It was partly self-inflicted. I've tried to avoid consecutive day-long stops wherever I can, but there are a couple of places where my choice is between that and giving up something I don't want to give up. Cordoba, which I wrote about in the previous post, and Valencia - home to perhaps the world's best aquarium - were the first such stops.
It started well enough. My first day European train from Cordoba to Valencia was luxurious, with an executive-style leather seat all to myself. 'Luxury' takes on a different meaning as a budget traveller, I guess. A room to yourself is either a guilt-inducing indulgence or an unexpected lottery win, depending on whether you paid for it. That seat was amazing.
Unfortunately this time I think I did pay for it. My earlyish-bird fare had felt a little steep at €30, and it took me until I found the rather more plebeian fittings of my train to Barcelona to realise that I must have bought a first class ticket to Valencia by mistake. I can live with the wasted money, but next time I book something in first class I hope I know to fully appreciate it. My descent back to the backpacker set en route to Barcelona was a reality check.
I arrived in Valencia at about 10:30PM, only to find once there that the subway line Google Maps had directed me to for my hostel wasn't operating. Wonderful. But this was the first of three times in 36 hours that random strangers went out of their way to intervene in crappy situations, and make my way through Spain easier just because they could.
A local Valencian woman saw my futile attempts to reconcile the train map with my Google map and, after expressing some bemusement that I'd washed up so far from home, told me to follow her. So I did, onto one train and then onto another, but only after she had raced through the inter-connecting station with me to show the way to my platform, in the opposite direction to the one she needed. She will have missed at least one train on her own line to do it.
The second was later that night at the hostel. I'd arrived not much before midnight and, desperate as I was to sleep, I was completely out of fresh clothes. So I paid the exorbitant fee for using the washing machine and dryer and calculated that I might just get to sleep before 1:30 if I was lucky.
I was very lucky. When I went to retrieve the clothes from the dryer I was accompanied by my dorm-mate, a German woman named Susan. She'd been waiting to use the dryer for much of the evening - I'd actually jumped in ahead of her when I set my load going, without realising it. So when I opened the dryer and found my stuff hadn't dried I was crestfallen: it was unambiguously Susan's turn, my bed time was slipping closer and closer to 3AM and I had both a zoo and aquarium to fit into the next day, which was feeling less and less likely to be possible.
Susan to the rescue. Despite having waited for hours to do her own load, she told me she'd run my stuff together with hers, and she'd leave them out in the room for me to collect in the morning. 'Go to bed', I was told. 'You look terrible'. Given how bad the dryer was I fear she had to do a second load after that one, to dry her own stuff fully, but sure enough my clothes were there for me in the morning. She was still asleep when I left, so I gave strict instructions to the other man in the room, as well as at reception, to pass on how grateful I was.
The third was the next morning in Barcelona. I'd arrived at the hostel after midnight and feeling miserable: my blood sugar has been trending lower, but something went wrong that night because it had soared to 20 on the train from Valencia (5-7 being the ideal range that I never seem to manage).
Running high feels a lot like a hangover, except I'm pretty sure I did nothing to deserve this one. So when I got to the hostel only to find their fridge was set too high for my insulin, and that they didn't have a freezer at all, it was more than I had the mental agility to deal with. I'd stay the night, I told them, but in the morning I'd need to move on. Please refund the rest of my money.
I jumped on booking.com and booked a room in a hostel just down the street, Hostal One, leaving a message that I was booking because I needed a functional fridge and freezer. Except when I walked to Hostal One in the morning I hadn't booked at Hostal One, but at One Hostel, another 10 minutes away. And when I found my way there I found they didn't have a fridge at all, let alone a freezer. Welcome to Barcelona, a city untouched by modern white goods.
The guy at this hostel would have been quite within his rights to tell me to take the room or leave it: in my haze of stress, exhaustion and hyperglycaemia I'd made a non-refundable booking. But instead he had not only cancelled the booking free of charge, but made some calls before I'd gotten there and had found me the closest hostel nearby that had what I needed. Just because he could. So if you're ever in Barcelona and don't need a fridge, please stay at One Hostel Sants. Not Hostal One.
If all of that was too long and you skipped ahead, that's fine. All I need you to read is this: if you get an opportunity, please be helpful to tourists. Help me to pay all these little kindnesses forward. Without those three people I would not have gotten much joy out of these few days at all.
I'd be lying if I said I liked the hostel-with-a-working-fridge, but I had a bag full of insulin that wasn't going to be able to wander around Barcelona indefinitely so I took it. Eight bed dorm. Signs for happy hour and ads for party buses everywhere. Great. As it happens the other guests mostly proved no louder here than anywhere else, though I twice had to ask *staff* to keep quiet.
One great thing about this hostel, other than its fridge, was that I made my first new friend along the trip. Sean is a North Dakotan who is about to start cycling - yes, pedalling a bicycle - from Barcelona to Lisbon. He's also a Swans supporter, having mentioned to me that he'd seen two minutes of AFL highlights and wanted to see more. So he watched the first half of our game against the Bulldogs, after agreeing to my terms and conditions that he would swear an oath of loyalty to the Swans and declare undying enmity to Hawthorn. Welcome to the club, mate.
(As an aside, Sean is also a suitably repentant Bernie Sanders-turned-Jill Stein voter, who tolerated my lecture about tactical voting remarkably well. Admittedly I may have been less tactful about it if Trump hadn't won North Dakota by 30 odd points)
Anyway. This is ostensibly a story about Barcelona, which I have now spent 16 paragraphs barely mentioning.
I didn't love it. I think that's partly a result of circumstances: when a chunk of your first day in a place is spent sorting out a logistical snafu, and you have a few other things go not quite to plan, it's difficult to totally divorce all that frustration from how you perceive the place itself. Partly, too, it's that most of Barcelona's big drawcards - modern and contemporary art, gastronomy and nightlife - don't quite align with what I'm looking for in a city. But I was warming to it by the time I had to leave. I think, like New York, it's a place I'm likely to enjoy more a second time. And that's not to suggest I didn't have a good first time here: I did.
On day one I did the obligatory Barcelona tourist thing and went to La Sagrada Familia, the gaudy Gaudi temple that's supposedly going to be finished in 2026, only 160 years or so after work started.
I had been ambivalent about going here, not least because when I was making notes about things to do and see along this trip I'd put this down as having a cost of €29; a bit too steep for a church. I had thought I might just look from the outside without going in, before finding that a 'basic' ticket was only €15. I'm very glad I decided to pay it.
To be honest I found the outside of the building to be interesting, but ugly: I guess that makes me an architectural Philistine. And the view was hopelessly compromised by those pestilential City Sightseeing buses parking outside every two minutes. The inside, though, more than exceeded my expectations. Churches aren't supposed to be this psychedelic:
And it's not usually Batman watching over from above, either:
If ever the Catholic Church wants to make an honest living in Barcelona it could do worse than hiring La Sagrada out for rave parties.
I had planned to double up on Gaudi with a visit to Park Guell afterwards. I hopped on the subway and got off at the station closest to it; again Google Maps neglected to mention that the route passed through the Himalayas. I've got to stop climbing mountains.
Alas, it was for naught: I'd been warned at the hostel to book my Sagrada ticket online but was told I could simply front at Park Guell and buy a ticket. When I got there at 6 - tired, footsore and perhaps ever so slightly cranky - I was told I'd have to wait 90 minutes to go in. I couldn't be bothered, and caught the bus back. I never did get around to trying to visit a second time.
Part of day two was spent at the zoo, which is surprisingly good, compensating for the bitter disappointment that was Madrid. The day was sunny and considerably warmer than had been forecast so once done there I went for a walk to go and see the Mediterranean. All of Barcelona had had the same idea: they have several kilometres of beach and all of it was packed.
At one end of the beach were four naked men, each seemingly there on their own. They were all walking up and down along the water, stopping frequently to turn and face the beach-goers around them. It was obvious they were there because they wanted to be seen, but the Barcelonans weren't going to give them the attention they were seeking: nobody was taking the slightest bit of notice except a giggling pair of British teenagers. There's apparently a clothing optional area at the opposite end of the beach, so there's no excuse for these guys choosing not to use it.
Day three was largely given over to watching the Swans game: another little thing that I couldn't control but that fed into the theme that nothing quite went right in Barcelona. After that, though, I went for a ramble through the Gothic Quarter, ultimately landing at a museum whose name I can't recall but was built over and around excavated ruins of Roman Barcino, Barcelona's first incarnation as a city.
I'm a bit of a Romanophile, and a long-ago vision of this trip - when it was still just a concept, rather than anything that could reasonably be called a plan - would have had me following the Mediterranean around in a bid to visit every country of the Roman Empire. Although the Arab Winter has put an end to that idea for the foreseeable future, I'll still be visiting plenty of Roman sites along the way. This one was only the remains of a couple of workshops, but I was transported back in time all the same. I always like to imagine explaining to the people who used such sites - in this case, laundry workers, winemakers and fishmongers - that 2000 years later people come to see where they worked and learn what they did for a living. It's a form of immortality.
Day four was foreshortened by a late afternoon train out of Barcelona, but I had time for one last thing. Park Guell was too far out of the way for a second attempt so I headed back to the Gothic Quarter to choose a museum. I had been leaning towards the Marine Museum - on Sean's recommendation - but it became a certainty when I emerged from the subway station opposite it to find it was raining.
You can take the boy out of Melbourne but you can't take... actually, you must be able to take Melbourne out of the boy. Less than three weeks away and I've forgotten the lesson of a lifetime: never go out without an umbrella. It was about ten seconds after I decided that the rain wasn't so bad, and that I'd walk through it after all, that it turned into the worst downpour I'd experienced since the great Madrid snowstorm of 2017. I was in the rain for perhaps 45 seconds and the bottom half of my trousers were soaked. I *hate* wearing wet clothes.
This is where the benefits of being in a city 16,000 kilometres from home, and that you're leaving in a couple of hours, become most apparent. After trying and failing to contort myself into a position on the bathroom vanity that would allow me to use the hand dryer to dry my pants, I gave up and rolled them up to halfway up my calves. And then walked around the Barcelona Marine Museum with all the self-assurance of somebody who knew he would never see any of the people around him ever again.
Next stop: Avignon. 'Merci', not 'gracias'. 'Bonjour', not 'hola'. I was just starting to get used to it too.
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