Ripoff in Requena?

Satuday in Spain aint such a bad thing. Today we woke up and met in the lobby around 9:30 for a surprising adventure. With our program, basically everything is a mystery which is either fun or completely frustrating. Today was a bit of both. We took a city bus a half hour out to the Valencian bus station. We hopped on a bus and headed out to Requena. For those of you who demand geographic relations it's an hour west of Valencia, past the mountains. The bus ride out was beautiful, it was a sunny and clear day. Once we arrived we walked 20 minutes or so in what we found was almost a deserted city. We went to a Bodega called Covinas. We were told we were going to tour it, so I was expecting a vineyard and maybe some working machines but it basically turned out to be a few fancy sets of garage doors and a few barrels of wine and a few hundred wine bottles on a rack. It honestly wasn't too impressive. Their wine tasting area was pretty interesting on the other hand, although it did not have any sort of outside view. They quickly gave us a glass of blush, which wasn't my cup of tea. It was my first official wine tasting, and I'm not whining but they didn't have any freaking cheese. They had a choice of potato chips or pork rinds (not even flavored ones!). Our second glass was a vino tinto (spanish for red wine). It wasn't horrible, but wasn't my favorite. After our quick half hour tour of the Bodega we walked around the city and quickly found out that the caves were actually closed (hence the surprise on our trips seems to always happen). I was really looking forward to the caves because I was told that there were ancient writings and markings on there which sounded really interesting. Rather than visiting the caves we basically walked aimlessly around the city. Ryan and I made well of our time advancing our gargoyling careers. Ryan may have reached the pinnacle of his career with a daring high altitude church gargoyle. I'm in the prime of my gargoyling career now. We walked through an open air market into a left over Carnival festival. There was a group of Spaniards dressed like tourists and came up and gave us a hard time. What can I say, I look American. But if looking like a badass is wrong...I don't want to be right. As Dubya would say...Americuh. The trip back was pretty nice, we took a train through the mountains which was pretty nice. This coming up weekend, on the other hand, is Barcelona! I'm really excited to see this city, the architecture around it I've seen in books and on the internet looks really beautiful. I'll definitely have some good updates and pictures after the weekend. Pictures from Saturday (A barrel signed by the president of Spain, me wine tasting, the view in Requena and the weird carnival festival we ran into) - Sean