Episode 6: New Friends & New Experiences – Barcelona, Spain (Days 12 to 15)

Previously on the trip:
Episode 1 – First Day in Marrakech – Marrakech (Days 1-2) Link
Episode 2 – Church Music & Fish – The Rest of Morocco (2-4) Link
Episode 3 – Stuck Between a Rock & a Spain Place – Gibraltar (5-6) Link
Episode 4 – Homeless in a Hostel – Granada (6-9) Link
Episode 5 – Getting the Hang of It – Madrid (9-11) Link

Writing Barcelona was interesting. We really didn’t do much touristy stuff because we were staying with friends and spent most of the weekend partying and absorbing local culture. So… check out some pretty pictures and get ready because a very emotional Episode 7 is coming in a few days.

-Joshua

After an all night bus ride from Madrid where we both got little sleep, Nate and I had all day before meeting Domingo, my friend of a friend who was hosting us for the weekend. We gained our bearings outside the Metro by the Arc de Triumph stop, and made our way to what we thought would be a good place to start – the main street – La Rambla. It turned out to be the Times Square of Barcelona, crammed with tourists and vendors selling the most useless and annoying noise making crap. It was awful. We were sweaty, overtired and were bumping into everyone as we passed by; sometimes by accident.

We needed internet to prep for the city as usual: where to go, what to see, how to get out, etc. We didn’t know how long we would be able to stay, and hostels didn’t feel like an option, so we decided to start planning the next stop already. We knew it would be France, but hadn’t yet chosen between Toulouse, Bordeaux or Marseille. There was a McDonald’s advertising free Wi-Fi, and we hopped on with no problems but after half an hour or so we lost the connection. We figured that they kicked you off after a certain point so we tried another McDonald’s with no luck. They must be in cahoots.

Sitting there, too tired to hitch our bags again, we met another backpacker. It’s cool if you don’t get the reference, but he looked like the actor DJ Qualls (imdb him – you’ll recognize him). Like the star, he was kind of a weird kid. But he was alone and we had nothing to do so we said that we would chill with him for the day while waiting for our friend to get out of work. As we left Mickey D’s #2, DJ Backpacker said that he had an errand to run so we told him that we’d meet him at the third McDonald’s. We would end up waiting for him for about an hour, but we would never reconnect (there were, expectedly, a lot of McDonald’s on the main stretch).

Nate and I walked further south to where the tourists thinned out until we reached the docks. I was looking for a park. I was exhausted and needed to sleep so I began to take a nap under a tree while resting up against my bag. Nate needed sleep also, but couldn’t connect his irritability with tiredness. He scolded me that we always do what I wanted to do, to which I replied, “Do whatever you want. I need to sleep. And if you’re not going anywhere, can you watch the guitar?” I slept for about an hour on the grass. It was a surprisingly good nap and I woke up feeling much better. Nate was sitting on the other side of the tree playing the guitar, so at least he wasn’t just sitting around.

By the docks

I had left Domingo a message a few hours ago but hadn’t heard back from him yet. We knew he wasn’t going to be free until the afternoon, but as the hours went by, the question of whether we’d hear from him at all started to plague us. The phone’s battery was dying, and as our McDonald’s experiment played out, we had no access to internet. This is the kind of situation that either just works out, or to nobody’s fault goes horribly wrong. But around 5PM, we got a call from Domingo telling us a place to meet him in 15 minutes. We couldn’t really hear him on the phone, and random directions like “make a left on Ferran and a right on Av. Drassanes or something” didn’t mean much to us, so we asked him to meet us at one of the Metro stops. This was the moment of truth. All he knew was that I had red hair and a guitar (my “go to” description when meeting up with someone new) and all we knew was that some unidentified dude was looking for us.

After a few minutes waiting, hoping that we had the right exit of the station, a guy showed up.

“Joshua?”

“Yea. Domingo?” Bingo. We man-hugged hello and he grabbed the guitar to help us on the 15 minute walk to his apartment across town. We didn’t mind the walk; we were just happy to be moving away from the tourist area. Domingo told us that he was in the process of moving out of the apartment to get a place with his girlfriend and we offered to help him move but he said it was cool and that we should just chill.

After setting down our stuff, we showered and used the bathroom. When travelling, each shower and toilet has its own special quirks. Yassine’s had that “earthquake-like” quality, and this one had no flusher. Nate and I both on separate occasions looked around – even in weird places like in the cabinets and outside the door – but couldn’t find anything to flush the toilet. Hoping we didn’t use an unusable throne, we had to ask. As it turned out, there was no flusher. After use, you had to use a bucket full of water from the shower to force-flush the toilet. So now we knew. After I showered, I hung my travel towel on the clothes line out the window. More on that later. We met Fredrico and Leonardo, the other roommates, and since they barely spoke English, we jammed for a while in the common language.

View from Domingo’s apartment

Over the weekend, Nate and I would experience the Barcelona nightlife. The guys took us around their part of the city to local places including street parties, a live music club, and the alleys of Barri Gòtic at 5AM. One night, we stopped at Plaça del Catalunya where a student rally was going on. It was a protest against mainstream political parties, high unemployment, corruption and welfare cuts. It was the second potentially violent rally that we expected to run into after the post-terrorist attack in Marrakech, but adventurely speaking, it was another let down. Don’t get me wrong; run-ins-with-police-or-not, the sit in was fun and we met some cool people while walking through severely inebriated.

The rally

Nate speaks some Spanish, but the most in-common language that I had with the roommates was French. Luckily, the drunker I got, the better at French I became (or at least that’s my recollection of what happened). Maybe I accessed a deeply buried part of my subconscious that recalled all the work I put in a decade ago in high school, or maybe we both just spoke gibberish and pretended to understand each other. But for the purpose of this story, and backed by my Moroccan experience utilizing French, I’m gonna go with the simple fact that I rock. We all stayed out for a while longer and walked around the hidden parts of Barcelona all while talking French like I never thought I could.

In the morning we woke up with a vacation hangover which is a real world nothing. Between heightened substance tolerance, superhero-like language recollection, and a near-iron clad stomach capable of eating “meat” twice a day, our bodies had adapted to the necessities of life on the road.

I was about to shower when I found out that my towel had dropped from the drying line. I hadn’t considered that I needed to pin it to the string when hanging it last night. I’m just a spoiled dryer user. I wallowed for a few minutes, and then came to terms that my mistake would cost me a new towel. Then out of the blue, a downstairs neighbor brought up the very same towel! The Island takes and the Island gives.

While the guys relaxed, Nate and I went out to the Jaron recommended Parc Güell, Antoni Gaudi’s mountaintop Dr. Seuss themed park with gingerbread houses and colorful stone-like sculptures. Up the many sets of stairs to reach the top, we passed mosaic sculptures, stucco caves and a pillared sub-lookout cutaway where kids were playing. At the top, we stopped to eat our normal meal of pot-luck sandwiches. The bottle of barbeque sauce that we carried around to mask all other flavors was a trickster and would tend to squirt indirectly and indiscriminately. As usual, it misfired and sprayed all over my shorts. When an item is forced to retire early, it affects the whole laundry paradigm. Nate and I each had two pairs of shorts, a tan cargo set and a pair of plaid board shorts. We had to coordinate days on and off between us so as not to look ridiculous, and now that my plaid shorts were prematurely dirty, I would be the man-in-cargo until our next opportunity to do a wash. This story isn’t so much significant in itself; rather it just explains more of the travel life.

Parc Güell

Parc Güell

View of BCN from Parc Güell

The rest of the weekend continued in the same manner, partying at night and wandering during the day. We spent more time with our hosts than touristing, and didn’t make up for it after the weekend since museums were closed on Mondays when they returned to work and we decided to leave for France anyway. At the last minute, we decided instead to go to Andorra, a small landlocked country in the Pyrenees between Spain and France, because who knew that there was a small landlocked country in the Pyrenees called Andorra?

Rushing to catch the train that would get us out of the country, Nate and I stopped at Barcelona’s most famous landmark, Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia, better known as his “Unfinished Cathedral”. Started in 1882, the cathedral has been under construction on and off through his death in 1926 all the way until today. It is expected to be completed in 2026 on the centennial of Gaudi’s death, but there are skeptics. Like the Alhambra, there were intricate carvings on the outside walls of the cathedral. I’m sure the inside was nice too, but we didn’t have enough time, money or desire to tour it.

Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia

Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia

Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia

By the end of our time in Barcelona, Nate and I felt like we had overstayed our welcome at the apartment, especially with one of the roommates. We tried to be good guests by doing the dishes, replacing food we ate, and buying alcohol, but we kept getting feelings of “so you’re staying another night?” Maybe I’m over thinking it, or maybe three nights was too much for two guests to stay at friends of a friend. Either way, Barcelona would be remembered as one of the wilder experiences we would have in Europe, and a lot of what went on there… will stay there.

What happens in Barcelona, stays in Barcelona