Meaningless, meaningless

I´m typing this from a cheap-but-lovely "hostal" in sunny Madrid.  Tom has just awoken from his slumber and we´re contemplating a trip to the big museum where Guernica is (I forget its name).

We´ve had a whirlwind trip around the Iberian peninsula, starting in Barcelona, which I found, quite frankly, a little disappointing -- all the pretty bits were packed with tourists and the rest wasn´t really worth the bother.  Gaudi park was quite good -- I´ve got a nice photo with the lizard dribbling on my head, which I was going to attach but this PC is connected to both internet and mouse by USB - grr! 

Sagrada Familia (the big spikey cathedral) was one big rip-off -- you pay 8 euros to get in and it´s basically a building site.  But we enjoyed sitting around in plazas in the evening watching the Spanish people hang around, including little kids running about until the wee hours.  It´s a nice culture.

From Barcelona we hired a car on a whim and drove down the coast to a seaside resort called Villanova, stopping off for a picnic lunch on a secluded beach we spotted... which was full of naked people!  I saw sooo many willies!  And boobies!  I was tempted to get mine out but didn´t want to blind anyone with my alabaster skin, so I refrained.

Villanova had a nice beach and a mini golf course and a Chinese lady who came past offering massages for 5 euros (well good) and no accommodation.  The unfriendly young woman in the tourist office told us there was no room anywhere along the coast.  So Rosie and Tom decided to sleep in the car. 

If you have never experienced car-sleep, it is like camping, but worse.  We had all our wet swimming kit drying out in the car and we trapped one of the towels in the front windows to block the windscreen and give us a little privacy -- the effect of which was to raise car-humidity instantly to 100%.  Plus we were in the beach car-park, which didn´t empty until about 4am.  But the advantage was that minutes after we woke we were up, swimsuited and on the beach.

We managed to get accommodation the next night, which was a Sunday, in a Roman seaside town called Tarragona.  We saw a pretty lightning storm over the sea, then the next day we were zooming back to Barcelona to catch a train to Madrid and then the Trenhotel to Galicia (the bit above Portugal).

Galicia is brilliant -- there are pretty much no English tourists so we got to practice our Spanish and it was also well cheap.  We ate lots of tapas and admired the serious-but-friendly way of the Galician people and went to a port where you could take a boat out to the Islas Cies. which the Guardian described as the best islands in the world, ever (or something).

Then it was time to get the Trenhotel back to Madrid, which is also brilliant.  Our hostal is in a thiving but dirt-cheap barrio with loads of gay clubs (there is one just round the corner called HOT).  We did the Prado yesterday.  And lots of other stuff.  But Tom is now up and ready and I have to go... hasta luego.

Does anyone want any of my old Pratchetts?  I need to get rid of them to make space for all the books Clurb sent up!

I've got most of the Discworld ones up to Thief of Time, which is where I kind of lost interest, and then the crappy sci-fi ones too.   All paperback, sadly, or they might be worth something...

I managed to get an e-mail blocked for obscenity at work yesterday!  I had to e-mail the IT Security people and eventually they got back to me to say that it got blocked because in the scanned, handwritten attachment I'd abbreviated the word "cumulative".  Brilliant!

I just bought a spoke key (for reasons too annoying to go into) and it has its name in different languages on the front.  And the German for spoke key is...

Nippelspanner.

This makes me very happy indeed.