A blog about Barcelona and Munich
The train ride was painful, the seats were not that comfortable and as much as we tried to relax and go to sleep, we had major problems doing so.
We arrived in Barcelona and found the hostel quite easily, we were in a 10 bed dorm and for the first night, we were the only two people in there, which was nice and quiet.
We awoke the next morning ready to get some stuff done.
Our walk was a fairly long one to Sagrada Familia which was a crazy church, it looks like something out of a horror movie, the outside looks like disembodied limbs and torsos have been sewn together to make a frightening pattern on the church, the four spires of the church reach up really high and in the centre a sculpture of Jesus on the crucifix.
We did not go inside however, as the church, as most churches are, was fairly expensive to go inside. We didn’t feel like being ripped off by religion, so we continued our journey and walked to the metro.
We got off and walked up to Museu D’Art, from there we got a view of Barcelona similar to the one we got from the Pantheon in Greece.
Tapas bars lined the streets the next morning on our way to La Boqueria, a market full of all different types of goodies, mainly being food and sweets.
Meat and fruit stands were the main attractions here and we watched in amazement as people grabbed bags upon bags of mushrooms and went on their way.
The seafood section was my favourite. Prawns covered an extremely large table, Megan and I were discussing how fresh they were when a gentleman started pointing at different ones and the lady behind the counter started throwing them all out of the way, they were still alive, their little legs twitched as they tried to escape.
We walked through the rest of the market, huge cuts of tuna and salmon were on ice ready to be purchased by the rich seafood enthusiast.
We walked up La Rambla, which is considered to be one of the main streets in Barcelona.
Street performers lined the streets, from princesses with huge dresses to a giant Jack Skellington from Nightmare Before Christmas. Some sat in chairs or stood completely still until some coins were thrown into their cups. Others moved around and performed and just hoped that people would drop a few coins in.
There were market stall lining the sides of this street, we came across a part that were stalls upon stalls of pet stores, selling rabbits, turtles, birds, fish, chipmunks and one even was selling an albino porcupine.
The next day was our last in Barcelona, so we made it our mission to make it the Gaudi Park, Parc Güell.
We walked for about 2km from the metro station and then we got to a rather steep hill, we made our way up and entered the park.
This is one of the standout parts of the entire trip for me, the park was beautiful, everything tiled in blue and white tiles with the spires of buildings twisting around in almost a Tim Burton-esque style of building.
Beautiful fountains and plants split the staircase in two.
We reached a room full of columns, the roof was covered in white tiles with blue suns. We walked up the stairs and reached a huge dirt circle the sides of which had a wavy bench that ran the entire length of the circle. It is the largest park bench in the world.
From up here we had another great view of Barcelona.
Then we reached my favourite part, a sheltered walkway that was leaning all the way to the right, it looked as though it had been windblown over time to lean on almost a 90º angle.
We left Parc Güell headed for Torre Agbar, which is the building that looks like a dildo.
We took some photos and headed back to the hostel to grab our things before heading to the airport to spend the night there for our flight early the next morning.
We slept on the hard marble floor of the airport, sprawled out under the departure/arrival sign like a pair of hobos. People gave us strange looks as they walked past and we had about an hour of sleep.
At around 5am we checked our bags and headed to our gate, ready to sly to Munich, Germany.
We arrived in Munich at around lunchtime.
We checked into our hostel and went to find a supermarket to grab some food for lunch.
I grabbed a beer and we had an early night in the hostel due to barely any sleep the night before.
The following morning we went to have a look at what was around our hostel seeing that we were in the middle of Munich. We went in and out of stores, seeing beer steins everywhere we looked. Pretzels, sausages and beer were everywhere we looked. We found a porn store, so of course we had to go and see what kind of German porn they had in there.
As we walked in, the place looked incredibly seedy, they had glass dildos shaped like eggplants in the display cases in the entrance hallway.
What I wanted to find was the German porn of people shitting on each other, just to see if it was actually sold in porn stores.
We found a section and there was a guy standing next to us excitedly browsing through the ‘Brutality’ porn and down on the right hand bottom shelf I saw a DVD titled ‘Shit Eating Incest Grannies’. I picked it up and couldn’t stop laughing, on the cover was a grandma having her face shit on. It wasn’t long after that, we decided to leave.
That night we went down to the restaurant and I ordered up a litre of beer for a fairly decent price, the litre came out in one giant glass and I put it away.
The free tour started at about 11am the next morning, it was raining and it was freezing outside. But there were enough people for the tour to start.
Our tour guide, Iain, showed us through Munich, we saw the Devils Footprint inside the church, the beer hall where Hitler started his rise to power, the famous Hofbräuhaus, the place where Hitler was almost killed and many other amazing places that are part of Munichs history.
Making our way back to the hostel, frozen to the bone, we stopped and picked up some beer for later that night.
Our last day in Munich, Megan and I went into the Hofbräuhaus so I could drink some of their beautiful beer.
I ordered up a litre of their darkest ale and put away the delicious beverage.
We headed back out into the frosty German weather and walked to the old town square where Hitler gave many speeches. Two poles stood about halfway down the square on the left and right side, on top of them, was a gold circle, one with a monk inside the circle, the other with a dragon, in the 1940s these circles contain swastikas.
The Glockenspiel was the next stop on the walk back to the hostel.
We waited until it started and somehow managed to survive the 15 horrific minutes of the bells playing and the mechanical show creaking along with it.
We boarded a train early the next morning headed for Utrecht to meet up with our friends Richard and Danielle.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
BJ
