I have mixed feelings on my holiday to Barcelona. It was kinda nice, the place is really nice and there is a lot to see but after the horrible food poisoning I got on the 3rd day, and having my awesome Nokia N93 stolen, it does kind of ruin the nice events! Oh and by the way, welcome to the longest blog post you’ll ever read!

After the day with the food poisoning and after a terrible night with a terrible stomach ache I managed to get out of bed and I really wanted to get out of bed. Since our schedule was completely screwed now, we decided on some alternatives. I fired up the laptop and we looked around for some interesting/nice places to go. Some of my co-workers before leaving for the holiday, highly suggested me to visit Port Aventura, a fun park with lots of scary, mildly scary and kiddy rides. I looked up on their website and I saw that they were open on the day, so we decided to go. (although I was a bit worried as I didn’t know if it was a good idea to visit a fun park right after food poisoning. 

We left the hotel at about 9am and we went to check out at the train station for a ride to Port Aventura… Surprise Surprise! The direct train was out of order on that day and we had to take another train that passes close to another train station, and we would have to go from one train to another. The train ride was about 2 hrs long… I was bored silly.

We arrived at Port Aventura at about 13.00 we paid for the ticket and we went around exploring the park. It was surprisingly nice, and there were some very exciting and fun rides. The first one we got into was the dolphin adventure. It was a simulation of a special mission in front of a very large screen and sitting in a large “underwater vehicle” during the course of the “adventure” the vehicle we were in moved according to the directions and actions of the movie. It was pretty exciting!

Then there were the other normal rides, and I was really looking forward to go on the rollercoaster. I have never been on one since here in Malta there are no such parks. I really loved it, the feeling of such great speed was really cool, I wanted to try it again but the queue was too long!

The next stop was the tower! Although I was a bit hesitant of dropping from over 10 storeys high at over 100mph, I still was really curious on how it feels and I just decided to do it. After spending about 30 mins waiting in queue, it was finally my time to take this hell of a drop. The assistants fastened the safety belts and stuff to make sure nobody actually drops from the seat and off we go! We started rising slowly up and when we arrived on top, after a couple of seconds, we were dropped down. It was an extremely HORRIBLE feeling! My heart wanted to explode, and the feeling was really really really scary! During the fall you wont be able to breath or think… I was like WHAT THE FUCK AM I DOING HERE!!!!! When I arrived safely back to earth I felt like dying, but the feeling wore off pretty quickly and my friend was laughing his ass off at my expense! I’ll get my revenge!

After that it was mostly walking around, playing games and some other less worth mentioning rides, until we arrived to the last one! This was like a ride on a rounded thing that glides on a river that takes you around in some fake canyon and caves. At first it started out quite nicely, but then as it started to catch up some speed, the thing was bumping to the sides of the river and splashing water all over me! Then there was a sort of small waterfall that I didn’t see early enough and I ended up even more wet… and to add salt to injury, when I thought it was all over, there were some guys using water cannons on top of this “canyon” and they were blasting us with water spray and laughing their ass off!!!! I was like FUCK YOU ALL!! while waving my middle finger at them! Geez! At the end of the ride you can take your chance to blast off other people with waters spray by paying an extra 1euro… and it was really really fun!! I got my own fair shares of fuck you’s and middle fingers! Hahaha… man it was fun!

Well after that I was completely wet and cold and I had to go back to the hotel, I was too tired after all the day’s activities anyway, so we went back to the train station for another super boring 2 hr ride back! Well… what would you expect to make an unlucky holiday even more unlucky… we missed the train! And we had to wait for about 1 hr for the next one! And it was bloody 14 degrees outside! We caught the next train back to the hotel and we finally arrived back at about 9pm! Change of clothes and sleep! – I was way too tired.

The following day, we planned to try to go to Andorra, Spain’s neighboring country. We woke up early at about 6.15, went to the bus station to buy the 3hr bus ride nightmare ticket to Andorra. But we got screwed again, cos they told us they need the passport to pass the border to Andorra (since it’s not an EU country! I actually accidentally brought my passport along, but my friend didn’t, and he was furious and he started hitting a pole in anger haha. I wanted to try to go to Andorra cos I heard it’s a tax free country expecially on electronics, and I wanted to check the price of the Wii and if it was cheaper than the price I got from Barcelona, I would have bought it from there.

Anyway, our schedule was screwed once again, and we now had to change plans again. I suggested to go to the zoo, cos apparently it was quite big, and there was a large variety of animals. This was so true, cos after about 3 hrs we still didn’t see the whole thing and we were dead tired of walking by then. We stopped for lunch in a nearby restaurant and we went back on our way to explore. 

Later that day after we visited the entire zoo, we went back to the hotel. Since this was our last day we had to do the last plans for the rest of the day and plans on how to go back to the airport. Our flight back was at 6.30am and we had to be at the airport 2 hrs earlier (5.30am) and the bus ride takes about 1hr and a half (4am) and and extra 1 hr more for the metro ride from the hotel to the bus station (3am) – we agreed immediately that this would have been too much of a hassle in the early hrs of the day, so we looked up on the net for a hotel near the airport. We found a cheap hotel about 5 mins away from the airport and it cost only 75 Euro for 2 people for 1 night. We called them up and booked our room. We decided to leave in the evening so we would be at the hotel at about 9pm – spend the night at the hotel, and wake up in the morning normally to take the flight back. – that’s where more problems arise…..

When we were with the luggage on our way to the bus station, I realized that my phone was missing, at first I was calm thinking I could have just misplaced it in some luggage or in a different pocket in my bag, however I couldn’t find it anywhere! I asked my friend to call me up to check if I could hear the ringing tone… but nothing could be heard! I started to panic big time since the phone was really expensive (Nokia N93) and I had it only for about 3 weeks! Nothing else to do, my phone got stolen from my bag, right under my nose! I felt like crying and I was really pissed! We had to stop at the next station and go to a police station to report the loss of the phone.

At the police station, there weren’t much English speaking police men/woman and we had to wait a while until a proper English speaking policewoman came to talk to me.

I made the very extensive police report with all the details of the location where the phone was stolen, and the details, cost, colour, brand of the phone etc… It took about 1 hr to have it done. When I went out of the office there were another 4 people waiting to get in to report stolen stuff! Most of which were mobile phones. There was a girl who got all her documents stolen! Passport, visa, drivers licence and she was very pissed.

N.B – if you go to Spain, beware of pickpocketers

After the trip to the police station, we continued on our way to the bus station, and we arrived at about 9pm. Unfortunately (once again) the last bus to the airport was at 9pm (we lost it for a few mins) and the next bus to the airport left at 3am!!!

Thank god I had my mp3 player and my Nintendo DS to kill some time – although 6 hrs of waiting was still way too much – no matter what sort of portable game you could get. We stayed inside the train station up till about 1am, but at one point a guy came yelling about and threw us out of the station and locked the place… that sucked, outside it was quite cold! We just decided to lock our stuff in a safety box and went around walking to kill the last couple of hours, and at the same time, try to warm up.

At 3am sharp, the bus arrived, we went into the bus and spent the next 1 hr sleeping until we reached the airport. The airport was quite busy at the time, and it took me quite some time to check in my luggage and do the security checks, but once there, the rest was fairly fast and we were soon on the plane off for home… YAY!!

We arrived to Malta 15 mins earlier than scheduled, luggage pickup was quick aswell and mum was already waiting to pick me up to go pick up the new sim card from Vodafone and than back home.