Writer's Block

As usual I have been doing too much living and not enough blogging (or is that the other way around?), so I thought I would share some pictures from a few places I've traveled to:

Andorra - this is a very small country near the French border of Barcelona that survives almost solely on tourism for its nice sky slopes. As in most countries that depend on tourism, Andorrans are really mean to tourists. Apparently its citizens don't pay taxes, and the national language is Catalan, two reasons for which Cristina would like to live there. Me, I'd rather just go there to sky every one in a while, but I have to admit it’s nice to not pay sales tax on anything. Cigarettes, especially, are really cheap.





Sitges - this is a small beach town south of Barcelona known primarily as a haven for bourgeois gay people. It's a really nice place to take a breather from the (relatively!) big city-ness of Barcelona, and I went there with some friends to do just that. Also, it is known for having a great Carnival celebration. What is Carnival, you ask? It's essentially Marti Gras for Catholics, and yet (another) excuse for everyone to get drunk and dress up in crazy costumes. It was fun, but Sitges is a bit too small to handle that type of craziness, and it filled up waayy too much with drunken idiots. Who would have known?







Valencia - Cristina's dad is technically from a village on the Valencian side of the Valencia/Catalunya border, but he apparently is ashamed of it and just says he's Catalan. Valencians and Catalans don't get along very well, partly because Valencians speak a dialect of Catalan that they *think* should be its own language. Language politics in Spain are kind of ridiculous sometimes, because "Valencian" is exactly the same fucking thing as Catalan. Anyway, what the Hell was I talking about? Oh yeah, so Valencia the city (not the region) isn't all that special, but they have an awesome festival every year called Las Fallas, in which they build giant statue-type things and then set them on fire. Not a bad idea, eh? The Fallas (as they’re called) are massive, sometimes as big as a six-story building.










Florence – Italy reminds me more of Mexico every time I go back. The really nice people are from the more dangerous areas in the south where the Mafia runs everything (just like the Narcos run every thing in the most open and friendly parts of Mexico) and the more safe parts of both countries are so touristic it’s almost embarrassing. Florence is probably a bit of both: the center has more Americans than Italians in it, and getting into the museums is almost impossible because you have to wait a minimum of three hours in the giant lines filled with student groups. Some of those students basically treat the entire thing like a vacation – for example, we met a bunch of Swiss German architecture students who were ridiculously drunk at a bar on our last night in Florence, and they were actually quite nice, but very, very drunk. I didn't manage to get any pictures of them. I did get quite a few nice scenery pictures, though, and a picture of the statue of David that I had to take very covertly because there are many undercover Picture Preventers in the museum that houses it. Here it is: