Today finally marked the start of our Eastern European vacation. Both Mari and I had wanted to do this trip for a long time, so we were pretty excited. Over the next couple of months we would probably visit at least ten countries, with lots of different languages and cultures, and get fat on lots of strange food....

We left the apartment. It definitely felt a bit weird to think that I wouldn't see Pontevedra for at least two months. It felt like the movie Inception or something like that - a trip within a trip. Australia seemed further away than ever.

First, we caught a bus towards Porto so we could catch our first flight. Spent a few hours in Porto, had lunch with Roberto, the Chilean Erasmus-in-Pontevedra dude who was going to Germany.

Later, we took our flight in the evening towards Barcelona airport, where we would have to stay overnight, as our flight to Helsinki was early the next morning. Mari fell asleep very quickly (of course), while I struggled. To pass the time, I started to watch Shoah, Claude Lanzmann's incredible nine-hour documentary on the Holocaust made back in 1985. I wanted to immerse myself into some of the history of this event, because I knew I would be seeing a lot of stuff related to it in the following weeks, and it definitely made a difference to know some of the personal stories related to places that I would end up visiting.