I cannot blame you if you never heard of La Nou de Berguedà, seriously, I can’t. In fact, if you don’t envision tourism without visiting big-time cathedrals and buying fridge magnets, I may add: just as well, since you will find any of these items here. What brings us to this village lost somewhere in the heart of the Catalan Pyrenees, then? People, people! It is not the first and hopefully not last time, either, when Servas takes us to places we would never otherwise have gone to and enables us to do things we would never otherwise do.
Spending a couple of days under a wing of local people is a precious experience for a traveler, I tell you. Our hosts here, Josep-Miguel and Imma are very internationally-oriented people, fond of multiculturality (is there such a word? probably no, huh?) and are as curious about our lives as we are about their, so we end up talking until small hours of the morning.
In the course of the day we visit a local (very local, indeed) festival, hence the epic paella on a gigantic pan. Other parts of the program included driving freakishly scary uncharted roads (I put on a brave face and said something like “we have roads like this for motorways back home”, but my hands sweated more than once – I had never thought I would roll the steering wheel around while driving on a road), nocturnal hikes in the mountains (“is that an owl? of course it’s an owl!”) and lots of delicious homemade food. I got a complete crash-course on the famous jamón ibérico: from what, where and how to buy to how to carve. This enabled us to leave Spain with some very nice souvenirs besides fridge magnets.
New friends, though, is the best luggage you can carry, isn’t it?