On to Barcelona

We got up the next morning, and it was raining. We got on the bus and headed for the airport to fly to our last destination--Barcelona, Spain. On the airplane, Sandra told me that she had decided not to marry Jim back in the States. She said she was going to call him to tell him not to pick her up at the airport, when we got back in a few days. As the plane was descending to the Barcelona airport, we flew over the Spanish Riviera, and we thought it would be great to go to the beach. People were waving at us flying over them. When we would get to the airports on the trip, we would just go from the plane, through the terminal, and to our bus. So, I was doing that in Barcelona. I heard a man behind me yelling "Alto Alto". I didn't speak Spanish, so I just kept walking. I heard him again yelling "Alto Alto". I knew alto was a singing voice, but I was a baritone. Then the man, who was a Spanish soldier, stuck his machine gun in my face, and said "Alto". I figured that he was saying "Stop", as I didn't have to go to the bathroom anymore. It seems that they required us to go through customs, so I did. I tried to tell him I was an American, but that didn't seem to matter. Spain was being ruled by Franco and was still something of a dictatorship. There were signs and pictures of Franco everywhere. We got to our hotel, and it was far from being a four-star hotel. There were speakers in the rooms that broadcasted music. There was a woman on our tour, who was a Spanish teacher. She found the same thing about the Spanish language that I did about French. Her Spanish was not the same as they spoke in Barcelona. The Spanish she knew was Mexican Spanish. So, she could pick out certain words but not much else. We went walking around the city and found a 9-story department store in the center of the city. They had everything, so naturally the girls and I went shopping. During our visit there, I got lost from the girls for a few minutes. It was a rather frantic time, but we found each other again before going back to the hotel. Sandra wanted to call home, but the hotel said that there had been a fire and the long distance phone lines had been cut. We just thought that the hotel didn't want to put the call through, so they told her that she would have to go to the post office two blocks away to make a call, and they were closed and wouldn't be open until the next day. So, her call to Jim would have to wait one more day. We found Barcelona to be a rather stark and boring place. Maybe we were just tired and ready to go home. Two more days.