WiFi Wonderland

We arrived in Las Vegas tonight!!
More about that later, but first... photos to round of our Spanish adventures.

That's our room! on the left corner in front!

First decent coffee since we left.

Gelatino!

The Basque Language

All the buildings are 5-8 stories high! Apartment living.

View from the room

Old Town

A normal day at the beach

Wave fail.

Hand stand! And new bathers :D

Basque, Catelan, Spanish...

Hola!
We are surviving in Barcelona. We haven't been relieved of all our prized posessions yet.

We have three days here. Yesterday we spent the day riding the hop'on hop off tourist bus around the city. We saw heaps of Gaudi' designed buildings, gates and Parc Guell, a huge public park with buildings, mosaics and hard landscaping all designed by him. So cool, and hopefully a closer look tomorrow.

San Sebastian was a little disappointing in the end. We didn't manage to get a surf. The banks were just nonexistent and the swell was all over the place. Scary to see where some people were surfing. It was not pretty and looked downright dangerous! After wandering around trying to get pinxtos in tiny, smoke filled, sweaty pubs til 11pm, we thought a home cooked meal in the hostel kitchen would be the go for Sunday night. But nothing opens on Sunday! Not a single deli or fruit and veg shop. So we got by with possibly the worst ham and cheese toasty ever made. I'm not proud of it.
Monday brought rain. We did a lot of walking and it is a beautiful city, hugging a river with a beach on either side. Unlike Barcelona though, once you've seen the old town and the "Jesus Statue" there wasn't a lot to do!

Today we took a tour out to Girona and to Figueres. It was a great day, made even more entertaining by the dude behind us on the bus who was from Ottowa. He spoke just like Johnny Depp in Willy Wonka and was the master of the obvious. He and his wife, Debbie *he used her name most sentences* provided me with some fascinating dialogue.

Girona is a medieval city with some beautiful buildings and Figueres is home of the Salvador Dali' museum. More an experience than a museum with paintings as well as sculpture, installations and jewellery. Visited by about 1million people a year it is the second busiest museum in Spain, even though Figueres is otherwise forgettable. A real eyeopener. We visited a cool little Museu del Cinema in Girona and Oo!! We also saw the Pyrenees!

Some zany punctuation today as the keyboard isn't producing the symbols shown on it.
Also no photos. "( We did try, believe me. The maccas across the road is meant to have free wifi, but we had to have some very average burgers to find out that its not working. They will follow soon.

The train trip out from San Seb was pretty nice. A good way to get a sense of the landscape. It played tricks on you with buildings closer than they appeared, dwarfed by the mounain range. We travelled through mists up into the hills before crossing the plain. I saw some tumbled down ruins as well as a fleet of solar panels and more wind turbines than I could count.

The language has been a huge barrier here, and after Greek, French, Basque, Catelan and Spanish, we are well and truly ready to head off to America-land for some 'English'! Not a great many people speak English here so we've been pretty self-reliant, saving our appalling Spanish for ordering food.

Alright. Enough for now. The next time you hear from us may just be from the hallowed walls of the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

Hola desde España!!

Hola amigos!

We've arrived in San Sebastian, or Donostia as it's known locally. There's a very strong Basque culture here, so everything is named and signed twice, with Spanish and the native Basque (which I think is called Euskada).

It's a lovely little town at a glance, rambling cobbled streets, soaring cathedrals and basillica, and a surf beach plonked right out the front. The surf looks a little more promising here, and less crowded than Biarritz. Actually a pretty modern town too, compared to what we were expecting.

The hostel is nice. It probably wouldn't pass a fire code inspection, but it's comfortable and very friendly, and seems fairly clean. There's HEAPS of Aussies here, as with most hostels around the world. Everyone running the hostel is Aussie, Kiwi or Americano, so there's no problem with English at all.

Last night we had a little BBQ with some people up "Jesus Hill", which may or may not be the correct name for the little hill with a big ass statue of Old Mate on top of it. In true Australian style they burnt the bajingo out of the snags, which was a nice home reminder.

In other great news, we found a bookshop with books in ENGLISH!!! We read our books from home in about a week, then bought up the 3 English books in Biarritz... they lasted 3 days. So we bought the biggest 3 books we could find from a bookshop here in San Seb, which should keep up going!!

Travel tip: DON'T bring the 2nd book in a trilogy with you overseas if you can't get a hold of the third one. It's killing me not being able to conclude the trilogy.

No photos yet. We just blasted around quickly this morning and last night, but we're still pretty knackered. Hannah and I have gotten a little bit sick (just head colds etc), and didn't have any sleep for the two weeks we were in France, so we're going to take the opportunity for a little siesta this afternoon, and then see how we go.

Hope you're all well! I'm starting to miss people quite a lot, so let us know how you're all going. I chatted to an English woman in France yesterday when we were having breakfast who reminded me of Mum, so I got a little home sick :P Travelling has been awesome so far, but it's always an amazing reminder of just how good it is at home.

I've started rambling, so I'll leave it there. Updates will come soon, once we have some nice pictures of San Sebastian.