Desserts, a grave and Dali

I just got back from my adventure up and down Coasta Brava (the "wild coast," just north of Barcelona that reaches up in to southern France). It was beautiful, even with rainy skies. We were able to see Roman and Greek ruins, EAT (the all-caps to let you all know just how much eating I did) in beautiful costal towns, visit the Dali museum, watch TV in English, sleep in pillow-top beds with black-out curtains covering the windows and see a grave of one of the most famous Spanish poets that no one (at least on my trip) had ever heard of. All in all it was a wonderful, fast-paced trip.

Quite possibly my favorite part of the weekend was traveling to Collioure, a tiny french seaside town. We actually only made the trip to see the grave of Antonio Machado. Who is Machado, you may ask (as I did and am still wondering)? Machado was, apparently, a famous Spanish poet who was forced in to Exile during the Spanish Civil War. However, this is still the only information that I know about him. As the time approached when we were suppose to view his grave, there was a noticeable whisper throughout my 80 or so peers, wondering who the heck Machado was. We were all perplexed. But, because we were making a special stop just to view the grave we all assumed that it would be at least slightly spectacular, interesting, weird, cool, neat, pretty...

We got of the bus, made our routine bathroom stop (this time with no toilet paper, yay public bathrooms) and headed toward the gravesite. About three blocks up the road, we turned on to a side street and in to a grave yard. A regular graveyard. However, when I walked in most of the students who were simply walking in front of me in the group were already leaving. I assumed that we were at the wrong place, until a friend came up to me and said "there it is," pointing to an older-looking, but very unsuspecting grave.

We travelled to FRANCE to look at a normal grave!!!

Good thing the city was absolutely beautiful, and since we were in France I took the liberty to have two desserts with lunch:
1. A crepe (of course, nutella and bananas...nothing is better)
2. A semi-fired, semi-baked lemony pastry covered in sugar

Also, it turns out that in France, they speak French. This seems very simple, but when you've spent the past three weeks stumbling through Spanish when all you really know how to speak is English and you sit on a bus for 30 minutes, get off and are expected to speak ANOTHER language; it's a shock! I don't even know how to say water in french. So we spoke broken Spanish and everyone else spoke French and I got my desserts.

A wonderful weekend on the coast!