Barcelona, Spain

October 29, 2007
N41°23.190
E002°10.480

Our neighborhood has great little Tapas Bars, loaded with all of the Spanish classics such as albondigas, pulpitos en salsa, patas bravas and croquettes. Some of the places are fancy with bottled wine; others serve house wine or sangria directly from the carafe or pitcher. We tend to frequent the places where you can get wine by the carafe. The tapas bars are definitely a highlight of Barcelona, well, that and seeing some familiar faces for the first time since we left Dad and Pat in Rome.

Marc has a former co-worker who currently resides in Barcelona. He is originally from Spain and after the dot-com crash left him out of a job he moved backed to his home land. It has been three years since David Castillo left the Bay Area and headed back to Mallorca, Spain. He has since bounced around between Madrid, Mallorca and Barcelona and we were lucky enough to catch up with him today.

I also have an old college friend, Ana Esteban, who recently moved back to Spain after living between Sacramento, Davis and the Bay Area for several years. She even lived in Santiago, Chile for a period of time until last year. She is also back in Barcelona after several years living abroad and starting up a new spa (that was recently mentioned in Vogue Espana—and it hasn’t even opened yet!). We plan on catching up with Ana in the next few days.

The irony of the whole story is Ana’s brother, Jordie, who also lived in San Francisco in the early 2000’s played soccer with David and they know each other quite well. It makes you realize how small the world really is—especially when you’re 7,000 miles from home and familiar faces help you feel like you’re just around the corner.

Hopefully we’ll get the whole gang together for some tapas during our stay in Barcelona.

Other notes: Today is the official nine month milestone for our trip. It’s crazy to think we’ve been traveling together, and putting up with each other, for nine whole months… but we have. We still have three months to go, but we know those months will fly by quickly—just like the last nine.