Saturday, 26th August 2001 – Spain & Stop Smoking
Once again, it’s been a while, but life tends to rush past you, and before you know it, months have gone by.
Quite a lot has happened, as you’d expect!
At the beginning of June, the 3 of us went to Spain (Costa Brava) for a week in the sun. We didn’t do a lot of sunbathing, but we did a lot of travelling. We hired a car for 4 days and went around the Catalán country. The first thing I did when I hired the car, has hit it (The Spanish drive on the “wrong” side of the road). I hit it as we were pulling off the parking space! I kind of miscalculated the space I had, and hit this very old pick up on my right (where R. was sat, but where I’m used to sitting). The first day was a bit touch and go with the driving: R. kept telling me to pull the car away from the kerb… We went to Figueras, to the Dali museum. By the time we got on the road to the Pyrenes, I was confident enough with my driving. Just as well, because driving on the mountains (which I had never done before as a driver) is hard work.
We got to Andorra (the little principality between France and Catalonia), which to be honest, I must have heard of before, but didn’t remember when, and we got a nice big room in a 4 star hotel for about 30 pounds. Bargain! Because it wasn’t the skiing season, the town was pretty deserted (yes, it’s a skiing resort at about 1.5km above sea level). I was wearing my beach clothes (we weren’t planning on staying the night when we left our resort in Calella, but it took a lot longer than expected to get to Andorra) and feeling a bit cold, so we had a walk around the deserted town and went to bed pretty early for Spain (at around 11). The next day we shopped till we dropped at the shopping centre where the car got locked in the night before!
The first thing we did when we arrived to Andorra was go in this massive supermarket, full of tax free stuff. We were wondering around looking at all the cheap tobacco and drink, but the store was closing (it was only 8 in the evening – back in Calella, things were just starting to go!). So we went into this restaurant and had a meal: nothing special, but the restaurant looked very posh, yet tacky. As we left the waiter said (in Spanish, as I can understand it ok, if spoken slowly) that we might have problems getting into the car park, to try and get in through the back door. R. ran to the back door, which was closed. We ended up having to grab the cleaner’s attention through the main door, who then got a security guard (he carried a real gun), who, after asking a load of questions, let us in to get the car!
Anyway we did all the shopping until about lunch time, had something to eat, and spent the rest of the day trying to get back to Calella, getting very lost on one occasion. Even R., with his amazing sense of direction, got lost for a while. We also went to Barcelona, of course, and Parc Guel – the nicest park I have ever been to.
This trip was also special for being the first time you AND R. went on a plane… You were ok when we took off, but your dad, who had a hold of the camcorder, could only come up with the words ‘Oh, Jesus’, in a voice that didn’t sound like his own. This was also your first encounter with the sea (well, there was Brighton last year, but we didn’t go near it). You refused to go in, and what’s more, cried your eyes out whenever R. or I went in! Luckily for you I didn’t go in a lot because the sea bed had too many stones and really hurt my feet, not to mention that the water was still cold at that time of year.
R. stayed away from the sun, as he’s so pale. I think I got a total of about 8 hours sunbathing in the week. Not because the weather was bad, but because we were doing other stuff. Spain is so nice, when it comes to families. We’d be out at 12 at night, and the city was buzzing. The tourists at that time of year were mainly Spanish and German, with a few English. There’d be children everywhere, and you’d be tired but happy. You even made a couple of friends in the hotel!
This summer has been one of the worst for flight delays, tour bus driver strikes, lost luggage… We escaped all that by 1 week, if we had done everything just a week later it would have been a nightmare to get there and back. Instead we had an easy time, but it makes me realise what a nightmare it is to travel these days, simply because of the sheer amount of other people doing it too. When I was younger, in my early teens, flying was still a great event, people would wear their best clothes for the plane, and you could smoke on the plane! Now it’s the complete opposite: flying is just a hassle to be endured to get somewhere else, you wear your most comfortable clothes to travel, and if you’re a smoker and going to the other side of the world, you just have to give up for 12 hours…
No, I don’t think so – when I went back to Brazil in ’97, I think I was in the smoking section. Anyway, on shorter trips you can’t smoke. Sorry about the obsession with smoking, but I sort of gave up on my 30th birthday (22 days ago!) and I’m still obsessed with it. The reason being because I’m still smoking 1 or 2 a day (but if in the pub, as I have been twice since giving up. then I just smoke lots), in the evening. I spent my birthday suffering, and the next day and the day after. But I had decided to do it cold turkey, to get rid of the physical symptoms quickly. I had just 1 nicotine chewing gum – which Amy brought around as part of my birthday present (bless her!) – I still have the pack, with just one gum missing. My birthday was on a Saturday, and the weekend was not very pleasant. I tried to sleep as much as possible. I was very emotional on Sunday and crying for silly little things. I still felt very sad for another 2 weeks. Not only did I feel very sad … I also felt very happy and pleased with myself. I smoked over 20 cigarettes a day since the age of 15 (actually, just before I turned 15) – I mostly stopped when I was pregnant, but that was it. So my biggest hurdle here was (and is) to convince myself that I can live without my best friend, my crutch, my constant companion, who is intent on killing me.