R is for Raining Champagne

Travel Date: May 14, 2014
Cities: Barcelona, Figueras, and Geneva
Author: James Lloyd


Today started with an early 1.5 hour train ride to Figueras, Spain for me, Luke and Nick. I assume Kelsey did girly things like sleep in, go shopping, and prepare meals barefoot in a kitchen.

The train ride to Figueras was quite nice. Not a ton of stops and some very beautiful landscapes. At one point, we could see the ocean out the right window and snow-capped peaks of the Pyrenees out the left.

We arrived in Figueras around 11 and made our way to the Salvidor Dali museum across town.

In case you're unfamiliar, Dali was a bit of a kook, and while he's most famous for his paintings of drippy clocks and spindly-legged elephants, there were also many sketches, statues, and full-room exhibitions at this museum.

Here are some of the highlights...

After we returned to Barcelona from Figueras, we headed to the airport for our trip to our next destination - Geneva, Switzerland. We're already having problems with people speaking to us in French and us responding in shitty Spanish. I hope we can work though that...

It'll be a bit colder here, though we're all excited for picturesque landscapes, yodeling, playing those big Ricola horns, and observing cuckoo clocks.

The first evening in Geneva was more chaotic than the entire trip combined! We arrived at our hotel to find out that it was already sold out, but they were super helpful and paid for a taxi and arranged another hotel at the same rate. Once we got to our new hotel, Luke, Kelsey and I went out to find a bite to eat. It was about 11:30 pm at this point and everything appeared to be closed until we found a tiny bar that was still open. This is when the real chaos began.

There were two things that were immediately obvious: 1) The bartender/owner was plastered, and 2) the other people at the bar were two prostitutes and an old dude picking one of them up. Clearly we were up for hanging out to see what happened and oh man was it worth it...

To tell the whole story in paragraph form would take up too much of my vacation time, so here's a bulleted list of the events that occurred within the bar this evening:

• Carlos sneakily dropped shots of tequila into our beers
• The old man that was trying to pick up one of the prostitutes was very happy. Too happy in fact for someone who has not yet closed the deal, yet interested in a prostitute...
• A german banker came in and talked to Luke about soccer for quite a while.
• Carlos took a bottle of champagne from behind the bar, uncorked it, then shook it up and sprayed it all around the bar - on the ceiling, on the patrons, everywhere. This is when the german guy left. 
• Throughout the evening it was clear that Carlos was too drunk to care about service, so it turned into a self-serve bar (my favorite kind...)
• Carlos and his friend started playing soccer with a crumpled up napkin behind the bar. Almost certainly due to the previously mentioned champagne event, Carlos fell face first on the ground, and came up holding a bottle of tequila saying "It's OK!"
• Carlos also took quite a liking to Kelsey - she even got a few free roses out of it.