Barcelona, to me, is the best city in Spain, and I might go as far as to say the best city I've visited on my trip yet. Having just passed the halfway point on our trip Zac and I had a surge of 'carpe diem', sensing that our time remaining might fly past. As always, it seems, we had trouble finding our hostel at first, not because of our poor navigational skills but because of misleading signs like "blah blah blah metro" (spanish stuff) and an arrow, which it tu...

Valencia... I'll never eat napolitana sauce again. Valencia was a very significant city for me in a lot of ways. It was our first time sharing an apartment with the five of us. It was where we celebrated Gavin's birthday prematurely (Zac and I will be in London for the real deal). But most importantly it was the setting for the Tomatina, which we had been fantasizing about for a good 10 months, which we planned our entire trip around, and which marked the nostal...

We were in Grenada for all of 40 hours, so it was a bit of a pit stop really, but a lot of fun. Zac and I stumbled into the other boys on our way to the hostel, and excitedly shared stories of the two cities we had each visited. That night we went on a Tapas tour organized by the hostel, by the tapas was like frozen pizza and stuff so we split and made our own tour. Later the same night I had a lovely jam session with a British guy on a ancient keyboard and a tam...

Marbella is not a backpacking destination. Not in the slightest. We arrived, put our stuff down and immediately met up with Rachel, one of Zara's friends from when she lived in England. It didn't take long to realize that we weren't in Spain at all, more like Little England. Absolutely everyone was British in Marbella, to the point that after just a few days we began to pick up the accent. If we stayed a week we'd be speaking like the queen. Still, I refuse to e...

Madrid has been a very different experience to the rest of my trip so far for two main reasons: the French and World Youth Week. As I explained last time, Zac and I accepted an offer to split an apartment for cheap with six French girls who gave us a taste of authentic French cuisine 3 meals a day for 4 days. When we went to the supermarket at first I was worried by the fancy stuff they were buying, and the stuff we had just never heard of, like creme fraiche (w...