Have you ever wandered through a city being blown to smithereens? We have. Our final night in Barcelona was the festival of Sant Joan, a festival in which the entire city plunges into chaos. The festival itself is supposed to welcome in the summer solstice, and as such people play with fire. Fireworks and bonfires abound- everywhere. You'd think that it would be difficult, or at least frowned upon to have a bonfire in a city street (outside of a revolution). You'd think that it would be difficult, or at least frowned upon for children to light fireworks in the street at all hours of the night. It's not. The city seems to even take a lax attitude toward the whole situation, setting up roadblocks in the intersections in which the bonfires are being set so that traffic doesn't wantonly drive through piles of burning furniture.
We went out to dinner with Matt and some of his friends, and the fireworks had already begun. We're not talking bottle rockets and sparklers here (though there certainly were plenty of those)- we sat through big fire crackers being set off in the streets with a flash like lightning and a bang that rattled the windowpanes. After dinner we all ducked and covered our way down the street, dodging the fireworks being thrown directly at us, until we made it to one of the aforementioned blazing intersections. Fathers and sons (no older than seven) were setting off all manner of fireworks in the streets, the blasts from which hit trees and buildings, though luckily not other people. Some were throwing firecrackers directly into the bonfire. It was certainly interesting to see a side of the fire simply explode every now and then.
When we decided to give our eardrums a break, we headed onto a smelly, packed city bus for the beach, where we staked out a spot amid the fires, drunks, and sketchy folks selling everything from beer to cocaine to watch the chaos. Even on the beach we weren't safe, as we had to keep a wary eye on a drunk Chilean woman gleefully setting off firecrackers in beer cans, piles of sand, and even attempting to do so in my shoe! At least she managed to keep the "salesmen" at bay by threatening them with firecrackers! We learned to stop dodging anything we heard heading into the air, and stop being scared of any fire we saw on the ground after we were hit by sand and pebbles blasted by one of the Chilean woman's explosives.
When we finally managed to get back to our hostel, we slept for a few hours before getting up to catch the train to Nice. Our first train headed from Barcelona to Montpellier (France). It was an uneventful, but ancient machine that creaked and groaned as it dragged itself along the tracks. The joints sounded like they were being pulled apart at every turn. The journey was gratefully shortened by the fact that we slept through most of it.
The next leg of the journey, from Montpellier to Nice, was aboard a much more modern train, which wound up being significantly longer than we anticipated. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere we suddenly stopped for maybe half an hour, moved slowly forward to a station, and stopped again. Thanks to a stranger's translation of the conductor's announcement, we learned that a train on the same track ahead of us had (a) hit something, (b) derailed, or (c) hit something and derailed, thus rendering us stuck as well. Apparently the rail folks had no idea what to do or how long it would take, so their estimate of our delay was anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours. We wound up stuck for a total of an hour and a half or so. Most people got out of the train and milled around for a while, which I also did, and used as an excuse to take some photos.
Once we got underway, we managed to get to Nice, where we quickly found our hotel. It's odd to have a room to ourselves here, our own bathroom, and so forth. It's also odd (and something of a pain) to not have a kitchen or bustling common room. Marc and Michael had planned Nice as a vacation from our vacation- Nice is a resort town, so there wasn't a great deal of walking around activity to be planned aside from sleeping in and sitting on the beach, staring at the Mediterranean. That's what we did today, and that's what we'll do tomorrow. It'll be nice to get to Cinque Terre, where we'll be back to busy days and exhausted nights!
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