Happy Easter!

Thursday night, we never went to bed.

But, unlike our first attempt to go to Budapest, this preemptive action ensured that we didn't sleep through our early morning flight.

However, it also meant that we spent most of Good Friday taking a kip in our hotel room.

When we finally emerged, we found Barcelona to be a lovely city and discovered that tapas can be a gamble. Our knowledge of Catalan (zero) [note to readers: contrary to popular belief, Spanish is NOT the main lanquage in all parts of Spain, rather Catalan, a mix of Spanish, French, Italian and Latin is the official language in the Cataluyna regions of Spain...would've been nice if one so-called favorite cousin who spent a summer in Spain would have told us this...] made it difficult to read the menu and we wound up with a revolting mixture of raw fish and, it gets worse, raw beef. Whoever likes such delicacies can keep them for themselves! Maybe we'll grow into it when we get older.

Saturday we made it up in time to eat brunch (thankfully the Spanish recognise that people like to sleep in on holiday and kept the breakfast bar open until noon). We felt better when we saw another couple from our flight both then and another day - we weren't the laziest tourists.

We caught the bike tour - cycling through a city that boasts, probably correctly, that no other city saw as much growth as a result of hosting the Olympics... we were definitely not even teenagers in '92 but I think I remember spending the night at Patrick's house playing Monopoly with the gymnastics on in the background.

Sunday we went to the only English speaking church in Barcelona that we could find on the Internet, and there we celebrated Resurrection Sunday with a strong representation of tribes and tongues at the International Church of Barcelona. After an afternoon at the beach, we watched The Passion with Catalan subtitles - if the movie gives you a lot to think about normally, try hearing one language, reading another, and trying to follow by recalling the verses in the only one that you know!

Monday we went sailing- well we sat on a large touristy vessel with 20 other people while 2 guys did all of the work.

Coming home we were quite annoyed with the nearly 2 hour delay to an already late night flight which resulted in us missing the train(s) we wished to catch and not arriving home until 4 am. Luckily, we watched a movie on Bree's birthday present from her parents, making the time pass more quickly. Door to door, our holiday ended up being 97 hours, so close to the century mark.

And for more stats, this trip marked our 15th month anniversary and the 10th country that we've been to together during that time (Spain, France, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Poland, the Netherlands, Monaco, the UK and the US of A; we don't count our brief transit time through the Czech Republic).

Our only Easter eggs were the Resurrection eggs that my mom sent... we just bought each other ice cream instead. And our friends over here seem to never had seen a plastic egg - all they use are the Cadbury creme-filleds by the dozens... what a marketing coup!

We're back to work, but two days in a row we've been home before dark, which is quite an accomplishment.