Aidan Delaney’s weblog

I can’t get through to some people still (most notably Lori). So I want to wish Lorraine a big happy birthday from here. And I suppose I should post up somthing about my travels.

I flew Ryanair to Girona. The weather in Dublin was crap and I was glad to see a nice dusky mediterranian evening when we touched down in Girona. Girona is 110km north of Barcalona. Getting to Barcalona was easy, I took the provided bus. However, we were let off at some place in Barcelona and I had no idea where the train station was. I wandered around for an hour and a half untill I figured out which Metro lines to get to Sans Estacio, which means Sans station. It all seems easy in hindsight, but I was actually looking for Barcelona Sans, as per my directions from the course organiser, and there are three stations with sans in the title in Barca, Placya de Sans, St. Sans and Sans Estacio. I made the train to Tarragona with 5 minutes to spare.

I shared a cabin on the train with a Dr. from Greece who was convinced that everything has a greek origin. He was exactly like the character in the film “My big fat greek wedding”. Did you know that Ireland was founded by greeks? Seemingly the story is that one of the sons of Hercules was the leader of the Celts. The Celts begat Ireland thus by the rules of implication Greeks => Celts => Ireland, the Greeks => Ireland. I agreed with the chap, it was easier to nod and smile for an hour than to argue. Besides, I was tired after lugging my 27kg case around Barca.

Tarragona is a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be. The buildings in the center of the town are all huge. It seems a nice spot though and I’m enjoying it. The food from the canteen is really good, which makes a change from Maynooth. I had some kind of lamb stew today where the lamb was served on the bone. The accomodation is decent too. There are five showers (for males) in my dorm which will hopefully be plenty.

I sat talking with GuanWu Liu (my roommate) this morning over a cup of Chinese tea. His english is pretty decent and I’m confident we’ll get on.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 21st, 2004 at 4:00 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.