Dublin to Barcelona to the middle of nowhere...

It´s been a while and we´re a long way from Carraig Dulra now. We are now staying in a georgeous finca in the middle of nowhere in Spain. It is situated near Orgiva, which is about an hour or two out of Granada. A mad Brit named Steve is living here with his three dogs, Patches, Zaphyra, and Rocky. Teagan and I have our own room separate from the house with its own bathroom en-suite. The house overlooks a huge valley with desert like mountains on either side and at the end you can see the Mediteranean. On a very clear day, supposedly you can see Africa, but while the weather has been beautiful, we haven´t been able to see that distant coast. This helpstay is actually a happy accident because of a little dose of miscommunication with the host we had originally intended to stay with in this area. We needed to kill a week or two before going to this other finca and already had a night train from Barcelona booked to Granada with nowhere to stay. We scrambled to find another host and Steve was the first person we called.

We stayed in Dublin for only two nights and had a pretty relaxing time. Seeing as how we were only going to be in non English speaking countries after Dublin we decided to seize our last chance at seeing a movie in English and saw the Goofy Pineapple Express. The next and last night in Dublin we went to an improv comedy open mic night, which was, in all honesty, pretty terrible, but fun nonetheless. Teagan and I did some heckling and played the dumb Americans (Europeans like it when you do that sometimes, its endearing). After the show we messed with the heads of some silly Finnish tourists (what isteen spirit...?). We also did some museums, a W.B. Yeats exhibit being a highlight, art hanging on walls, all that good stuff. The Jameson distillery tour was another big highlight.

Dublin was fun and we could have spent a lot more time there, but the country of Ireland is not easy on the pocketbook by a long shot and the weather was beginning to short circuit our brains so the next day we booked it to Barcelona. Teagan almost didn´t get let on the plane due to her not having any ticket to prove she was going to leave the country after 90 days so we had to rush over to the ticket booking stand for Iberia airlines where she bought the same ticket to Casablanca that I booked for those exact reasons.

We arrived in Barcelona at around 930 at night feeling pretty tired. To make matters worse, my backpack was somehow the only piece of luggage misplaced on the flight, so after giving the luggage people all the pertinent information for its return, trying to figure out trains and subways that weren´t running, and ending up taking a taxi, we got to Marc´s (our couchsurfing host) at around 1130. The airline delivered the backpack about 24 hours later to Marc´s apartment... damn... if they had taken any longer I could have bought some flashy new Spanish clothes on the airline´s dime. The rest of our time in Barcelona we just did a lot of walking around. The Gaudi park up in the hills, went and saw about five minutes of a jazz session before it ended as we arrived too late, just walking around soaking the sights, sounds, smells, Tapas, and everything else in. We went to Figueres on the train for the Dali museum there, which was pretty spectacular. After a while of traveling for a while, being from Seattle and so used to having a good dose of rock n´ roll every now and then, both Teagan and I were feeling a bit sluggish and the Pharmacy (a Seattle band, go figure) came to our rescue and reinvigorated both of us. Teagan´s friend Alex is roadying for them, so we had a heads up on the show. We went and saw another band the night before, which was Spanish and whose name we didn´t catch, but it really didn´t do it for us. I know I generalize, but I don´t think Spain knows how to rock n´ roll. Sorry, Spain. Our last day in Barcelona we decided to just shlaze it on the beach until we had to catch our overnight train to Granada. When we got to the train station about a half hour before departure, we realized that we were at the wrong station and the right one was on the other side of town. We were informed if we hurried and took a cab we would make it. A few frantic dozen minutes later, we were on the train, hearts steadily slowing down from the near panic of hitting every. single. stoplight. red. I´m pretty sure it´s completely impossible to drive through a large metropolitan Spanish city without hitting at least 85% of the lights red. And there are a lot of stoplights. Once again, I know I generalize.

We got to Granada in the morning, and near panic hits me once again when a cop stops me at the station and asks to see my passport for a random check. I had to wait outside the police station while they ran my information, then they sent me on my way. We stayed and napped for a few hours at some couchsurfer´s apartment and caught a bus to Orgiva. Upon getting off the bus we met Geraldine, a 20 year old Belgian girl, who was just going to Orgiva from Granada to kill some time before she started a two week Spanish course in Granada, but didn´t have a place to stay. She went on her way right before Steve, our host, pulled up in his jeep. He gathered us and we went and searched for her, finding her we discovered she had already payed for a hostel, but she decided she´d try to hitchhike to Steve´s the next day. ¨Not a chance, I live in the middle of nowhere¨ he says. The next day we get a call from someone who had picked up Geraldine. She had hitched the wrong way. We went and picked her up in the middle of a drunken haze of a day, in which we had tried to work on his fountain, but Steve started feeding us beer at 11 in the morning, took us to the bar about an hour later and that´s where we got the call from Geraldine. It´s rather like resort-help-x-ing here, with pretty lush surroundings and accomodations, beer flowing fairly freely, and a host that ¨really just wants us to enjoy ourselves¨. Steve is a great guy, really really likes to take the piss, chain smoke and drink. He´s very intelligent and does work for OXFAM in Africa, but mostly likes to work on his finca out here in Spain. There is already a pool, but he has plans to heat it solarly, put a sauna and a jacuzzi in and basically all around pimp out an already pimped out little spot. We set stones into cement into a Moorish pattern as a walkway down to his pool that water will run over, and I must say it looks pretty flash. Next we´ll be making a fountain outside his kitchen window and setting a mosaic of bulls into the wall above his barbecue. Steve is also an excellent cook and almost every night shows us how to make food the ´right´ way, as he would say (he´s always right). My favorite being Chicken Tikka Masala.



We are here for about a week longer and Geraldine left for Granada yesterday. It is just Steve, Teagan and me. We are actually the first helpxers that he has had. Steve is not quite used to having other people around but it´s all running fairly smoothly and, I think, helping Steve in a lot of ways with different points of view and just all around good company.