Growing the 'Fro in Barcelona

Dear Barcelona,

Great job so far. You are officially in the running for "Ross's Favorite European City." You get to join Berlin & Rome as a nominee. And the nice thing is you still have at least 3 days to impress me further. Keep it coming.

Yours Truly,

Ross

And because Barcelona has been so much fun, I haven't had blogging time. This one will be short on writing, but with a lot of pictures for you to feast your eyes on.

After Rome, I did 3 days in the Naples/Pompeii/Amalfi area. Unfortunately I finally experienced multiple days of terrible weather--pouring rain almost the entire 3 days. This coincided nicely with my first cold of the trip so you can probably guess it wasn't my favorite part of the journey.

Naples didn't impress me at all. I had read they have a huge trash problem, but in recent years have cleaned up the streets a little. If that's true, I would never want to see what it was like before. It was pretty disgusting even trying to walk on the sidewalks. It was like an obstacle course of trash. Wait, obstacle course makes it sound possibly fun; it was like constantly walking through a field of land mines. Anyway, Naples is famous for its pizza, or for being the birthplace of pizza, or something like that. My dinner on night 1 didn't disappoint:

Yes, I ate it all. So cheap too...I think 5.5o euro for the pizza & beer combined. One other thing I determined on my first night in Naples: it is absolutely the scariest city to be a pedestrian crossing the street. I thought Rome would win that award, but Naples was far worse. I feared for my life every time I had to cross the road.

I took a day trip to Pompeii on my second day even though it was going to rain again. My goal was to do both the Pompeii ruins & climb Mt. Vesuvius, but with the awful weather & me getting sicker by the minute, I chose just the ruins. You can see how great the weather was, but the ruins were still a cool sight to see:

On day three, the rain cleared a little and I took a train to the Amalfi Coast. I had to catch a bus to the actual town of Amalfi from Salerno, and it was absolutely amazing. I quickly realized I would never dare drive on that coastal road. You couldn't pay me enough money to do it. It's a 2-lane road theoretically, but our bus had to stop & back up plenty of times because it couldn't fit around a corner when a car was coming the other way. There's literally no room for error. I tried my best to take some pictures while on the bus (pretty amazing minus the clouds):

Of course I got off at the wrong bus stop & had to waste 20 minutes waiting for the next bus. The Amalfi area reminded me a lot of Cinque Terre, only much bigger. I squeezed in a 2-hour hike before the rain came. It was basically just walking up hundreds of stairs to the top of some of the cliffs. After drinking a bottle of wine at dinner, I did the strangest thing on this night in Amalfi. There were some kids, maybe 11-12 years old, and they were running up a staircase in front of a church over & over. I was having a beer at a bar in the square where they were, and I watched them for a few minutes...and then I joined in. What the hell was that all about? Yes, I made friends with 2 Italian kids and they cheated their way into beating me up the stairs. Sometimes holding my sweatshirt, sometimes 1 would fall in front of me so the other could beat me. Anyway, it was the most random thing I've done so far--in my life, not just on this trip.

On Sunday I went back to Rome because I was flying to Barcelona on Monday. Since the Patriots were playing in London on Sunday night, I got the crazy idea to find a place to watch it. The hostel manager directed me to a pub where the owner was apparently a huge Steelers fan & always has games on. I found it fine, but the large woman at the front door told me to leave when I said I wanted to watch the Patriots. She was dead serious, but at least she was nice enough to direct me to another pub that did actually have the Pats and other games on. I spent the next 4 hours drinking pitchers of beer, watching the Pats win, and talking trash to fans of other teams who were at the bar.

I'm now 3 days into Barcelona and as I already noted, I'm thoroughly enjoying it. There's just so much to do during the day & night. And the one thing it has going for it over Berlin & Rome is the beach...literally a 10-minute walk from my hostel & still good beach weather. I will probably do a separate Barcelona blog when I move on from here, so for now let's just do some pictures.

View from my hostel:

The "street performers" on La Rambla (giving me ideas for what to do when I can't find a job in January):

The beach:

And La Sagrada Familia (a Church/building so amazing I would trade in all the other churches I've seen so far just for this place):

Oh, and finally, for those of you who want to view the Afro progress (and for the ladies who wanna see a half naked Ross):