Paris - Barcelona

I think we might be cursed to have Irish weather follow us wherever we go. Paris was gray which I'm sure dented the impact of the place. Most of the touristy sites we saw; The Louvre, Eiffel Tower, Champs elysees and all were pretty impressive (except for various queues). The Louvre, much to my suprise was really cool. Interesting enough, in fact, for me to splash out on the headset to translate things. We stayed in Montmartre, though no sign of Amelie and all was fine until we tried to do laundry in a local place where the machine broke and the kind pony tailed Parisian artisan who tried to help out only succeeded in flooding the entire laundromat. I hadn't intended on showing Paris my underwear. Question: Why is coffee so expensive in France? Observation: Parisians take their dogs absolutely eveywhere. We got the train with our rail passes to Perpignan and it was suprisingly little hassle. The double decker train whizzed through the country side but everything else about the journey was leisurely. The next day we visited Carcasonne, a castle town that is supposed to look like something from a fairy tale but proved to be a big tourist trap. From afar it looked like everything it is supposed to be (even despite the overcast Irish sky) but up close the walls looked like they'd been repaired with cinder blocks. We weren't really able to appreciate its complicated Crusader history either because of all the souvenir shops but I think I may have taken a couple of carefully cropped photos to come away with a good impression. On Thursday morning we got the train to Barcelona. The landscape gradually changing from green fields to one resembling the back of a mangy cat - low hills with scrubland and scattered bushes. We met Fergal & Paola for lunch (all Tapas and Paella from here) and then strolled around the very nice city centre (complete with our first blue sky) and took in some of the Gaudi sites. Pyschadelic architecture aside the city is very posh, maybe even moreso than the parts of Paris we saw. Unfortunatly the nice warm weather couldn't even stretch out two full days and in the afternoon it started pissing rain. As we'd been told and witnessed, the locals eat lunch at 4pm and dinner is at 10pm so there was no rushing around. We're stuck on a slow train tomorrow back to France and Montpellier. Experts with France now (the train jingle is stuck is in my head) ordering coffee again should be no problem. I'm bloody full of butter from feckin croissants every morning though..