Will y Christina, Barcelona

Week 44

2010-07-09T02:02:00.000-07:00

Christina

With the weather being so lovely, we've been spending a lot of time at the beach. Some people are right at home in the sea: they run up and jump in with all the energy of David Hasselhoff and they emerge, unruffled, like models in Dolce & Gabbana perfume adverts. Sadly, I am not one of these people.

My approach is less carefree, more careful. On the rare occasions I do venture for a paddle, it's a right pantomime. I tentatively walk to the water's edge and dip a foot in to determine the temperature. It's invariably too chilly for my liking. I slowly inch myself in by degrees. Once the water has reached the tops of my legs, I stop for a moment. I pretend I'm admiring the views but in reality, I'm having second thoughts. I then scoop up some water, splash it over my arms and shudder. After 10 minutes of this rigmarole, I decide that I'd rather not go for a swim and I return to my towel sheepishly.

"The water looked a bit dirty, I'd rather not swallow it," I offer Will by way of explanation.

I'm marginally better in a swimming pool; at least there's no chance of getting stung by a jellyfish or colliding with a boat. And there are nice steps to get you down into the water. Last Friday morning we went to one of two outdoor swimming pools which were built on Montjuic for the 1992 Olympics. Piscina Municipal de Montjuic is open to the public from the end of June until early September and it must have the best views of any swimming pool in the world - you can see sights like the Sagrada Familia, Torre Agbar and the sea, while you're doing your lengths. Kylie fans might also be interested to know that this is where the video for her single, Slow, was filmed.

A jar of tomato marmalade. It tastes like jam, but also like tomatoes

Will

Something we have noticed about the Catalans is that they see absolutely nothing wrong with rooting through a bin. Everyone, from a grizzled curmudgeon to a dainty churchgoer, will stop and have a rummage now and then. This is partly because they are less fastidious, and partly because it's common practice here to dump anything unwanted but usable in the street, where passers-by can make off with it.

In Britain, the dumper of goods could be arrested for fly-tipping and the receiver of goods for stealing, so we use Freecycle, a network of internet groups which help people give stuff away for free. This is probably for the best, given that dumped goods will get rained on more quickly in Blighty, but I think it would be a good idea for councils to install weatherproof containers where usable things could be left for others to collect. It would save time, money and landfill, and it would re-connect us with the noble art of bin-diving.

I like new things as much as the next man, but people do buy an awful lot of needless crap: a new mobile phone every year, a new TV every three years. The UK throws away a third of all of all its food, uneaten. If people rooted through a bin more often, perhaps they'd start being more realistic about what they need, and what they throw away.

I've been trying to spend more time picking up stuff off the street, and my recent trash safaris have included some beautiful white orchids, which Christina thought were lovely until I revealed that I'd found them in a skip – she clings willfully to her wasteful consumerism, and stands by looking embarrassed when I stop to investigate a pile of 'treasure'.

Today, I happened across a real goldmine: several bottles of priceless vintage wine, there for the taking. I got two, but Christina's hoity-toity attitude prevented her from carrying off any more. Even so, we're both looking forward to enjoying these stunning vintages, which are probably worth at least a billion Euro each.

I'll probably be able to sell these and buy a massive house in Kensington and then do it up and sell it to some Russian oligarch and then buy two more even bigger houses in Mayfair and do them up and sell them to the Sheikh of Brunei and then I can buy BUCKINGHAM PALACE and do that up, cos its in a good location and I can put that on the market for twice what I paid for it so I can buy a MASSIVE GREAT BIG CASTLE ON THE MOON

2010-06-25T12:45:00.000-07:00

Will

On Wednesday night, we joined thousands of other people on the beach for El Noche de San Juan, the enormous party Catalonia (along with lots of other places) holds to celebrate the summer solstice. Anyone trying to get some shut-eye on El Noche de San Juan would be advised to try another country; not only is it a huge party – much bigger than New Year’s Eve – it is also the night of fireworks.

I absolutely love the fifth of November. Fireworks and bonfires look and smell brilliant, there’s lots of food and drinking, and it’s the night of the year on which we remember Guy Fawkes, the brave and sensible man who tried to blow up all of the country’s politicians. The fireworks displays I’ve seen in London are jaw-dropping displays of pyrotechnical expertise, but for sheer disregard for personal safety, the Catalans have us beaten hands down.

Your typical Catalan plan for the evening seems to be something along the lines of: start with a few beers, then wander down to the beach, carrying a huge bag of fireworks (while smoking, obviously), lighting them and throwing them at other people, all of whom are also carrying huge bags of fireworks. Arrive at the beach, where thousands of people are now randomly letting off fireworks in every direction. Continue drinking and letting off fireworks until midnight, when it’s time to drunkenly attempt jumping over a bonfire, for ‘good luck’. If you survive this and the ensuing four hours of Bacchanalian pyromania, celebrate by going swimming, drunk, at sunrise.

The best thing about is that it’s a family event. Everyone, from Nan to the toddlers, is armed to the teeth with explosives. Four-year-olds could be seen tossing lit fireworks up into the air, or at each other, while their mothers looked proudly on.

It’s a real pity that in the UK, you can’t throw a firework at someone else’s child for fear of being slapped with some sort of punitive lawsuit for frightening them, or causing them stress, or blowing a couple of their fingers off. This means that British children are growing up soft, while their Catalan contemporaries get a head start in the art of offensive fire. If you live in Britain and you care about your country’s future defence, it is your duty to go out right now and throw a lit firework at a small child. It’s the only way they’ll learn.

Note the use of chiaroscuro in this picture of a small boy setting his dad on fire

Christina

After 10 months of living with Will, I'm a little worried that I'm turning into him. Perhaps it's inevitable that when you spend a lot of time with someone you start to take on their traits, much like dogs who resemble their owners.

Here are some examples of my increasingly Will-like behaviours:

1. Complaining about the noise from TommyGun Sneakers. Initially, I didn't mind. It's cosmopolitan! I told myself good-naturedly. Now, after almost a year of incessant urban beats being piped into my brain from Monday to Saturday, I've realised it's not cosmopolitan, it's a bloody nuisance. But I haven't gone as far as using retaliation tactics. This week, the man downstairs turned up his music to drown out the music from TommyGun's. In turn, Will turned on our music, turned up the bass and placed a speaker on the floor. As I witnessed this spectacle, it afforded me a glimpse into the future. Today it's a speaker on the floor; in 10 years' time, he'll be furiously cutting down our next-door neighbour's tree because it's hanging over our garden fence in Surbiton.

2. Using the tablecloth to wipe food from my hands. I am ashamed to type this because when I first noticed Will doing it, I was livid.

3. Picking my nose.

It's just as well we're moving back to the UK in four weeks. I have friends there. Nice, fragrant female friends who will re-introduce me to The ways of Being a Lady. An evening with three excitable and/or pre-menstrual friends, a Sex and the City boxset and a Natasha Bedingfield CD should do the trick.

I don't pick my nose actually, it's just Christina who does that

Week 40

2010-06-22T03:38:00.000-07:00

Christina

I have sad news: it seems that I am now too old to deal with the consequences of a night out and must resign myself to a lifetime of afternoon naps and BBC antique programmes. Where once a hangover was cured by a bacon sandwich and a can of Coke, now it drags on for days where I'm confined to my bed like a Victorian damsel, swooning as Will wafts smelling salts at me. Or fetches me a bucket.

I have just emerged from a three-day, pastis, absinthe and kebab-fuelled hangover. This looks quite rock 'n roll written down - like I'm Lindsay Lohan - but the reality is quite different. I had one pastis, two absinthes and one kebab*, and have been put out of action for 72 hours as a result.

On Friday night, we visited two of Barcelona's drinking institutions. The first was Bar Pastis on Carrer de Santa Monica. As the name suggests, this is a watering hole dedicated to pastis, the anise-flavoured liqueur that was introduced to France in the 1930s after absinthe was banned (they thought it made people go mad). Bar Pastis opened in the 1940s with the intention of replicating the bars found in the old port of Marseilles and in Paris' Latin Quarter. It's a cosy affair, with walls and ceilings that are crammed with pictures of all things French like Edith Piaf and the Eiffel Tower.

Next up was Bar Marsella on Carrer de Sant Pau in El Raval. This absinthe bar has been going since 1820 - absinthe was never banned in Spain - where the likes of Salvador Dali and Ernest Hemingway came to drink and think. Here we got chatting to some British people who were celebrating a 21st birthday party. Or rather, Will got chatting to them. I sat nodding mutely: I couldn't hear a word they were saying because of the noise. Another reason to stay at home with a mug of hot milk.

*Okay, I also had two beers while watching football and red wine with dinner. Sorry mum.

The Tower of King Alphabeticus, which Christina knocked over on purpose

Will

Having snapped the neck of my old acoustic guitar in a French campsite, I tried to repair the wounded instrument during our first week here. Unfortunately, the glue I used was too soft. “This is not glue, this is shit,” said the man in the guitar workshop on Carrer del Regomir, which I thought was a little unfair. I might be an idiot, but I wouldn’t try to fix a guitar with a poo. Anyway, when I could afford it I bought myself a cheap classical guitar, and since then I have been trying to learn some pieces by composers from Barcelona.

Modern classical guitars follow a Spanish design: they are all based, broadly speaking, on the designs of a luthier called Antonio de Torres, from Almería. Torres is sometimes called the ‘Stradivarius of the guitar’, despie the fact that Antonio Stradivari did himself make guitars, but you get the idea. Only a handful of Torres guitars remain, but his best work spent most of its life in Barcelona. In 1869, a teenage boy named Francisco Tárrega travelled the 600 miles from Barcelona to Seville to buy a guitar from Torres, who produced a modestly-priced model for him to try. When Francisco began to play, however, Torres was so impressed that he gave the 17-year-old guitarist his own instrument, a masterpiece which he made for himself a few years earlier and which, if you could really calculate such a thing, was probably the most valuable guitar in the world. Francisco Tárrega did not disappoint his benefactor, and became one of the most celebrated and influential Spanish composers.

In fact, though you may never have heard of Francisco Tárrega, I can guarantee you have heard a little bit of his work. In 1993, two executives from the mobile phone company Nokia were going through famous pieces of classical music to chop up into ringtones, and they heard a phrase in Tárrega’s solo guitar piece Gran Vals that suited their purpose. Bars 13-16 of this beautiful little waltz, composed in 1902, became the Nokia Tune: “duh-duh-doo-dah, duh-duh-doo-dah, duh-duh-doo-dah-DEEE!”

If Franciso Tárrega was alive today and earned a cent each time his phrase was played, he would make 200 Euros a second, or 18 million a day. Although, of course, he wouldn’t, because Nokia have trademarked the hell out of that thing and any long-dead composer who tries to get shirty with them is going to find himself in a world of legal pain.

Bernard Crabbins, hand explorer

Weeks 38-39

2010-06-22T03:04:00.000-07:00

We apologise, again, for not updating the blog. We have dropped the ball. Then we have picked the ball up and then dropped it again, repeatedly, until the ball became bruised and traumatised. The ball is now in care, where it will stay until it stops taking drugs and acting all mental.

Not only have we not EDIT updated our blog not often enough, but there have been compliiants that our writing is become sloppy, too. What started as a noble endaevour has been repeatedly placed on the EDIT backburner because of work and stuff TINA CAN YOU SORT THIS BIT OUT and stuff.

Normal service will be resumed probably

Week 37

2010-06-04T07:17:00.000-07:00

Will:

Those of you who read the blog often will know that there’s a trainer shop downstairs from us that plays hip-hop, reggae and R&B, loudly, from 11am until 9pm. Here’s one they’ve been playing recently. I can write the lyrics out in full, because the same words are repeated all the way through:

Something about you girl that turn me on
Oh, something about you girl that turn me on
Yeah yeah yeah yeah, turn me on
You turn me o-o-o-o-n, o-o-o-o-n

I'd say they play this five or six times a day on average. The whole song is sung through an auto-tune (the computerised voice effect that you hear on most modern R&B). Now, I won’t deny that these lyrics have a certain subtle poetry, but what this bloke is essentially singing is:

I’ve got an erection
I find you attractive, so I’ve got an erection
Yeah yeah yeah, I don’t fully understand the process involved
But I’ve definitely got an erection

Initially, I chalked this up as another victory for the geniuses who make modern R&B. Any day now, I thought, they are going to discover their own bottoms, and then they’ll have another bodily function to sing about. But then I realised that this song is actually very clever. More than any other, it distills the central message of all popular music, which is: let’s have sex.

Take any pop song from the last fifty years, and think about what it means. Are You Lonesome Tonight – if so, I have some suggestions; I Wanna Hold Your Hand – as a prelude to taking off your clothes; Ain’t No Sunshine – when she’s gone, which makes me sad on account of there not being any sex involved; Don’t Stand So Close To Me – or I’ll try to have sex with you; Do They Know It’s Christmas – probably not as they’re mostly Muslims but hey, I gave to charity… reward me with sex?

The list is endless. In the light of what I have learned from Tommy Guns Sneakers, even Bob the Builder’s Can We Fix It? becomes a saucy ballad intended to lull Wendy the Builder into a receptive state. By isolating the central theme of all pop music so effectively, Somethin About You Girl That Turn Me On holds up a devastating critical mirror to everything on the radio. What is the point of all this bland, genital-gazing dross, it asks? What kind of species would turn its back on complex aesthetic systems like European and Indian classical music, both of which took centuries to produce, to listen to the dull uh-uh-uh of a copulating moron?

On the other hand, maybe it's always been this way. Was Mozart's Oboe Concerto in C Major composed purely to lull a buxom fräulein into loosening her bodice? I must go down to Tommy Guns Sneakers at once, and discuss it with them.

At the end of the 18th century, French scientists calculated the distance from the castle on top of Montjuic to Dunkirk, as part of an effort to establish the distance between the North pole and the equator (the metre would then be calculated as one ten-millionth of this distance). This line, known as the Paris Meridian, was a contender for the status of Prime Meridian – a title which eventually went to the Greenwich Meridian, presumably once it was realised that if the French had their way, the basis for all time standards around the world would be not Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) but Paris Mean Time (PMT).

Christina:

(is currently involved in some sort of ludicrous dance craze, and could not be reached for comment)

Weeks 33-35 (normal service to resume with another post tomorrow!)

2010-06-03T04:26:00.000-07:00

Christina:

(written Week 34)

Last Sunday, I said goodbye to Will for a few days when he drove to Marseilles for a work assignment. As much as I like my own company, I knew I was ready for his return when I actually enjoyed a 20-minute phone conversation with an employee from a mobile phone company.

Mobile phone lady: How are you today, Christina?
Me: Fine thanks. How are you?
Mobile phone lady: Good, thank you. How's your day going?
Me: Er ... yes, very well thanks.

Will was due back on Thursday night but alas, I received a text from him that evening saying that he couldn't withdraw any money from his bank, meaning he was unable to pay for petrol and road tolls. Oh dear. After various frantic phone calls and money transfers which proved fruitless, it became clear that Will would be spending the night in his car.

The following day, I embarked on a mercy mission to Marseilles to secure his safe return with my trusty friend, Visa. This involved a 9-hour bus journey. It was all a bit of a rush and I just about had time to buy myself a bottle of water and a Twix before boarding.

Right, I said to myself as I settled into my seat. This journey is going to last nine hours and you only have a Twix to keep you going. Consume with caution!

I snaffled the entire thing before we had left Barcelona.

With the Twix taken care of, I spent the rest of the journey trying and failing to read my book, listening to the driver's choice of music - Haddaway, The Corrs, Spanish-sounding stuff - and looking at vineyards and the cities of Perpignan and Montpellier.

We finally rolled into Marseilles at 10pm on Friday night where I was greeted by a tired and hungry Will. I treated us to a McDonalds in the bus station, then we got in the car and drove straight back to Barcelona again. So just to clarify, I travelled 1000km in 18 hours to rescue my boyfriend from another night of sleeping in his car. I intend to use this as my Get Out of Jail Free card for some time to come.

The cleaning ladies make their presence known at a rally for workers' rights

Will:

(written yesterday)

        Imagine the look on a plumber’s face if he finished a job for you and you said “right, I’m happy with that, so send me your invoice and I’ll look into paying you around 45 days after I receive it. Unless I’m busy, or I make up some rule that says you have to wait longer.” You would, I think, end up with no water, and quite possibly a spanner where it wasn’t welcome.
                This, however, is exactly how the Finance People from publishing companies talk to freelancers: despite working for large organisations with high turnover, they’ll often hold off paying until they feel like it. I landed in Marseille the other week with three different companies owing me money, but none of them had paid on time. My meagre cash flow had dried up, and I had no money to buy petrol for the drive back to Barcelona. I also have no credit card. I ended up sleeping in my car twice and waiting under a flyover for 30 hours until Christina arrived with a working bank-card. She had to take the bus, a nine-hour journey.
               I know of one freelancer who tearfully phoned a company for whom she’d done a month’s work, begging to be paid (I believe she had invoiced some 6 weeks earlier) so that she could make her mortgage payment. I also happen to know that the finance director of that particular company had a rule that freelancers should not be paid if it meant the company going into the red at the end of the month, thereby saving the company the interest they’d have to pay if they went overdrawn. He probably earned five times what she did, and he put her home at risk to save a few quid. This is something a freelancer learns: finance people aren’t there to make sure you’re paid – they make sure you aren’t paid, or at least not until it’s convenient for them.
         What do finance people even do? I can see the need for an accountant, but what is the point of someone who takes six weeks to press a key to make a BACS payment? Wouldn’t a pigeon be more effective?
         Anyway, that’s why we haven’t posted in ages – I’ve gone insane with rage. I spent the last three weeks jumping up and down on the spot, my face a mask of beetroot-red apoplexy, screaming obscenities and punching myself in the nuts. It helps me to relax.

EDIT: I should just point out that it's only finance people I have a beef with. Editors and features editors are nice, hard-working people who are never any bother, and if it was up to the people who actually create the magazines, I'm sure they'd pay me bang on time. Please continue to commission me. Thanks. I love you.

Molasses and sugar in massive quantities. I want to get in there and muck about.

Week 32

2010-05-07T09:13:00.000-07:00

Will:
A few years ago I lived on a small alley off Shepherd’s Bush Road. There was a park nearby, which enjoyed a enviable location between a large police station and an extremely cheap off-license. This park was a must-visit destination for Gentlemen of Leisure who, having checked out of their accommodation at the police station, would head straight for Best Wine and then the park, the nearest spot where one could hold the sort of impromptu liquid-based picnic that these chaps seem to enjoy so much. While the park was obviously the place to be for al fresco drinking and goading one’s aggressive dog, it was lamentably under-equipped where bathroom facilities were concerned. Luckily our front door, situated as it was on a nearby alley with plenty of cover, provided a ready solution to their straining bladders. My flatmate and I used to fantasise (usually after picking up some urine-stained post) about running the leads from a car battery through the letterbox, electrifying any stream that touched the door, but we never went through with it; neither of us wanted to have to step over a dead tramp first thing in the morning.
   Here in Barcelona, we also live on a small alley, and again we are regularly visited by people who mistake our front door for a servicio. Everywhere in the winding streets of the gotico you’ll see the tell-tale streams, usually emitting from some shaded corner. Again, it’s an area that invites such activity: there are lots of nice bars, and plenty of cover for someone who is just at the right level – drunk enough to hose down a wall, but not so drunk that they’re not shy about someone seeing their little fireman.
          I’m not going to pretend that I’ve never done it myself and luckily we’re on the second floor, so it only bothers us when we’re going in and out of the building. However, the stench in the little porch where the post-boxes are was getting a bit much last week, so I went down to the bottom of the stairwell and began sweeping and mopping. A full two hours later, I had swept and mopped my way right up to our door, and the whole stairwell was clean as a whistle.
   Then, just ten minutes after I’d finished, Christina beckoned me to the front door. The old lady from across the hall was re-mopping the stairs! She cannot have been unhappy with the quality of my work – you could have eaten your dinner off those steps – so I can only assume that my neighbour was trying to mop up some of the credit for my labour. She thought she’d let some of the others in the building see her mopping, and they’d assume it was her that had done the lot! Well, I’m not having it. I want you all to know: it was me who did the stairs, not that bucket-come-lately from Flat 2.

A modernist vase in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya

Christina:

You know those nights out where you spend a bit too much money and although it feels like someone is standing on your head for the entire following day, it was cash well spent? Well, Tuesday was not one of those nights. We did, however, manage to spend 100 Euros without leaving the building.

It was 11.30pm and we'd decided to head out to a bar with my sister who was visiting. We closed the door to the flat and instantly realised that one set of keys was in the lock on the other side meaning that we couldn't get back in with the keys we did have. Thus ensued the following:

1. Will set about trying to lever the door off with a makeshift crowbar (a broken stair railing)/throwing himself at the door in a bid to break it down/trying to pick out the pesky key with a hairpin;

2. me wondering whether I was to spend another night in the youth hostel around the corner (see week 20) and angrily calculating how much this latest fiasco was likely to cost;

3. my sister feeling quite awkward.

After an hour we conceded that a locksmith would have to be called. Will did very well with his Spanish over the phone and a cerrajero was with us within half an hour. He prised the door open with a screwdriver and we parted with 100 Euros.

By this time it was almost 2am. We had a cup of tea and went to bed. But hey, at least we didn't have hangovers the next morning. We might have spent a lot of money, but we definitely had no hangovers and no fun. Yeah!

I don't know what to make of this

Week 31

2010-04-30T07:18:00.000-07:00

Will

I have always had a pretty low opinion of coach drivers. They are the losers of the HGV fraternity: not man enough to drive a lorry, not free-spirited enough to take to the open road as a trucker. But now, they have gone too far.

As we approached the car park, it was immediately clear that we would not be spending Sunday at the beach. Where once the Astra had stood alone, surveying the sea like a green sage, row upon row of coaches waited, their fat, sweaty pilots staring dumbly into the middle distance. The car was gone – but, thankfully, not far. It had been towed, along with all the other cars in the car park, to a scrap of waste ground on the other side of the road. Like every other car that had been relocated to make way for the vehicles of men who lack the social skills to drive a bus, it had been broken into.

Calm yourselves – calm. I know you want to find a coach driver, to physically slap him, to shout at his incomprehending face “why couldn’t you have parked your big stupid fridge of a vehicle over there, you fat berk? What was the point of moving everyone else's cars to an unlit car park, just so you could all park together?”, but it would be the futile. You would be Ahab, the tragic hero lambasting the great white whale, for nothing. No – we must rebuild.

Happily, this should be fairly straightforward. For one thing, the thieves broke the smallest pane of glass in the car, the quarter glass. Having found a more suitable parking spot, I spent Monday afternoon fashioning a new window for the Astra, from a piece of wood. This morning, I took delivery of a second-hand replacement pane that I ordered from Rotherham, which is about as close as I plan to get to ever going to Rotherham, so I have been spared the terrifying expense of visiting a mechanic as a foreigner.

Best of all, the thieves only escaped with one thing – my sat-nav. This device has been known to lead me up to sixty miles in the wrong direction, and was once unable to find the city of Leeds. They won’t get far.

"Ooh, you have a wooden window? I've been saving up for one of those for my Porsche."

Christina

Following on from Will's rant last week against Barcelona's alternative types, we found ourselves in a swarm of them on Saturday afternoon when we happened upon La Fira de la Tierra (the Earth Fair) in Barcelona's Parc de la Ciutadella.

There was a pop-up north African cafe where we enjoyed some mint tea in the sunshine, there were drums being beaten with a passion, digeridoos being played, colourful trousers billowing in the breeze, stalls selling organic beer and wheat-free cupcakes, a meditation tent - you get the idea. We passed an area where people were lying on the ground, being massaged by barefooted masseurs.

"Ooh, that looks really nice," I said, contemplating getting in the queue.

"It looks bloody disgusting," Will spat. "I can't think of anything worse than being pummelled by some man's hairy foot."

We pressed on. I was enjoying the laidback, happy, hippy atmosphere until we came to a stall promoting an all-natural, eco-friendly birthing method. At least, I think that's what it was. I can't be sure because I was too horrified by the promotional photographs, depicting a woman in the throes of having a baby, with everything on show, the husband weeping with joy (fear?) in the background. Why, oh why, would you let anyone take pictures of you in this state, let alone allow them to be displayed at a public festival? Far from making me think "okay, I'll pop one out without the help of drugs" this has only served to put me off having children indefinitely. So I'm sorry mum, but there'll be no grandchildren from me.

P.S. You may have noticed we're running a General Election to see who'll be Prime Minister of our flat. I was enjoying a comfortable lead earlier this week, with five votes to Will's three. Someone has since changed their vote from me to Will. I will find out who you are. It shouldn't be too difficult considering a total of eight people have voted and most of them are probably members of my family.

Week 30

2010-04-23T08:54:00.000-07:00

Christina:

This week I had my first taste of pintxos, snacks on cocktail sticks which originate from the Basque region of northern Spain ('pintxo' means 'spike' in Euskara, the language of the Basque people). They usually come in the form of slices of bread topped with chorizo, ham or cheese, and the one I had was like an exotic sausage roll, if you can imagine such a thing. Pintxos are usually left on platters at the bar, you ask for a plate and then help yourself - a bit like a wedding buffet except you don't have to dance to Come on Eileen after stuffing yourself silly with chicken drumsticks.

The buffet concept is ideal for someone like me, someone who can't leave food alone if it's there. Will has started referring to me as a 'snaffler' because sharing a packet of Doritos turns into an extreme eating contest to see who can hoover up the most orangey crisps. But in my defence, I come from a big family. As fun as dinner times are when there's seven people around the table, there's always the underlying fear that if you take your eye off the potato for just a second, someone else will have it. Usually Dad. So eating takes on a competitive element and if you can leave the table having eaten everything on your plate - and ideally off someone else's - you're a winner.

This attitude is something that Will and I have always bonded over. Neither of us really likes sharing food which is handy when you're living in a country renowned for sociable dining. Whenever I've been for tapas here or at home, I pretend to enjoy the laid-back free-for-all but in reality, I'm compiling a mental spreadsheet of who's had what and if I don't get my fair share of patatas bravas then dinner is, quite frankly, ruined.

The grand hall of the Museu Nacional de Arte Catalan

Will:

I love Barcelona’s large population of alternative types. I enjoy the unusual haircuts, massive trousers and multiple piercings of this distinctive tribe. But while non-conformism is generally a positive thing, you can go too far, and that point comes when you start eating rice cakes.

Rice cakes, for those of you who don’t know, are circles of expanded polystyrene foam which have been impregnated with farts. When you crack one in half, the farts escape, and everyone in your home or office looks about and says “eurr, have you let one go? Who’s done a fart? Who’s – ohh, false alarm. It's Jenny, she’s having a rice cake.”

I observed a horrendous example in a bar the other night, while idly watching a couple over Christina’s shoulder. The man, if you could call him that, was a particularly strong example of someone who has gone too alternative. Not content with having bought some alternative-looking shoes, he had them up on the chair, in that self-conscious way that people lounge when they want to let everyone know that they’re alternative lounging types, and he was munching on some rice cakes he’d brought from home, presumably because the bar didn’t serve anything alternative enough. Even in a smoky Spanish bar, the farty whiff of rice cake was all too detectable. The two of them were just sitting around, talking – not drinking, like proper people – while their beers sat, half-empty and ignored, on the table. In half an hour, I never saw either of them take so much as a sip. For them, the bar was nothing more than a public place in which to consume rice cakes.

Worse was to come. When the lady went off to the loo, the bloke started industriously picking his nose, rolling the bogeys up and dropping them on the sofa and the floor. Now, I’m not above a pick, we all do it. But on a public chair? Why don’t you just smear one on my arm, you disgusting beast?
Then came the real nightmare: when his missus returned, the hand – the minging bogey hand – returned to the bag of rice cakes. He even offered her one – mmm! a snotty fart-cake! Yes please! Shaking with disgust, I could not help but watch as she munched away on her boyfriend’s nasal detritus. “We’re leaving,” I announced to Christina, the hot tears stinging my eyes as I choked back a throatful of vomit.

We returned to the same bar last night, but my apprehension was dispelled when I discovered that the Alternatives had moved on. They were replaced by a brown labrador in a neckerchief, with whom I spent a good part of the evening.

A bag of rice cakes can cost over a pound, but contains barely a few pennies' worth of rice. If you eat rice cakes, your breath will smell of farts.

Week 29

2010-04-18T06:30:00.000-07:00

Will:

This week, a warning: cyber criminals are everywhere. Give them a chance, and they’ll gain access to your computer and invade your privacy. I found out the hard way when, this week, it happened to me.
            When you think of a cyber criminal you probably imagine a lone male, a geek turned to the dark side, surrounded by screens in a darkened room. You never suspect the enemy could be nearby, perhaps even in your own home.
           The warning signs were there all along. Every now and then, my ‘recent items’ would contain files I couldn’t remember opening. I’d leave my computer unattended for a while, and return to find subtle changes – things arranged differently, windows open or closed. In real life, I can sometimes leave a few clothes lying around, but in the digital realm I keep everything carefully arranged, and I can tell when someone’s been rooting around in there.
              Then, this week, the miscreant was unmasked. Returning from a trip to the bakery, I saw Christina exiting the spare room where I work. Her normal confident stride was replaced by the sort of guilty scuffle that a naughty spaniel adopts when it has been interrupted helping itself to some unattended leftovers. Glancing through the door, I noticed that my screen was on, indicating that it had been used within the last two minutes, and that my webmail was open.
“I haven’t been reading your email,” blurted Christina, “I haven’t, and anyway, if I had, then that’s completely normal and everyone does it. But I wasn’t.”

Clearly, any attempt at interrogation would have been pointless – I was dealing with a master criminal.

“I haven’t done it before,” she protested. “You’re not going to tell anyone, are you? Please don’t tell anyone! You can’t prove anything!”

“No,” I sighed, “I can’t prove a thing. Your secret’s safe with me.”

Castellers – builders of human towers known as castells – on the Portal de l'Angel this morning

Christina

Celebrity spot of the week: Dev from Coronation Street on the Barcelona Metro! Don't worry, you haven't accidentally stumbled across Heat magazine; this is, indeed, Will y Christina Barcelona.

For those of you wondering who on earth I'm talking about, Dev is a character in a popular British TV programme who runs a corner shop and who looks like he's deposited an entire tub of hair gel onto his head.

Yet for some reason, I find him strangely attractive. In fact, Dev is just one in a long line of unlikely celebrity crushes I've had over the years. There's been David Brent, the excruciating, tie-fiddling boss in The Office, and smug football pundit Alan Handsome. I mean, Hansen.

One celebrity it is perfectly acceptable to fancy is Dominic West from The Wire, a show which Will and I have become unhealthily addicted to. While Will appreciates The Wire for the script-writing, the drama and the other brilliant characters, I'm in it for lusting after Jimmy McNulty, West's flawed but loveable cop.

At first, I didn't have a bloody clue what was going on. This wasn't helped by the fact that I'd fall asleep as soon as the opening credits had ended. I have mentioned before how I'm not really suited to late nights and TV has a soporific effect on me, anyway. We'd usually start watching an episode at midnight, so it was game over for me after the first 10 minutes. It also takes a while to get to grips with the dialogue but once you understand what a 're-up stash'* and a 'shit bird'** are, you're fine.

We have finished watching the first two seasons and this weekend my sister, Catherine, was supposed to be visiting and bringing us season three. However, that's been scuppered by the volcanic ash fiasco. Never mind the British couples who stare forlornly from the pages of the Daily Mail because they were supposed to be tying the knot in Barbados, I want my Dominic West fix!

* According to the Urban Dictionary, this is when drug dealers are running low and they replenish their supply.
** An annoying person.

The people on the castell get smaller and lighter as they go up, with the very top person (known as the 'exaneta') being small child – in this case a girl of about five or six years old. The castell is a success when the exaneta holds up a hand with the fingers spread, and returns safely to the ground

Week 28

2010-04-09T07:47:00.000-07:00

Christina:

"Camping can be a real pleasure if you bring all the right stuff," Will told me a couple of weeks ago during a camping trip in which we brought a camping stove that had run out of gas (my fault, apparently) and a punctured inflatable mattress that was too big for our tent. The Baden-Powells - founders of the Boy Scout and Girl Guide movements - would have been disgusted.

Our destination was Siurana which is about a three-hour drive south-west of Barcelona. Getting to the village and campsite involves driving up steep, twisting roads and you're rewarded at the top with stunning views of green valleys and sheer cliffs. The area is very popular with rock climbers - in fact, Will and I were the only people at the campsite who weren't wearing technical clothing (actually, my leopard-print top could well be moisture-wicking but I can't be sure).

Everything was going quite smoothly until it was time to cook dinner on the first evening. Will lit the stove and it sneezed a trickle of gas. It had run out. Will threw the lighter to the ground in a rage and we had to abandon sausage and lentils for dinner at the campsite cafe.

Bedtime brought more kerfuffle. To compensate for its inevitable deflation during the night, we over-pumped the punctured mattress. This meant that it took up most of the tent and I felt as claustrophobic as I would on a packed underground train. I needn't have worried. By morning, we were lying on flaccid plastic, our bones chilled by the cold, hard ground. Next, it was time to trudge from tent to the communal bathrooms. This is another thing that troubles me about camping: people - strangers - can see you first thing in the morning. It's bad enough that Will has to witness my morning mouth crust and unkempt hair but I hate that other campers can see this, too.

But enough of my whingeing: Siurana is a beautiful, idyllic place, it's great if you like walking and the local wines and olive oil are highly recommended. Just make sure you bring the right camping equipment for added enjoyment.

This is where you have to sit when you forget the camping gas

Will:

This week has been Cinema Week. Christina and I went to see Shutter Island on Monday, which I would recommend, although it's not as good as the other, amazing, Scorcese/DiCaprio film, The Departed. The film's confusing psycho-drama was added to by the Cinema Verdi's popcorn, which contains an hallucinogenic quantity of salt, and the fact that we turned up after it had started – the films at the Verdi start at the time on the poster, not after 45 minutes of adverts, so we missed a couple of minutes. What happened in those minutes? Crucial plot developments? Or just a long shot from a helicopter flying over the sea? No idea.

On Tuesday, I went to a film club in a bar in El Raval. Here I met a bloke who was from Barcelona, but had moved to Swindon for a while a few years ago. Why anyone would move to Swindon from anywhere, let alone Barcelona, is beyond imagining, but he told me he moved because he'd been offered a sweet job in the events centre of a big hotel. In Swindon.
"It was crazy," he told me, "just absolutely crazy." I bet it was.

The film on Tuesday was Mediterraneo, which is a film of the novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin, but released two years before the book was published... about the same time it was being written, in fact. Still, it was funny and enjoyable, unlike Harry Brown, which Christina and I watched last night.
Bleak is hardly the word for Harry Brown, a film in which sweet old men are murdered by drug-peddling rapist hoodies (and vice versa) on a massive council estate. It may have been well acted and beautifully shot, but I couldn't tell, because I was so depressed I could barely see. Films like that should come with a warning label, and a complimentary copy of Kung Foo Panda to watch afterwards.

Shutter Island: Good film, followed by salt-induced renal failure and a discussion about what the hell was going on. 4/5.
Mediterraneo: Decent Italian pacifist comedy, confusing thoughts of Swindon throughout. 2/5.
Harry Brown: So depressing I cried myself into a dehydrated husk, like a big, sad pork scratching. 0/5.

Kung Foo Panda: Superb. 5/5.

A train of caterpillars walking nose-to-tail

2010-03-26T07:45:00.000-07:00

Will:

I always knew my mortal enemy was out there, waiting for the moment to emerge as my nemesis. And now I have met him: he works in the internet/photocopying place on Carrer dels Canvis Vells.

Like any city where there are lots of tourists, Barcelona has a lot of rip-off merchants. Go into the Carrefour supermarket on La Rambla and you’re likely to see a bloke carrying as many frozen pizzas as he can carry: dine in a restaurant on the same street, and you can eat one of those pizzas for €12 or more.

The man in the internet shop is a thieving scoundrel of a different order, a black-hearted scumbag of pure evil. His racket involves writing his prices on a tiny sign at knee level, at the back of the shop where you can’t see it, then being on the phone when you try to talk to him.
Oh, he’ll cheerfully print your document, but then, like Satan, he’ll ask his terrible price: THIRTY-FIVE CENTS A PAGE. Is it printed on sheets of platinum, you may ask, or the canvases of Renaissance paintings? Is the ink distilled from the venom of some rare desert spider? “Printed already,” he said, unable or unwilling to engage me in Spanish, “good paper. Printed. You pay, eight forty.”

Unlike the poor diners of La Rambla, I was not content to munch upon my supermarket pizza. I refused to pay more than twenty-five cents a sheet (and even that, I informed him, was daylight robbery). The miscreant’s reaction was to issue a threat: “Okay. You will not pay it now,” he snarled, “but you will pay for it. Later in life, you will pay.”

And so it begins. The carefree days of my youth are behind me, and my life is now a mortal battle between me and the man from the photocopying shop. Each time I walk down a dark alley, I will sniff the air warily for the whiff of copying toner, and my nights will be sleepless for the imagined rustle of Post-its. I will not dare to enter a branch of Rymans unarmed. How long before I am wounded in a stapling ‘accident’, before I lose a thumb to a dangerous biro? If anything should happen to me, at least my readers will know: it was him. It was the bloke in RJA & Sons Telecom.

Leave anything lying around in Barcelona, someone'll paint something on it

Christina:

SPOILER ALERT! If you haven't read Carlos Ruis Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind and you don't want to know what happens, DO NOT read this blog entry.

One of the nice things about living in Spain is reading books that are set here, as it's exciting when you recognise the streets and the landmarks described; it makes the book feel more personal somehow. Before coming to Barcelona, my friend, Fiona, lent me The Shadow of the Wind, an epic page-turner set in Barcelona after the Spanish Civil War. Will and I drove into the city on 26 September last year, and while he sweated over the terrifying traffic, I was gazing up at Mount Tibidabo which I instantly recognised from Zafon's descriptions.

A couple of months into our stay here, Will had started reading the novel and one evening, we decided to walk over to the church on Carrer de Santa Ana which the book's protagonist, Daniel Sempere, lives next to.

"Oh, that's the streetlight where Daniel sees the man with the burnt face," Will observed as we headed back towards Portal de l'Angel.

"Yes, Julian Carax!", I blurted.

Oops. Will hadn't got to the bit of the story where the man's identity had been revealed, so I'd ruined the entire novel for him which he won't let me forget in a hurry. Will is now reading another book I've already read: The Woman in White (just to clarify, it's set in England not in Spain), so I'm currently living in fear that I'll reveal all whether it be in my sleep or after a vodka drinking binge.

So yes, it's lovely reading books about Spain but only if you don't have a loose-lipped girlfriend who tells you what happens at the end.

Caterpillar plant, Parc del Garraf

Week 25

2010-03-19T08:24:00.000-07:00

Will:
A significant feature in my daily routine here in Barcelona is the Mercat St Josep, or La Boqueria. I know we’ve mentioned this market a few times before, but it’s where we get most of our food, and when you move abroad it’s important to go on about how wonderful it is buying fresh ingredients from a market stall, and how sorry you feel for all the idiots trudging around supermarkets back home, so that you can forget about how you haven’t got any money or friends or central heating and there isn’t a proper pub within a thousand miles.
        La Boqueria is also a big tourist destination, and while most people want a picture of the great stacks of fruit and veg or the weird and wonderful creatures on sale at the fish stalls, the offal stalls are also a draw. Here, there’s a wide variety of animals’ bits on sale: hearts, lungs, kidneys, heads, cakes of pressed blood and whole livers, surprisingly massive, hanging from shiny hooks and drawing horrified gasps from some (typically American and British) onlookers.
    It’s a classic case of ‘one man’s meat’ – there are things are eaten by these very people that would turn the stomach of a Spanish butcher. Chicken nuggets, for example, which are made from the eyes, brains, reproductive organs, skin, feathers and faeces of chickens, beefed up with maltodextrin and water (and beef extract, for flavour). By the time the mashed skin and faeces have been salted and fried, they taste okay – like something that has been salted and fried. They are even shaped to look like chicken wings or drumsticks, giving you a strange, rubbery, boneless imitation of what was once normal human food, at a fraction of the cost (to the manufacturer, that is: if you can get people to pay you to eat turds, you’re hardly going to pass the saving on to your customers). But if you find meat and offal to be disgusting, what else are you going to do? You can either inure yourself to the icky meat, or you can be a vegetarian, or you can eat chicken nuggets – which, as I may have mentioned, are made out of shit.
    On the other hand, it could be that the Spanish butchers are a little too relaxed about plunging their gloveless hands into piles of carnage: normally when paying at the carniceria, I get my change handed back with an added smearing of meaty goodness. If I’ve been buying mince, any bank note the butcher hands me will have a few little chunks stuck to it. I then have to try to remember which hand is covered with meat-germs, and try not to let it enter a pocket (or, worse still, a nostril) until I get home. Usually I forget, and end up affectionately stroking Christina’s hair while thinking oops, that’s the beefy hand, but it still beats going to Tesco.

Montgat, a town 15km up the coast from Barcelona, where quite a number of cats live on the beach in some sort of cat hippy community

Christina:
I have always harboured notions of being an air hostess. I like the idea of being perfectly made-up, smiling a lot and offering beverages and perfumes to holiday-makers. The only thing holding me back is that I'm absolutely petrified of flying. As I write this, I'm 40,000 feet in the air and my pen keeps slipping out of my sweaty hand.

I'd never set foot on a plane until I was 18 and until that point, I thought flying was a very glamorous mode of transport. These suspicions were only confirmed many years ago when one of my siblings - who had gone with dad to collect mum from Stansted - reported seeing Pat Butcher at the airport. Pat Butcher! Off Eastenders! Off the telly! A place of glamour, indeed.

But it seems the more I fly, the more terrified I become. As I board the plane, I sniff the air for signs of burning engines and I try to get a good look at the pilot and co-pilot. Are they drunk? Have they had enough sleep? Do they look capable of getting us to our destination safely? As the plane taxis towards the runway for take-off, my stomach lurches. Is it too late to get off the plane now? Yes, it's probably too late. Here I must sit for two hours with my entire body tensed like a Christmas cracker waiting to be pulled. Can't we just stay on the ground? The plane has wheels, we can just drive there. Why has no one thought of this before? I'm not sure what we'll do when we get to the English Channel, but we'll sort something out. Have the cabin crew closed the doors properly? What if they haven't closed them properly and we all fall out of the sky? Oh God!

It's because of this reasoning that Will drove us to Barcelona. We pretend that it's because we wanted the adventure of driving through France, but we both know the real reason: flying reduces both of us to a pale-faced, jibbering mess.

Anyway, I have to stop writing now. The plane has jolted slightly and we're probably all doomed. I'd rather be anywhere other than here right now. Even if Pat Butcher was sitting next to me.

Week 24

2010-03-12T07:43:00.000-08:00

Christina:

Some pleasures in life are best enjoyed alone: listening to a Richard Marx album, for example. Similarly, I've developed a Dunkin' Donut addiction which I've been hiding from Will. From Monday to Thursday evenings, I babysit four Spanish children and on my way there, I often steal into the Las Ramblas branch of Dunkin', select their most fattening, chocolatey offering, squirrel it into Liceu Metro station, where I sit at the platform, often letting a train go by so I can snaffle away in peace.

I've been furtive about this because Will and I are trying to be healthy since we've become one of those couples who've moved in together and developed portly eating habits such as eating a whole wedge of cheese after dinner. I also realise I should probably be buying dried apricots and pulses from the market instead of giving money to fast food giants like Dunkin' and McDonalds.

Aah, McDonalds. On New Year's Day, I had a raging hangover and nothing else would do but a Bic Mac with all the trimmings. I found myself alone in the flat as Will and our guests had gone for a walk. It was the perfect opportunity to sneak down to Portal D'Angel's branch and bring my meal back to the flat for an undisturbed meat-fest. I had just bitten into the first delicious chip when the doorbell went. I sighed, put down my chip and answered the door. To three vegetarians. Had they been sent by the Locally-Produced-Organic-Additive-Free-Foods-Watchdog to lecture me on the evils of Ronald McDonalds' stinking beef empire? Thankfully no, it was just my friends who were staying in hotel down the road. That said, there are many ways to enjoy a Bic Mac meal but under the watchful gaze of three veggies is not one of them.

Still, at almost 7 Euro for a Big Mac meal over here, it's not exactly cheap dining. You're better off going for one of Barcelona's menus del dia (menus of the day); they're a real bargain and you can get a decent, three-course lunch with a drink, sometimes for as little as 7.50 Euro. I think I'll keep my doughnut habit though, you've got to have some vices.

A pocket for poo-bags gives this coat an extra touch of chic

Will:

We returned, a couple of weeks ago, from a day out in the Catalan countryside to find that the only free parking space remaining in Barcelona had turned from white (the colour of free parking) to green (the colour of envy, and parking fines). An hour later, we pulled into a desolate-looking patch of ground overlooking Mar Bella beach, to the north of the city centre.

“Is this fine? I don’t know if this is fine.”

“It should be alright. None of these other people have parking tickets.”

"Maybe they live here. Is that rusty lamp-post going to fall onto the car? It's probably fine."

And there it has stayed. I feel a strong sense of guilt about my car, parked some 4 miles from our flat. This is the workhorse that carried Christina and I around France on our way here, moved us into our flat, and has taken us on a number of nice trips since then. It has put up with Christina’s use of the side door pocket as a rubbish bin, her refusal to admit that the sat-nav is better with a map than she is, and her incessant complaining and messing about with the radio. Every time Christina, who cannot drive, has said “Will, those traffic lights are red, you’d better stop”, the car has held its tongue, and every time she has waited until we are just a fraction of a second past the turn-off before saying “that one!”, it has patiently waited for the next turn-off before turning around. The car is a trooper.

In fact, I was just thinking about how reliable the Vauxhall Astra is the other day, as I was jogging along the beach, on my way to check up on it and run the engine for a bit. Which is probably why the bastard wouldn’t start. Still, at least it’s got a sea view.

Week 23

2010-03-09T06:36:00.000-08:00

Will:

Firstly, an apology to anyone who was taken the time to look at our blog recently and been disappointed: we’ve dropped the ball lately. I promise to resume normal service as of this Friday.

Regular readers will be pleased to hear that I am not a racist any more. I have been listening to a lot of Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis, and Hitler absolutely wouldn’t have liked them, so I’m back in the multicultural game. As an immigrant myself, I was never going to be all that successful with the politics of the far right.

That having been said, I wonder what Hitler would have made of my recent purchase of a copy of the Sunday Express. Much like the Führer, both the mid-market papers in the UK (that’s the Daily Express and the Daily Mail) are strongly critical of immigration, regularly portraying migrants from Eastern Europe as a threat to the British way of life. Interestingly, however, these two papers are also the only British papers printed in Spain, as they have a market in the large British communities on the Mediterranean coast. Of course, Brits over here are ‘ex-patriots’, not ‘immigrants’, and they have done nothing wrong moving to a new country to enjoy a better quality of life and cushy free health care (the last WHO ranking, in 2000, placed Spain’s health system at 7th in the world, and Britain’s at 18th).

Politics aside, my furtive leafing through the papers at the tabac has uncovered only one with a cryptic crossword – the Sunday Express. At €1.90, it’s also a lot cheaper than the broadsheets, which cost around €4. Before you begin spitting with rage at your screen at the thought of my giving money to the noted pornographer Richard Desmond, who owns the Express along with TV channels like Red Hot Only 18 and Erotika, let’s take a look at that crossword:

Charming foreigner holds object (6). P---T-

A Pole, a charming foreigner? Can it be that the Express’s crossword setter is sneaking cleverly coded liberal messages into that conservative organ?

Spectators at the marathon on Sunday

Christina:

I had been intending to write all about how spring has sprung in Barcelona, how the blossom is on the trees, how the days are getting longer, warmer and sunnier - all of which was true until the temperature plummeted and it began snowing heavily earlier today. Will and I have just ventured outside, thinking it would be all magical and festive but the reality is, it's bone-chillingly cold, Christmas was months ago and the ground is like a slushy bathroom floor after someone's had a shower and not closed the shower curtain properly.

However, this latest meteorological development allows me to indulge in one of my favourite pastimes: discussing the weather. It doesn't matter how much tapas I eat or how good I get at rolling my 'Rs', because I will always have that innate British ability to twitter on about how sunny/windy/hot/cold/muggy/foggy/snowy it is. I check the daily forecast with the kind of anticipation that other people might reserve for checking their lottery numbers and I love to deliver a weather report to Will every morning, whether he likes it or not.

Last Sunday was beautiful, so Will and I took the car out to the Parc Natural del Garraf, a great chunk of wild-looking, mountainous countryside which lies 30km south-west of Barcelona and feels a million miles away from the bustle of the city. It offers sweeping views of the coastline and there are plenty of walking opportunities; on our two-hour hike, we saw nobody else but a couple having a picnic and we heard nothing but the far-off hum of a tractor.

It's times like these when the difference between mine and Will's childhoods becomes apparent: he's a country boy who can identify herbs and trees, while and I'm a suburban type who's better at identifying the best London Underground route from Woodford to Brixton. When Will suggested we forget about the path, cross over some fields and go off the beaten track, I was aghast. But we'll get eaten by cows or shot at by a farmer! I thought in a panic. Luckily, I was saved by a sign telling us that the fields were private property. Ha, country boy! We're sticking to the nice, official path for right-thinking people and there's nothing you can do about it.

Sunny Barcelona. How we laughed

Week 22

2010-02-26T07:45:00.000-08:00

Christina:

I am having a very angry week. It's not PMT; the reasons for my rage are perfectly just. The main culprit is Vodafone España, the company which provides me with access to the internet. They disconnected me a week ago because I hadn't paid my bill (oops) but I've paid it now (twice). Will and I have spent most of the week in the Vodafone shop around the corner which is officially the Place I Hate Most in the World, and it's mainly because of a particular po-faced employee who would sooner shove a SIM card up her arse than help you.

We've also been on the phone to their customer service deparment which involves being on hold a lot, listening to an intensely irritating tune that sounds like something you'd hear in Clinton Cards with a bit of Right Said Fred's Deeply Dippy thrown in for good measure. At the time of going to press, I am still internet-less which is so annoying as I could really do with wasting some time on Facebook.

The other source of my disquiet is Will's Clothes Volcano. There's a wardrobe in our spare room. In this wardrobe, I store my clothes. But Will's side of the wardrobe is empty because he keeps his clothes on the chairs and on the floor. Naturally. It started with an innocent jumper hung on the back of a chair which has kept on growing, a bit like the magic porridge pot in the fairytale of the same name. No longer can the chair cope with the groaning weight of Will's vestments and the Clothes Volcano is spewing its molten, textile lava through the flat, taking in swathes of floorspace, leaving no floor tile unscathed.

After a lot of nagging on my part, Will put his clothes in the wardrobe yesterday but I know it won't be long before they're back out. The final straw will come when I find a sock in the fridge. You have been warned, Will. I am a woman on the edge (until I can get back on Facebook).

Week 21

2010-02-25T07:16:00.000-08:00

Christina:

I think there comes a time in life when the child-parent roles get reversed, and that time arrived this week when my mum and dad came to visit.

"Text me when you get back to your hotel," I said anxiously as they were leaving our flat in the early hours of Sunday morning after dinner and drinks. They were only staying a 10-minute walk away but I was worried they would fall down a pothole, get lost, mugged or similar. It wasn't just my concerns about their safety that highlighted a shift in our roles: my efforts to get them to eat anything remotely Spanish was like trying to get a two-year old to eat sprouts.

On their first day, Will and I brought them for lunch to a tapas bar in the food market, La Boqueria, where you turn up, find a stool, squish in amongst the crowds, order some plates of tapas and enjoy. Or not. Mum wasn't happy that we weren't sitting on proper chairs, while dad's reaction to the little pieces of spicy sausage was to make a face and spit them out into a napkin. To be fair, they were a bit rank. On Sunday we went for brunch and mum was beside herself over whether the bacon would be crispy enough and whether the milk in her coffee would be the correct temperature.

That night, I desperately tried to think of somewhere suitable for us to eat. A tortillera was out of the question because mum doesn't like eggs.

"How about a Lebanese?" I ventured. No thanks. Frantically, I scoured the Rough Guide to Barcelona and found a restaurant called Cuines Santa Catarina where the food is described as "touching all bases - pasta to sushi, Catalan rice dishes to Thai curries". Surely there would be something here to suit? Thankfully, the meal passed without a tantrum.

So my parents appear to have developed the kind of dietary requirements that make Madonna seem unfussy, but I wouldn't want them to be any other way and I do miss them now.

Mr Pincers was a lot less talkative after his bath

Will:

More bad news from Barcelona this week. For most people, moving to another country would be an enlightening experience, one which would make them more tolerant and accepting of other peoples, but Barcelona has made me more of a curmudgeon than ever before. In fact, it is even worse than that: Barcelona has turned me into a massive racist.

It’s the restaurants and bars that have done it. By serving lovely food and drinks and staying open for as long as I want them to, these conniving institutions exact all they can from my meagre income, meaning that I have to stay in my flat and work all day. Unfortunately, my flat is above a trainer shop which blares out rap, hip-hop, R&B and reggae all day. Thanks to their inconsiderate attitude to volume control, I have been conditioned into hating these forms of music, just like Hitler would have done if he was still around.

It gets worse. Not only have I become an opponent of Music of Black Origin but by staying in all day, I am actually making myself more white. And when I do venture outside, the light is too bright for me, and my face scrunches into a violent squint. In the largely Chinese neighbourhood where I tend to buy my lunch, this tends to make me look like I'm ripping off some of Benny Hill's material from the 1970s. You know, the bits that definitely don't get played on TV any more.

Suffice to say I am rather angry with Barcelona’s too-talented chefs and bartenders (and all people from ethnic minorities, obviously, but in a more general sort of way). My one consolation is that the UK will have a Conservative government by this summer, and as a card-carrying* hate-monger, they will probably offer me some sort of tax credits.

The only solution as far as I can see is to stop working at once and take my ignorant, pallid neo-fascism down to the beach, where it can limbo itself back into a lithe, tanned open-mindedness. I’ll leave earning money to Christina, who was a horrendous bigot before we moved here**.

*In retrospect, perhaps I shouldn’t have actually made myself a card, but it is rather nice.

**This is completely untrue, as is practically everything in this post. Sorry for wasting your time.

Week 20

2010-02-12T08:03:00.000-08:00

Will:

I tried to pay an English cheque into my Spanish bank account today, and was rewarded with an insight into the efficiency, intelligence and hard work that goes into the modern banking system.

“You can pay it in, but it’s a really bad idea” explained the nice lady in the bank. “It will take a minimum of 45 days, and there will be a charge of 30 Euros. Also the exchange rate will not be good.” So I sent it back to the UK, where it will go into my British account, so that I can take it out of a Spanish cash machine, to pay it into my Spanish account.

Once, when I was sitting on a train somewhere in south London, I had an idea that any rail or bus ticket should be refunded if the passenger could have completed their journey more quickly on foot. In that case, the 5.5-mile journey from Penge to London Bridge took two hours – I could have walked it in one and a quarter hours, so all my train fare bought me was a wasted three-quarters of an hour, and I should have got my money back. On the other hand, for people who get into a beetroot-faced paroxysm when their flight is delayed, this policy would help them to realise that for a journey of 1,000 miles, an hour’s delay is completely acceptable.

Looking at the map, I am certain I could make the journey from Barcelona to my bank in London on foot in less than 45 days. Given the 30 Euros, plus the extra 15 or so they’d sting me for in the exchange rate, I could feed myself, too. I’d have to take a tent and some good boots, but then the banks have some infrastructure of their own in place. Massive buildings, laws that are made in their favour, everyone else’s taxes, and that sort of thing.

So maybe I’ll do that: put on my walking shoes and set off on an adventure, to show the monstrous titans of finance just how rubbish they are in comparison to a good sturdy pair of man-legs. Anyone care to send me a cheque?

Our clothes dryer and winch-thing. We often winch each other down into the street.

Christina:

When friends from home come to visit, you want to show them the best of Barcelona; the beaches, the restaurants, the boutiques, Gaudi's architecture, that kind of thing. Getting mugged is definitely not on the agenda.

Last weekend my friend, Eleanor, came to stay and on Saturday night we headed to El Born, which is a well-to-do area with some nice bars. As we walked along a well-lit, busy street, two men appeared from the shadows and tried to grab our belongings. It's not the first time this has happened to me in Barcelona so I think that some kind of fighting instinct kicked in because I wouldn't let go of my handbag. There ensued a lot of shouting and a tussle which involved me grappling on the ground with the thief. This is so undignified, I thought as I fell towards the concrete.

I eventually lost the fight because – well, he was a good deal stronger than me. With no handbag, this meant no keys to my flat. This was bad news because Will was back home in Devon for the weekend so we had no way of getting back in. Several phone calls, texts, glasses of wine, and vodkas and tonics later, we couldn't get through to my landlord and we had to concede that we'd be staying in a hotel that night.

Eleanor and I traipsed wearily from hotel to hotel only to be met with funny looks and shaking heads from the night men telling us there was no room at the inn. We eventually found two free bunk beds in a dorm at a youth hostel a stone's throw from my flat. This was actually quite fun because at the age of 30, neither of us had been in a hostel for many years.

"It's the crisis," said my landlord sadly as he met us the next morning with some spare keys. Whatever the reason, I am now on a mission not to be mugged again for the remainder of our stay in Barcelona. Some have suggested carrying pepper spray, others think a vicious-looking dog would do the trick. But I think I'll defeat the robbers with a style statement: I see that the bum bag is making a comeback this season so I'll invest in one of those.

The Parc de L'Espanya Industrial

Week 19

2010-02-05T07:35:00.000-08:00

Christina:

Will has returned home for a few days which leaves me free to listen to Part-Time Lover by Stevie Wonder as much as I like, spend ages deciding on an outfit for the day and eat ice cream for dinner. Hooray! One of the downsides, however, is that my attempts at frugal food shopping will be a shambles.

Will is a savvy shopper, I am not. I think it’s because he generally loves cooking more than I do and he is far more patient when it comes to buying ingredients. We get a lot of our food from La Boqueria, the famous food market on Las Ramblas where you’ll see everything from sheeps' heads to goose barnacles to herbs to spices to er … potatoes. I enjoy its hustle and bustle to a certain extent but if I’m there too long, I turn into a bored kid who’s been dragged to Allied Carpets on a Bank Holiday Monday.

I recently went there to buy some tomatoes and Will gave me a pep-talk beforehand:

“Walk around the market first, smell the tomatoes and compare prices before you buy anything,” Will advised. I nodded sagely. But I don’t want to!, screamed my inner brat. I just want to buy the first tomatoes I see and be done with it!

It’s because of this laziness that I once parted with 16 Euro for some fish that should have been half the price, and it’s why I return home with strawberries that I could have got for 1.49 a kilo but why do that when you can pay 4 Euro for the same amount? By the time Will returns, I expect he’ll find me weeping down the phone to the bank, pleading for loan in order to pay for some expensive mushrooms.

Some cauliflowers, decorating a roundabout

Will:

As Christina will tell you, I am a skilled healer. The World Health Organisation refuses to acknowledge my work or the work of my subordinates, Nurse Hotty-Botty and Dr Cuddles, but my powers are beyond doubt. I mention this because Christina has been ill this week. I diagnosed her as being properly ill, rather than what we specialists call ‘girl ill’; confined to her sickbed, feverish and drowsy, Christina’s only hope lay in my special healing magic. She is now much better, and it’s all thanks to me. Let me tell you how.

Medicine is simpler than you think. They* like to dress it up with fancy words and white coats, but there are actually only three medicines: the Lemsip, or a variant thereof, the cuddle (see above), and thirdly – probably the single most important development in medical history – the hot water bottle. For almost every ailment, a hot water bottle applied in some way will do the trick. In the case of Patient C (Christina), I prescribed two to three hotty-botties a day, to be taken with a Lemsip, some pyjamas and a few old episodes of Seinfeld. Worked like a charm, despite the fact that I have no idea if what I bought was Lemsip. It could have been a hot, lemony mug of toilet cleaner for all I know, but my healing touch obviously made it good.

As a result of Christina’s being covered in germs – and thanks to her congested nasal passageways, snoring at shouting volume – I have spent three nights on the camp-bed this week. It has been fun, like camping out in my own home. I may extend the concept by putting up a tent, and possibly starting a small fire in the middle of the floor on which to toast marshmallows. I could even go on an adventure holiday around the flat, hiking from room to room before setting up camp.

*yeah, you know,Them.

A street in Poble Nou

Week 18

2010-01-29T07:56:00.000-08:00

Will:

Having broken our third coffee maker in as many months, I decided to improvise. It won’t be as good, I reasoned, but it’ll do until I buy another cafétiere. So, I heated some water in a saucepan, added a tablespoon of coffee, and poured it through the filter from our broken coffee machine, straight into the mug. And for this, I will probably be assassinated. Why?

Because all coffee makers are a scam!

Making your coffee as I’ve just described is quicker and easier than a cafétiere, not to mention an electric machine or one of those stove-top things. It also uses less ground coffee, and makes a nicer drink. The thing is, the coffee companies want you to waste ground coffee in their stupid contraptions. They want you to believe that coffee-making is a special, mysterious thing, that a barista is as profound a craftsman as a chef or perhaps a surgeon, and that only by spending all your money will you get the best flavour.

Coffee is a product with a proud history of oppression; the espresso everyone thinks is so lovely was designed by an Italian factory owner, who wanted to force his workers to take shorter coffee breaks (he should have called it opresso! Ha!) And the fact that some more expensive coffee is ‘Fair Trade’ (ie, you can spend more to buy coffee that is not morally wrong) says a lot about us. But the idea that I have for years been needlessly mucking about with different sorts of coffee apparatus – that just takes the cake.

Spanish coffee differs from other coffee in that two types are always available: regular coffee and mezcla, meaning mixed. Mezcla coffee uses the same beans, but some of the beans are roasted in sugar (and then mixed into the regular beans, hence the name). It mostly tastes like normal coffee but with a slight edge of burnt sugar and toffee.

So take it from me, a qualified freelance food journalist: if you’re buying cheap ground coffee in Spain, I think it’s better to go with mezcla, although it is important to note that buying a good-quality coffee maker will make absolutely no difference at all.

A head-on view of a wooden submarine.

Christina:

Wandering off the beaten track is the ultimate ambition for the travelling type. You want to be able to say to others, “Oh god, I went to this AMAZING restaurant/shop/beauty spot. You’ll never find it in the guide books. You can try, but you won’t!”
Lately, Will and I have been taking the paths less travelled in and around Barcelona and consequently, we have discovered there’s a reason for this. Because they’re a bit rubbish. A couple of Sundays ago we took the car to Vilanova i la Geltru, a seaside town about 40 km south of Barcelona. We packed a picnic and set off with visions of bracing walks along the sand before settling down to some nice food. As soon as we stepped out of the flat, it started raining and however nice Vilanova i la Geltru might be in the sunshine, it’s quite depressing when it’s bucketing down. Our day consisted of walking around for a bit, having coffee in a deserted café where we sat in silence watching a wildlife programme on the TV screen, eating our picnic in the car, playing I Spy (which was limiting because we couldn’t see much out of the rain-lashed car window) and observing a severed doll's arm that had been washed up on the beach, before Will turned to me and asked, “Can we go home now?”
Last Saturday we went for a walk in the city and I picked Esquerra de l’Eixample as our destination. This is despite the guidebook describing it as “perhaps the least visited on any city sightseeing trip.” Again, the weather wasn’t great so perhaps it’s a little unfair to judge a place when it’s not bathed in a sunny glow. Anway, it wasn’t postcard material, that’s for sure. Among the sights we took in along Avinguda de Roma were high-rise buildings, plenty of concrete and a big train station. Oh, and a prison.

The beach was also strewn with sanitary towels and fat, purple sea-slugs. If you can weep through a snorkel, Vilanova i la Geltru would be the place to do it

Week 17

2010-01-25T06:49:00.000-08:00

Will:

Restaurants are generally pretty nice. You sit down, you eat, you have a couple of glasses of wine. You have a nice conversation. Someone does a shit next to you. No?

Oh, right, that’s because it’s rude to openly display faeces in a room where people are not only eating, but paying to eat. Still, that didn’t stop a Spanish lady from coming over to the table next to ours to change her baby’s nappy on Saturday night. I was just minding my own business, trying to eat a Peruvian goat, and there she was, cooing and fussing over the little mite as if it had done something unbelievably clever. If it’s so completely fine, I wondered, if it’s so normal and natural and fine, why have you come across the restaurant to our table? Eh? I am eating food here, you selfish, deviant maniac!

And with that, I resolved to take my revenge. While she bagged up the disposable nappy, I marched over to her table, sat on her chair and shat myself, as hard as I could. My red, shaking face was a mirror image of her child’s toilet grimace, but apparently not as adorable. Still, too bad.
Christina, understanding my protest, soon joined in. Hoisting me onto the table, she pushed my legs aloft and, borrowing a couple of wipes from the startled Spaniard, began industriously cleaning me. The job done, we returned to our seats, finished our meal and left.

Okay, we didn’t. We sat in outraged silence, shaking our heads in impotent disbelief. Don’t get me wrong, I like the fact that Spanish, French and Italian people take their kids to restaurants. Their kids are usually pretty well-behaved, and I don't mind a couple of little people running about while I eat. But a poo! A poo is too far, madam. Too far by half.

Handball: BCN take on a team from, er, somewhere else. Goooal! Or is it? Don't know.

Week 16

2010-01-15T09:45:00.000-08:00

Will
Living in the centre of Barcelona has given me a distorted image of the city’s population. While it’s true that, unlike the centre of London, central Barcelona is populated by people – normal people, rather than millionaires and beggars – the vast majority of people in the street have arrived from elsewhere. Living just off the Portal de l’Angel, perhaps the city’s busiest retail street, it’s all too easy to see the Barcelonians as a shopping people, mainly concerned with the acquisition of clothing from the ubiquitous H&M, Desigual and their beloved Zara. This is a false impression, and a negative one, because shopping is an inherently stupid activity.
       January is a prime month for observing how incredibly thick the shop-owners rightly suppose us to be. We have just spent all of our money on things for other people, because baby Jesus wanted us to, and now all that stuff is half price. Half price! So, that means it was never worth what they were charging, doesn’t it? It means the prices were artificially inflated, weren't they, to take cynical advantage of our Yuletide munificence? But rather than marching into the shop and saying, ‘you scammed us, you snakes, and we want our money back’, we march into the shop and get in a queue, and hand over yet more of our money for a new jumper or some pants. What an unbelievably stupid thing to do.
     I should re-iterate that I am not saying that the Barcelonites are all shopping folk, much less that they are in any way stupid. It’s just that we live in an area frequented heavily by shoppers. Being constantly surrounded by shoppers makes it impossible not to notice that anyone who walks into a shop becomes a moron, for the time they are in there. It’s not our fault. The shops have us beaten. They have strange hypnotic powers, vast resources, and technology beyond our imagining. They will spread and spread, until every person in the world works for, lives and spends all of his money in a branch of H&M.
                Having said that, living in an area where everyone comes to go shopping makes Sundays a real treat. All the shops being shut, everyone goes somewhere else and the wide avenues become empty but for a few families, strolling, devoid of retail intent. I love Sundays.

Some Reflections on a Bus

Christina

Last weekend a travel magazine editor who Will has been getting some work from was in town. It was the perfect opportunity for them to meet (I won't use the word 'network', I am not a contestant on The Apprentice). I tagged along and the meeting took place on Sunday. At 11pm. In a bar. These are either the best or the worst circumstances under which to present yourself, depending on your viewpoint.

Earlier that day, I had eaten some funny-tasting soup. I'd made it a couple of days earlier and I think the blue cheese had chemically reacted with the cauliflower because it tasted fizzy. I should have stopped after the first spoonful but I persisted for a bit longer, all in the name of frugality. Eleven hours later, my stomach began gurgling as we left the bar. It's okay, I thought. It's only five minutes on the metro, we'll be home in no time. But it was 2am and the metro was shut so I endured a 50-minute walk down Passeig de Gracia, with the onset of food poisoning creeping upon me. I said nothing of my predicament, lest I hamper Will's career.

"The first time we came to Barcelona, I got food poisoning," Will revealed to the editor. "We were on our way to the Sagrada Famila and Christina had brought some plastic bags for me to be sick in." When you're suffering from this kind of ailment, there is nothing worse than a) the smell of fried food or b) hearing someone else's food poisoning story.

We eventually reached Placa de Catalunya, where we would part company with the editor. By now, I felt delirious, faint, hot, nauseous and really, really in need of the loo. But there were no quick goodbyes. Will and the editor continued chatting for what was probably only a minute, but felt like an eternity. Come on! I wanted to shout at Will. I'm actually going to soil myself here! The editor turned to me and said "Christina, if you want to do any writing for us ..."

"Great, thanks," I said with all the enthusiasm of someone who asked for a Yorkie but got a Chomp. However, if it's a choice between sounding ungrateful and disgracing yourself in front of a potential employer, I know which one I'd rather live with.
*Footnote: I made it home without incident.

Week 15

2010-01-13T08:44:00.000-08:00

Christina:

"I have never fixed a boiler", our landlord cheerfully announced yesterday as he arrived to fix our leaking boiler.

I get very nervous when it comes to home appliances. I'm the kind of person who thinks that unless I unplug everything and do a thorough safety check before going to put the rubbish out, I will return to a big ball of flames. So when a kindly, but evidently clueless, man turns up to do a bit of plumbing, my stomach starts to churn.

Of course, broken boilers are a common feature of the winter months but it's not so bad to be without hot water when you have central heating. If you're brave enough for a cold shower you can reward yourself afterwards with a nice radiator hug. This flat, like many of Barcelona's old buildings, does not have central heating. When we moved here in balmy September, I would boast to friends and family back home, "you know, our flat doesn't have central heating? That's right, I live in a country where radiators are not required. Radiators are for wimps! Enjoy the cold, losers!"

Well, I can inform you that Barcelona does get cold. Over the past weeks we've gaffer-taped the window seals like we're preparing for nuclear war, stuffed gaps in the windows with towels and used rolled-up duvet covers as draft excluders.

"Why do your arms look so big?", Will asked me over dinner the other night. Because I'm wearing three jumpers and a cardigan, that's why. For those of you planning to come and stay with us, please don't let any of this put you off.

Back to the boiler and my confidence in the landlord's handyman skills plummeted further when, by the end of the day, he had managed to turn a few drips into a full-on waterfall. Anyway, heís just been back with a new 'part' and after much faffing, grunting, to-ing and fro-ing, it's apparently fixed. Roll on summer.

Will:

I may not be the best fisherman in the world. I may in fact be the worst, but at least I’m not cursed.

I was fishing down on the long sea wall that extends a few hundred metres in front of the Olympic port, when the weather suddenly turned nasty. A chill wind came up out of nowhere, the sea started to heave menacingly, and angry bruises appeared in the sky. She’s here, I thought. And sure enough, I heard a voice behind me.

“Hi! It’s me! How do I get down?”

She’s never told me how it happened but Christina, like Odysseus, has somehow incurred the wrath of Poseidon, or some other marine deity. As a result, fish instinctively flee from her presence, and fishing line loops wilfully into impossible knots. I am like a character in some forgotten shanty: Don’t ye let Will Dunn’s woman near yon boat, lad… storms roll in from the sea when’er she be near it.

Still, I kept on fishing, because only a small part of the activity of fishing has anything to do with catching fish. It’s more about doing nothing: sitting somewhere by the sea, staring blankly into the middle distance, listening to the cawing of gulls and doing bugger all. Because if someone asked you what you did on Sunday and you said, “oh, I sat on a wall”, they’d think you had failed to use your Sunday properly. Factor in a half-hearted attempt to kill a herring, and suddenly you’re a sportsman.
There is a real air of contentment down on the sea wall, the quiet satisfaction of men getting away with not doing anything at all. Gardening? Car washing? Football? Sorry, I can’t. I’m going fishing.

Inside Barcelona Cathedral. I wonder if the font is warm enough for an armpit-wash?

Week 14

2010-01-04T04:57:00.000-08:00

Will:

At six o’clock this morning, I drew back the covers and took a tentative sniff. It was even worse than I had imagined. As a gust of two-hundred-degree air may singe the eyebrows of a too-eager oven user, so my nasal hairs withered and crackled in the ghastly brimstone of my nocturnal flatulence.

I have been spending too much time in the company of vegetarians, three of whom Christina invited to spend New Year with us. In the last three days I have eaten nothing but spicy white bean chilli, cauliflower curry, eggs, spinach and falafels. As a result of this unfamiliar diet, I am now so flatulent that nearby offices have had to be evacuated. Birds drop dead in mid-flight and fall onto our roof, their eyes massive, their beaks twisted with disgust. The seagulls land with a crunch and ricochet clumsily into the street below, where children in gas masks give them solemn, inappropriate funerals. As far away as Tarragona, 100km to the south, people have reported that fresh milk turns to mucky Stilton upon contact with the polluted air.

With my bottom pouring forth a fresh miasma once every few minutes, every living thing in Barcelona is clearing out. Even the rats have fled. They emerged from the sewers last night and came streaming out of the Raval and up Las Ramblas, making for the hills. A scurrying brown river of nasally offended rodentdom, they crawled over the last few escaping tourists and headed West, where they hope to make a new existence, free from the terrible consequences of my misguided dalliance with meat-free dining.

It has to be stopped. If I continue to not eat sausages and burgers, all of Western Europe will fall. If there is anyone out there with a strong stomach, no sense of smell and their own scuba equipment, for pity’s sake, get me a mixed grill and restore the balance before it’s too late. We’re counting on you.

And a can of Coke, please. And a Twix, for pudding.

A band playing outside the cathedral on Christmas Day

Christina:

And that was Christmas. Will and I stayed in Barcelona, making it the first Christmas either of us has had away from home. I had been feeling quite homesick thinking about my usual festive routine: Quality Streets for breakfast, a glass of Harveys Bristol Cream with mum while the turkey is in the oven, falling into an Eastenders-and-Coronation Street-induced coma before rising again for turkey sandwiches and a game of Absolute Balderdash.

By Christmas Day my homesickness had turned to actual vomiting. Admittedly, this was the result of too much booze the night before. In the absence of a traditional English pub, Will and I went for the next best thing: an Irish pub. There was lager, there was Guinness and then there was half a bottle of port at about 2am on Christmas morning back at our flat. I can’t decide whether my hangovers are getting worse with age, or whether it’s because I have taken to drinking like a sailor since moving to Spain. It’s not helped by the fact that the spirit measures are so liberal here and I have got it into my head that to drink lots of wine makes me terribly continental.

Hungover or not, Christmas can be a stressful time. I think Will and I were both a bit nervous that, having spent the last 101 days exclusively in each other’s company, it might all become a bit much. Would my mounting resentment at him using our curtains as a tea towel result in me boxing his head with the Peep Show DVD boxset? Or would my crimes against washing up (see Will’s entry, week 7), culminate in strangulation by tinsel? No, we buttoned up and carried on. Once my hangover had worn off, we had a lovely time opening presents, walking around Barcelona Cathedral and the Parc de la Ciutadella, eating traditional Catalan food and drinking cava. I did miss the Quality Streets, though.

The fairground at Tibidabo, which looks out over the city

Week 12

2009-12-18T05:02:00.000-08:00

Christina:

It’s Friday night and I’m waiting outside a bar in the Sant Pere area of Barcelona, nervously picking at my nail varnish. A man is pacing up and down on the pavement beside me. He looks like he’s waiting for someone, I tell myself. I eventually muster the courage to approach him.

Me: “Hola. Eres Jordi?”

Him: “Si. Christina?”

   It’s okay, I’m not having an affair; Will is by my side and Jordi is the organiser of the Barcelona English/Spanish Language Exchange Group, which Will and I are attending for the first time. The idea is that you go to a bar and chat to people you don’t know in an effort to improve your Spanish or English. Will and I deliberately sit at opposite ends of the table so that we don’t end up discussing utility bills, and I spend most of the evening talking to two lovely ladies from Barcelona.
   Topics of conversation include having a good moan about our respective city’s transport systems. It’s reassuring to find that wherever you’re from in the world, tutting about delayed trains, lack of information and exorbitant ticket prices can keep a conversation going for ages. Personally, I don’t know what they’ve got to complain about. In Barcelona it costs 70p for a single journey, anywhere on the network. 70p! That’s 1950s London prices! And you’re allowed to drink on the trains here; one station, Glories (it’s on the red line), even has a bar next to the ticket machines.
   I also chat to a sweet and eccentric Catalan man who tells me he loves 1970s British TV sitcoms like George & Mildred. His English accent is so good that I become suspicious he’s an undercover, er … English person. Undercover for what, exactly, I don’t know. But I’m a Londoner and it’s my duty to be deeply cynical; that’s what years of travelling on the London Underground does for you.

Our Christmas tree, which I (Will) found in a bin. Observe how it is in

danger of being crushed by a falling Christmas card

Will:

The postal colour in Spain, as in France, is yellow. I enjoy the sight of a postman (or postwoman) anywhere I go, and the posties of Barcelona are no exception. They are often to be seen taking the tube with their trolleys full of post, but the area around our flat is particularly good ground for spying a postie or two, because we’re within a few minutes’ walk of the central post office on Via Laietana, the city’s main conurbation of carteros. From my observations, Barcelona’s female posties may not be as pulchritudinous as the street-sweepers (see my post for Week 2 for details), but they are punctual and well turned-out.

I feel a duty to continue sending post, despite the fact that it is obviously stupid and outdated and irrelevant, because when society collapses and the internet explodes and we’re all clubbing each other to death with our own femurs, we may need them. Possibly. Although they may be on strike.
Anyway, el correo is not the first species to arouse my interest of a morning. Many of the old buildings here (including the one we live in) have never been fitted for gas, central heating not being common. Instead, people use bottled butane, which is delivered by men with hand-trolleys. The butano-men make their rounds between 8 and 10 am, walking around the streets and shouting “butano!”. If you need a bottle, you shout down to them and they bring it up to your flat; one bottle will last a flat like ours two months, and I think they cost 11 Euro. The best thing about the butano-men is that each one has a different, distinctive way of shouting butano!, just as birds or squirrels or monkeys might use a distinctive cry to establish their identities. Our spare bottle ran out this week, so I am currently evaluating the cries of the butano-men who pass our flat in the mornings (there are four), and on Monday I will shout Sí! Sí! Butano, aqui! to the one I deem best. It’s a bit like the singing contests on TV at home, only it’s not a horrendous waste of everyone’s time and it won’t poison music for ever.

The Butano! Network Chart:
1. But-tan-noey! – Unidentified Butano Man A
2. Butaerno! – Unidentified Butano Man B
3. Peutahno! – Another Unidentified Butano Man
4. Beu-tar-noy! – Unidentified Butano Man With a Limp

There is a special pasta shape eaten here at Christmas, and large, illuminated pasta shells have been placed around the city to remind people which shape to buy

Week 11

2009-12-11T05:43:00.000-08:00

Will:
If you come to visit Barcelona, your first concern will be to sort out the essentials of modern travel – a place to stay, a fistful of the funny foreign ‘money’ they use over here, and possibly some sort of amusing hat. Those sorted, you’ll probably want to try some local cuisine and have a drink or two before enjoying some drugs and, if you’re not too tired, the services of a prostitute.
   ‘Volem un barri digne’ is a phrase that can help you find these last two; in certain parts of town, the residents have taken to putting up flags bearing this phrase on their balconies. It means ‘we want a decent neighbourhood’, and it is intended to draw attention to the levels of drug dealing, prostitution and delinquency outside people’s homes. In the district of el Raval, where the flags first appeared, prostitutes and seedy bars have always been part of the landscape, but the locals say that huge increases in tourism and immigration have led to the development of a new underworld, one they find unfamiliar and threatening.
   You’ll also see home-made flags. Over by the Plaça de George Orwell, there’s a banner that goes up on Friday and Saturday nights imploring people (in English) to stop buying and selling drugs. I can see what he’s trying to do, but this banner merely confirms to the prospective drug-buyer that the shifty-looking individuals hanging around underneath it are in fact drug dealers. The people in this flat need to do some market research, to make sure they’re not providing free advertising.
   Speaking of terrible addictions, I have developed a mania for chocolate beverages. Very fine, thick, chilli-spiced cocoa is available from the various granjas, or milk bars. Most food shops sell three or four different brands of chocolate milk and chocolatey horchata. The churrerias sell churros y chocolata, deep-fried sugary dough strips that are covered in sugar and served with a cup of very thick hot chocolate, for dipping. For breakfast, only an all-brown cereal can satisfy me now, and I pace the room each morning like an expectant father, waiting for my Choco Krispies to turn the milk brown enough to slake my chocolatey thirst. It is only a matter of time before I am found roaming the streets, a brown moustache of shame upon my lips, belching cocoa at passers-by and roaring with choco-madness. Someone should put up a flag.

José, Ivan and Maria wanted the druggies out, but Gary wasn't too bothered.

Christina:

Barcelona offers plenty in the way of retail therapy, thus keeping Barcelonians (Barcelonites? Barceloners?) looking stylish, from the jumper-clad dogs to the Penelope Cruz-alike women. Portal D’Angel is the city’s answer to London’s Oxford Street; head here if you don’t mind shuffling along in a big, noisy queue of dazed shoppers before hauling yourself into the safe embrace of H&M. Passeig de Gracia is a grand thoroughfare which runs north from Placa de Catalunya up to the smart neighbourhood of Graciá. This is where the designer shops are, but only 10 people in the whole world can actually afford to buy anything here. The Gothic Quarter is a mix of shops selling those trousers with pavement-grazing crotches that are favoured by many of Barcelona’s ladies, and beautiful vintage and antique shops where everything is so gorgeous that you’re absolutely terrified of touching anything. And El Born’s tiny streets are home to many independent, local designers whose shops are straight out of a fairytale.

But this all pales in comparison to the fact that Barcelona still has a C&A! Ten years ago, this budget retail mecca disappeared from Britain’s high streets to make way for the likes of Primark and its stampedes for 50p knickers. As a teenager, I loved C&A. I liked nothing more than spending a Saturday afternoon at the Ilford Exchange, trawling the Clockhouse section for something to wear to the school disco, such as purple Lycra bellbottoms which I sadly no longer have.

And the TV adverts! With the people skiing in the C&A ski wear! I had never even been skiing but those adverts with the jaunty music – which I’m sure was the Ski Sunday theme tune but internet research to verify this has proved fruitless - over images of happy people capering about in powdery white snow, made me want to tear myself away from the TV screen, go and buy a bright pink ski jacket and demand that mum and dad take me somewhere cold and snowy.

Christina's wardrobe is getting out of control.

Week 10

2009-12-04T08:59:00.000-08:00

Christina:

Apologies for my absence last week, but I returned home to attend my eighth wedding of the year. Well, not my wedding - it was that of my lovely friends Sam and Jon - but it’s the eighth time in 365 days that I’ve danced to Build Me Up Buttercup at a wedding reception. A message to The Foundations, the group responsible for this song: I don’t know why the buttercup builds you up, and quite frankly I don’t care, so stop whining.

After a couple of hours on a very busy and very orange easyJet flight, I was back on English soil. And how things have changed since Will and I departed in the Vauxhall Astra at the crack of dawn on 16 September. Mum and dad now have an even bigger flat-screen TV, a fruit war is being waged between two shops by Woodford tube station, Oxford Circus has a new pedestrian crossing and to top it all, the Circle Line isn’t even going to be a circle anymore when it gets a new branch that terminates at Hammersmith. It was lovely being home though, and I especially enjoyed not having to rehearse what I was going to say every time I went into a shop.

Since returning to Barcelona, my sleep has been disturbed by late-night ramblings from Will. This is not a new phenomenon; when he lived in Penge, he bolted up in the middle of the night, convinced there was a spider in the bed. Last night, just as I was drifting off to sleep, he leapt up and darted into the kitchen which is next to our bed. Apparently, the fridge was humming so he went to sort it out, but I was none the wiser which is one of the few benefits to being a bit deaf. On his return, he said, “remind me tomorrow to move the fridge into the spare room so the noise doesn’t bother me.”
"Mmm ... yes, goodnight," I replied. What I was really thinking, was, are you mental? A fridge in the spare room? What next? A stereo in the bathroom? This is not a Travelodge!

Will:

Lying in the dark, I listen as the humming of the fridge gets louder and louder, developing into a whine, then a buzz.

“Christina.”

“Hnhnhn.”

“Are you awake?”

“Sfghesh. Hhnhnhn?”

“Christina, I think I might move the fridge into the spare room.”

“Jesh.”

I stumble, zombie-like, into the kitchen and give the fridge the sort of meaty, open-handed slap a Sicilian might give to a misbehaving donkey. The buzzing noise cuts out. I have about ten minutes to get soundly asleep, before the hum works its way back up to full volume. Christina has started snoring.

I envy Christina; she is just deaf enough that she can sleep through any amount of nocturnal noise, but not so deaf that it presents her with any problems during the day. I, on the other hand, can hear a mouse clearing its throat in a hurricane, so I get to stay awake all night listening to the fridge, and the people urinating in the street outside, and the quiet metallic farting of the boiler. Best of all, I get woken up a couple of times a night by a strange, demonic susurration on the other side of the bed. It’s a specialised sort of snore that Christina has developed, which combines breathing in with a sort of backwards whispering and smacking of the lips. It is genuinely terrifying. It sounds like she’s possessed. More than once I have awoken, confused and afraid, and thought to myself, run for the cathedral. There is Holy Water there, and a priest who may cast out the… oh, it’s just Christina’s Linda Blair impression.

Anyway, that’s my excuse for not getting up until half nine on a weekday.

Spongebob, aloft

Week 9

2009-12-01T06:42:00.000-08:00

Will:

In the square in front of the cathedral, the Christmas market has arrived. The Catalans are very keen on making small nativity scenes for their homes, and most of the stalls in the market sell little figures – the shepherds, Mary and Joseph, the wise men, baby Jesus and, of course, a man with his pants around his ankles and a warm smile on his face, cranking out a nice big poo onto the ground.

This little chap is the caganer (in Catalan, or cagador in Spanish), meaning ‘the crapper’, and he has been a feature of the Pessebre, the Catalan nativity scene, for hundreds of years. Generations of children have looked at the nativity scene in each other’s homes and exclaimed “Look! There he is! The shitting man! Ha ha ha!” And their grandparents have smiled and given them sweets for being so clever.

But the caganer is not the only wonderful Catalan tradition you can buy at the market. Many English people burn a large log, the Yule log, at Christmas time, and over here, too, they have a special log. The tió de Nadal (Christmas log) is hollowed, given legs and a smiling face and wrapped up a nice warm blanket. They then ‘feed’ this little chap every night from the 8^th of December until Christmas Day, when he earns his more popular name: caga tió, the shitting log. In what must be one of the most beautiful Yuletide traditions of anywhere in the world, the log is sung to, threatened with fire and beaten with sticks until he shits out the delicious treats that have been hidden inside his hollow body – nuts, sweets and torróns, bars of Christmas nougat. When caga tió has nothing left to give, he craps out a salted herring.

Apparently a massive caga tió is being constructed directly in front of the cathedral, and I literally cannot wait to join the crowds singing and beating him with sticks this year. It is heartwarming indeed to know that while endless incitements to go shopping and appalling music may have robbed Christmas of much of its magic, the simple joy of a nice big turd remains free to all*.

*Well, most of us – let’s not forget the faecally impacted this Advent, and pray that Baby Jesus brings them a movement, or at least a gifted bottom-doctor.

There he is! And he's crapping like a champion!

The defecating log of Christmas

Week 8

2009-11-20T06:22:00.000-08:00

Christina:

After Will threatening to do away with me if I didn’t stop leaving dirty teaspoons in the sink, I’m sad to report there has been yet more cleaning-related conflict this week. On Sunday, we had a fight because I suggested (or ‘ordered’ as he puts it) that Will clean the kitchen while I took care of the other rooms; he was angry that I was being bossy, I was angry that he was angry and it resulted in an hour of door-slamming, furious mopping and heavy-hearted scrubbing from both parties. Yes, we argue about the really important stuff.
I eventually flounced out of the flat (more door-slamming) to go for a walk along the beach. Because if you’ve got a beach on your doorstep, that’s where you go when you’re in need of a think, isn’t it? Just ask anyone in Home & Away.
I’d just found a spot to have a nice sit-down and a meaningful gaze out to sea, when a man came into my line of vision. He was sitting a few metres in front of me, reading a paper and, apart from a shirt, he wasn’t wearing anything else. What is it with this incessant flesh-baring? I know it’s a beach but it’s not summer anymore, you’re not going to get a tan, you’ve gone to the effort of putting on a shirt, just put on a pair of trousers love, and stop terrifying the women and children!
I quickly moved on, but it wasn’t time to go home just yet. When you’re in a strop you want to string it out for as long as possible so I wandered around for a while longer, hungry as I hadn’t eaten since breakfast but adamant that I was far too furious to eat. I sat on the steps of Barcelona Cathedral, just around the corner from our flat, a bit like a child who pretends to have run away from home but who is actually hiding in an upstairs wardrobe. Eventually I returned, half-expecting the living room to be filled with heart-shaped helium balloons, roses and a string quartet. It wasn’t, but the kitchen did look really, really clean. Thanks Will.

A transparent cross-sectional model of Las Ramblas. I call him 'Lampy'.

Will:

Casa Batlló is a large house on the Passeig de Gracia, a long, wide street that runs north from the Plaça de Catalunya to the Avinguda Diagonal. It is instantly recognisable, because the windows are irregular, swooping and multi-coloured, flanked by bone-like struts and topped by a humped, scaly roof that looks like a dragon’s back. The inside of the house is an airy, spacious grotto of cool blue walls, swirling ceilings and abstract submarine forms. It’s a big place, but there are lots of nooks and crannies and clever cupboards, so it’s cosy, too. It is probably the nicest house I have ever been into, from a design point of view. The only thing ruining Casa Batlló, when we went there last Saturday, was me.
“This must have been such an amazing place to live,” I droned, mooching from room to room with my audio guide stuck to my face like a big mobile phone. As the home of one of the city’s richest merchants, Casa Batlló was where the cream of Barcelona society came for parties and receptions, my audio guide told me. Wow! That must make me the cream of Barcelona society, because I was free to wander about the place as much as I liked, having paid my €16.50 at the door. I stopped to take a picture of the cosy, shell-like nook designed for couples who wanted to sit by the fire. Luckily for me, it is now roped off, and no couples will ever be allowed to sit there again, so I could get a proper photo. I shuffled into a small room which I think might have been a bedroom for one of Señor Battló’s ten children, but is now a gift shop, and then I wandered upstairs to take some more photos.
Back in the good old days, Señor Batlló would probably have rolled up his sleeves and kicked this bimbling, camera-toting intruder out onto the Passeig de Gracia, but now any such behaviour would be recorded by the security cameras that adorn every wall in his old house, and I’d be able to sue him. The cameras are a feature Gaudí probably never thought about, along with the fire exit signs and the smoke alarms. That house was designed as a beautiful home for a big family and their friends, but now it’s full of berks like me. On the other hand, I got some cracking pics in there! Nice one!

A window. I call him 'Window-y'

Week 7

2009-11-13T06:55:00.000-08:00

Will:

I have sad news: it looks as if I will have to kill Christina. I know, I know, she’s a nice girl, but once I explain, you’ll agree. You see, it has come to my attention that Christina is one of The Enemy. That’s right – Christina is one of those people who keeps all the unwashed dishes in the sink.

You know the people I mean: people who will put all the plates from lunch at the bottom of the sink, then put the previous evening’s curry pan on top, then run the cold tap on the whole mess for a bit, as if that’s going to help. You want to shout at them: stop, you fool! Those plates only had a bit of bread on them, and now you’re covering them with curry grease and bits of rice! But they won’t listen, because they are The Enemy, and they want you to suffer. They want you to have to reach into a saucepan full of cold, eggy-smelling water in order to retrieve a teaspoon, which had only had a single tear of milky tea running down its surface, but was consigned to the manky egg-pan as part of some insane plan by The Enemy, a plan which has resulted in the teaspoon becoming dirtier than ever before!

Worst of all, you both know that you’re going to have to remove all of this stuff from the sink in order to start doing the washing up, but The Enemy cares not a jot. All The Enemy cares about is short-term appearances: that the plates aren’t on a work surface. Why? Is the Work Surface Inspector going to fine me for a Cluttering Offence? The ineffective splash-baptism the plates receive is intended to make it look like the washing-up process is being taken care of, but all that’s happened is that the least dirty plates and utensils have been covered in the skanky stuff from the cooking pans.

In her defence, Christina tells me that she’s only adopted this practice because our kitchen is the size of one of Ronnie Corbett’s shoes. This is true. Also, she is a fine woman in every other respect, so perhaps I won’t actually kill her. Some sort of spring-loaded sink trap should do the trick.

Or I could just do the washing up.

This is going to be my lair once I'm evil

Christina:

The trouble with working from home is that it’s easy to become lazy about your personal presentation. When I got up this morning I put on my running clothes and so I didn’t bother having a shower or doing my hair and make-up. It is now almost two in the afternoon, I still haven’t been for a run and I look like a sad ‘before’ picture in a magazine makeover. Will, too, is unwashed, unshaven and has just removed his glasses because his face is so greasy that they were sliding off his nose.

Happily, this isn’t always the case and we do make an effort when we venture outside. On Wednesday we visited Montserrat, a mountain with a monastery which is about 30 miles north-west of Barcelona. There are a few ways of getting up to the monastery - by foot, car, train or funicular. We decided on the Aeri de Montserrat, which transports you 544m upwards in a bright yellow cable car that dangles precariously over the river and valley below.

Reading the Wikipedia article now, I see that there are many fascinating things we could have done on our trip: we could have seen the world’s oldest printing press, works by Picasso and Dali or the Virgin of Montserrat. We didn’t see any of that but we did see a Spanish Ibex on our way back down from the mountain’s summit. This might sound like the name of a bank but it is, in fact, a wild mountain goat with huge horns. I have written that with an air of authority but at the time, I didn’t have a bloody clue and said to Will: “er, is that a ram?” Will replied, “no, it’s an Ibex. It’s a goat with massive horns!” We were both uneasy. Goats aren’t usually scary animals but you try remembering that when a be-horned beast is staring intently at you. We stood there gulping for a few minutes before deciding that the best thing to do would be to walk quickly and confidently past the animal. As we scuttled past, the goat gave a frightened little bleat and ran off, clearly more scared of us than we were of him.

The monastery from above, some 4,500ft from the plain below. A place of goats.

Week 6

2009-11-06T07:39:00.000-08:00

Christina:

You don’t see elderly people out and about that much in Britain unless you spend a lot of time on buses, in churches or shopping at Bodgers of Ilford. But old people are everywhere in Barcelona and in other parts of Spain as I discovered last week when I visited Rioja, in the north of the country. Its capital, Logroño, was swarming with good-time grannies and granddads out on the town quaffing wine and eating tapas with their children and grandchildren. And Barcelona’s streets and squares are home to benches-full of old folk watching the world go by through wise eyes and waving their sticks furiously as they make a point about something or other.

But it’s Barceloneta beach where they feel most at home: so at home, in fact, that they walk around practically starkers. On Wednesday morning, Will and I went for a run along the beach and we must have seen 20 old men wandering around in the tiniest swimming trunks imaginable: some of them were out for a swim, others were jogging or doing lunges, but most of them were just hanging out at the outdoor cafes, being very noisy, playing card games and drinking beer. This was at 9 o’clock in the morning. Will and I have just returned to the beach to try and photograph these scantily-clad octogenarians but sadly we were too late for them – they were probably on lunch or having a siesta – so you’ll have to make do with this fully-clothed old man’s club. The old ladies, too, are a source of inspiration and are snazzy dressers as demonstrated by this golden-shoed stylista (pictured).

It doesn’t feel very Christmassy here yet. It’s 6 November and I bet that back home in London, every shop you walk into has Jingle Bells blaring out at a hundred decibels and that shop workers are being forced to wear Santa hats against their will. I have seen none of this yet, but in a nod to all things festive, I have this week exchanged emails with a PR person named Natividad (Nativity) and met a man called Jesus.

Those trainers are to die for!!!

The first rule of Old Man Club is: you have to be an old man.

Will:

(Warning: the last word of this entry is a strong swearword.)

Last Saturday morning in the Plaça Carles Pi I Sunyer, the members of a local brass band were warming their instruments up in the fresh autumn air. Shoppers from the Portal del Angel stopped to look as they trilled up and down their scales. Some old ladies erupted into giggles when a tuba parped flatulently in their direction, the tuba-player waggling his eyebrows suggestively.
    But behind the band, a dull, aggressive music emanated from the Carrer dels Capellans. It was coming from Tommy Gun Sneakers, where the men in the shop had turned up their stereo to cut over the musicians. They weren’t happy that, for once, there was a sound louder than their stereo to be heard in the square. I don’t know what song it was; some American hip-hop, I think. To be honest, it sounded like a ringtone. The guys in the shop were doing their best to drown out the jolly, home-made music of the band, and draw attention to their display of Nike trainers. They were also standing in the street, jeering and gesticulating at the musicians.
    In the 1950s and 60s, while the rest of the world was undergoing a musical revolution, Spain remained under strict muscial censorship – even Cliff Richard was considered too risqué for Franco’s far-right regime. Back then, music-for-fun had to shut up in favour of music-for-your-own-good. Now, music-for-fun is blared over by music-for-money.

   After about fifteen minutes of my ruminating on the evils of American cultural imperialism and the like, I saw a young woman lean into the doorway of Tommy Gun Sneakers.

        “Shhh! Pajeros!” (“Shut it, wankers!”), she shouts.

And they did. So you can ruminate all you like, but if you want a pajero to shut up, you tell him.

   Incidentally, the fact that pajero is Spanish for ‘wanker’ is the reason that you’ll find it difficult to buy a Mitsubishi Pajero in the Spanish-speaking world. I love it when companies do that. Apparently the Honda Jazz was originally named the Honda Fitta, until it was discovered that, across Scandinavia, fitta is a popular slang word. It means ‘cunt’.

Fans of last week's entry on specific shops will enjoy this, the globe shop.

There are drinking fountains all over Barcelona. You can drink from them, or just take a picture.

Week 5

2009-10-30T09:40:00.000-07:00

Will:
“Do not worry about crime”, said our landlord, smiling, “there are murders in Barcelona, but normally they are… how is it… crimes of passion?”

We nodded.

“A man loves a woman,” he explained, “so he kills her. Or sometimes, a Morrocan will get you. Look out for the Morrocans.”

It was sage advice, but lovers and Morrocans aren’t the only criminals in Barcelona. There are also some complete idiots trying to get in on the act, as you’ll find out from Christina’s blog entry (below).

The shops in Barcelona are a similarly diverse bunch. Billions (yes) of people come here to go shopping, and there are almost no supermarkets, so the independent shops seem to do alright. There are mask shops, puppet shops, candle shops (chandlers?), ham shops; you name it, they've got a shop. There's a coat hanger shop. There are also quite a few independent toy shops, and a magic shop or two (which sell equipment for creating illusions, rather than magic itself, although I suspect if you knew the secret code, the old man in the magic shop in El Born would give you the power of invisibility, or the power to speak to animals in their own languages.)

The thing about going into a charming old toy shop is that it makes you realise you’re an adult. As an adult, you look at a charming old wooden toy car and you think, wow, that is so special. What a timeless, precious image of the innocence of youth. Whereas any normal child would look at it and think, that is a shit car.

There is also a shop around the corner called Happy Pills. It’s a pick ‘n’ mix shop done up to look like a pharmacy, and you put your sweets in a pill bottle before putting a prescription-ish label on it that says something like ‘Against Mondays’ or ‘Against the Unbearable Lightness of Being’. I would like to show you a picture, but I scoffed all the sweets I bought before my camera could turn on. Then I ate the bottle. This is pretty sweet, though:

An eight foot-high church organ, made entirely from chocolate, at the Museu de la Xocolata.

Christina:
Last Saturday, Will and I were on our way home from a stressful afternoon looking at a cocoa-based sculpture of Homer Simpson at the Chocolate Museum, when we were the victims of a shambolic attempted robbery. As we walked through the tiny cobbled streets of the Gothic Quarter, a man stopped and us and asked which street we were on. The first problem with this was that we were all standing under the street sign and secondly, he had a map so it wasn’t really too difficult to work out. But we gave him the benefit of the doubt and asked him where he was trying to get to. He told us the Sagrada Familia - which we were nowhere near – then asked where we were from, offered a handshake to Will and told us he was Portugese. Again, a bit suspicious considering his very un-Portugese fair hair, pale skin and milky blue eyes.

Enter crook number two, a staggering, crumpled-shirted man masquerading as a police officer. At least I think that’s what he was supposed to be: our landlord had warned us about this kind of trick where pickpockets pretend to be law enforcers by showing some ID, asking tourists to produce documents which they then scarper with along with their money. I’d imagined such a criminal might hire a fancy dress police costume, or at least wear a shirt. But this guy was no Tosh from The Bill, he wasn’t even as good as Horatio from CSI Miami.

"We've been watching this guy," was his opening line, delivered with the kind of woodness that Keanu Reeves would be ashamed of. He then briefly wafted his ‘ID’ card at us which looked a lot like a library card or his Blockbuster video membership.

You’re probably wondering why we were still standing there, but this all happened more quickly than it looks written down. The ‘police officer’ then asked the first man to produce his passport - actually, scrap that, the first man had already got his passport out before he was even asked, so it was obviously a well-rehearsed routine. At this point, the charade became too much, so like a disgruntled audience, Will and I hurried off with all our belongings intact.

Giants are common in Barcelona; the locals pay them no attention.

Week 4

2009-10-23T08:18:00.000-07:00

Christina:

Another Sunday and another visit to the charming coastal town of Sitges. This time, we took the toll-free coast road: highly recommended as you’ll save €11.60 and it’s great fun pretending to be Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief as you cruise along winding, cliff-edge roads. That is, it’s great fun if you’re not a big bag of nerves like me. I should point out that my jumpiness in the car has nothing to do with Will’s driving, but while he pretends to be Jeremy Clarkson (“Hammond, the Astra’s purring like a canary”), I am grey-faced, crunching up my toes and clutching onto the suit-hanger thing on the passenger door. I’m the same with fairground rides which is just as well as we’re planning a visit Barcelona’s mountain-top Tibidabo Amusement Park. I just hope they have teacups or something similarly soothing.

Continuing on the theme of transport, there’s an excellent cycling scheme in Barcelona whereby you pay around €30 a year to use public bicycles, which you pick up and drop off at one of many designated spots around the city. I intend to sign up, if only to experience the joy of being allowed to cycle on the pavement.

Cyclists back home will know that it’s illegal to ride on the pavements in Britain. I know it’s illegal because I was once arrested for it. That’s right, arrested. Alright, I wasn’t handcuffed and thrown in the slammer but I was stopped by three Metropolitan Police officers, told to dismount, given a lecture about pedestrians being mown down by cyclists and ordered to pay a £30 fine. Given the speed at which I was travelling – no more than 5mph – pedestrians would have been at greater risk from a particularly keen jogger or a low-flying pigeon. It’s a different story over here: pedestrians are definitely the inferior pavement-pounder, while cyclists of all ages ring their bells urgently and tear about the place like teenage boys.

Gargoyle of the week

Will:

The first time Christina and I walked to the Sagrada Familia, it took us well over an hour. It should have taken about ten minutes, but I chose to stop every few minutes to be noisily sick.
I say chose, but it was the ripe-smelling steak tartare I’d eaten the day before that made the decision for me. This was in March of last year, on a crisp, sunny morning, and I had formed an itinerary of places to visit before we returned to London; I wasn’t going to let a little stomach bug get in the way. So, our walk was punctuated by six or seven bouts of loud retching into the plastic bags that Christina had, with admirable foresight, brought with her. By the time we arrived, I had time for a quick look at Gaudí’s famous cathedral before collapsing, unconscious, in front of it. Yesterday, we went again, and I was sure it was going to be different. It was pissing with rain, for a start.

Last week, the first time it's rained properly, I was in El Raval: a trendy area with a big art college, and lots of people with improbably thin legs and skateboards. I was not there for anything trendy. I was on my way to Cash Converters. As soon as it started to tip down, the street-hawkers could be seen racing away from Las Ramblas in droves, then returning, from wherever they keep their wares, with armloads of umbrellas. I reckon it took three minutes from the heavens opening before fifty umbrella salesmen were out on the main tourist thoroughfare.

The Sagrada Familia is probably the best-known building in the city, and there were at least ten different people from whom I could have bought an umbrella before we went in. Gaudí’s final work is still being built, but I’m pleased to report that the roof is on, and watertight.

On our way back, we took the Metro, and I discovered why Spanish people aren’t all horrendously fat, like British people and Americans are. It’s because a Kit Kat will cost you a week’s wages, and you need to talk to your bank manager before buying a Kinder Bueno. See the pictures below, your eyes are not deceiving you – that Kinder Bueno costs ONE POUND FORTY. In England, you would never pay that much for a Kinder Bueno! Not if you were the King of the Moon.

Note to the inexperienced: A Kinder Bueno is a series of farts, emitted by a tiny, magical hippo, and encased in chocolate by Swiss gnomes.

The cost of machine-vended snacks on Barcelona's public transport system is an absolute bloody disgrace.

Week 3

2009-10-16T06:23:00.000-07:00

Christina:

The urgent need to improve my Spanish became apparent on Wednesday when I met our old lady neighbour, and we had a five-minute conversation in which I mainly grinned stupidly, repeating “soy inglesa, no entiendo”. Still, I’m sure relations will improve and we’ll soon be chugging back cava together every Friday night.

I’ve decided that the life of a freelance journalist is much like when you first start going out with someone: You obsessively check your inbox every 30 seconds to see if you’ve heard from any editors, your heart leaps when you see you’ve got a new message, then you plummet into despair when it’s a newsletter from Ticketmaster. However, I remain buoyant and I’ve resolved to look for bar work and I’ve also just filled out a form to get a refund for paying too much fuel tax on a Virgin Atlantic flight in 2005. If only they had Boots here, I could use my Advantage Card points to buy lunch.

While money is tight, Will and I are doing our best to avoid Barcelona’s many tempting bars and restaurants. On Tuesday we decided to go for a post-dinner walk at around 11 o’clock (I’m getting used to Spanish hours and I’ll quite happily eat dinner at 10pm: this is from someone who has been known to fall asleep in a restaurant. Sorry Amy and Catherine). We wandered through the Gothic Quarter and ended up sitting in Plaça Sant Felip Neri. It’s my favourite thing we’ve done in the city so far: the square is a magical and ghostly place, especially at night when the tourists are safely tucked up in their hotel rooms or over on Las Ramblas. As we sat by the fountain, we noticed the damaged façade of the church which, it turns out, was hit by a bomb during the Civil War, killing many children who were taking shelter inside. The architect Gaudi was on his way to the church here when he was run over and killed by a tram in 1926.

I don’t want to end this entry on a sad note, so I’ll finish by reporting that I bought some 3 Euro trousers yesterday.

A gargoyle, yesterday.

Will:

Last Sunday, I watched a man walking a small, hairy pig along the promenade at Sitges, a little town down the coast from Barcelona. The pig was wearing a collar and lead, as a dog would. But it was a pig.

This week, Christina and I have been doing our best to get some work done. Work is important, because I need to buy a new guitar – my old one received a broken neck during a late-night prancing incident in a French campsite – and Christina thinks we should have food and accommodation as well.

There are two kinds of work that I’m doing at the moment. The first is brilliant fun: I go to a café on a secluded alley in el gótico, where I am often the only customer, and I sit at a table outside with my notebook and work on a short story. The second is the business of freelance journalism, which involves sending out lots of emails and often being ignored. I take each rejection with all the pragmatism and sang-froid of a teenage girl, so I’m beginning to think it might be smart to get a trade. The following options are open to me:

Chauffeur: how hard can it be? You just drive around. I’ve got a sat-nav.
English teacher: I speak English. Not sure what else you need.
Guitar teacher/busker: also, this gives me a good reason to buy a new guitar.
Carpenter: I know the Spanish for glue (cola), and I like the smell of sawdust.

All these options became defunct, however, when I spotted the following advert in the classified ads pages of Barcelona Connect, an English language magazine, under ‘Sales and Marketing’:

Cabbage Sales
Looking for a door to door cabbage sales person. Previous experience not necessary, full training given.

I replied immediately. ‘Dear Sir,’ I wrote, ‘I have extensive experience with cabbages…’ I won’t reproduce my application here in full, in case some crafty vegetable-hawker tries to copy it, but let’s just say I’ve got a good feeling about this one. Within days, I will be riding a cartload of brassicas about the Old Town, singing a merry song and enjoying the heady life of an itinerant cabbage-trader. My parents are going to be very proud.

'Your dog looks hot, Brian.'

'Tell me about it... he's positively bacon!'

Week 2

2009-10-09T06:04:00.000-07:00

Will:
On Saturday, we gathered our bags together in the living room of the apartment we’d been staying in for our first week. As we were thanking our hosts, the largest and heaviest of my bags toppled over, causing a loud wail to emit from the toddler onto whom it had fallen.

My God, I thought, I’ve crushed their baby. Christina has given their house keys to criminals [see her blog entry for details], and I’ve murdered their son.
I hadn’t, as it turned out, but it was definitely time to move house.

Our flat is fairly small and ramshackle, but it is perched above a small street in the barrio gótico, the old city that has been the heart of Barcelona since the Middle Ages. In the evenings, we sit with the windows open, listening to the soft babble of voices from the bar on the corner and the tolling of the cathedral bells a few streets away. During the day, we sit with the windows open, listening to the R&B blaring out from the shop that sells trainers in the street below. Still, I suppose they were here first, and nothing can detract from the novelty of living in a maze of medieval alleyways, surrounded by nice little bars and old-man cafés, or of buying our bread from a baker and our food at La Boqueria, Barcelona’s famous market.

Living in the centre of town also gives me plenty of opportunities to pursue my new hobby: observing Barcelona’s unusually attractive bin-ladies. The beauty of Spanish women is a well-documented phenomenon, but their street-sweepers, often blonde bombshells who have clearly made an effort to look their best, really put the English ones to shame. Who are these comely broomsters? And how are the Barcelona waste disposal people recruiting all these good-looking women? Like some bird-watcher or collector of rare butterflies, I have become fascinated by them. I have been trying to get a good photo of one for our readers (there’s a real hottie who empties the bins over by the Jaume 1 Metro station), with Christina’s help. She finds the bin-ladies as interesting a species as I do, and gamely pretends to pose for a photo while I’m actually focussing over her shoulder for a shot of a dolled-up refuse collector. Not many girlfriends would be so open-minded and sensible, although she has made it clear that if I bother the bin-ladies, she will report me to the authorities. Fair enough.

Broom broom! Barcelona's garbage gals scrub up nice!

Christina:
I once had the contents of my handbag analysed (I’m not sure what qualifications you need for that, but it’s nice to know there’s a career out there for everyone). After extracting enough pens to stock a small Paperchase store, notebooks, make-up, bank statements and other miscellany, the bag doctor’s diagnosis was no surprise: I am a hoarder. I’ve never minded being a bit Mary Poppins, until last Friday when my bag got stolen from a bar and with it, my bank card, mobile phone, our NIE papers, the keys to the flat we were staying in and the address. Will did a lot of tutting, which was fair enough I suppose. Did I really need to carry around photocopies of our passports while we were out on the town and under the influence of wine? Well no, but it’s a lesson learned.

So, as well as moving into our new flat on Saturday, I went down to the police station off Las Ramblas to report the incident. As I stood in line with dozens of other grim-faced Brits who’d suffered the same fate, I was cheered by the presence of a translator whose job it is to assist those who don’t speak Catalan or Spanish. He had the jauntiness of an X Factor contestant and when he saw I’d written my mobile phone’s IMEI number on my report form (I’m not sure what this is, but apparently it’s important), he gave a little cry of delight at how excellent this was. There was more entertainment in the waiting room, which had a big TV screen playing Living in America by James Brown. It’s nice to have an upbeat tune to tap your foot to when you’re contemplating what’s been stolen from you.

In other news, I made the mistake of pointing out to Will that Barcelona’s female refuse collectors are very glamorous (one of them wears red lipstick!) Like a low-rent David Bailey, he has taken to photographing them, and I’m acting as a foil: I stand there pretending I’m having my photo taken when in fact, he’s papping the hot bin ladies behind me.

Bruce Springsteen, earlier today.

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Friday, 2 October: Week 1

2009-10-02T09:00:00.000-07:00

Will:

“I’m champing at the bit for a good ear-clean,” said Christina over breakfast this morning. “It’s starting to look like a candle factory in there.”
It’s funny, the things you miss when you’ve been away from home for a while.

Our first week has been, in a word, daunting. The ten days it took us to get here were were very much a holiday – a ruddy-cheeked, idyllic French camping holiday. On our first evening in Barcelona, we walked up to the Parc Güell, a short distance from where we’ve been staying this first week. You can see most of Barcelona from the Parc Güell, and it looked very big to us on that first night. We were two more tourists in a parkful, but we may have been the only ones thinking: Where are we going to live, and what the hell are we going to do for money?

After a week of filling in forms and traipsing the streets, the city seems a little less massive. We have been staying with a very friendly and helpful couple called Paco and Aura, who have made us feel at home in their flat. Spanish bureacracy is not all that bad, even if you don’t speak much Spanish. Estate agents are arseholes, wherever you go. I even negotiated a (small) reduction in rent with a wily Catalan, on a very Gothic flat indeed, so one of my questions from the first night is answered. As for the other – we have enough saved to tide us over for a while, and thanks to Christina’s organisational skills we seem to be doing quite a lot of work. We’ve even had a meeting with a lady from the tourist office – “the problem is that we are too close to Africa,” she informed us with a knowing look, “and so we have a lot of crime now” – who told us to look for jobs in something other than journalism. I thought about suggesting something in race relations, or motivational speaking.

Things I have seen this week:
An ocean sunfish (at the aquarium)
Lots of flats
The world’s tiniest language expert: Paco and Aura’s 16-month-old son, Luca, who speaks Italian, Romanian and Spanish. I normally despise small children, but Luca is quite the charmer.

A man with a small dog, yesterday.

Christina:

“Wouldn’t it be nice to live somewhere hot and sunny and do lots of writing?” About a year ago, I uttered words to that effect to Will. Instead of leaving it at that and returning to gazing out of a drizzly train window, we quit our jobs, said adios to postal strikes and David Cameron, and headed to Barcelona for a year-long sun-and-sangria-fuelled knees-up.

We’ve been here for a week and this is what we’ve done:

1. Found a flat in the centre of town, not through an agency. Hurray! We move in tomorrow.

2. Queued for two hours outside the foreigners’ office to get some forms for our NIE numbers. This is a number that every foreigner (or extranjero, if you want to know some espanol) needs in order to live here. It’s a tedious process.

3. Connected to Skype. This is big news and yesterday, I received my first Skype call from my friend Catherine. I went into a spin as her expectant face popped up on my computer screen and I scrambled about for the headphones. “Catherine’s calling! I can see her! She’s in Hull and I’m in Barcelona! Wow!” I remember experiencing similar awe when mum and dad first bought a video player and we watched a recording of the Smurfs.

Will and I have also replaced sloppy text messages with a daily bicker about subjects as diverse as Scrabble, slippers and coffee. We haven’t lived together before and it’s quite a challenge spending all our time together in a city where we have no friends and speak little Spanish. As I type, Will is in a sulk because he can’t find the cable that connects his camera to his laptop. It’s my fault, of course, just like it’s my fault he keeps losing his slippers (the lovely couple we’ve been staying with while we flat hunt, have provided us with slippers so that their 16-month old child doesn’t feast on the dirt from our shoes). “Where are they? You’ve hidden them!”, he bellows at me with predictable regularity. I roll my eyes as he tears around the room, before eventually locating his fluffy footwear. It’s going to be a long year.

Apparently this is a statue of Colombo – they must really love their TV detectives over here.