Barcelona, Spain, Friday September 5th

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Joel left early for his conference and we sadly said goodbye, since the next time we see him will be in January 2009 in Australia. We packed up and trudged off to the station for a trip to the outer suburb of Reina Elisenda and the hostel room where we intended to hole up and type, sleep and use the internet. The trip should have taken about fifteen minutes but after a very pleasant half hour with the suburban buildings making way for mountains and the occasional village, we suspected that we were on the wrong train. The map in the compartment had the right stations on it up to a point but now we were on a branch line heading off for an adventure that we just didn’t have time for right now. Some ladies in the carriage confirmed our fears and luckily it was possible for us to check because Keith was remembering and confidently using quite a bit of Spanish. We got off the next time that the train stopped, at a little town with dry red earth and a few buildings surrounding the station. If we hadn’t been carrying our big packs we would have been tempted to go for a walk, and if we hadn’t already booked the hostel we could have decided that this town would be our destination, but as it was, we simply crossed over the tracks and waited for a train back towards Barcelona. Surely this was an opportunity lost, I thought, but Keith sensibly pointed out that we were wanting a day of rest and catching up, not of more adventures. At Sarria we were able to change to the train to Reina Elisenda, where we followed the very clear instructions to the hostel.
There is nothing much more to say about the majority of this day, other than that we both felt virtuous for catching up marginally on our back log of writing and refreshed from taking the time to have some catch up sleep. Not a single photo was taken. Our room opened onto the light well, so the conversations of some American men rose and fell on the breeze and provided a little in-house entertainment. It was so hot that we sat about in nothing much with the window open, but I was suitably careful about not supplying any visual entertainment to the Americans across the way. Keith spent a lot of time on the internet in the cellar, with uploading the text and the photos always taking longer than it would if we were at home.
We ate every meal in our room and, after nine hours in there, I was beginning to feel like a prisoner who needed a walk in the exercise yard. The suburb was a very pleasant one, with the ancient church of St Vincenca de Sarria crowning the hilltop and acting as a hub for the streets radiating out from it. White petals strewn on the cobblestones told of a recent wedding, and the sound of music told us that a service was taking place inside. The street we followed was lined with apartment blocks and small shops and led down to a more modern commercial centre with department type stores. We simply walked sown the hill, then retraced our steps. Three girls raced past us with all of them sitting on the one skateboard, their laughter and joyous young faces a great antidote to the general quietness of the area. They skilfully applied all their shoes as brakes when they needed to stop. The supermarket was closed and the chocolate that I had a craving for would have been out of our reach if I had not spotted a small mixed business near where the girls had passed us. Outside the church, a priest in an open shirt was shaking hands with the parishioners and two tiny children tossed petals into the air.
The chocolate fuelled a bit more thinking and typing, with the thinking and remembering being a major problem after a delay of nearly two weeks. At last we slept, with an early morning to look forward to and the American tones finally stilled.