Barcelonian Extravaganza

The first full day of Barcelona started with a wander through the main food market. It's quite an incredible place, the amount of fresh fish and fruit was mind blowing. Certainly seafood is in the majority, however there were various other meats available as well. This includes whole skinned rabbits, skinned lambs heads and various other animal body parts which I'm not sure I want to identify. After a few minutes of walking through the place my stomach started to turn a little, indicating that that it was time to leave. I should make a point, however, about the freshness of the seafood available. Most of the lobsters and crabs were still moving their appendages around in a slow dance announcing the recentness of their catch. If you can't wait to get the stuff home to eat or perhaps, like me, you don't have a kitchen to take it home to, there are several of the fish stalls that are also like kiosk restaurants where you can pick your catch of the day and they'll cook it up for you on the spot. Ian was very impressed, and made the commitment to come back for dinner. We did so, however the whole place was completely closed. It was surreal to see an area that was so incredibly bustling with life shut down into such a ghost town. It took a minute or two of Ian's convincing to make me believe we were actually looking at the same place.

The fruit part of the market was just as amazing, and I have had several fresh juices from there already. You can also get a plate of sliced fruit for about 2 euros, the quality of which is fantastic. We got an english breakfast of bacon, eggs and potato at one of the stalls and continued some general wandering throughout the day.

We didn't see a lot, though the main strip, Las Ramblas, is very very busy the whole time. It is basically the main walking strip of Barcelona, and the number of street performers is truly amazing. Most of them do the living statue thing, and there is a lot of interesting variety in this. Some will simply do the ¨Look at me stand still for ages¨, though others are a lot more original and will do a little movement or trick when you give them some money.

After killing a few hours wandering up and down the strip, we did a bike tour run by the same company we did in Paris. The guy running this one was an Australian (Perth), and had been living in Barcelona for the past 4 years. He explained various interesting quirks about the city, describing how the locals call themselves ¨Catalan¨ or some such, and that they don´t exactly consider themselves Spanish as such. They have their own language, which apparently isn´t as close to Spanish as you might reckon, and they deliberately change laws to separate themselves from the rest of Spain. This includes the legality of street drinking and public nudity. As you might start to realise, this is a very liberal city. The bike tour took us to some of the major sights of Barcelona, of which there are not too many. There is a massive cathedral that they´ve been building for the past hundred years or so and are only about half way. The government isn´t helping with funding and neither is the Catholic church. Apparently the whole thing is funded by the money it makes off tourists going in and out of the joint. It was designed by a guy named Gaudi, who has a very unique style of architecture. I like some of the cathedral, the Sagrada Familia, but it has some weird sculptures of bunches of fruit on top of some of the towers which I just find plain weird.

The tour continued to their version of the Arche de Triomfe, a cool park with an awesome fountain full of ducks and little baby ducks, and by this stage I hope I don´t need remind the good reader of my fondness for the Anatidae. We continued on to the beach, where various art works both constructed by man and of man himself, or to be more precise in this case, herself, were to be found. We lounged here for half an hour or so, sampling a generic local brew, before heading back to the the bike shop. I might point out at this stage that it was not a simple matter of just riding from place to place, primarily because the tour guide wasn´t too concerned with keeping a lesuirely pace that garaunteed all would follow. Neither had he instituted something like Team Kaboose, that those who´ve read the Paris entry might recall being quite an excellent idea. Considering it was the same tour company I found this a bit odd, but there were several instances where he had to stop the few that had actually kept up with him, whilst he turned around and herded the stragglers. This was not for lack of athleticism on their part, but the lights change quite quickly in Barcelona, and many were left dangling simply because they didn´t want to brave the significantly heavier vehicles that tend to cross your path on the regular Barcelonian street.

Eventually we made it back, and after a nice dinner of Japanese fare, I convinced Ian and Lisa to accompany me to a local jazz bar known as ¨Harlem Jazz Club¨ not too far from where we were staying, on the recommendation from a very nice English girl I met on the bike tour. As I expected, Ian wasn´t too keen on the music and they left after a song or two, but I enjoyed my time there until close. The interesting thing about this place was that it consisted of improvisational artists. Every song or two one of the musicians would change, and it astonished me how well they could play together when I expect they had never rehearsed as a group. Excellent musicians obviously, though one guy who took the mic wasn´t so great. There was a Spanish girl who ripped up the mic, and a black guy who could scat very well, but it was definitely those with an instrument who stole the show. The main guy who seemed to be running the show was wearing an American cowboy hat, and I assume was from the south, as all of the numbers he was involved with (about 50%) had a very country bent. Some were definitely blues jazzy, however a couple were real knee slapping, hoe down stuff. Nice for a change, but I hope it´s not like that every Tuesday. I wandered back home a couple hours after midnight.

The following day we decided to take the cable car over Barcelona which offered some nice views of the city and its expanse. The whole place is fairly sprawling, with very few high rises to speak of. It is quite clear where the new, business area of town is being built up. Before heading off to the launching tower we decided to try this Paella thing that Ian was so keen on. We were directed to a very authentic Spanish restaurant not far from the market. Greeted in Spanish by who I think was the owner that didn´t speak a word of English, we eventually managed to order the seafood paella. Originally Ian was going to get the seafood one, and I another, but we were quickly informed in a roundabout way that the paella was for at least 2 people. Lisa decided to jump on the wagon and we ordered for three, and half an hour later a very large and very hot baking dish was brought out with the dish inside. It was very nice, very salty and consisted of rice, mussels, clams, two types of prawns, and other seafood bits and pieces which my limited knowledge of seafood could not identify. The whole thing was very good, and it was cool to eat in a real Spanish restaurant.

The cable car queue wasn´t short, but after about a half hour of waiting, we were in the little cabin with about 10 other people, slowly winding our way across the harbour. Hovering above docks and water at about 50 meters gives quite a view, and not the smallest amount of vertigo. The whole trip only lasted a few minutes, but I was able to snap some good photo´s that give a good sense of how big Barcelona actually is. It was quite clear that the places we´d been hanging around (where most of the entertainment is) is really quite a localised area of the city.

After getting to the hill, we caught another gondola up it, to see some of the parkland which we were assured by an English chick from whom we asked for directions was ¨Loads of fun¨. Intrigued how a simple park could harbour such wonders, we had a wander around and quickly found a castle or fortress like place that looked over the docklands. This place was pretty cool, and had several large cannons mounted on the precipes. We overlooked the docks for a while and the little trucks that were buzzing about all of the crates, moving them from ship to truck and vice versa were almost comical. There were no less than 10 moving at any one time and, it appeared, in no particularly orderly fashion. They really resembled ants running around the place, however I can assure you that even though I say little trucks, these things could straddle three shipping containers high and were about half as long, as they were used to stack and destack the containers. It was during this little visage that Ian got shat on by a seagull, and so we decided to head back down the hill.

After a short siesta back at the hostel the three of us went out to an Irish pub and tried to guess the songs that were being played on the TV before the little blurb came up informing you of such. This mingled in with some interesting conversation on music in general coupled with some musings on life, goals and the purpose of each of our trips proved to be one of the most enjoyable afternoons I´ve had so far.

Later on we found ourselves heading down towards the marina area we had visited a couple days earlier, had some Italian food for dinner, continued our musical discussions and headed towards another bar I wanted to check out. This proved an interesting walk, as Lisa had managed to ingest the perfect amount of alcohol for her system and was coming out with some of the funniest and weirdest stuff I´d ever heard her say. Anyone that knows Ian and Lisa even slightly will understand the coochie coo and baby talk stuff they seem to let out every now and then, and Lisa started posing the questions of whether Ian ever broke out in the stuff with me. The whole thing was quite funny, and eventually we ended up at Chupitos shots bar. This place was packed with Americans celebrating 4th of July, and we were quickly greeted inside by a guy who told us as much, and quickly started rambling a bunch of crap before telling us that we couldn´t be Australian, because of the way we pronounced ¨Past¨. We later found out that this guy was actually a gay kiwi pretended to be American because he´d been hanging out with some of them since the early afternoon. We bumped into another Australian girl from Gundagai, Cheryl, to whom we directed several jokes related to dogs sitting on various types of food bearing rectangular objects. I ordered a round of shots, as is the custom in the venue. The wall was covered with hundreds of different types, however this proved absolutely useless as the chick behind the counter couldn´t understand me enunciating any of them. I reverted to ¨Just give us 4 shots¨, ¨Strong?¨, ¨Yeah sure, why not!¨. She whipped out 4 glasses, poured about 4 different somethings in them, lit them all on fires and gave us a series of straws. These we proceeded to suck down quickly, as I was concerned the straw would melt and I´d soon be inhaling some kind of toxic straw smoke. Luckily this wasn´t the case, but we decided not to hang around the place too long due to the packed crowd of Americans, and headed down the street a couple places to the one we´d had those wonderful Mojito´s a few days before. We spent the next hour or so there having a drink and discussing things Australian and British, as Cheryl had been living in London for the past year or so.

On entering this place however, I felt the urge to rush directly to the toilet. A sudden panic attack struck me as I realised there was no toilet paper, yet the urge to use the facilities was rapidly increasing. I spied a roll in the womens toilet, and in quick ninja style swiped it from their counter (the absence of which Lisa would later bemoan), and quickly realised that perhaps the paella we´d eaten earlier that day may not have agreed with my system as well as I´d thought it had. Ian and Lisa would confirm this the following day as they too were struck with the same rather uncomfortable affliction. I felt pretty poor for the rest of our time in the bar, and thankfully not too long later we made our way home.

Thankfully this was my only episode, however Ian and Lisa´s lasted most of following day, Lisa informing me the next morning that come 4AM, she´d hardly been able to lie in one place, for fear of rupturing. Luckily I´d packed Immodium, of which Lisa quickly and gladly partook, however Ian decided to take the path of running it´s course. Considering come Monday I´ll have been travelling for 4 weeks, and I´ve been trying several of the local cuisines in each place, I think I´ve been quite lucky to only have been struck down once.

The next day would be a very quite one, with a couple of unexpected surprises.... Stay tuned!