Touch-Down: Vic and The Costa Brava

Hey babes. I just realized that my post about leaving published wayyy late (are we surprised?) and didn't really make sense. Hope it was fun anyway!

I've been traveling in Spain for the past two weeks with my family, in an attempt to get absolutely annoyed with each other before they go back to NY and leave me in the beautiful country of love and cheese.

We landed in Barcelona at the height of noon with a fitful few hours of sleep under our belts. After shoving our bags into the rental car, we drove the hour ride to our hotel, the Parador de Vic-Sau. I tried valiantly to stay up and listen to There She Goes, (thanks for the inspiration Lindsay Lohan) but I was almost immediately slumped in my chair asleep. When I woke up, it seemed like we were years away from any heat and noise: the Parador is tranquil and overlooks the large Pantà de Sau river. We spent most of our afternoon swimming in the pool, reading while swaddling ourselves in the Parador's yellow towels, and drinking tea in order to keep ourselves awake. For dinner, we drove on the winding mountain roads to a restaurant (that I have forgotten the name of) where we ordered a comical pile of food, including a cutting board full of sausages, a platter of seafood, gazpacho, a few plates vegetables, and a pitcher of sangria, which made the drive back interesting.

         
On our second day, we drove into the town of Vic, which was hosting its market. The streets and square were filled with produce of all kinds, the occasional tray of antiques, and many booths selling piles of shirts and dresses that were attractive because of their simplicity. I think "the town market" is such a culturally important part of that #Europe Life, and even though this market wasn't the best I'd seen, I enjoyed bopping around. The streets were mostly quiet and pedestrian, with yellow ribbons placed in every free space to assert and celebrate Catalonia's independence.

Also, Siesta is a real thing, you guys. It hit 1PM, and suddenly I felt like the four of us were in an abandoned city: the morning market was gone without a trace, and only a handful of restaurants were open: we sat in one and ate, and I realized how hard it would be to find a similarly quiet moment in NYC.

  

We conked out early, and when we woke up, our two days in Vic were over. We piled in the car to head to Pau, a small town near the Costa Brava, but stopped off first in Ripoll (pronounced constantly by my parents as Ripoll) to see their famous monastery, which reportedly fostered a lot of culture in the Catalonia region. 

I just finished reading A Little Life (V intense, 700 pages, talks about a boy being harshly abused at a monastery), and so (even more than usual) I didn't quite know what to do with myself when faced with a big building founded in religion. I don't spend a lot of time contemplating god, but I often find myself looking at the arches and art of places built for/in devotion. It seems wrong to ignore the reason for a monastery's creation, and yet I'm not sure how to fit it in my brain any other way. I don't have any grand conclusion here: everywhere we went on this vacation, the tallest building was the church/cathedral, and while we visited them I tried to appreciate rather than evaluate, because I didn't know what else to do. The End.

In (equally gorgeous and quaint) Pau, we stayed at Ca la Sònia de Pau, a fantastic old house with three floors, two balconies, and a yellow (!!) kitchen with animal themed (!!) tiles. The house felt like home, which is not something you can say often about an AirBNB, especially when the town is the exact opposite of your usual stomping ground. Each road we turned on was made for a certain specific-color-scheme Italian drama: there were occasional farms with olives and fruit lining the roads, a municipal pool, 2 restaurants, and not much else. Sonia, the house proprietor, was incredibly kind, and gave us a good handful of restaurants to try, including Garimall, which was a 3-minute walk away from our house, and served me a delish cold-zucchini soup, and some of the best rosé I've ever had, which was perfect for the heat. The air was so thic that we had to take a few cold showers a day to regulate our temperatures. On our first night, my mom and I decided to pull 2 twin mattresses out on the highest balcony in the house. We slept under the wide carpet of stars as the church bells chimed every hour and pulled us slightly out of our sleep. After that, it cooled substantially, but we decided to stay in our outside bedroom for a few more nights amongst the cloudless air.

Et bien sûr, there was the beach. Many of the less populated beaches (which are the ones you must search out, especially in August) had various sized rocks in the place of sand, and in true European form, half of the beach-goers were fully naked. Regardless, the water was clean and cold, beautiful and blue. We hiked about twenty minutes to a cove over the hills, and I channeled my inner Donna Sheridan and basked to my heart's content. 

BTW: shout out to Mamma Mia 2 for affecting my life WAY more than I thought it would. 

                                                                                                                                                For a lot our lunches and dinners there was a (relatively inexpensive) menu that would offer you a huge starter, a large meat-based meal, and a dessert. Despite my undying lust for bread, I started ordering just Gazpacho, melon with ham, or other light appetizers: there's nothing like Gazpacho, and in Spain I couldn't help but order it every chance I got. We also fell in love with the Cannelloni, a Catalonian (?) dish that varied from resto to resto, but always contained local sausages under blankets of fromage.

We spent one of our beach days in a city: Girona was humid and rainy, but even the more tourist-y shops were inviting, and it was the most medieval-feeling town I've ever been in. Despite the tourists in ponchos, I felt the old seeping out of each cobblestone. Not coincidentally, it was a big shooting site for Game of Thrones (It's basically King's Landing).

We visited the Girona Cathedral, their art museum, which had 5 floors, containing some truly beautiful and unique religious art. Most importantly, I bought a GORGEOUS squishy cream-orange notebook, because OF COURSE, I need more paper products. Shhhh.

Our last full day in Spain was spent at Aiguablava, a fairly well-known beach that was terrifyingly packed (not a square inch of sand was free) before we drove across the border to France (oo la la).

OK. That's it for now folks.
I'll write up a little thing and share some photos from our time in France//the Pyrenees next, so stay tuned, and as always, you're watching Disney Channel.