Road Trip to Barcelona

ROAD TRIP
In response to the many responses and kind comments about previously broadcase email travel diaries, the authors have decided to provide their readers with MORE! Questions, accolades (or brickbats) continue to be welcome

From Brantome, France to Barcelonaa
We provide you with some of the sights you might take in if driving, as we did last week, from Brantome, France to Barcelona and back.
	Walled city of Carcassone (11th to 12th Century; restored in the 18th, since much of it had been canabelized by the peasantry to build houses)		The Pyrenees-Oriental, along the border
Market day in Perigueux				Southeastern Mountains


Below, Barcelona / one of the world's most exciting, alive and interesting cities. Marvelous architecture, busy people (but they don't seem in a rush), fantastic restaurants, and culture galore. The main center of resistance against Franco during the Civil War (1936-38), it's just as politically conscious today.

Two buildings by Antonio Gaudi - La Pedrera ("Quarry" - 1905-1911)	La Sagrada Familia, church of the Holy Family (begun in 1883, it's still under construction)	Las Ramblas, a broad, long and mainly pedestrianized street, filled with wandering entertainers almost every day, from noon to midnight		A street in the Barrio Gotico, one of the older parts of town.
NEWS ABOUT US

The following photos are from the film interviews in Spain. (Jeanne, took all the photos, so there are none of her included here.)

Dan in the Hotel Gran Via (same hotel Alvah Bessie stayed at in 1938, during his R & R in Barcelona)	Alvah, in the village of Darmos, Catalonia, April, 1938	Dan in the same location - with almost NOTHING changed in 70 years! (The director had spent a day looking to find the location		Filming in the ruins of Corbera (Dan with screenwriter and historian Ramon Gubern. Director Oriol Porta is the curly-haired fellow second from left); Corbera, destroyed by fascist bombers in 1938, remains as a memorial to the Civil War.
A bit more about living in France: Supermarkets: where we shop, in Perigueux, feature an enormous variety of foods. Far more than in the U.S. or the U.K. The French are huge fans of fresh fish and meat, cheese, bread, and pastry, so there are long rows of everything imaginable (some not to our taste). The variety of pastries is staggering, yet amazingly one doesn't see too many overweight French. (They take two hour lunches, and don't tend to snack. Though weight is becoming a problem with younger people, what with the advent of McDonaldized fast food in the cities.) And it's quite possible to eat inexpensively, with baguettes available for as little as .50 cents, great pastries for .50 to a buck, decent wine from $2.00, and fresh fruit and veggies half of California prices. Politics: the French are currently obsessing about the coming presidential elections (takes place in two stages, with the two top vote-getters competing in the second round). The polls have shifted back and forth between the Socialist candidate, Segolene Royal, and the center-right's Nicolas Sarkozy (now in a slight lead). The far right, anti-immigration loudmouth, Jean-Marie Le Pen polls a fairly steady 15%. (In the last election he got into the second round, but voters of all persuasions ganged up to defeat him soundly. Ms Royal has had bad press lately, sometimes making remarks that have been a bit thoughtless and have come back to haunt her, and it's quite possible that Sarkozy, who has nowhere near the progressive program Royale offers - a program she's presented in a fairly vague manner, however - will be the winner. (There are variety of other candidates, but only one, the centrist Francois Bayrou, polls above 10%). Bureacracy: though the French are allegedly famous for it, and though expats starting a business in France apparently have long waits and mountains of paperwork to deal with, we've encountered almost none. We zipped through government offices to get both our *carte de sejour* (permit to live in the country) and our *carte de sante* (right to access the French healthcare system - rated #1 in the world, by the way), in minutes. But we'll see what happens when we receive the notice of how much we have to pay for the speeding ticket I got, driving back from Barcelona. Speed cameras - Grrrr!) News: in addition to the BBC we get France 24 (in English), and Aljazeera (also in English) all of which - especially Aljazeera - offer much more thorough coverage than anything we've seen in the States. And, contrary to the view from Washington, Aljazeera is anything but an Arab propaganda network. It's reporting covers all sides, and probes little-reported stories in great depth. Notable death: Abbe Pierre (Henri Groues) has died, age 94. This unique individual, a former monk, anti-Nazi resistance fighter during WW II, tireless advocate for the homeless, and who lived in a single room, furnished with packing cases ("style Louie Caisse" - packing cases, he jokingly called them), was annually voted the most popular and admired individual in France - until he asked the newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche (Sunday), sponsor of the contest, to stop entering him for the award. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________