Beach bumming

I'm a tad red from being at the beach all day.



It was perfect weather for it: not so hot that you felt your skin turning into leather, a cool breeze every now and again, and the water briskly cool, enough to shock the heat off of you the moment you dive in but warm enough that you quickly adapt. I'd told a group of people here at the hostel that I'd go with them today, but I woke up early and they partied until very late the night before so I took off alone. There were only a few dozen other people on the sand when I first got there -- it felt like the shore was my own.

That changed quickly over the course of only a few hours when a couple hundred other people dragged themselves out of bed and joined me at the beach. And then came the hawkers; "Beer? Cola? Water, cold? Cervesa? Cola? Aqua frio?" they shouted in the same flat tone, dozens of men wandering up and down the sand. "Massage? Good massage?" the ladies asked, going from beach towel to beach towel.

I alternated between swimming through the waves like an overgrown Nemo and drying out on my towel. Even now, hours later, I can still almost feel the movement of the ocean in my bones, like the waves are still surrounding me and are just about to sweep me over by force. I once read a study about the reason why people like shores and waterfalls so much is because the water breaking releases more oxygen into the air. That's how I feel now, like I've taken a deeper breath of life, like my body is lighter now for all the sun and water and sand it got today.



Getting back to my hostel, I had some time to talk to the hostel owner for the first time. He's a young guy from Crete, 26-ish, and the co-owner is a silently surly older woman that I found out is not his mom, like I'd initially assumed. He's a party animal. I haven't really talked to him before because he was too busy promoting partying with all the other people. Even today when we talked, it was with a continual reference to some beach party going on that I had to continually turn down. I feel really out of place in this hostel. Everyone is only interested in partying, which is the norm at hostels, but it's so small that there're no real place to get away from it except on my bed. That's where I've spent most of my time when I've been back here and it makes me feel like some sort of invalid constantly tucked up in her sheets. Oh well.

I did end up waking up with a wonderful new collection of bug bites. Any guesses to how many? 5? 8? How about 10? Nope, none of the above: I've got 12 bites all over, from right on my knee to on my left index finger to on my forehead (Ok, that miiiight be a pimple...but I'm going to blame it on the bugs anyway). Its pretty ridiculous! And sitting here typing all this up, I see a mosquito out of the corner of my eye zipping back and forth, taunting me as if it were saying, "And just wait until tonight!"

The beach really was wonderful. I think, though, that my favorite part of Barcelona will be the huge open-air market. The sheer selection of fresh goods offered there (...and selection of candy) is still amazing to me. I went there 3 days in a row and still loved it. I want to find something like it in Boulder. Maybe without the fish.


My flight out to Rome is very early tomorrow, at 5:55am, leaving on the last spiral of this journey through my last two countries. I got a Let's Go Student Travel Guide for this trip that was originally some 800 pages long. Before I left, I tore out all the countries I wasn't going to visit and as I've gone along I continually tore out the pages of places I left for good. Today, I tore out Spain. It's a pretty picture of what more I have left before coming home:

Location:Barcelona, Spain