>>My Spanish isn't good enough to be of use to you, but I can give you some great restaurant recommendations if you're going <g>
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>We will be in Barcelona and Costa Brava so if you can recommend any good (or bad ones so that I exclude them <g>) restaurants, I will appreciate it.

If you are near Costa Del Sol, don't eat red meat unless you go to the German restaurant. There, you can eat anything on the menu :o)

One of my instructors at the Defense Language Institute was from Spain. It was very difficult at first to understand her, but nothing compared to the instructor from Chile! :o) Actually, the spoken language in Argentina, Peru, Chile, and Spain sounded very similar to me. I think they are all closer to Castellano (Spanish)... but then there is Galician, Basque, and Catalan spoken there too. Which one are you listening to? In Barcelona I heard mostly Catalan but they spoke both (everyone)...

What I mostly noticed was the different verbs used in everyday language:

coger -> tomar
enfermar -> enfermarse

And different words (nouns) too:

billete -> boleto
patata -> papa
autobus -> guagua

Really, it's the verb tenses that were always throwing me (it still does!)...

He ido al escuela esta mañana -> Fui al escuela esta mañana

And some phrases like antes de nada -> en primer lugar

And vosotros was used all the time in Barcelona and I never heard it in Central America. There I heard ustedes...

Basically, they would speak to me using castellano as soon as they realized it took me entirely too long to figure out what they were saying when they spoke in Catalan...

Walk around and listen to everyone speaking. You will notice a huge difference in some converstations and then they switch between the two sometimes also!

If you can, try to get to Manilva and Frigilana.. Beautiful!