Esthpana: Ya, let's go ahead and put toothpicks in everything.

Thanksgiving rolls around, and I really am thankful. It's been a charmed life these past few years, and I'm surrounded by so many good people on both sides of the ocean.

London is a tough city in a lot of ways related to how comically expensive things are (though no Scandinavia), but even when you're scraping pences together, you sometimes wake up and you're in a hostel in Barcelona.

When the roundtrip flight costs £39 ($60), it's like you're making money, right?

View out our hostel window.

I literally ran off the RyanAir when we landed in Spain. I was first through the passport checkpoints (because there are prizes for this sort of thing), sprinted for the Aerobus (again, gold star), and Lincoln was there to meet me at the finish line in the Plaça de Catalunya.

I don't even know what a viguèta sandwich really is, but there are suddenly so many country sausages in our mouths, and I chug a Fanta Limon before we walk into a flamenco performance inside the Palau de la Música Catalana.

As soon as the lights dim, we upgrade ourselves to nice box seats like we own the place, trying in vain to capture the stained glass bulb that's been my wallpaper for months. Sweat sprays from dancers in arcs as they whip their porn star locks back and forth.

A drizzily walk back with a gander at the Sagrada Familia at twilight, and we split four pintxos (mm, tuna-stuffed peppers) and an Estrella Damm before checking into Hotel One Paralelo.

Pinxtos are basically tapas, but they're €1 each and they charge you for how many toothpicks you have when you pull your face out of the feeding trough.

Yes, that's the tiniest frying pan in the world, and it has a small pancake with smoked salmon on it. I am in love.

Some Spanish tortilla before bed because you aren't in Spain to get skinny, and I don't fall asleep until 4 am amidst the moist bedding and Lincoln's snoring/whale song.

We're up by 10 am to get some epic Chinese lunch, and yeah, based simply on the cheap noodles/dumplings alone, I'm ready to move to Barcelona.

Posing in front of ham seems like it should be an American past time.

The problem with growing up in San Francisco is that whenever you see a fancy food market, you immediately compare it to the Ferry Building.

Borough Market: "Ferry Building, but with English accents and everything costs 60% more."

Mercat de Sant Josep de la Boqueria: "Ferry Building, but we're obsessed with moldy ham."

¿Pero dónde está mi café helado de Blue Bottle (Botella Azul)?

This emergency kit at the hostel by the elevator never ceased to amuse me.

So much walking, and if we didn't both train like speedwalking champs on a daily basis, the endless promenades would have slapped us down. The toughest day on little sleep took us to the top of Montjuïc, and can someone explain to me why the medieval locals named it JEW MOUNTAIN?

I saw no reference or presence of Hebraic populaces. Lincoln and I fell onto a couch, napped, and then we split up to run around the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya until closing.

My high school Spanish is somehow intact enough for me to read most signs, and Odesza is floating me on a summer state o' mind through galleries of Catalan art across the last thousand years.

I'm alone in the medieval gallery caves, so I just nap on the big stone slabs under the murals dating back to 1123 from a little church called Santa Maria de Taüll. The Virgin Mary, the magi, and their anthropo-zoomorphic buddies glare down at me, and it's incredible to just slumber under the weight of all that history.

And besides, the artist's nickname was the Master of the Last Judgement, so pretty badass.

In the rest of Barcelona, Gaudí hero worship is slathered over everything, and by the end of Casa Batlló's audiotour, Lincoln and I are so sick of hearing about what a genius the dude was.

The texture of the walls was pretty magical, like being in a giant fish.

Since his most popular quote is "The straight line belongs to man - the curve to God," I can already imagine how insufferable he must have been to work for. 

Roof of Casa Batlló

So obsessed with the street tiling in Barcelona

So many little alleys with so many alcoves for saints and churches, and we nurse little coffees as we alternate umbrella arms.

I get in some journal time from the front pew of the incomplete Sagrada Familia while Jesus parachutes in on a canopy of candles.

The Gaudí glass stretches up into the heights, and I can see why religion makes sense sometimes.

Bosque Palermo dishes out excellent chimichurri'd churrasco and paella, and we end with a crema catalana (which seems like ice cream made of pure yolk?).

My vows of no-dairy collapsed in the face of Catalan pudding.

Socarrat is a word that's been stuck in my craw for years now. Also known as rak-rak (damn boy, that onomatopoeia!), it's a Spanish word to refer to the crunchy crispy layer of rice at the edges and bottom of a well-done paella.

You know what I'm talking about, Gordito.

Clearly something with universal appeal, since the Chinese call it 鍋耙, and the other East Asians have terms as well (お焦げ and 누룽지).

Clearly I fall into Wikipedia abysses sometimes, and it's hard to escape adding to my pedantic nature. "Actually, ..." being one of the annoying things I chime into conversations with.

Churros and hot choco to dunk them in at Xurreria in the Barri Gòtic. Lincoln and I even get into a brief spat when he says "seafood" and I think he says "stupid." The dumb shit you trip up on when you travel is always embarrassing in retrospect.

We're drenched in La Barceloneta, blown by mini-tradewinds as we bounce between closed seafood joints. Frank Gehry's goldfish arches out of the ocean and then we're saved by a small place called Jai-Ca that quickly warms us up with mussels, fried anchovies, and plenty of lemon to keep scurvy at bay.

Lincoln heads off to sleep at the airport before Hamburg, and I have a day to myself in Montserrat. I somehow talk myself into making it onto the first train at 8:36 am, sweaty and loaded down with bread, ham & apples. People are stumbling home with their dürüm in hand, but it's satisfying to make it just in time to chug off.

I haul ass to the Santa Cova where local children allegedly saw a black Virgin Mary manifested, but the gates are closed for another hour.

Napping with the view below while reading Love in the Time of Cholera isn't such a bad wait.

The groundskeeper finally gets there, we exchange "buenos días!" and then it's silence in the holy grotto. The stations of the cross brings to mind a lot of poisoned gods, crowns of plague thorns, masks, veils. 

There's a children's choir, but before they're done, I'm hiking to the tippy top of Sant Jeromi, where every turn is a magical look down into the valleys. 

My shadow has legs that don't end.

I don't see a single person for an hour and a half, and the nature-loving introvert in me is singing a happy song. 

Stray cats are mewling at everyone that walk by, and I get to practice my French and Japanese with people who seem confused by slopes once I'm on the homestretch back down to the monastery.

I rubbed the black Madonna's Palantír for good luck, and it was tempting to buy a candle, but sorry, I'd rather have two more pintxos.

I briefly amuse myself thinking about what would happen if Catalunya declared independence while I'm in the hills above it all.

Last night is a race through the supermarket buying as much torró for friends and family as my little arms can carry, and also two jars of fig jam that I somehow think I can sneak through airport security. I spend a horrifyingly cold night at El Prat airport, and around 4 am, I'm eating fig jam off my fingers and getting eaten alive by golden mosquitoes when Caga tió falls out of my bag.

Lincoln and I had each purchased one for €2, and I just start giggling to myself as I circle Terminal 2 trying to keep warm.

Here's a description of Caga tió (Shitting Log) to warm your Christmas heart:

tl;dr - The Catalan tell their kids that a small log shits out the Xmas presents.

On Christmas day or, depending on the particular household, on Christmas Eve, one puts the Tió partly into the fireplace and orders it to defecate; the fire part of this tradition is no longer as widespread as it once was, since many modern homes do not have a fireplace. To make it defecate one beats the Tió with sticks, while singing various songs of Tió de Nadal.

The tradition says that before beating the Tió all the kids have to leave the room and go to another place of the house to pray asking for the tió to deliver a lot of presents. This makes the perfect excuse for the relatives to do the trick and put the presents under the blanket while the kids are praying.

The tió does not drop larger objects, as those are considered to be brought by the Three Wise Men. It does leave candies, nuts and torrons. Depending on the part of Catalonia, it may also give out dried figs. When nothing is left to "shit", it drops a salt herring, a head of garlic, an onion, or it "urinates" by leaving a bowl of water. What comes out of the Tió is a communal rather than individual gift, shared by everyone present.