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Published: December 27th 2009
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La Boqueria
Europe's most famous food market. I only discovered I was going to Barcelona two hours before we flew from Gatwick, thanks to Ursula playing me like a fiddle with her superior lying skills. When I guessed six weeks beforehand that we were going to Paris, she grimaced in an embarrassed way and said "don't get your hopes up". Then a couple of days before the flight I chanced upon a book on our bedroom floor called Great Hotels in Paris. So as not to disappoint her, I only admitted I knew where we were going on the morning of the flight. She was, of course, slightly disappointed, but in the train to Gatwick I started to get excited about her images of the Sacre Coeur and Montmartre. When got to the Easyjet queue, a man asked where we were flying to and Ursula replied "Barcelona". My jaw fell to the floor and I was rendered a jibbering idiot for some minutes. "Whaaaa...? How...?" etc. Ursula had deliberately planted the Paris Hotel book, and is officially a criminal genius.
Paris would have had to try pretty hard to outdo Barcelona on this occasion, considering in November it was still sunny and balmy, and both days were
Dancers
In the courtyard of Barcelona's hill-top fortress, Castell de Montjuïc. filled with crystalline blue skies.
With only a weekend in one of the world's culinary capitols, the stakes were high every mealtime. During our four-hour wander through Barcelona’s Ramblas in search of our idealised Spanish restaurant, we stumbled upon a tapas bar too tantalising to resist. As the photos attest, the only thing more stylish and theatrical than the lighting was the tapas themselves. Each item cost only €1.60 and one paid at the end by counting up the leftover cocktail sticks.
It was easy to adjust to Mediterranean eating habits, since we only found our eventual restuarant at c. 11pm. It was in a medieval wine-cellar-like cave filled with Spanish revellers who, unlike we Anglo-Saxons, express their drunken jubilance through the medium of song (rather than head-butts).
Our main issue was how to jam as many of Barcelona’s amazing sights as possible into the limited time available. We swallowed our pride and our bohemian backpacker self-image and joined the masses atop the open-decked tourist buses, plugged ourselves in to the helpful audio descriptions of the sights we were zooming past, and the surprisingly hypnotic and addictive light dance music interludes. Even though the dying shreds of my
Segrada Familia
The last great cathedral. backpacking credibility screamed out 'no!', we had made the right decision, and over the two days we covered many, many miles in and around Barcelona, which is in fact surprisingly large.
Luck seemed to be on our side at every corner. We took a funicular up to the Castell de Montjuïc where, for one day only, they were holding a competition of folk dancing, cheered on by a crowd of screaming families with swizzle sticks. An hour or so later, descending the steep hill by foot to rejoin our bus route, we found ourselves separated from the main road by a 6-foot concrete precipice. Jumping down was easy enough - Ursula went first - but as I prepared to follow, my camera slipped out of my hands. (Bear in mind at this point that I now have a heavy digital SLR with a full-sized lens, which is probably my most treasured possession - sorry Ursula.) After a split second of stunned silence, Ursula screamed and I jumped off the precipice in a panic. It transpired that the camera had landed squarely on her big toe, and had skidded safely away nearby, completed unharmed. The same couldn't be said for
Ursula, who spent the remainder of the day limping dramatically and acting slightly hysterical. She had done the heroic thing, however, as the photos from the remaining half of the holiday attest.
Ursula really deserved a treat, and we found her one - an authentically grungy tapas bar so popular it had a line of locals queuing outside. A litre of local wine and 7 plates of tapas later, the slowly leaking ice-filled sock under the table had been forgotten. We liked it so much we returned the following day.
The whole purpose of our trip to Barcelona had been to sugar the pill of turning 30. With the witching hour of that dreaded day fast approaching, we finally found a small restaurant that was still open at 11.45pm, with a slightly mad middle-aged owner who did the waiting. Using the phrase-book, Ursula went up to the owner and the cook, pointed at me, said the word "birthday", then looked at them and commanded "sing!" Not only did they follow her request, regaling me with the whole of "happy birthday" in Catalan, but they also cracked open a bottle of bubbly in my honour. Who says turning 30
is difficult?
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david
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where to stay
Happy birthday! We're going on a cruise the end of May, leaving from Barcelona. Can you reccommend a place to stay for one night?