Montserrat

One nice thing about living in Spain is that they take their Christian holidays seriously.  For example, the institute where I work was closed on both Good Friday and on the day after Easter.  Nice.  With the day off on Good Friday, I decided to take a visit to Montserrat.  Montserrat is the site of a Benedictine monk mountain retreat about an hour or so northwest of Barcelona.  Apparently the views there are incredible.  The word Montserrat means "Saw Mountain", probably because the guy who first discovered it told his buddy, "I saw a mountain" and his buddy translated it into Catalan.  Probably something like that.

Now, if you're ever thinking of going to a religious tourist retreat during a national religious holiday, I have some advice for you: don't do it.  The first sign of trouble appeared when I had to fight through the masses to get onto the train at La Plaça Espanya:

Things got way worse when I got to the bottom of the mountain:

There are two primary ways to get to the top of the mountain.  One is a cable car called the Aeri, which can carry only 30 people at a time and goes every 15 minutes.  The other is a train, which holds way more people and is way more efficient.  Guess which one was closed for the holiday?  That's right, good guess.  In a way this is a refreshing contrast to the way things are in the US, where people have to go to work at Walmart on Christmas morning.  Here in Spain, they value their time off.  The price for this refreshing view of life, however, is that it took me 2 hours to make it from the train to the top of the mountain.

Eventually, though, I did make it to the top and the view was incredible:

I also took a picture of all the masses still waiting in line at the bottom of the mountain:

Suckers!  Aside from the view, there were also a bunch of cool-looking buildings and whatnot.

Finally, you win a prize if you can figure out what's going on in the lower left panel of this sign: