Wednesday, November 08, 2017

You win some, you lose some

We were only ever supposed to be using Tarragona as a base to leave the car and get public transport into Barcelona. The idea was to see a bit of political history in the making then go out and "make party" until the early hours.

But two things immediately stood in the way of this plan. Firstly, Tarragona is really nowhere near Barcelona on any scale that a person from England can appreciate. Looking at a road atlas of the whole of Spain gives you a pretty warped perspective about which places are near and which are far. It's huge, this country.

Secondly, on the day we arrived, our Couchsurfing host told us that we would have to stay in and guard the house the following day, since her front door was broken (see other posts for details of where this innocent-sounding predicament ended up. Anyway, for now at least, we'd only be trapped in the flat on the basis of a promise. What was to come was a little more severely enforced.) So we resigned ourselves to a day in the flat and moved our trip to Barcelona back a day. This turned out to be far more boring that it sounded, and I had to take a solo stroll to escape the cabin fever.

But go to Barcelona we did, the following the day. We drove to some anonymous outskirts then got the Metro into town. Things were pretty damn exciting when we arrived, as our first glimpse of Barcelona was the beating tourist heart. It's like coming up from the Tube in Leicester Square as your very first experience of London.

To cut a long story short, we ate, strolled, gawped at architecture coming at us from every direction, made friends with a guy in a pizza joint who told us that Manu Chao was playing in a square round the corner, watched Manu Chao play to a crowd of about 70 in the rain, made friends in a bar, drank tequilas with friends, got a tip-off about an underground reggae party happening in a warehouse nearby, went to warehouse, made friends at the party, went with new friends to an insane all-night rave in a very, very muddy patch of scrubland surrounded by cliffs where featureless and pounding beats were being blasted from a speaker wall, in front of which ravers worshipped, the most devout approaching the holy wall to a distance which seemed neither necessary nor healthy. Both our shoes and our eardrums will never be the same again.

This long, long night in Barcelona (we got "home" to Tarragona around noon) resulted in a day in bed, the following morning of which being the morning I set out to get breakfast and ended up locked out of the house for the entire day. M had thus been uninterruptedly in the flat for 2 days.

Needless to say, when it finally came time to leave, door fixed, stuff packed up, we had a feeling a freedom and a hunger to be back on the road. (Our Couchsurfing host had been one of those people where you suddenly feel very, very tired whenever you talk to them. Her voice was very loud, and her only mode seemed to be complaining exasperatedly about one thing or another.) Our joy, though, quickly turned to ashes as the realisation dawned on my that my wallet, being neither in the flat, the car or among my possessions, had somehow got lost on the long day of being locked out the flat. As we drove south into a new world where I no longer had either of my debit cards or my driving licence, I for once rejoiced for the mobile office I had in my pocket, as I called the bank to cancel my cards, ordered new ones, and even negotiated with Visa to get an emergency 200 Euro wired to a Western Union in Granada.

With a cold night in the hammocks (I've now bought one too!) and a bracing morning swim in which is alleged (by random people on the internet) to be Spain's most beautiful beach, we are back on the road heading south. The plan now is to get to Granada for me to pick up my emergency cash.

Until then, it's gonna be a frugal few days.

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