These are crucial words when traveling in Spain and as many times as I’ve gone to Mexico, I had not really learned to say them quite right.  But as we discovered, women in Spain are more likely to be able to use el baño for free than men are and I got very good at saying that phrase – as well as “gracias” “hola” “muy bueno”. I’m sure I got by because most of them speak english – but at least I tried.  On Tuesday we took a trip up to the brave coast or costa del Brava.  It’s very beautiful but to get there you have to go through three toll booths that cost €12 (euros) each to drive through.  Our guide (whose name I can’t recall and B never remembers anyones name so he’s no help. If I remember I will come back and put it in) told us that the tolls have long-since paid for the highway but the Spanish government refuses to remove them.  They are the only tolls in Spain and they make a lot of money off of them.  This is when we heard about how Barcelona (formerly known as the country Catalunya, with a different language that sounds more like French than Spanish – Franco took it over and outlawed the language and killed all their royalty and politicians) would like to secede from Spain but because Spain’s primary source of income comes from Barcelona, they can’t even get it on the ballot.

Our first stop was at this medieval city Pals.  I loved this little town that sat on a little hill with people still living there along with a few cute stores.One of the cool cottages near the top of the town.B would like to replicate this wall somewhere sometime.Then we headed down to see the beaches.  FF: ALL beaches in Spain are topless but it is illegal to be topless in town (women and men), but it is perfectly legal to be completely naked in town.  It wasn’t tourist season yet so the beach was not crowded but we had a little bit of a shock from the few beach goers (not pictured) since we didn’t know that fun fact yet.  We ate at a restaurant by a lighthouse at the top of a beautiful view of the mediterranean sea and was served some sub-par seafood paella, disappointingly. Location location, location.  All the rich Russians and europeans buy homes here and spend their summers.

For some reason that our hotel concierge (Manuel) didn’t explain to us and we didn’t argue with him, the hotel upgraded our room to this charming hideaway with our own garden balcony.  The wall of the hotel was part of the old Roman wall.  It was back in this narrow walkway where cars couldn’t get to, but close to everything so we walked everywhere. These small hotels are nice in so many ways, but if you want to be anonymous and come and go unnoticed, don’t stay in one of these.  He did have a lot of great recommendations, directions and comments about our tourist activities.I think everyone we talked to before we left that had been there before warned us about keeping our bags close and our purses zipped, as there are a lot of sneaky thieves about.  Our first morning after arriving, B woke up super early and went outside to walk around only to witness several drunken partiers just leaving clubs (FF: the bars stay open until 6 am on weekends), one couple get into a fight using colorful Spanish obscenities and then he watched as an older couple checking out of a hotel and loading luggage into a taxi, one of those sneaky thieves ran up grabbed one of their bags and took off through the very narrow streets.  He was chased by the man and taxi driver but was not caught.  During the daytime, thank heavens, we saw no more of that.

No one eats dinner there until after 8:30 at night, if you want to eat earlier they know you are American but you can get a table no problem.  We did find a great restaurant on Yelp one night and sat right across from a mom and 18 year old daughter who had just finished her freshman year from Ohio.  We had a very interesting conversation about the Marriotts (whom she used to work for and are not the best examples of lds people), the craziness of this election year and how much she wished Mitt was back in the race. We meet some of the most interesting people on our travels. That reminds me of a joke I heard the other day from a friend:

Hilary and Donald are flying in an airplane together and it crashes.  Who survives?…….

America