Axl's Adventures In The Mediterranean: Part 2

So anyway, waking up at God-knows-when o'clock in the morning, on August the 9th we went to Heathrow to catch a plane to Barcelona. Now, I don't particularly like flying. I remember flying to Denmark when I was 8 and thinking it was pretty awesome. Imagine my shock a couple of years ago when I flew to Paris to find myself mildly crapping myself as soon as the plane started leaving the ground. Foolishly I had assumed that something I was fine with when I was 8 would be fine still when I was 25. Axl, you ageing plonker. So now, at 27 I was already crapping it when I got on the plane (I was crapping it even more on the flight back, but that will have to wait.) and I'm sure this made it worse. Needless to say, there were some tense moments. Taking off and landing, to be precise. Anyway, we made it to Barcelona, went straight to the cruise ship, got our Butlins style greeting, and found that we had a couple of hours to spare, so we decided that it would be really fucking stupid of us to not go into Barcelona.
We were in Barcelona for about an hour & a half in between getting our stuff on the ship and boarding proper, so I only got a first impression of the place, which was that I loved it. It's such an attractive city. Had nowhere near enough time to take it all in.
You soon realise that on these things though, you only really get a chance to have a flavour of somewhere, so most places end up in essence the same. Almost everywhere is beautiful & picturesque and has great sidestreet restaurants with amazing food. Never being in a place for more than a few hours means you rarely see a places faults, which makes for a very pleasing holiday of snapshot memories and opinions.

Sat 9th: Barcelona.

Spent time wandering round the centres sidestreets. Barcelona is absolutely beautiful. I want to go back sometime yes please. Barcelona had an amazing cathedral - the name of which I can't remember now and we didn't actually have time to go inside it, a really pretty square, and a guy walking the streets naked. That's most of what we had time to see.
Be careful with yer wallet/purse tho. Micaela's mum had her's nicked from out of her bag.


Sun 10th: Cannes.

Cannes was beachy. Pretty much everything was closed coz we were there on a Sunday and it would seem that the rest of Europe hasn't been quite so taken with the pursuit of money over all else just yet. Which made for a nice Sunday afternoon of swimming in the sea, eating ice-cream, seeing the line of famous peoples hand prints in the pavement near the beach (including Luc Besson & David Lynch) and wondering around the streets not going into anywhere coz everywhere's closed. Which meant that we could properly stop and marvel at the ridiculous pet shop we saw, without the scariness of actually being inside it or near the type of people who would shop there.
People in Cannes love those tiny little dogs that look like rats. There were tons of the little bastards. You know, the ones like Paris Hilton carries around with her so much that they can't use their legs properly and so are submissive enough for her to shove up her vagina and use them as tampons.
Now, people in Cannes love their little tampon rat-dogs soooo much that they have the most ridiculous pet shop in the world selling ridiculous accessories like costumes, sun visors and perfume. Yup, I said perfume. It's called (and I really wish I had a photo to prove this because it's so perfect that yer gonna think I'm making it it up) "Oh My Dog!". As if that weren't good enough in itself, it had a notice on the advert saying, in French & in English, "This product has been made in connection with animal rights workers and vegetarians." So you can use this product on your pet, safe in the knowledge that no animals got blinded or injured by the testing process and then had to be eaten to end their suffering. They made one for cats too called "Oh My Cat!" which I did take a picture of to show my mum (yet it never occurred to me to take one of "Oh My Dog!". Fool!), but I can't get it on here right now. It's a shame coz the male model they've used in the advert for it is fucking scary.
That was pretty much it. Half the time wondering empty streets (apart from the people walking their tampon rat-dogs) after spending the first half of our time on the beach. I enjoyed swimming in the sea for the first time in years, then while trying to discreetly change clothes, managed to flash about 4 kids. They giggled. I was incredibly embarrassed.

Mon 11th: Lucca & Pisa.

Lucca is a very pretty village in Italy with a big wall bordering it. It's main points of interest are a church which is kinda pretty but a little dull but faces onto a nice square which is nice to sit in when waiting for everyone else to finish looking around, and a tower that takes ages to walk up to the top of with some unsafe looking stairs towards the top but is totally worth braving it to see the area at the top which has really cool trees growing in it and provides an amazing setting to see some absolutely beautiful views from. Oh, and the fact that Giacomo Puccini either lived there or was born there. Lucca is totally obsessed with Puccini. They have statues of him and notices about him all over the place. They have bars and B&B's named after his operas. They are clearly VERY proud of him.

We pretty much just went to Pisa to see the leaning tower, which totally defies belief when you see it in person. I mean, we've all seen pictures of it and gone "Woah, that's pretty weird. I mean it like, leans a bit to the side.", but, and I'm aware that this may make me sound like a total wanker, it really doesn't actually physically come across in photos just how much it leans, coz when yer there in person, seeing this massive fucking tower that looks like it's about one accidental nudge away from crashing down, it's pretty much incredible.

On the way back to the ship, we had a fun game of "Prossiespots." A game in which you basically try to be the first person to see a prostitute. This was because we were clearly driving down the place to be for a bit of an exchange of money and bodily fluids. It was yer bog standard country road that just happened to have a lot of prostitutes hanging around, waiting for business to come their way. A couple of time we saw cars pulling off the road towards one of them for some sky rockets in flight, afternoon delight. Ohhhhhhhwuh-hohhhhhhhh, afternoon delight.
And why should they wait until the middle of a cold dark night, eh?