Happy New Year

Happy New Year to everyone. I fucking love New Year's Eve, it goes up in the top 3 of my favorite holidays of the year. Good times. I went over to Jake Henderson's house for a little get together with some ultimate people and non ultimate people, which usually leads to an uncomfortable setting for the non ultimate people. Luckily alcohol was involved, which loosened things up a little bit. I was fairly impressed with my drinking ability that night, I decided to keep tallies of how many shots I took during the night. I had never done this before, primarily because I don't really need to count how many I've taken, I just drink until I don't want to drink anymore. But there's a picture on facebook with my wrist marked 13 times and it was only 11:49 pm.... awesome. I think I ended up with 15 tallies. Which in turn was probably not the smartest thing since I had to wake up at 8am the next morning and drive home, pack, go to the airport, and fly 7 1/2 hours to Spain.

I was definately still drunk when my Mom picked me up that morning and then drunk for the next few hours at the airport. It was not a great morning. But my Mom, my older brother Tom (25) and I flew into Madrid that day and then took a smaller plane over to Granada. We were in Granada for two days, Cordoba for two days, Mardid for three days and Barcelona for the last four days. Granada was a pretty cool little town, not very touristy at all which was pretty nice. We visited Alhambra which is supposed to be one of the top 10 world wonders. I think it was an old Mosque for the Muslims until the Christians came and decided "Hey this place looks dank, lets take it". (not exact wording). Otherwise Granada was a pretty low key place, which was a nice way to start off our trip, getting accustomed to the time change was very difficult, and now I'm still waking up at 6 am.

Then for some reason my Mom decided to rent a car....bad idea. And we drove to Cordoba, which was only about a two hour drive at most. Her idea was to rent a car and visit a vineyard and some small neighboring towns, but when we tried to go to the vineyard we got lost in this tiny city and my brother ended up driving the wrong way down a one way street. It was awful, there were about 15 cars lined up just staring at us. If we had been waving giant American flags out our window, it would have been no different than this. Eventually we got out of there and made it to Cordoba...this is where it got horrible. The streets in Spain are so ridiculous, the traffic was horrendous, there are tons of one way streets, and tons of round-a-bouts. We were trying to find the train station because that's where we were supposed to drop off the car. After 30 minutes of driving around we found it, but we didn't know where to pull over and drop off the car. So we decided we would circle around and look again...but NO. You circle around and it leads you to a one way straight that takes you 5 miles the opposite direction. We literally drove around the city for 2 hours trying to figure out where the fuck to drop this car off. My brother was freaking out (he was driving, i was sitting in the back listening to my ipod being of no help to anyone). After getting back to the train station he pulled over to a spot where we clearly weren't supposed to park. I was forced to do something and got out and asked someone where to go. Basically, we found it, dropped it off, and we didn't speak of this incident the rest of the trip. Overall, Cordoba wasn't bad we got to see this amazing Cathedral called the Mezquita, which was a Mosque before hand.

After Cordoba we took a train to Madrid. We stayed in a really cool, modern, hotel. It was called Hotel ME. I highly suggest staying there if you ever go to Madrid. It's located in Plaza Santa Anna, which has tons of restaurants, shops and bars all around it. My brother and I's room was sick, we had a flat screen tv, stereo system, dvd player, and even an Ipod hookup so we could play our Ipods through it. The bathroom was all marble and had the most amazing shower I have ever been in. Then next to the beds there were like 8 buttons for the lights. Each button controlled a different light, and mood. There was one button that said "It's sexy time" next to it and when you pushed it all the lights would go off except for a bright purple neon light above the beds. Awesome...

Madrid was fun, alot of bars to go to. And one perk about being a tourist there is that all these guys promoting clubs and bars in the street see you and come give you these free tickets for a free drink at their club/bar. So my brother and I collected those then would go in to that place for the free drink, then move on to the next bar for a free drink. Crafty I know. But the highlight of Madrid, and probably the trip for me was going to the Real Madrid soccer game. My Mom some how scored sick, front row seats. It was amazing, and it was so fun because everyone there was so into the game and the Madrid cheering section behind the goal had drums and they were constantly shouting and cheering and dancing.

We took some photos and a sweet video from our seats.....

I can't get the video on here, but if you check out my facebook profile I uploaded it there.

Barcelona was our final stop, where we stayed at Hotel Montecarlo for four nights. It was located on "La Rambla" which is a strip over a mile long, which is basically a haven for tourists to stay. There are tons of little shops and Tapas bars to eat at, as well as drinking bars.

LA RAMBLA

While in Barcelona we went to the Olympic Stadium that was used in the 1992 Barcelona Games. We also saw where FC Barcelona played their matches. Otherwise we did alot of walking around, went and saw the Olympic port and the harbor. Did the bulk of my shopping here where we had to haggle for everything, and they definately tried to rip you off as much as possible. A few nights my brother and I went to this cool pub called Molly's Fair City, where the bartenders were from all over Europe and were extremely friendly and fun to hang out and talk with. We also met a Brazilian guy and a Swiss guy there, who both spoke great english.....neither of us spoke Portuguese or any of the 5 languages people from Switzerland speak.

The few nights we went out in Barcelona we went to the discos where all the younger people went. But the thing is people don't start showing up at these places until 3am, people in Spain don't even start dinner until around 9:30pm or later. So it was probably about 1:30 in the morning and we're walking down La Rambla to this disco, and there are alot of prostitutes in the streets around this time. You're constantly being offered something, my favorite line was "you want me suck your cock, you can have me doggystyle" as this hooker followed us for about a minute. ANYWAYS, back to the story. 1:30 in the morning and these two hookers are walking towards us so I put my hands in my pockets cause I don't want anything stolen, cause these sluts will just grab your dick and hold on to you spouting off obscenities. Sure enough, one grabs me and one grabs me brother, she tries to get one of her hands in my pockets while the other has a vice grip on my balls. I literally push her away and run she starts chasing after me, then gave up after about 10 yards. If you didn't know hookers aren't built for sprints, they're built for endurance. My brother comes running up and catches up with me and i say "did you check your pockets?" and he just goes "ohhhh fuck...well my 20 euros are gone". So the tricksy thing took 20 euros from him, this is why we didn't bring our wallets anywhere with us. Gooood times.

Overall I had a blast, got to spend some good quality time with my Mom and my brother whom I don't see very much. And got to experience a whole new culture and way of life. I did miss American telivision and eating lots of food that isn't good for me. Since I've been home I've eaten: Burger King, Davannis, Chilis, and Buffalo Wild Wings. Im feening for some Applebees tonight....we'll see.

If you made it this far I'm impressed.

Sir Beckified of Nationsville