Freixenet Anyone?

You know you´re in trouble when the best part of an excursion is a wine tasting. We went to Freixenet yesterday, which is about 30 minutes southwest of Barcelona, and went on a tour, which was really interesting. Freixenet is the 9th largest wine company in the world, despite the fact that they make mostly sparkling wine, champagne in Champagne, cava in Spain. They bottle 140,000,000 bottles a year, 80% of which is Cordon Negro, which we´ve all had, I´m assuming, at weddings. The tour was actually really interesting. Freixenet´s business model fascinates me. They will change a brand of cava to fit a country´s market. So, for example, there are 3 versions of Cordon Negro, depending on sweetness, which they ship to different places depending on their tastes. After the tour, we had a wine tasting, of course, despite FC´s policy of no alcohol on excursions. I have the evidence to prove it to your right. It was really fun in that way that only wine tastings can be fun.

After that we went to Montserrat which is a huge mountain 60 minutes west of Barcelona. It´s a religious site, and it has 1000 religious communities on it, including these amazing hermit shacks, which I couldn´t get a good picture of. We took a nature walk which was fun, and heard a boy´s choir that lives and goes to school on the hill. It was a weird place, really, because the whole hill is essentially only religious.

It´s origin is fascinating. It seems during the Middle Ages when the Christians were trying to drive out the Moors, Montserrat was on the edge of the two territories and because of that no one wanted to live there. One day some boys went into a cave and saw a statue of the Virgin Mary. The Church, of course, wanted to remove it and put it in a safer place, but the animals used to move it wouldn´t budge (either because of divine intervention or because they were scared shitless by a wolf). So they built a monastery around it.

The original monastery was destroyed by Napolean, so now there´s an interesting 18th century church on the site.

We only have one more excursion together as a group, and I think we´re all happy about that. Everyone gets along with each other, which is great, but I think we´re getting sick of each other. The next one is a huge weekend to Andalucia, and then they will be on there own.