Rome to Valencia

It´s quite fair to say that a lack of blogs on this program is directly proportionate to the amount of fun I´m having and with the arrival of my good old mate BJ, time spent indoors on computers has been limited.

As we speak I am sitting in a hostel in Valencia, Spain. I was able to get here by way of train from Rome through cities like Venice (Venezia), Florence (Firenze), Nice (in the South of France) and Barcelona. Yes, I have pictures for all of these places... They´re piled on in the memory of a stack of memory cards I have in my bag and in my camera. It´s a bit risky to have them only in one place but I really do have so many pictures and so little patience and time to upload them right now. On the 11th of July I will be flying out of Berlin to London. There, I am excited to be catching up with Uncle Paul and his lovely wife Karren, who have just moved there. Hopefully, here, whilst under some more stable conditions, I will be capable of backing up everything (and dishing out some photos of places between Rome and here - and I do have some belters).

Just to update you all, I did fly quite quickly through the north of Italy, spending a couple of days in Florence (a great city for art, culture and massive old buildings) and a couple of hours in Venice (I actually stayed overnight but the way train time tables worked out, I had 3 hours to see the whole city - did pretty well I thought haha).

After the north of Italy, I caught a train through the South of France to Nice where I walked the streets looking for the cheapest accomodation I could find. Ended up walking right past a restaurant where I heard some Aussie accents and with my backpack, walzing up to this table and asking how well they knew the area. Needless to say, this good old Aussie lass ripped the bag off me, put me in a seat and shouted me a mojito. I soon found out that she had done the same thing in her youth and seemed to be doing a fellow world tripper a favour. I´m sure I´ll do the same one day.

Soon enough, I got to Barcelona where I ran into BJ. Ever since, we´ve been having a great old time seeing the sites and checking out Spains imfamous night life. By some crazy coincidence, we managed to be in Barcelona for the countries largest beach party of the year. The fiesta which ate right through the night seemed to be celebrating Fire, Water and Summer. This was evident through a surpluss of mischievous fire-work activity.

So after the party, we decided to come down to check out Valencia, the home of the traditional Spanish seafood and rice dish that I adore. We havent actually had one here yet.. but we will get around to it. Still sussing out the best prices..

The other thing we´re keeping an eye out for is when and where they hold the historic bull fighting ceremonies. I am very keen to see one as I´d love to see my star sign in action! Hopefully the matador cops some too...