Ola Barcelona!

The Brat and I are on part 2 of our summer sojourn. And I am blogging from a dump of a net cafe in sunny Barcelona. It could all have been so different, as our route getting here was somewhat problematic.

Having returned from Norfolk on Monday, I was still in quite a laidback mood thinking I had three days to sort myself before travelling to Barca. On Tuesday evening a random thought occurred to me, I had booked our accomodation for four nights, but if we were leaving on Wednesday, then that would only be three. It was a classic Goldilocs ´I fucked up´ moment. But what´s travelling without a little pre-flight drama!

I checked the booking confirmation and lo and behold, it revealed our flight was indeed the following morning and we needed to haul ass quicktime to get it together.

Thanks to a withdrawal from the Bank of the Bobo Dread - my funds were still sitting in my savings account - we were able to actually leave the country with some money...or else we might have ended up as the main attraction on Las Ramblas as the busking duo from London singing and bodypoppin for our 20 euro supper.

We flew Ryanair which thankfully was not as bad as I anticipated, just the fact that it was a 6am flight meant no sleep all night as we had to get a coach to Stansted which was full of similarly sleep-deprived people.

We arrived in Barcelona to rain. Not an auspicious start, but of course it didn´t last. A bit of guide book reading revealed our cheap digs near the centre are situated in the local red light district. And I thought it was bohemian.

This being Spain though, it´s not too seedy, and you just see a few ladies of the night dotted about. To be honest they wear more clothes than you see on girls going out for the night in London. Although the he/she´s look a bit more conspicous. Clarke said they wore too much make-up which gave them away!

This being one of Europe´s cultural capital´s we looked at our itinerary and decided our first stop would be....FC Barcelona for the stadium tour. Well it is really Clarke´s holiday and that´s what she wanted to do. I was pretty bored after 15 minutes. It´s like a football Disneyland, you get taken for a ride, posing for expensive photos with the trophy (which I had to buy) and deposited straight into the Barcelona store (two Barca footballs I had to buy). I was hoping that Ronaldinho would appear, but of course he didn´t although his mug was everywhere.

We´ve eaten a lot of tapas (don´t worry philistines they have Mickey Ds and KFC here too) and drunk lots of coffee. Even though I´m not a great fan of the Spanish (monkey noises during international football games....) Barcelona is a really great city.