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Thursday March 20th



I had an exam in the morning, and Bart was planning on meeting me in the center around noon when I would be finished with class. He was feeling ambitious because this would be his last day in Aix/France, and he had a little souvenir shopping to do. He didn¡¯t wake up quite as early as he had planned and he we had to really hurry to find the souvenirs he wanted. Our train was leaving Marseille around 3 oclock and we hadn¡¯t packed our bags at 1 oclock. I was feeling a little bit of a panic, but we managed to catch the bus to Marseille and make it to catch our train on time.

Our first train was to Montpellier and then we were to switch for a train to Barcelona. Nothing too eventful happened on the first train¡¦we made the switch just fine. Things were just normal on the second train until we decided to go to the food car to get a couple of beers. When we walked into the food train and stepped up to the counter someone behind us said, ¡°Jesse and Bart, I knew Id see you guys again¡± we turned around to see who it was¡¦neither Bart or I had any idea who this guy was, but he knew our names¡¦I thought this was some kind of a trick, I had never seen this guy before in my life, I would have sworn by that¡¦So I acted confused probably sounded like an idiot when I said, ¡°uhhh, do I know you?¡± apparently the night of St. Patricks day we were walking home and swearing¡¦I have no recollection of this, even after he told us the story, and he stopped us and talked to us¡¦I was really impressed, he knew our names¡¦I don¡¯t think there is anything in the world that makes you feel like a bigger jerk when someone remembers you but you don¡¯t remember them. Anyway, it turns out this guy is from Germany, he is studying in Aix, and he has studied in the states too. So he is fluent in German, English, French, and Spanish from what I could tell. I bought him (Dominique) a beer, because this was the first time I had been able to buy a beer for around a euro since I was in Prague. And that¡¯s what happened on the train.

When we arrived in Barcelona we got off the train with a couple of people from New Zealand who were just traveling around. They are in the pictures (Paul and Rachel) they were looking for a place to stay and so were we. I found a guy standing around and asked him which way to the downtown area, he pointed and said it would be a 15 minute walk. A 15 minute walk with my heavy backpack on is more like a 45 minute walk without it. We started this walk and after a few minutes, I realized this would be a bad idea and decided to hail a cab and ask him to drive us to the downtown area. The driver tried his best to find us a place to stay but eventually we ended up hopping out, going to a couple of hostels that were full, wandering around for a while, before I found an English speaking couple who drew me a map to Gothic Point, a new hostel with a good location.

At Gothic Point the service at the desk was very slow but eventually we got a room, put our stuff away and walked around for a bite to eat. Paul went with Bart and I and we enjoyed low prices on the good food. This was quite different than what I am used to in Aix.

After the food we walked around aimlessly, found a few bars/pubs. Since we didn¡¯t know where anything was we mostly stumbled into middle age bars, and were not too impressed. We ended up heading home at like 3 am.