He Was Kind Of A Dick

July10, 2012


We got up for our first day in Barcelona. First order of business was breakfast so we walk down the Rambla to the Mercat to grab a bite to eat. It's somewhere between breakfast and lunch when we arrive. The Mercat is this huge open market that is like the biggest farmers market you've ever seen times ten on steroids. It's a crazy busy place and there are as many people there to take pictures and gawk as there are people to buy things all crowded into narrow aisles. It is organized bedlam. There are hundreds of stalls with fish, chicken, beef, fruits, vegetables, nuts, candy, cups of ujuice and anything else you can imagine.

There are also a few stands with stools where you can order and eat breakfast sitting down. One of these is El Quim which has been recommended by my fellow students from Salamanca. We find ourselves two stools and peruse the menu. We order, get our café con leche and wait for our food. This food stand is a bevy of activity. There are four men cooking, taking orders, serving people, and all the other things people do in a restaurant, all in a space that is about three feet square. It is a ballet of movement and purpose. The food as was yummy. I had a sausage and egg sandwich with bell peppers and Leea had an omelette sandwich. Amazing. We were ready to face the day.

After breakfast we take the metro to the Estacion Barcelona Sants to exchange our return tickets to Madrid because we realized our current tickets would be a really, really tight squeeze to make our flight to Istanbul. Missing a flight would be a little more problematic than the train we missed. There are about ten counters and you take a number and wait in chairs placed in front of the counters. When I get my number it is 685 and the board says they are currently assisting number 537. Yikes. I sit down to wait and Leea goes having have café con leche.

I wait for forty five minutes, get up to the counter and realize I have the wrong credit card (I need the one I used to buy the ticket) and I forgot my passport. So off we go making a decision to try this again tomorrow. We have laundry to do and a walking tour at half past four. Laundry is easy. I walk across the street give it and some euros to someone and come back at nine to pick it up.

I get back to the hotel to find out that Hicham's family has searched the house and my iPad is not there. This means it was stolen from my checked luggage on the flight out of Marrakech and the airline claims you are not supposed to carry expensive things I your luggage, so I'm probably out of luck, but I will file a claim anyway. There is a slight outside chance that they took it out when scanning the checked luggage and it is sitting in lost and found. It also means I need to rewrite the last four days. And, I'm not sure how much personal information they can get or use from that iPad. I hadn't been using it that much since it was handed down from John to Leea to me. Oh well, we didn't need to check our luggage, it was a last minute decision at my suggestion and it caused us to miss the train in Madrid and me to lose my iPad. I could kick myself, but then I would have a bruise.

We rest for a while and then go to meet our walking tour of the Gothic Quarter. We spend about three hours walking with the guide and eighteen other people. We see lots of things I've never seen before and learn a lot, maybe too much, about Barcelona's history. I knew I would not retain the Kings and Queens and dates for more than five minutes, but there was some context that was interesting.

After the tour we stop for some iced coffee's and then headed to the Mercat to get some snacks. Armed with snacks we went back to the hotel and settled in for a while. Later in the evening we wandered out to take a stroke down La Rambla. La Rambla is a long street that cuts between the Gothic quarter on one side and the Ravel Quarter on the other side. It runs from Catalunya Plaza down to the harbor an has narrow streets for traffic on either side of a large pedestrian walkway. The walkway is crowded with outdoor restaurants whose waiters dash back and forth through traffic to bring the food from the indoor restaurants on the sidewalk along the traffic lanes. The walkway also has vendors of souvenirs and all manner of street artists. My favorite street artists are the performance artist who don a costume or persona and stand or sit frozen like a statute. It's like a version of the Festival of the Arts only wildly uncontrolled.

After this we return to our hotel for a good night's sleep.