Spain!

Up, up and away. Bidding farewell to Qatar felt surreal. For all of the reasons that I have already explained, my departure from that country is bitter sweet.

On the bright side of things, we made it to Spain!  The kids were great on the plane.  What was not so great was lugging four 25 kg pieces of luggage and four additional bags.

We landed in Madrid and caught a cab to our hotel on the outskirts of the city, a 20 minute bus ride.  Madrid was a nice city, but it had a lot to live up to after visiting Italy. We did the tourist bus ride and saw the city that way.

I am writing this blog several days after being there. So it is a fading memory.  We did enjoy the big park in the centre of the city. We also visited the Royal Bontanic Garden.  And the gelato was great. There was a bull fight the weekend that we were there. I didn't want to go for obvious reasons. It was a blood bath apparently as three out of three matadors were gored, one severally injured when the bull stuck it's horn straight through his artery in his leg. Looks good on him.

So here is the kicker. After three days in Madrid it was time to go the Balcelona. As luck would have it, the flipping taxi drivers went on strike at 11am. We managed to catch a ride to the train station in Madrid. The drivers were a little stressed out because it is more than likely that they would get beaten down here. So they dropped us off a distance from the picket and that was it.

The dark side meant that when we got to Barcelona, there would be no cab service. Just imagine 100s of people trying to figure out how to get to where they needed to go. To make our situation worse, our debit cards decided not to work and I had to call TD via a shoddy Skype connection!  To say that I was stressed out would be an serious understatement.

I traded in our high speed tickets for regular tickets, because we could use them again. That saved us some money and would get us to the Metro line.  We had a nice man point us in the right direction and we got on the Metro. Two transfers later, several sets of stairs and a lot of sweat and we made it out alive. Linds started laughing and crying at the same time at one point!  There was even a guy playing heavy metal. He played a death metal song in our honour!!!

Our trek wasn't over yet, we still had to walk three blocks to get to the hotel. What a nightmare.

Anyways, once all the dust settled, I reminded myself that I wasn't in Doha and that we were in Spain. We are in a really nice up and coming neighbourhood that has a Main Street designated for walking with loads of restaurants, shops and Sangria. Yummy!

We did the bus tour over the past couple of days. We went up into the mountains and visited Guell Park, were Gaudi left some interesting architecture to look at.

We hit the beach today and are just doing laundry. Looks like Mamma Mia Pizzeria tonight.

Home in one week. It is really hard to believe.