Today we walked a million miles.

Alrighty -- Barcelona highlights and then a bit of Lyon:

We saw a bunch of different Gaudi buildings: Casa Batllo, Casa Vicens, Casa Mila (La Pedrara), and we also spent a couple of hours in Parc Guell and walked around the permanently under-construction Sagrada Familia.  Our CS host, S, told us that the Sagrada Familia is supposed to be finished in 2015 but probably in the year 2015 they'll say it will be finished in 2030.  Or something.  The castle-like building is built using only donations to the church and the money from entry fees.  So whenever they run out of money, they stop construction.  Donnie and I were disappointed at first that there were so many cranes and other construction things in the way of our view, but now we feel like we saw an ongoing part of history.  Pretty cool.  Also, it gives us a good reason to go back when it's done.  Just like the Harry Potter section of Universal Studio in Florida.  Except in both cases, we want to wait a bit for the initial crowds to die down.  Anyways.

Other points of interest... This ended up being a crazy time to visit Barcelona because there was Carnival, a weekend long celebration of joy and happiness before Lent starts.  Kind of like a drawn-out Mardi Gras.  There were kids in costume everywhere we went, including an awesome 3 year old with a drawn-on moustache.  There was a parade but on our way to the parade, it started pouring, so we didn't last long there, and went back to our hostel to dry out.

We ended up staying at S's house for three of the four days planned, leaving a day early to go stay in a hostel in Barcelona.  She was a lovely host, preparing us for public transportation, loading us up with maps and advice for what to see, but we were staying in a rather drafty room on a thin pad on the floor, and her house was about an hour away from the center of Barcelona by public transportation.  We were ready to step out our door and walk into the center of the city.  The hostel we found was right along the Mediterranean Sea and it had a slew of interesting people.  We ate breakfast with two Russian girls, a German dude, a man from England, and another American (whose friend is also an assistant!), while staring at the sea.  Lovely.

The next day, we headed to our previously-reserved hostel/hotel.  There was a loud child there, but otherwise it was lovely.  That day, it was Valentine's Day, so we went to dinner at a restaurant called Dostrece (213, the area code of the guys who opened the restaurant, who were from LA) and shared a lovely meal for couples only complete with tapas style hors d'oeuvres, lasagna and blue cheese gnocchi, and dessert, and complimentary champagne and wine.  Donnie and I are hardly wasteful people, so we did our job of finishing both the bottles of alcohol.  Oops.  The next morning, the lovely city of Barcelona became my own personal Barfalona.  That's all I'll say about that.

We spent a terrible day of travel to get to Lyon the day after V-tine's day.  I had a major gueule de bois (or, and for Cameron, a katzenjammer) and Donnie wasn't feeling so hot either.  We took a train to the airport, waited in lines at the airport to check in, took an hour long flight to Lyon, took a 45 minute bus into the center of Lyon.  Oy.  But we arrived and met our Couchsurfing hosts here.  They (I and K) are great.  I and K are a German couple who have lived in France for years and years.  They both use German, English, and French in their jobs and have Russian and Spanish skills as well.  Amazing. 

I (our host; it keeps looking like I'm talking about myself but I'm not) took us on an incredible backdoor tour through Lyon today and we shared two meals with them.  Last night, Donnie and I made a recipe from a vegetarian cooking magazine that Gram (Donnie's grandma) gave us.  It was a stuffed baked eggplant dish.  Delicious -- thanks, Gram!  And we accompanied the meal with a fajita salad: basically, we took the ingredients we use to make fajitas and stuck them on top of some mâche (this kind of lettuce-ish stuff here that we like a lot) and drizzled my dressing on it.  Also a great thing.  Tonight, I (host again) made dinner for all of us -- he made this dish called quenelle, a typical lyonnais meal.  Except he made it vegetarian.  It was verrry tasty.  Success all around.

We're off to Avignon tomorrow to go visit my former host family and to show the town off to Donnie.  We're wishing we had one more day to explore Lyon, but at least we had a little bit of time to know that we definitely want to come back here someday!

Over and out.