World War Z is the best book I've read in about forever. A fictional history of an event that happens in the future, WWZ touches on what I usually find missing in apocalyptic stories (and what I liked so much about Jericho): the breakdown of the state. Creative and clever, there are so many subtle references to events that could be further fleshed out in future stories.
The Last Assassin starts in Barcelona, which was cool for me so soon after visiting there. Eisler steps away from the "Rain" pun title pattern, but only maybe because "Torrential Rain" and "Rain Clouds" and "Light Rain" and "Raining Cats and Dogs" don't sound very tough. Also, I can't remember from books 3 and 4, but The Last Assassin might be the first of the series to not be told exclusively from John Rain's point of view, which gives you a better feel for the ladies.
Thanks for clicking on the Free Barcelona Travel Guide. There are 10 chapters total, listed at the end of this post. Check out the introduction for more information.
Our last day. A couple days earlier, we had started feeling tired of being on vacation. I know, I know, that problem tops everyone's list of "Nice Problems to Have", but still. We had saved Montjuïc for today because it was a Sunday and we didn't think they'd close an entire mountain. It was sunny and hot, the African Heat J had read about earlier in the week had come. It was about 127 degrees (check my Celsius math) and sunny. Montjuic sits on the water looking over the city and giving the opposite view as Parc Guell and Tibidabo (presumably, we never went).
There's a fort on the top of the mountain, which has been used several times throughout history to shell the city. Also, the Olympic stadium is up there, which must have made for a nice opening ceremony. There's a bus that will take you from the bottom of Montjuic to the fort at the top. If you want to avoid a sunburn, please, dear reader, take the bus. I'm speaking from experience here, but, you know, do what you want. Also at the bottom is a fountain that if you go when it's not a drought (which it was) and at night (which it wasn't), you'll see a fantastic light/fountain show. Anyway, we walked up and wished we hadn't.
After taking some pictures at the Olympic stadium, we walked over to the botanical gardens to consider the high entry cost. It looked very nice and all, but we decided against it to continue our march to the top in the scorching heat (seriously, take the bus).
Castell de Montjuïc is a fairly standard 17th/18th Century Store fort, but what makes it so cool is the crazy port right below it. We thoroughly enjoyed the view, had a lunch of Cornettos, and decided to head down. I'll take this opportunity to interrupt the travelogue and mention the sun and heat. Again.
As it was the end of the trip, we were trying to manage our Euros in such a way that we got on the plane heading to Boston with exactly no cash left. This had us in a bind when we wanted to take the cable car from the castle to the bottom of Montjuic and the only way to buy tickets was a machine that wasn't accepting our credit or debit cards. The main problem with 17th/18th century castles, as we saw it, is the lack of ATMs. With only enough cash for one ticket and about 7 useless pieces of plastic between us, we continued marching down in the unrelenting "African Heat". The reality of our foolishness was beginning to illustrate itself in the form of mild sunburns and I must beseech you, if you visit Montjuic, take the bus up and down.
We took a breather in The Jacint Verdaguer Gardens or "bulbous" gardens, which were not a replacement for the Botanical Gardens so much as lovely park to collapse in the shade and marshal energy for our continued march. A respite from the unrelenting assault of the sun. The park was dried by the drought, but had plenty of children playing and families picnicking.
Just below the bulbous garden was a street with a restaurant, metro buses, and information booths. We knew a funicular was supposed to be somewhere on this hill and thought the information booth would be able to tell us how far. Unfortunately... well, not to mince words, but the girl in the information booth didn't know anything about the funicular and didn't know where it was when we showed her the map. The funicular was literally 35 yards across the street. Finally the funicular came and took us off this Godforsaken hill. May we only return under somewhat cloudier conditions. Try not to miss the Fundació Joan Miró, I think we would have loved it if we had planned this morning better.
After alighting from the funicular, we decided to make one more wide loop of this eminently walkable city, hitting the Born and Barri Gotic again for memory, and for the first time exploring the Port area. The Port includes an extension of La Rambla called La Rambla del Mar, which is essentially a funky drawbridge. The drawbridge is a walking path separating the marina and a crazy futuristic mall. They let the boats out of the marina at regular intervals and try not to be stuck on one side or the other. It turns into bedlam as people keep moving towards their destination in that human trait that has them moving forward even as there is nowhere further to go. The mall is out on a mini-island and likely caters to cruise ships, but we were too tired to explore fully. If we had known about it earlier, we might have come here to do any shopping we had intended to do. As it was, we completely struck out on the Barcelona shopping experience. On our way home, we stopped ever so briefly at a Spanish flea market and confirmed that junk is junk no matter what language.
We heroically made it back to the hotel and rested up for dinner while reflecting on our trip. Just kidding. We were so devastated by the heat that I don't even remember this couple of hours. Wanting to make one last trip to our favorite part of the city, La Placa de Maria del Mar, we decided to try dinner at Taller de Tapas
We got to Taller de Tapas around 9 and illustrated the point beautifully that the reason we hadn't had waits at restaurants all week was because we were getting there before the late night dinner rush. We waited about 35 minutes, a wait that would have been much more pleasant if we hadn't decided to wear our cranky pants. I liked this place... We got a pot roasty thing that was awesome, pan y tomate, patatas bravas, green beans that were delicious and then, since it was our last night and we hadn't yet, gambas al ajillo. These weren't very good, but overall, Taller de Tapas is a win. Try to sit across from the restaurant in the courtyard so you can be serenaded by the duo of singer and guitar player playing along to a boombox.
After dinner, we did one more spin around the Placa, getting gellato from the good gellato place (the smaller of the two) and happening upon a tiny shop with a TV just as Spain won a Eurocup match against Italy advancing to the quarter finals. All the way back to our hotel, there were shouts of joy, sky rockets and roman candles, and cars honking. It was a cinematic ending to the perfect vacation, just as this would be a cliched ending to the perfect Free Barcelona Travel Guide. If only we hadn't had to fly home.
Waking up early the next day, we walked to the train station and got to the Barcelona airport a couple hours ahead of our flight. Spain's amazing propensity for travel lines (as evidenced by customs on our first day) was again displayed in the check-in line I waited in without moving for an hour and fifteen minutes. There was some excitement when luggage was left unattended and someone told a guard. The missing person had been using their luggage to save a place in line. Tsk tsk tsk. We made it through in the nick of time only to land in Madrid and have our Madrid to Boston delayed SIX HOURS! I prefer to think of the above paragraph as the end of our trip and this travel day as the re-entry into the real world. Hope you enjoyed this guide and that you have fun in Barcelona!
Hard Rain is number two of six, and is sort of indistinguishable from the others in the way I would probably feel about any series of books if I read them in quick succession. The specific naming of different scotches and jazz performers began to grate in this book, but again, likely because of the quick succession I read the series in. Unlike the first book, this one had scenes seemingly written with a movie in mind.
Rain Fall is the first in a series of six (so far?) smart books about a Japanese-American assassin who loves whiskey and jazz. I read books 3 and 4 on vacation a couple years ago and then read 1, 2, 5 and 6 in the last month. I should stay away from books like this because they're really like crack to me, but perfect for vacation or commuting.
This book was a completely engrossing read, and was way weirder than I expected it to be. Although I enjoyed every minute reading, I was unsettled by how many plot threads were left unfinished, and how the rules of Murakami's magical world were never explained in any internally-coherent way. Maybe that's my limitation as a reader.
Thanks for clicking on the Free Barcelona Travel Guide. There are 10 chapters total, listed at the end of this post. Check out the introduction for more information.
It was on this day that the realities of staying at a gay hotel began to set in, but only in that the realities of staying at a gay hotel are that there aren't any women down at breakfast besides J. Earlier in the week, it was impossible to notice because we were the only ones at breakfast. Today was very hot, so why not spend the morning lounging on the beach reading trashy novels? In any case, that's what we did until lunch. We had a smoothie at Parrots Terrace and then light sandwiches at Mostaza right next door before, uh, going back to the beach to read trashy novels for the afternoon.
Douglas at Parrots who had steered us so rightly to The Beach House on our first night in Sitges suggested Mezzanine. We weren't AS thrilled with Mezzanine, but only because of the incredibly high bar set by The Beach House. The atmosphere was lovely, the service charming, and the tempura de gambas had eyes. The food was presented amazingly, but unfortunately, there was something missing from the taste. The chocolate cake for dessert, however, was out of this world.
Thanks for clicking on the Free Barcelona Travel Guide. There are 10 chapters total, listed at the end of this post. Check out the introduction for more information.
About an hour and a half from Barcelona/Sitges is the monastery Santa Maria de Montserrat on top of the mountain/hill Montserrat. We decided to go there one of the days we were in Sitges, and instead of having to take a train back to Barcelona and then one up to Montserrat, we decided to rent a car. For some reason, I had the same irrational fear of driving in Europe that I have of sharks. I wasn't sure what could go wrong, only that something would, and I'd be less able to deal with it than usual. Renting a car in Sitges was something of a chore. We went into a travel office last night that suggested the Avis down the street. We went into the Avis office and the guy said he might have a car sometime this evening for 80 Euros, but we should check back today. We went into a travel agency at the end of Sin Street (across from the hamburger stand) and they rented us a car for 40 Euros. We picked up the car from a garage this morning and we were off, haphazardly finding our way out of Sitges and onto the highway.
We were cruising along pretty well, following our directions, until suddenly, none of the directions made any sense. (It turned out there were two exits with the same name, though we couldn't have known that at the time.) This was it, in my mind, and I was ready to take this driving adventure back to the garage and read trashy novels on the beach. But J insisted we persevere so we stopped at a gas station where she acted as interpreter. "Estoy perdida", she said to the romantic truck driver. "Todos estamos perdidos en la vida", he responded with a twinkle in his eye, "Sigame, le muestro la carretera." ("I'm lost." "In life, we are all lost. Follow me, I'll show you to the highway.") The truck driver had us follow him for about 5 miles until he got us back onto the highway we needed to be on and we never strayed again. This interaction was my favorite of the trip.
Montserrat is actually the city below the mountain. Once you get there, you can take a train to the top, or drive up on a steep, windy road that reminded me of some roads in Hawaii. I took it slow as there were folks driving down and also a good number of bikers riding to the top (psychos!). The monastery is beautiful and literally cut right into the side of the mountain. In front of the entrance, there is a circular pattern in the stone where several people were getting their picture taken with their arms out, eyes closed, and shoes off. Everyday at 1, the choir sings, so either try to be there for that, or avoid it because that's when the most people are there. I'd never heard the term funicular before going to Spain (it's a type of train that goes up steep inclines), but we took one up to a higher part of the mountain. From there we were able to hike for 20 minutes or so to get to a 500 year old hermitage that that formed a hamlet of sorts with other dwellings carved out of the side of the mountain. The hermitage was a replica, because, interestingly enough, the original had been destroyed about 200 years earlier by marauding French. We went back down to the visitor's center where we lunched on Cornetto. All in all, Montserrat is great and worth seeing, but I suggest taking the train from Barcelona. It runs every hour and takes you all the way up to the monastery.
On the way home, we took an alternate route that hugged the beautiful coast for a time. I was relaxed enough about driving in Europe at that point that we checked out Spanish radio. This was unfortunate because we happened on to that cursed Umbrella song. By the grace of Sitges, we made our way back to the right part of town and parked the car a short walk from the rental office. We found out later that I had left the lights on, but they didn't seem to mind. After a brief respite in the hotel, we napped on the beach in the dwindling sunlight.
We couldn't decide where to go for dinner, which resulted in us wandering aimlessly until we ended up at Restaurante Taiwan across from Al Fresco. I have a thing about trying Chinese food in various locales and tasting their Peking Raviolis. I'd like to say you can tell a lot about a city from the raviolis, but that would be silly. Restaurante Taiwan's version are called empanadillas and receive passing marks for tastiness.
After dinner we went on a hunt for gelato. In attempting to determine which of the four places to go, we asked the girl behind the counter if they were selling ice cream or gelato. She asked the difference between gelato and ice cream. For the record, gelato has less fat and no air added for a creamier taste.
Instead of using what happens in the story to describe what it's like to work in an office, Then We Came to the End writes in the first person plural. Successfully, too. I wonder what Josh Ferris will do for his second book?
Thanks for clicking on the Free Barcelona Travel Guide. There are 10 chapters total, listed at the end of this post. Check out the introduction for more information.
Sitges is an excellent little city/town. It's small enough that you can walk all over everywhere and walk by the same streets until they become familiar, but big enough that it's still interesting to see everything a couple times. Right by our hotel was a block without an official name, Calle del Pecado, or Sin Street, with cafes on either side of the road. The outdoor tables for the cafes are lined up 4 deep to give the maximum amount seats for people watching. This was my favorite part of Sitges, I thought of it as walking the gauntlet. Watching people people watching is more fun than I would have thought.
As I said yesterday, the weather became perfect about as soon as we got to Sitges, so we were excited to head to the beach after slathering on the 800 SPF sun block J had gotten for us. The hotel was a block and half from the beach, so we were basking in the sun reading trashy novels in no time. This being a European beach on the Mediterranean, you should be warned that there are a fair amount of Speedo bathing suits for the fellas, and not all of the ladies wear both parts of their bathing suit.
After about 2 hours of basking and trashy novels among the half-decent Europeans, we walked over to a Creperie on the corner of Sin Street for lunch. Has anyone ever had a bad crepe? I doubt it. By that point, we were exhausted and needed a nap, after which we promptly went back to the beach for several more hours of basking and trashy novels.
After another nap, which admittedly I spent reading trashy novels, we headed out to find some food. Douglas at the hotel had suggested Al Fresco as the 2nd best restaurant in Sitges, but we ended up at their sister restaurant next door, the Al Fresco Cafe. J got the menu del dia which came with vegetable soup, lasagna, and this delicious mango bread for dessert. I can't remember what I got, but I remember liking this restaurant, so it must have been good.
In the Esquire article about Roger Ebert a few weeks back, Ebert mentioned his interview interview with Lee Marvin as one of his favorites, and now they've republished it online.
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