Random/General:
- "Aiawawa!" - catchphrase of the trip, we heard a man shriek this at Weatherspoons at Gatwick whilst greedily ingesting our 7am veggie breakfasts like zombie gannets
- A moment in which we spontaneously hummed something from the Nutcracker Suite and danced like puppets
- "We ARE the station!" - a rather enthusiastic expression of quite enjoying waiting around in stations, something we've had to do rather a lot of. Reading good books (we've both been reading "If on a Winter's Night A Traveller" by Calvino, lying around on marble benches drawing faces in pen on my upside-down chin - Chin People, freaky, and making weird noises (and having weird animal noises made at us by various Spaniards...male and female)
- Watching a guy swiftly and adeptly play crystal glasses set out in front of him, each with different notes (different water levels)
- must mention again the boy-racer type taxi driver - music blaring, cigarette-readying. Reckless, slightly handsome (as is the Meditteranean theme, as I have said, time and time again), swerving terrifyingly to unwrap Starbursts. All in all highly inappropriate as Mojo was feeling sick...
- "Madrid is SO GAY" - www.gaycircus.net. We saw them setting up stuff on HUGE trucks by the park we were in on our last day, and felt sad that we couldn't continue our perusal of liberal Madridian festivals. I must say, some very attractive men were readying for the circus, but sadly the title of the show hinted at their likely unavailability.
- "and we emerge as beautiful shiny conkers" - a phrase used to simultaneously refer to and disguise the fact that everywhere we've been so far we sweat about 10 buckets per day, each. Enough to provide one week's ration of salt for a WWII family
- I can't stop laughing about/remembering the drag queen performances we saw in Madrid. The most extreme, over-sexualised, gaudy performances.... drunk audience singing along, wigs swooshing through the air like nylon whips, fake patent leather everywhere, and the heaviest makeup and most energetic simultaneous miming and dancing I've ever seen
Trains:
- (I know Jo's covered it already, but..) the first train we had from Madrid to Barcelona was amazing - cold as a fridge, super-modern design with posh LCD screens and glass informing us of our speed and the outside temperature (35°C), a film showing (The Nanny Diaries, in Spanish, but nevermind), a genuinely comfy headrest with nice reclining seats that worked smoothly (rather than after 5 minutes of your irritable wrestling and jealous glances at reclined neighbours). The views were also great, I should sort out some photos soon, from the window. That said, they're rubbish, but give you an idea of the landscape. LASTLY, we travelled at 273km/h! Beat that, National Rail.
I'll post again later. I need to eat lunch, wash my feet (mmm..they get SO dirty), recover from the shock, awe and strange delight at the absolute downpour we just had in Florence, complete with thunder, lightning, and opera on an ipod, and on top of all that we plan to go to San Croce cathedral.
See you later alligators,
Meg
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