July 16 - Barcelona

Jez and I woke up feeling pretty good considering the Welsh assault that we confronted the night before. We woke up as one of the pommies in our room was getting in. He had spent the majority of the morning at the cop station. Being the idiot that he was, he decided to go for a swim at about 4am, and left everything (wallet, jeans, passport, phone, ect) on the beach in Barcelona. For those of you who don’t know, Barcelona is the pick pocket capital of Spain, if not Europe. Needless to say, the pommie found his jeans 50 metres up the beach with no valuables in sight. Idiot.

After listening to the drunken sob story, we grabbed some breakfast and headed out to see one of Barcelona’s main attractions, La Ramblas. La Ramblas is actually a street, with buskers and stalls going down the middle of a large median strip. You can buy almost anything here, from fruit and meat to live chickens and turtles. We walked down La Ramblas and just soaked up the atmosphere. The buskers here go all out. They don’t showcase any talents, but they get dressed up to the nines. Some of the favourites were these weird guys on bikes, and someone in an Alien costume (from the movie Alien).

For lunch we took a leaf out of the Lonely Planet and headed to La Fonda, a place just off La Ramblas in the Gothic Quarter. It turned out to be a great find. It was a fairly classy restaurant (with table cloths and waiters actually dressed up. Jez and I were not used to this), and the set menu was massive for under 10 Euros. Unfortunately, we looked a bit out of place with singlets and thongs.

In the afternoon hit the beach (in the budgies of course). Its not really a beach, but it has sand and water and was created for the 1992 Olympics (Real talk). Basically in 1991, they got a shit load of sand and dumped it near the waters edge. The result is a 10 cm layer of sand, under which is dirt. Over the years, the dirt has started turning the sand a darker and darker colour. The water wasn’t that clean and it was packed, and it once again made us appreciate how good Aussie beaches are. They one good thing it had going for it is that you didn’t have to leave your spot to get a beer, coke, water or massage, with tons of people walking on the beach offering all these goods and services.

That night, we met up with Georgie Mosman and a few of her friends. We walked around the Gothic Quarter and stumbled upon a guy (playing the guitar and singing) and a girl (singing back up). They were amazing and were close to signing a record deal. They were muchos authentic.

Till we blog again,

Monty