Leaving Germany, for me, was pretty easy. I was impressed by the culture and history of this country, but for some reason, getting back to Spain was something I couldn’t stop thinking about. Although I knew we had a couple of days before I would be “moving home” so to speak, just being back in a country where I could feign knowledge of the language was, at least, refreshing.
We only spent 2 days in Barcelona and not a lot happened, so I will spend a paragraph, at most, recounting the events. Our entire existence revolved around food and booze. We walked around La Rambla, got tapas, drank beer, searched for paella, and that’s about it. On our second day, Emmy and I took the hop on/hop off bus while Brian attempted to go pick his cousin up at the airport (HA! I thought I could leave the kid to his own for 5 hours, but he didn’t seem to make it too well on his own and ended up taking the wrong train an hour in the opposite direction of the airport). 
After we reconnected with B Lee and his cousin, we grabbed paella down by the port and just went back to the hostel to go to bed. Super exciting.
But I wasn’t too bothered by our lame existence in our short days in Barcelona because we made up for it in awesomeness once we got to Lisbon. First off, our hostel was the most amazing hostel. EVER. It is so amazing, that I will spend an entire blog entry tomorrow telling you why it’s awesome and why you should make a trip to Lisbon JUST to stay at this hostel. But in addition to this, I just found Lisbon to be a really magical city. Its absolutely beautiful, first off, and located right on the water in a river inlet. We walked for a long time, down to the water, around the downtown area initially looking for a beach, but without too much direction couldn’t find one (only to find out later that there isn’t one near, and you must go about 30 minutes by bus to get to one).
The best part of this city for me was what we did once we realized that the beach wouldn’t be an option. This involved the likes of sitting down at a street café for round about 5 hours. The scene was pretty simple. Emily had a book. I had a computer and a notebook and was busy recounting the events of the past couple of days. Brian his journal and was doing much the same as myself. Each of us had a drink of choice: a jug of Sangria, a bottle of wine, a capriocha. We sat there and drank, ate tapas and listened to an amazing guitarist for hours. It was warm enough for sun dresses and I finally felt like I was getting warmer to home.
To top it off, we had an incredible dinner at McDonald’s. Don’t judge. It was incredible. And then we went back to the hostel to participate in a bit of karaoke night (that turned a bit too weird for our likings) and to watch the Simpson’s and Family Guy on a gigantic tele. It was the perfect down evening we were all looking for since we started this incredible binge drinking trip over a week before, but none of us had enough courage to ask for. It was a calmly unspoken agreement when we all retired before 11 and we all woke refreshed the next morning and ready to catch the train down to Faro.