Al's Travel Blog - Part 1

Saturday, May 31st 2008

Our packs are lighter than either of us expected them to be. We take a flight from Bournemouth to Girona. It's a short flight—maybe two hours—but most of the passengers around us I recognise from being around us in the small sticky bar before the boarding began. As soon as the pilot turns off the 'fasten seatbelt' sign there is a rush for the loos. The trolleys roam up and down the aisles constantly, resupplying the Brits with their beer and wine. I have beer, Claire a foul chardonnay and we share a hotdog. She does not like flying much.

The flight passes easily but the pilot lands fast and brakes hard, which I suppose has to do with their 25 minute turnaround on the ground before flying back to Bournemouth.

Customs is fast and painless—I love the EU's power to remove official suspicion—and Claire is excited at speaking Spanish for the first time:

"Si," says the passport official. He checks her passport and gives it back to her. "Si, bueno."

"Gracias!" she chirps.

I on the other hand just clam up like a good British schoolboy, confronted with my ignorance. They're used to this, too, and I am waved through.

We buy tickets for the bus from Girona to Estacio del Nord in Barcelona and step out into the air of Spain. It's dusk and the air is heavy—faint smells, so strong in California, linger with a heavy feeling of tired enthusiasm for another truckload of half-cut Brits come to burn on the beaches. It's almost enough to make you ashamed of being British; it's never enough to make you ashamed of being half-cut.

The bus drops us at Estacio del Nord and the streets of Barcelona are still warm an hour after sundown. We take the commuter train (we were trying for the metro—public transport here is confusing to say the least) to the Placa de Catalunya and walk the three blocks, past deli's and restauarants and fantastic, huge, towering blocks of apartments that are gorgeous and gaudily decorated. The room we are staying in is in a family apartment in just such a building on the Carrer de Roger des Lluria and we find it and our host, Xabier, buzzes us up and we climb six hundred flights of stairs with our backpacks on and begin to doubt our ability to go through with the hike.

It is a lovely simple room and we wash in the bathroom down the corridor after paying Xabier in cash and then we talk excitedly about our plans for the next day before we realise we are actually in Spain, and at the start of our grand adventure.

Sunday June 1st 2008

We sleep in—the other guests, Swiss girls we never got to meet, have already set off. We lock up our things and set off into Barcelona, towards the Placa des Catalunya and from there to the infamous Las Ramblas. It is too crowded and this is barely the beginning of the tourist season and we find that the best way through is to zig-zag through Las Ramblas visiting the smaller, quieter side streets. Our first port of call is breakfast and we struggle through with our lack of any language but in a small place near Placa des Angels and the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona we order mixed Paella and cold Sangria. The day is still cool and we do a little work before the food arrives and only have the one carife of Sangria despite the waiter's best efforts—he must think we aren't really Ingles after all. Afterwards we pay a short visit to the Museu but want to get on with seeing the city. Okay, that was me: I'm useless with art galleries and have heard a rumour of visible remains, traces perhaps, of Roman walls in the Gothic quarter. When we get there I can't find them but continue to bore Claire about Hannibal Barca (Barcelona is named for his family) and we stumble on some fantastic architecture that distracts me from the Roman Empire for a while. Eventually we end up at the harbour at the bottom of Las Ramblas. It is two in the afternoon and the sun is laughing heartily at the wilting, overdressed Ingles who now shuffle into a tourist cafe.

We sit outside and in my notebook is an entry I made while Claire was in the loo and I was asking vainly for the bill (La quentes). It reads: It's good just to walk, and pleasant to sit and drink cold sangria and hot coffee by the mirador des Colom (named for Cristobel Colom, known to our enterprising cousins in America as Christopher Columbus), but each unasked for entertainer expects payment, waiters speak English because it's just easier that way and drunk German and English and American boys catcall and whistle at passing girls. It will soon be time to move further away from the language we know—away from the travel guides. Of course then, when we are truly on our own, we're fucked.

After asking several times for la quentes without success Claire suggests we walk up a mountain. We walk up Montjuic and then up to the castle there. Here once lived Barcelona's historic Jewish community. The view north-west over Barcelona harbour and the mediterranean and the start of the Costa Brava is my favourite. It looks good, with the sea dark blue and the dots of white buildings scrambling up the brown heights beyond. 'That is where we will walk', I think.

We take some pictures (hopefully attached with Claire's entry if she can sort out the camera) and it gets cooler but we sit for a while before walking back down the hill to find dinner. On the way Claire points out to the Spanish that they are driving on the right: "Thank God I'm here," she says. "There could have been an awful crash." We walk through an exclusive street party and back up Las Ramblas, checking newspaper stands for the English Observer because I'm supposed to be in it. In Spain, I'm not. We decide to eat closer to our room, and off the Placa Urquanoia (sp?) we find a reasonably priced restaurant where the waiters hate us only marginally less than the elderly American couple with thick red glasses next to us. We make our best guesses at the menu and drink a bottle of wine and the food is okay and afterwards we find out that Claire ate veal—"I'm disgusted with myself! I know it's ridiculous but I actually feel sick."

"Don't feel sick. We've had a lovely day, I love this city, we ate well and we're going to have a romantic night in our room in Barcelona."

"I just ate a calf, you prick, I can never have sex again."