"I very much like your friend. And you are like your friend."

While we were at the beach for the Saint Joan festival, my friends met these Italian guys who are visiting from Naples and made plans to go out for dinner the next night. The friend who actually speaks Italian ended up bailing, so last night I had dinner with a friend, this girl who goes to the same dentist as my friend (none of us speaks Italian), and these three Napolian (Neopolitan?) guys who don't really speak English or Spanish. So random. It was the kind of bizarre social situation that would never happen to me in the US, but happens here all the time. We made it work, kind of, and my friend's got me sold on the idea of travelers' karma. I'm gonna be on the road for a while pretty soon--I hope I end up having dinner with strangers who make an effort to communicate with me even if we don't really share a common language.

Anyway, tried to go cava (champagne, they call it cava here) tasting today. Bought train tickets to Sant Sadurni D'Anoia, where the cava place is. The problem with taking trains here is there are often no routes or schedules posted. They have screens that show which trains leave from which tracks at what time, but the information only shows the final destination of the train. If you're getting off at one of the many stops en route, you often don't know the final destination of your train. So you usually have to ask someone. But Sant Sadurni sounds a lot like Sant Celoni. And Sant Celoni is a much bigger city and more people have heard of it. By the time we realized we'd been following directions to Sant Celoni rather than Sant Sadurni, we were an hour away from Barcelona in the wrong direction. With Sunday train schedules and the fact that we didn't really know how to get to the cava place once we were in Sant Sadurni or how late it stays open, we decided to cut our losses and go back to Barcelona and watch futbol. I don't really even like cava that much, but I was all set to start liking it today. Oh well.