Argentina

We left Barcelona at 10 am from the Barcelona airport. If you are ever in Barcelona you should use Rabbit Bike to get to the airport because it only costs €5/person and they take you in a car. They also rent bikes for €10 euros for 24 hours. Anyway, we had mapped out a route to get to Palariac, which is on Google Maps suprisingly. They even have street views of Palariac. Our plan was a route along the Spanish Mediterranean coast better known as the Costa Brava. The trips took about 7 hours compared to 4 hours on the highway, but it was worth it. We completed the journey in a Smart Car, which we named Pépe. I was worried that I wouldn´t be able to fit inside, but it was suprisingly spacious inside and I still had about 3 inches of head clearance even though I´m 6´3¨. It also had a good amount of power and could get maintain 75 mph on the freeway. I honestly think if I ever buy a car, I´ll buy a Smart Car, because it gets crazy good gas mileage and is comfortable. We drove 200 km from P...

From Lisbon we caught a flight to Barcelona in the cheapest, crappiest airline possilbe... EasyJet. They charge you for everything. Even 7 euros to pay for the flight. They only allow one carry-on that has to be under 10 kilos and fit in the box sizer. That´s it. So a backpack and purse counts as two things. You have to put the purse in the backpack. In the US you can have one thing in the overhead and one thing in your lap. Not here. Luckily the guy checking us in made an exception for some reason and saved us 60 euros. If you try to risk not checking it and get to the gate, they charge you 50 euros for a piece of luggage (or 60 USD). When the flight only costs $140, that´s a pretty swift kick to the nuts. Once we finally got on the plane, the seats don´t recline and they are mini seats where it only supports up to the bottom of your neck and your knees are driving into the seat in front of you. Moral of the story, although the cheap airline looks like the best deal, at the end of th...

Lisbon was one of the European powerhouses that colonized much of the world including Brazil and Mozambique. Today, its economy is in crisis and it is affectionately known as one of the PIGS (Portugual, Italy/Ireland, Greece, and Spain) by economists. We stayed in Lisbon for 4 nights and we could see evidence of the shell of Portugal´s former might. There were incredible stone buildings that were abandoned and left to decay because no one cared or could pay to maintain them. It seemed as though there were simply too many for the Portuguese to take care of all of them. Apart from this, Lisbon is architecturally very impressive. Virtually all of the buildings are painted white with red roofs, which is incredible to see from afar. Lisbon´s nickname is the ¨White City¨ because of this. See below: Miradouro: (a 3 minute walk from our apartment) For Lisbon, we decided to try airbnb.com for accomodations, wherein you pay to have someone´s apartment. It´s similar to VRBO, but the ...