Barcelona Day 2 - The day of Discovery

A large portion of today was taken up in the Easy Internet Café and then in the Policia Station. In the Police station we actually had to take a number and sit and wait to be called to a little room to make a report. Now, I'm not sure how this usually works, as I'm not in the habit of having to visit police stations, but this seems extremely organised....perhaps through necessity with 1 in 10 tourists having stuff nicked every day?

We were sandwiched between a grumpy/hungover looking lady with no shoes, dirty feet and massive scratches down her face to the right, and a rather cute spanish gentleman to the left. We took great pains not to make eye contact with the lady...she seemed slightly agitated. The guy eventually started chatting to us, and I think Nicki was quite shocked at how little english he spoke. I know, surprise surprise...we're in Spain, but I think a lot of English people would be the same, especially those who don't travel around very much. We're far too used to being understood! He went through the phrases he knew:

Hello

Goodbye

I love you (?)

Beautiful (seeing a pattern?)

One, two, three, four, five (number of girlfriends he has?)

My name is (Casanova?)

In all seriousness he seemed quite sweet, but thankfully just as the convo was getting a bit awkward...he was pointing at Nicki's rings and asking about husbands....his number was called up...phew.

I'd have taken some pictures, but I was concerned I'd be genuinely arrested for trying to steal governmental secrets...and spend the rest of my holiday in a different part of the police station.

Later that day we went for our first wander around the city, we investigated Barri Gotic (please forgive the lack of accent..I haven't figured it out on pootah) and the La Seu Cathedral. Some of you may know I don't hold with religion, and cathedrals in general only illustrate the grotesque wealth of Catholicism (surpassed only by good old Benedicts BLING BLING), but one cannot help but be impressed by the sheer scale of the place. The architecture is incredible.

Catholicism is certainly alive and kicking in Barcelona, as was evidenced by the priests hearing confession whilst we were there. We walked past one box where the guy had no current customers, and was sat under a reading light with his hands folded, reading a paper. Everything fibre of my being wanted to ask him if I could take a picture of him....but my polite nature took over and I decided it may be too disrespectful. DAMN!!

After Barri Gotic we wandered back towards home and into a bar just across the road called 'Cerversares Ski Bar' for 'dos cervesa'.

This is when we discovered it.....Estrella. Spanish....cheap....and YUMMY!! We fell in love there and then. Plonked there at the bar we drank our beers, ordered some tapas, and some more beers. Semi-cured spanish snozzage and patatas bravas was the order of the day. Must say I was a little disappointed with the patatas, it was essentially chopped-up chips with tommy sauce on! If that's what genuine patatas bravas is like then La Tasca has been spoiling us!

Nicki was perturbed by the indoor smoking, I was a little too. Amazing how quickly you get used to the status quo, it wasn't so long ago smoking was standard in most places in Britain.

That was the proper Spanish experience, sat at a smoky bar, drinking beer, eating tapas and passive smoking......oh yes. I loved it :)

Barcelona Day 1 - Pickpocket Hell

Barcelona Day 1. When I say Day 1, I mean, we landed in Girona at 9pm, so...Day 1 really consists of 21:00-00:00, and yet, such a lot can happen in such a small space of time.

Everyone knows the sensible advice that's given out whenever you go away, make sure your stuff is insured, keep your money in a few different places, not in one wadge together, take some travellers checks and make a note of the numbers, photocopy your passport and keep the copies separately. Etc etc etc. I've been looking at all this advice seriously in terms of the 3 months I'll be in South East Asia next year, but when it came to a week in Barcelona with my sister it all got forgotten.

I'm not sure why this may be, complacency? An ingrained sense of 'nice white Europeans wouldn't really steal from me' that I didn't even know I had? Laziness? Stupidity? A misplaced assumption that just because you'd zipped your bag shut no one would be able to steal from it? Nicki and I were also damned tired and grumpy from travelling all day.

The bloody annoying thing is that we were warned constantly before we left, by people who had been to Barcelona and knew what the place was like. To the point where we were left wondering why people seemed to be being so negative about the place.

Cut to Nicki and I on the Metro. We were knackered having arrived at the airport assuming that because we had flown into Girona airport, that there would be a transfer. There wasn't, and so we'd been on bus, train and were now on the Metro headed for a station that we thought might be near the apartments.

A group of about 6 teenagers get on, I guess they were about 16. They stood behind Nicki and were jostling about a bit in the boisterous way that slightly drunken teenagers do. One stop from ours Nicki looked down and realised her bag was open, and when she looked inside her travel wallet was missing.

This was the travel wallet which contained....wait for it:

-BOTH our passports

-BOTH our money which was due to pay for our accomodation

-Paperwork containing the number and address of our accomodation....you'd be correct in thinking we hadn't written those details down elsewhere....we're WELL clever like that!!

We've never been pickpocketed before and in that initial panic we lost all sense of reason and jumped off the Metro at our stop. Only then did we realise it must have been those bastard kids..no one else had got close enough since the last time Nicki had seen it to have taken it. She was wearing the bag the whole time and it had been zipped shut, but it had been like taking candy from a baby.

It was a bloody shock, but it had happened and we had to deal with it. We found a hotel with an internet connection we could use to find the phone number of the accomodation, got a taxi with the little money I had in my purse, and went to bed hoping all would look brighter in the morning.

Over the following days we sorted out the mess by spending an hour in a police station filing a report, contacting the consulate to organise appointments to collect emergency passports at €79 each, spending a couple of hours faffing around at and around the consulate whilst waiting for the passports to be processed. We also spent far too much time at an internet café photocopying, faxing and looking for details of various people/places in the internet.

In the end everything turned out ok and we managed to get home on the flights we had booked, but the whole thing was a massive waste of time and money. However! We learned some valuable lessons!

-Keep EVERYTHING separate!

-Never buy a travel wallet unless you plan to strap it to the inside of your thigh like a hooker in a Western movie.

-Spanish police people are very friendly

-Keep your bastard bag in front of you and secure at ALL times!

I'm VERY glad I learned these valuable lessons whilst with my sister in Europe...rather than by myself in Siem Reap next year.

Despite the horrideness of this first experience of Barcelona, we did go on to have a lovely time and I will also blog about that I promise! It's up and coming ladies and genst, I have some lovely pictures (mostly of beer) for you to peruse :).

Love love x