Barcelona 1 - Buenos Dias, Chocolate, y Picasso

We arrived in Barcelona at night, which is instantly disconcerting in any city. Danny had devised a system to take us down the one way streets adjacent to Parral-lel, working out the route beforehand and then writing down the number of turns we had to count before our next right or left. It worked, though no thanks to Michelin.

We chucked our bags and bikes off the train as quick as we could (I stood below while Danny threw things at me - panniers, tents, sleeping bags) and assembled our structural masses on the platform before taking the lift up to street level. Outside the scenery was confusing. I remember it as mostly being dark, though there must have been street-lights. Danny brought out his compass and made vague directional gestures with his hand before finally deciding on the other side of the station. We got ourselves onto a big road, indistinct in this rather quiet sunday evening, and it looked like we were heading in the right direction. Slowly but surely making our way through side streets, counting as we went, we finally wound up (I know not how) outside the Youth Hostel, wherein we had beds books and friends awaiting.

Fred and Lucas (how wierd to talk of people from back home in this, otherwise, entirely foreign story) were not in, for they had left to sample the delightful tastes of tradition spainish foods - a pizza from pizzahut. We saw them through the window before they saw us, they were engaged in conversation with others from the youth hostel, so Danny made silly faces to get their attention. We finally got their attention and they came out to congradulate us on getting this far, whilst a couple of others from the youth hostel joined in with the praise. We joined them indoors as they were just finishing up (splitting the bill as people of our age, by not paying for more than ate - which invariably leads to arguments and less money being forthcoming than appears on the bill).

We sauntered back to the youth hostel and talked our trip over with Fred and Lucas. There people made plans for the evening, a trip to the "travellers' bar" and perhaps something later. Then Rosie came bouncing up the stairs and introduced herself. She was off to meet a friend elsewhere, but said she would join the group later. So we left, as all big groups do, in varying waves of speed and enthusiasm. Danny talked to Fred and Lucas, while I mingled with others and spent most of the trip talking with a guy called Simon about bikes. In the dark, our trip had no relation to any later trip we made in the light the next day; almost as if we were walking in a different cities. Onto La Ramblas, the "travellers' bar" was off this road of heavy tourist traffic. Outside the bouncer was English - this really was an international bar. The bartenders spoke English so it was far too easy to order alcohol. We found an empy corner and sat with our beers and chatted about stuff.

The metric system of measuring alcohol is mostly unfortunate. Half a litre lacks the directness of "a pint" nor the foolish accurateness of "568ml" when measured in metric itself. Its a round number at "500ml" but it lacks life, and I missed the pint whilst I was out there. Another thing that was odd was that I quickly slipped into the spanish way of drinking: slowly and little.

Conversation was good, company great and everyone was very friendly. Reminded me of first week of university, where everybody doesn't know anybody; cliques aren't yet established and there is a free movement of people from group to group. Rosie joined us not long after and we shared a few conversations on interesting and varying topics such as, art, feminism, etc.; all of which we moved through with the ease and interest of two people really thinking at the same level.

Time was called at around 2am, and while the time had passed quite consistently it took me by complete suprise it so late and myself so awake. It took me a bit of time to realise that it made perfect sense - we hadn't got to the bar till 10pm! We walked through the faint pattering of rain in search of bar that was still open. The group found a club open in the Placa Reial and we queued up (though I wasn't keen on the idea - club's require payment on the door and generally don't allow for much in the way of conversation, and I was in the mood for conversation). Danny, who had not bought civvies with him on the trip, was instantly rejected by the bouncer's (for what we ain't sure, he didn't look too bad to be fair). With the group looking like it may split discussion turned into stalling, and eventually Rosie took the lead (she works as a teacher so is quite good at it) and lead a small group of us, Danny and I included, to find a bar that was still open. She had lived in the city before and knew the place far better than the rest of us so hopes were high for a drinking establishment to hole ourselves up in till morning.

A couple of non-starters later, we realised that even BCN, a city that never sleeps sometimes needs a rest and Sunday was its night to get a nap. The bars we tried were all closing up and had stopped serving at the bar before we got there. Danny started grumbling for food, and I was also in the mood for eats, as we had both missed dinner that evening. So we gave up on drinking and focused instead on getting a kebab of some sort (yes they do them in Spain, though quite different to what we expect back home).

Food sorted (I can't remember much about the kebab other than it was rather tasty), we returned to the Youth Hostel, where the night-shift receptionist seemed rather put-off by our insistent talking in the common room after midnight (it was a rule - a pretty crap one). We carried on as he got more and more irate, till finally we couldn't be bothered and so went our seperate ways into our rooms. Each room in the Youth Hostel slept 6 people and we were sleeping in room 4, the room where Fred and Lucas were also sleeping. When we went in we saw all but two of the beds were taken, Fred and Lucas and the other two had all got back before - we assumed they hadn't gone clubbing after all. We got into our beds and looked forward to a good nights sleep...

Which we didn't get because at about 5am we were woken up by someone exclaiming that there was someone in her bed. The night-shift receptionist was roused, and I got out of bed to help try figure the problem out. The receptionist kept asking me if I was George, and I kept having to explain to him that I wasn't. Finally he got the little slips of paper out that somehow organised the Youth Hostel sleeping arrangements and we found mine and Danny's slip. We had been given room 4 to sleep in and a locker key in the self-same room. Except Room 4 already had 6 people sleeping in it. So Danny, not looking very happy, and I were put in another room with a promise that it would all get sorted out in the morning.

I should perhaps mention that both Danny and myself quickly became associated with rather unsocialable things. For Danny it was his quite astounding snoring (and I felt quite sorry for everyone in our room - sleep could not have been good for them for the two nights we were there). For myself it was the quite upsettingly potent stench of my feet, in particular my socks. I had only take three pairs of socks with me, and as my shoes were constantly open to the elements they all became quite wet - I believe I have not had dry feet for some 2/3rds of this trip so far. The bottom of feet were disgusting to look at, wrinkled, white monstrosities that looked rotten and just plain wrong. My feet themselves were not overly bad, and my shoes were also hardly the worst I've smelt, but the socks, all 3 pairs of them were eye wateringly bad. It was for my feet that I became known in the Youth Hostel. Ah well.

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The next morning we woke suprisingly early as Breakfast was served from 8-10. I say served, it was left out for us to pick through. Toast, butter, cereal, tea or coffee made for a good breakfast (though far less in quantity then we were used to). Danny and I were among the first up but eventually others joined us in our wide-eyed awakeness. Most of the conversation was on the early-morning mix-up that the receptionists had got everyone into, everyone was damn sure it wasn't our fault - which was good. Rosie appeared for breakfast, poor thing, and we chatted for awhile, but she quickly went back to bed for a siesta after awhile - she had been sleeping in the bed next to Danny's, she can't have got much sleep.

The plan for today was to hang around with Fred and Lucas on their last day in Barcelona. They wanted to take us to Parc Guell (umlaut not included), which sounded like a pretty good way to spend the day; the sun was out and we were in a strange town. Danny also made reservations to meet up with Rosie during the day for a tour around the old town.

Plans set, we walked out of the Youth Hostel and into the warmth of the Barcelona sun. Up La Ramblas we stopped in a little known market called La Boqueria - you may have heard of it. The colour there was fantastic; a thriving throng of fruit stalls and others all aching to sell their wares to passers-by. I didn't buy anything on that first day, but subsequently I would only feel happy after I had purchased a kilo of golden delicious from my favourite stall there: they were so cheap and so delicious it made it hard to think of a good reason not to.

Onwards and upwards to the metro station at the Placa de Catalunya, we passed the most horrifying aspect of La Ramblas. The entire boulevard is packed with street performers the kiosks selling postcards and other tourist memorabilia, but stuffed between these two innocent money-making tourist traps were two stalls selling birds locked in cages. One of them was run by a nasty hobbit of a man, who sparkled and smiled in nasty, grimey way as people (most, I think, with a sense of, "I cannot believe this kind of place exists!") milled around, sometimes inquiring about prices, sometimes not. Lucas made a little film of Fred asking the hobbit-y man where one of his street pigeons had come from and how much it was. The man replied that it was from Madrid (I think) and cost 5o euros! We left him to his cruelty and boarded the metro that would take us to the Parc Guell.

We got of the Metro and followed the signs (they have good signs for local places in Spain) up to the hill, the top of which housed Parc Guell. So steep was the terrain here, the wise governors of Barcelona had decided to install escalators to aid the travel of interested tourists and tired locals. We had seen escalators like these before, and it is quite wierd to see such mechanical devices completely divorced from their usual surroundings (covered and near, or in, shopping centres). It is a long way up, and the hill rises at such an angle as to make one really question the veracity of the signs pointing toward Parc Guell - how could anything balance atop such a peak?!

We didn't see much of Parc Guell, but sat half-way up the path running toward the centre to just marvel at the view of Barecelona. A maze and mass of buildings that stretched for miles everywhere - Barcelona really is an impressive city, nestled so sporadically between the mountains and the coast. We sat there for awhile, Fred and Lucas pointing out interesting sights to us, the sun warming us so pleasantly. Before too long we had to leave to meet Rosie in the Placa Reial, so we made plans to catch Fred and Lucas later outside La BLa Boqueria at 4pm as we planned to have dinner with them later.

Danny and I walked down to the metro station and armed with the map found ourselves back on La Ramblas again and reached the Placa Reial spot on 2pm. We couldn't see Rosie though (and no-one turns up exactly on time anyway) so we went to a near cafe and Danny ordered a coffee - to take-away. I wasn't sure that it was something they would offer, but sure enough Danny exited with some coffee in a little see-through plastic cup. What wonders Barcelona offers.

Finally we spotted Rosie and Caroli, another girl from the Youth Hostel. They had been waiting at the fountain in the centre all along. Introductions sorted out, we hadn't met Caroli before, Rosie suggested a tour of the old town; a maze of close streets and balconies that join the many plazas that dot the city of Barcelona. One particular plaza that painted a particularly poignant image was the one where a large number of rebels during the Spanish Civil War were slaughtered by Franco's soldiers; you could still see the pocked walls where bullets had broken the skin of those buildings. And amongst all this history of violenc children were playing football without a care in the world. How wounds heal.

Our group was a very unusual one. Caroli didn't speak much English; Rosie spoke (to my ears anyway) fairly decent Spanish, though she often had to search for the right word; Danny was still learning, but looked fairly competent; and I spoke no Spanish whatsoever (I could say "hello", "please", "thankyou" and "good-bye"). This meant that Rosie had to act as translator for Caroli if our English conversations got out of hand, and when Rosie and Caroli spoke Spanish, Danny tried to follow along and I listened to noise. Still, we managed to communicate pretty well as a group with sign-language, and whilst Caroli didn't speak much English, she spoke well enough for her to ask me questions and understand my answers - made me ashamed to be English, not least because she also spoke Italian well enough to even start using Italian in her Spanish by accident!

We hardly saw even a quarter of the old town, though I was distracted by conversation with Rosie for most of it, so we may have seen more: I was to revisit this part of town in much greater depth whilst aimlessly wandering when it was just me left in Barcelona (Danny took to cycling quite early on). One of my favourite parts of Barcelona was the internal streets: behind every big door in these streets was an internal street from which the higher levels could be reached. They looked fantastic, like a city within a city.

One of the reasons we ventured into town was for supplies. Not food supplies, we were fairly competent with that now; we were looking for clothes. I was in need of new socks (my feet were awful, my socks even worse), and Danny was in need of some civvies. We spent a bit of time walking through that part of old town that was full of little shops and indoor markets, but we couldn't find anything cheap enough for Danny, and socks just did not seem to be on the menu.

As the time approached 4pm we made our back to La Ramblas and to the market where we met up with Fred and Lucas. They wanted to get back to the Youth Hostel, but we wanted to do a bit more shopping and also get food for this evening: Danny planned to cook a mean for us four and everyone else as it turned out. For the purposes of dinner, we took a little detour through the Carrefour Express on La Ramblas. Danny is like an old-woman in a supermarket, he spends ages getting just the right ingredients; it's quite funny to watch. Rosie was the one to point it out to me.

Don Simon: Danny has a taste for cheap red wine, and he found his greatest in Spain. It goes by the name of Don Simon and sells in Carrefour for 64 cents for a litre. So cheap it makes you wonder how the make any money off it. It is disgusting, and the Spanish we talked to were ashamed of it, but if we ever exclaim "Don Simon!", it is this we do it for. We also found the Sangria version 1 euro and 4 cents; it tastes much nicer and is far easier to drink.

Food shopping done, we stopped for a coffee and relaxed for a bit; staring at the cats on the wall. The siesta that afflicts the Spanish shopper between the hours of 12 an 4 was finally at a close and we quickly found lots of little shops selling cheap stuff cheaply. In one we found a shirt for Danny and new shoes, whilst I picked up some new socks and new underwear. Our tasks finally done we returned to the Youth Hostel so Danny could prepare dinner and I could finally wash with the prospect of something that didn't smell of stale sweat to put on my feet.

I spent 20 mins cleaning my feet alone, washing them over and over again till I could be sure that any smell eminating from them was only the lemon of the soap. That is something I've learned the hard way on this trip: Feet are important, do not underestimate the need to protect them from the elements and from themselves. As they spend most of their time enclosed in the same material all day long, it is vitally important to be able to change them into something more comfortable and allow them to air in dry socks and shoes. Next time I would definately do what Danny did, which was to have one pair of shoes to cycle with, and one pair for when the cycling is over. Fleece socks are also important, and waterproof shoes or over-shoes for when the weather is against you.

Finally, with feet done and socks donned, I stepped out into a world where I did not need to feel ashamed of my feet anymore. Fred and Lucas were not in when we got there, so we waited a bit before Danny decided to start cooking without them. I don't know at what point he decided to cook for everyone who was in, but it ended up as a meal for 9 people. In itself this is quite impressive, what makes it staggeringly god-like is that the Youth-Hostel, while equipped with a kitchen, did not have a cooker so Danny did the entire thing on our little camping-gaz stove. It really makes you realise how wasteful we are of our 4-hob monstrosities. If you can cook a meal for 9 on one hob, imagine what you could do with 4!

Dinner cooked, and Fred, Lucas and the others waiting and hungry, we sat down for a meal of epic proportions. There was so much food that Danny had to cook it in two batches! We ate well and accompanied by Don Simon (we had snuck it in as alcohol apparently forbidden) the entire meal was a great success. After Dinner we planned the proceedings for the evening. At the start everyone was planning to go out in one big group, but as the time got later and later, Rosie, Ethan and myself got impaitent and we decided to meet up with them later if we could.

The goal for the three of us was to visit a champagneria (or something like that - basically a place where they only serve Cava). The place we had seen during the day opened a 7pm, but it was shut because it was a Monday (The Spanish seem to follow the Garfield philosophy of week-days). With no chance of excessive amounts of Cava, we stopped off in a particularly plush cocktail bar. I can't remember where it was (perhaps Rosie can help), but it is certainly a place to go to if you are in Barecelona, if only because it made the most potent cocktail I have ever tried: the Hemingway. It was a cocktail made from Cava and Absinthe and may well have been made in the same way as the Death in the Afternoon Cocktail, the name of which is suitably descriptive of the stuff we drank. Rosie and I both had a Hemingway, while Ethan stuck with the far safer Mojitos. We had only sat down for a couple of minutes before Ethan said he had to rush to meet some friends of his. I didn't mind, he left his Mojitos behind, which meant more alcohol for us.

And so Rosie and I, accompanied by the quite potent mixture of the Hemingway cocktail, talked and talked. About what, I couldn't say; for how long, I have no idea. Conversation was effortless, pauses were comfortable, words flowed and wit was forthcoming. Topics were interesting and obscure, the kind of things that you only talk about when you are "talking shop", but here we were doing it in the context of open and friendly conversation; light-hearted mixing the deep and shallow with the simplest of ease. Basically, we connected. It was odd to find this here in Barcelona; a freak's chance. The excitement associated with meeting Rosie over the next few days can be quite accurately analogised to the feeling of excitement you get on Christmas Eve; a restless sense of expectation, which never fails to disappoint as a child: and meeting Rosie never failed to disappoint. It was not a new experience; we had met before, this companion and I, but to find her under a new guise was an unexpected pleasure. Her rarity had been shattered, with two there could no longer be one, and with two there could only be more: an interesting prospect.

But I digress. After polishing off our cocktails, and the one that Ethan left, we moved on to a small bar near the Placa Reial (which had seemed to become the unofficial centre of Barcelona). Here we randomly met a bloke from Rosie's school, who was enjoying a quiet drink with his newly acquired fiance - he had proposed to her only the night before in that very same bar (which was odd, because it wasn't a particularly romantic bar). We stayed there for awhile, but let the two lovebirds get back to revelling in their rings and plans (or whatever it is fiances talk about). Onwards, and me and Rosie dropped into a small bar in the Placa Reial (everyone ends up in the Placa Reial sooner or later), where we supped on fruit juice as we were both feeling the effects of the Hemingway with exceptional vividness.

At last tiredness crept up on us as the alcohol high left, and so we made our way back to the Youth Hostel, passing the largest chair I've ever soon. Though Rosie had been in Barcelona for some days already she had not noticed the big chair, it was like some giant chair-shaped elephant. She has a great interest in chairs (why? See here: http://www.rosie-alcock.moonfruit.com/ ) and I toyed with the notion of trying to climb up on it, but decided against it due to complexity and lateness of the evening.

When we got back, we expected the others to still be out, but no! Our little evening had outlasted their flamenco one, and we found Danny asleep in his bed. I introduced Rosie to Beirut (Elephant Gun is where you have to start), but before too long the night receptionist bloke started getting tetchy again so we retired for the evening, at the exact same moment that Danny began to snore. God! I felt sorry for the others in the room - I was largely used to it by now, but for the others it must have been difficult to get some sleep. Come on tomorrow!

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Today was the day we left the Youth Hostel, it was expensive and we were poor. Fred and Lucas were also leaving today so we stuck around with them till in the morning till we had to vacate the building at 11am. We escorted them, bikes in tow, to the metro station and then left them to their costly flight home - what fools they were, they should have cycled.

Our plan of action for today was to find campsite, and I had chosen one not far out of Barcelona (for there is none in Barcelona) called Tres Estralla (Tip: never stay at a campsite whose name is a direct reference to how well it has been graded by the local authority - that sentence was not nearly as succinct as I would have liked it, never mind and onwards). But to get there we had to get out of Barcelona first, and that was to prove difficult.