xkerryw: Girona, Spain

Sunday 19th May

For the past couple of days we've been staying in a French town called Le Boulou which is just a few miles away from the Spanish border. We've walked around the town and found that it's so close to Spain that they even have some Calalonian flags hanging from windows and a lot of the residents speak Spanish and Catalonian. Catalunya is a region of Spain, which includes Barcelona, and wants to be its own independent nation from Spain. We had lunch in the town, which meant just picking a cafe and ordering the 'Plat de Jour' without being able to read the menu or anyone being able to translate so it was a bit of a surprise The waitress tried to get another local to translate for us but all he said was 'stop string'. It turned out to be calamari with some kind of meat stuffed inside and rice in a tomato and olive oil sauce. Yum. We also found a river quite near where we were parked and had a BBQ in part of the dried up river bed.

The next day we crossed the border into Spain and whilst trying to find a place to stay saw signs for some Roman ruins which was on the coast so went to have a look. We got there at 5pm so only had an hour to look round but it was free that day and pretty cool. You could see a mosaic which would have been on the floor of someones house and parts of pillars from public buildings and a really deep well.

Today we drove a little further and stopped in a city called Girona. It seems that where there is a river in France or Spain there is usually parking alongside it so we stopped there and went for a walk finding it was the last day of a week long flower festival all over the city. There were flower displays all through the old streets, giant ladybirds made out of flowers on the steps up to a church, flowers in hanging shoes in the alleyways in the streets and all the balcony's of people's houses had flowers. Down the older streets there were alcoves behind doors that flowers and potted plant displays had been installed, I'm not sure what the space would be used for when the festival was over, they were just empty public rooms throughout the streets. It's known as quite an arty city and you could tell just from how everything was put out for the festival with even most of the shops getting involved, changing their window displays to include flowers or having things made from flowers.

It rained quite a bit most of the afternoon we were walking around but it was still really busy and brightly coloured. We had a look round the History of Girona museum and the Jewish museum and had a look in the cathedral which has the biggest vaulted Gothic ceiling in the world. It was maaaassive. We went and chilled in the van for a bit late in the afternoon until it stopped raining then went back out to walk on the wall that goes around the city. It's a really old, high wall that you can walk between at the top to have a view over the city and the views were pretty awesome. It ended just behind the cathedral where there were a few little walled gardens.

I think Girona has been my favourite place that we've been to so far. Tomorrow we're heading for Barcelona!