Life

Part IV

Montse picked us up at the train station and took us to her hotel, the Hotel Figueres Parc. http://www.hotelfigueresparc.com/ It’s a small hotel but it was nice, a bit outside the town. We were all starting to feel better by this point and they offered us drinks when we arrived so who could turn that down? We noticed that there was a big white tent set up out by the pool and there were a lot of preparations going on but that didn’t seem so unusual for a hotel. What was unusual was that it was all for us.

They had prepared this big party in our honor and invited many of the couples from the cruise. There were probably 20 people that came over for what I have always called “the feast”. Now, we were all 26 year old kids and very unimportant in the grand scheme of things but these new friends had gone way out of their way to welcome us. The hotel chef was manning the grill and the party began with drinks (of course) and appetizers of seafood. I remember this octopus sitting on a big plate and people would just come up and cut a big chunk of tentacle off it. That was about the only thing that I didn’t eat. The rest of the dinner was first class, steak, lobster, sausage, shrimp, etc. We found out later that lobster is very expensive in Spain and that people normally only had it during Christmas and on very special occasions. We all had a great time and the feeling was “I can’t believe they did all this for us”. We often had a difficult time talking to our new friends but I did my best to translate for everyone and Shep remembered a little bit of Spanish and Horner swore he could speak it when he had a few cocktails in him. Our friends spoke Catalan, which is a dialect of Spanish but different then what I learned while in Madrid. Besides the beer, they were pouring wine for us and they had this glass container with a thin spout on it that they would pour wine into our mouths with. It was almost like a glass bota bag and it was fun. They also made us drink whiskey and coffee but none of us enjoyed that. But we did it.

We relaxed after dinner but things were just getting started. They wanted to take us out on the town and we all piled in a bunch of cars. I had one of the crazy husbands and he drove like a maniac. I was pretty sure that my life would end in Figueres but that was okay. When we got down to this little bar someplace by the ocean, the Mayor of the town was there and he presented each of us with t-shirts from the city. I still have mine somewhere, I need to find it. They read “Terra, Mar I Pau” which loosely translates to Earth, Sea and Peace. I think. We all put them on and drank some more beer. They had something neat there and we would see it again on our travels. Meters of beer came in a long wooden tray and there were 9 draft beers on it. Which was perfect for us, we would each grab one and split the 3 remaining. Our amigos wouldn’t let us pay for anything.

Next up was a nightclub. They had a pool inside it and we all got separated. There might have been some dancing; I know there was some drinking. They gave you a card when you came in and you put all your drinks on it and paid for them when you left. Pretty neat but our friends wouldn’t let us spend a dime. Or peseta in this case. We left for the next place, two guys shy of six. We didn’t know where they were but we were on to another bar, this time more of a neighborhood place as opposed to a disco. I did my best to dance flamenco or whatever it was with one of Montse’s friends but that probably wasn’t the prettiest sight. George’s neck almost snapped off when he passed out/fell asleep in the bar. I still can’t believe a neck can go 90 degrees like that. At some point, it was time to call it a night and they drove us to a hotel in the city. I understood it to be Montse’s dad’s hotel and the four of us shared two rooms. They wouldn’t even let us pay for our hotel room!

The next day, Montse came and picked us up and took us back to the Hotel Figueres Parc. The two guys who went missing from the night before were there, they had slept outside near the pool. To this day I can’t believe they found their way back. We lounged around the pool before getting into the cars for a trip into town for lunch. Flora, one of the other ladies, apparently owned this restaurant and she led us back to the back patio where they had another big table set up. It was certainly not as big a party as the night before but she pulled out all stops. The food kept coming and we stuffed ourselves. But no drinks. What’s a guy to do? I told them we hadn’t tried Sangria yet so they started to bring out pitchers of it. And pitchers. Later I made the mistake of saying that this was better than the stuff we had in Barcelona and we were busted. Of course, they wouldn’t let us pay for anything. We had a blast and eventually walked down near the Dali Museum and got our photo taken in a plaza. Did we stop in a bar down there?

It was time for us to head to Nice. Figueres was a blast and we were treated like royalty there. Montse drove us back to the train station and I remember the Chris Cross song “Jump” coming on the radio. It was popular a few years before the trip and it was mostly him rapping and people dancing to it would jump and jump. But this version went like this “Chris Cross dice levanta levanta” instead of Chris Cross says jump jump. So we had to jump out of Montse’s car and jump. She wasn’t happy but what’s a few guys to do when they have had a couple pitchers of Sangria?

We had to wait an hour for our train to Nice. Someone broke out a bottle of vodka and we found some mix somewhere. Problem was we didn’t have near enough mix so in the end we were sitting there drinking straight vodka. It’s a wonder we even found the train. French Riviera, here we come.