Espana!

WOW. This has been a whirlwind few days of travel for me, much of it spent literally traveling, but I've had some time to see some cool things, starting with the Barcelona airport--where I spent about 12 hours on Monday. The airport is beautiful; the glass is all tinted sea foam green and it really affects the quality of the light and the atmosphere in general. The building is spotless and the bathroom are some of the nicest public ones I've ever seen. I spent a couple hours in the morning repacking my luggage to store some of it in the airport while I headed off to Ibiza for two nights with just my backpack and my camera.
By the time I finally got to sleep in Ibiza, I hadn't slept in about 38 hours. But staying awake was worth it for Ibiza. The water was the prettiest I've ever seen and the temperature was perfect (although I imagine being there in July and August would be *too* hot). It looked like this:

We spent our time in Ibiza at the beach and at a few clubs and then on our last day there we went to the "Hippymarket" which was fully of pretty shiny things:

and I bought myself a necklace. 

I do have one beef with Ibiza, and that's its transportation system. The public transport was so bad it was absurd. We took a bus to a town, then had to get off the bus to take it to a town that was only another 15 minutes away. This whole trip, which was about 30 minutes of actual travel time, took us about 2 hours. On our way back, there was no ticket station at the stop, so we had to buy the tickets on the bus, which meant everyone had to stand in line to get on the bus while tickets were purchased. But when we got back to the first stop, we had to get off the bus and the next bus was waiting. We thought oh we'll just buy our tickets on the bus again, but no, this time, you have to wait in line at the ticket station to get a ticket, while the driver sits there waiting for people to get on, when it could move twice as fast if he also sold tickets. Silly! The other annoying thing about transportation in Ibiza is the crazy cab drivers and the prominence of the "roundabout," which is possibly the most dangerous type of road since the one-lane bridge. When you combine the fast drivers with the roundabouts, disaster seems imminent. We made it out alive, if not a little poorer. 

Our trip back to Barcelona was flawless and we woke up early this morning for what I think was our best day yet. We decided to go cava tasting in the cava winemaking regions about an hour outside of Barcelona. If you don't know what cava is, it's basically the Spanish version of Champagne. It's made in exactly the same way, but they couldn't use the name, so they chose a different name (cava is the underground cellar where the wine undergoes the fermentation process). The train system in Barcelona was pretty easy to navigate, with the help of my high school Spanish (dos billetes, ida y regreso, a Sant Sadurni d'Anoia) and we arrived a bit early in the village. When we got to the train station, we saw that a winery different from the one we originally had reservations for was right across from the train station, we decided to go in there for a tour as well. It turns out that the two tours were pretty similar, but still interesting, and now I feel super informed about the cava making process. 

That's our tour guide at Freixenet (fresh-uh-net) holding up a bottle of cava that's almost done with its second fermentation. The stuff near the neck is basically leftover yeast that they need to get out (which they do by freezing it into an ice cube, taking off the cap, letting the ice cube pop out from pressure, and then recorking it quickly.
We tasted three cavas between our two tours, and I really liked them, although one was a bit dry (a brut natural) for my taste.
We ran into two Canadians on our second tour and got a recommendation for a restaurant from the woman who poured the cava for the tasting. As we were all walking away to go to the restaurant, the woman pulled up and told us it was closed (it's a holiday here!) and then she drove us around to a few different restaurants until she found an open one (that may have been her son's...although her English was a bit spotty). The four of us ate together and tried a cava sangria, which was actually delicious, and then headed back into Barcelona on the train together. The couple we ran into was engaged and really cute and it was the kind of thing that might be awkward but was just really nice. We all had a good time together and I'm really happy for the experience.
It's about time for me to take a nap and then tonight Melissa and I are heading into the center of Barcelona for the first time, finally, and tomorrow we'll head back into the city center for some real touristy-type sight-seeing. I'm glad that we didn't spend our whole trip doing that though, because going to do the wine tasting and running into a bunch of cool people was better than seeing the tourist attractions (not that I'm not super excited for Gaudi's La Sagrada Familia, among other things).

Well, as they say in Spain, adios!