BARCELONA LIFESTYLE ...

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The weather in Barcelona is incredible - even the locals are stunned. The week before I arrived, it was between 11 and 20 degrees because it is going into winter here. Now there are daily reports in the papers about snow falling in places where it hasn´t snowed in decades (if ever.)And it´s bloody cold!! It´s funny though - the sun is so bright that even with sunnies on I have to shade my eyes when heading towards it, yet the wind just drives the cold right through you. The hostel staff said that the snow was mainly up in the North and wouldn´t be a problem where I´m heading for (the South). Then the next day, the papers said that light snow had fallen in some places in the South where it never snows.

The Barcelonans are in love with colour! Almost every balcony (and there are thousands of them), has as least one flowering plant and some coloured mosaics etc, on the outside of their apartment walls. Shop windows spill colour and draw you to them, jewellery is more about colour, than plain gold and silver, and even socks and jocks come in rainbow colours. The old Gothic Quarter (the oldest part of the city) has buildings in it which are of very early Roman, Gothic and Spanish origin and are all mixed in together. Walking through the winding narrow cobblestoned streets, I´m up to my old habits again and continuously lost. It´s like being in a maze, with only the sky to guide one back to the start of your wanderings. The Roman watchtower walls and guard house still stand and there´s part of the original areal aquaduct still there. A small ornately beautiful little stone bridge spans the cobblestone street running through the old palace. Apparently the King was very ´large´and had troube moving around, so he had the bridge built between his apartments and the chapel, the eating hall and the entertaining areas. It´s a little like the pictures of the Bridge of Sighs in Venice. Protruding from the roofs above are stone gargoyles and the walls are decorated with beautiful stone carvings and scrollwork, often in the most unexpected places. Strolling between the narrow walls, you can see the two or three layers of previous civilizatons, one on top of the other. It´s an amazing feeling and I feel priviledged to be here.
This same feeling is tempered with the fact that other people don´t necessarily feel the same. I had just had lunch in a very small 17th century ristorante and walked right into everyday real life. A young English woman and another about my age were being crowded and pushed backwards into the wall by two Gypsy woman who had started out by offering them blown kisses with their hands. This was to distract and confuse them. Then they kept up the close contact and shoving and the older woman nearly fell. The younger one started shouting at them to get away and leave them alone. I saw a wallet fall to the ground and the older woman started shouting for the police. Others around started to look but did nothing. The gypsy women moved away very quickly and disappeared as if it had never happened. I picked up the wallet and gave it to the woman and she looked in it, but everything had been taken. She was quite shaken and couldn´t quite comprehed what had just happened. The wallet had been in the waist bag she had been wearing in front of her and yet they had been able to get the zip undone, the wallet out and emptied and dropped to the ground, and then disappeared in just few minutes at most. I read about this in the blog sites before coming here but now I´ve seen it for myself. Thankfully, I carry only a plastic supermarket bag, no expensive jewellery and perhaps don´t appear as if I have anything worth looking for. At least that´s what I´m hoping.

Yesterday I bought a 2 day bus ticket on the Bus Turistica which has 2 routes and covers the whole of BCN city. It´s a hop-on/hop-off system. I sat upstairs and there isn't a covered top on these double-decker buses. The view was wonderful, but at the end of the 2 hour journey, the cold had gone right through me and I needed 2 large coffees just to warm up again!
Now that I have seen which of the sights I want to see, I´ll be hopping off and on all day - mostly the Gaudi buildings. They are truly beautiful from the outside and all that I´d hoped for.

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