing, as was the wine and we were quite happy on our way back.

Even happier to see the fire contained and literally walk right into the most amazing Italian guitar music we have ever heard. This guy was the buisness, so we stayed to listen until he was finished.

The second day was dedicated to conquering the Cinque Terre national park walk, after our first taste the night before we thought it would be sweet laid path the whole way so we set off in jandels, we were mistaken...

It took us about 4 hours to do the entire walk and with 2 stops in between it was a whole day. We stumbled into the last village so fatigues and dehydrated we almost couldnt walk in a straight line. To see another beautiful beach at the end was probably the happiest moment of my life.

That night exhausted we were so looking forward to bed, ready for a restful sleep. What we got was the craziest goddamn storm imaginable we think we managed about 3 hours sleep in between thunder that hurt your ears and lightning that lit our whole room up regardless of dark curtains. The rain was so heavy it sounded like hail and the wind kept blowing our metal shutters against the walls we were freaking and that was before the power went out at about 3.30am and this weird light in our room that we couldnt control kept turning on and off! We bailed at 7am and in the rain headed to the South of France.

Go Captain Planet!

Below: dinner on our last night

Si si si... Prego!

Actually written by Belz, not Megan...

Roma was NOT built in one day (we actually learnt that on our Palatine Hill tour) and while it was pretty incredible it wasn't until our last day that we fully appreciated it. Rome was huge, hot and full on with so many sights to see - the highlights were....


- FOOD: We went off-roading into the Roman alley ways and found some super authentic (well we thought so) Italian restaurants and got ourselves into a spaghetti/pizza/bruschetta fueled frenzy on more than one occasion. The best one was where they spoke about two words (max) of English and what I thought was going to be a mushroom pizza just had four different kinds of cheese.

- WINE: We became acquainted with the local vino on our first lunch stop after a busy day visiting the Pantheon, Trevi Fountain and Piazzas. We immediately took a liking to the jug style of serving the vino bianco and perhaps had one jug too many. Shopping was fun after that :)


- COLOSSEUM: We saw the Colosseum on our last day in Rome and decided to get a tour - such a good call! Our first linen clad, miniature Italian man (Megan claims he was like an Italian Woody Allen) had some fab stories up his sleeve and we learnt heaps! Yip - we're all about the education. Our tour scored us a free tour of Palatine Hill and the Roman forum and it we had no idea what they were until our potentially-on-crack tour guide told us it was where Rome began!!! So we did the compulsory jumping high five shots to celebrate.




- MIDNIGHT TREVI FOUNTAIN VISIT with our new BFFs: Kate and Hetty arrived in Rome on our last night there and we welcomed them with some super classy (1,50 Euro per glass) vino. After a tonne more, some shots and meeting a bunch of Brazilian, Aussie and Argentinians Megan and I set of as drunken tour guides to show them the Trevi at night. Jumping high fives again, 3am bed time and a 7.30am train to catch! arrrrr. This pic was probably take 35. Drinking, strangers using your camera and air-shots are not a good combo...







Low lights were...


- VATICAN: Amazing and impressive but without a tour we were pretty clueless. We were CONVINCED St Peters Basilica was the Sistine chapel but later realised we never actually saw the Sistine chapel. Oops! Other people we talked to said it's amazing with a tour so I guess that's where we went wrong. Oh but we did see where all of the dead popes are.



- SHOPPING: Three words for you: Bling, diamantes and euro-trash. Urgh.

- GLADIATOR RIP OFF: If you are approached by big, tanned, sweaty studs/fake gladiators at the Colosseum, don't let them get you into a photo. They took three photos of us with the gladiators on OUR camera, then charged us 10 Euro each!!! Sink au!




Ciao!