Day 9... in transit

So currently, Scott and I are in transit to Valencia. We left Nice this morning and 13 1/2 hours later we are in Barcelona for the night. I'll get to the reasons behind that horrendous travel time in a minute.

NICE: We arrived in Nice, France three days ago. It was a little bit of a shock to come back into a city after being in Cinque Terra for three days, and even the parts of Milan where we were weren't too crowded. So huge shock to the senses. But we made it to our hostel, which was this cute little flat split up into nine rooms, an extra bathroom, and a kitchen/office. The owner was this cute french woman named Martine, and she had a little girl who was absolutly adorable. Se, we walk up what feels like a million flights of stairs (yes, more stairs!) and walk in and Martine just does a double take when she sees me. She them proceeds to compliment me on my hair and tell me that it is blonde, not red. Now to me, that is funny, because my hair is the fartherest thing from blonde you can get in the states, but whatever. So for that night, and the next two days, we preceed to just wander through Nice. We go up to this really cool Villa that is famous for something (I'm not sure what because everything was in french), and hang out there for a while, see some churchs, the museum of modern art, the old historic center and market, the beach, the harbor. We literally just meandered for two-ish days. It was fun, and beautiful, if a little panama beachy for me (lots of neon lights... lots).

So, this morning, we got up at 5:00am to catch our train to Barcelona. If you want to know what a french train station looks like at 5am, I've got pictures! So that is literally all we did today, was ride on trains... crowded trains. We get to barcelona, and then we end up on the metro for more time, trying to find our hostel, on some university that is too far north to even be on the map! We are here though, and are just relaxing. Tomorrow morning we leave for three nights and 2 1/2 days in Valencia where I get to hang out with Ellen! I'm so super excited!

Here is something that I learned while in France: the french language totally stresses me out. So we ate absolutly every meal out of the bakery that was close to our hostel, and at some point I just made scott start ordering for me because I can't pronounce a word in french to save my life. And of course every time i tried, there was this huge line of people behind me, and i just sounded like a stupid dumb american. What I learned from the experince: Always take someone who can speak french and read it with you when visiting france!