And the end is here. Finally after 6 weeks of hiking, climbing, observing, noting, interpreting and sweating 90% of the time, I am finally back home in sunny Twyford. I say sunny because I was hoping for it to be cool and maybe even rain but actually it's 31°C so the sweating has continued.
The final few days consisted of tidying up my work and doing some last minute data collection, all good stuff to help bolster the thesis which is making good progress at the moment (well, the introduction is done anyway). Early on in the trip, we decided to end the whole adventure with a day or so in Barcelona. I remembered from my time inter-railing that a fast train from Madrid to Barcelona stops in Zaragoza. Ideal then that we could drop off the cars and then catch the train and lucky that I managed to get fairly cheap tickets on the internet.
Barcelona is not a new place for me. In fact it is the 4th time I have visited. In line with wanting to keep the trip as cheap as possible, we decided to book a hostel. Using the good old hostelbookers website (a favourite of mine) lead us to a 'very nice looking' hostel close to the Plaza Catalunya which is effectively the Trafalgar Square of Barcelona and therefore smack bang in the middle of everything we needed. All seemed perfect until we arrived at the hostel. I will not name names as it was not the most terrible place I have ever visited and actually, despite the strong smell of BO and weed, the guys we first bumped into all seemed very nice. Indeed, within 30 seconds they had invited us to a festival. However, the general feel of the place was just grim. The bed was grim, the loo was awfully grim, the shower was grim (and had things growing on the base). I like to review everywhere I go on TripAdvisor as actually it has provided a really great service to me when travelling but here I am torn. I want to give it a bad review but the people (who all seemed to work in the hostel - it was strange) were so friendly that I would feel a bit guilty. Decisions eh!
As we only had a day, it was nice to just relax and have drinks (a fair few), eat good Spanish food at the famous Bilbao Berria (my absolute favourite Spanish restaurant) and walk around the beach. As it was a Monday, most of the museums and such were all closed as is common practise in Europe.
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| The beach, Barcelona |
Tuesday came and it was finally time to get home. The usual airport monotony was stirred up by listening to some loud mouthed scouse 'girls' (covered in tattoos, piercings and an unpleasant expression etc) trying to convince everyone why they needed to skip the queue for passport control in their own unique way. Lucky me also got to experience two delayed trains on arrival in the UK, typical really. So that is the end of that. As mentioned in earlier posts, now is the time to start writing up all of my observations and then using knowledge I already have and with lots of reading, I can make my scientific interpretations. This will be the bulk of my thesis and I have a few months from now to get in the first draft.
As for my blogs, I have a family camping trip coming up this weekend which probably won't warrant a post as all we do is sit, chill and chat. I have a dinner in Oxford next week and my dearest mother is going to visit so as you can see, not a hugely interesting few weeks to come. The next big adventure for me will be my tour of Asia starting in early September for 3 weeks. I plan to visit HK, China, Japan and Singapore and of course, I will have to write about my experiences there with lots of photos to enjoy.
Until then :D
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