Barcelona, Fun Fairs, Racing and Bill Withers.

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Well, after my snobbishness about tourists in the past, the last laugh, as it should always be, was on me. For a week or so after putting up a rather snotty blog about tourists in Vigo, we took a trip to Barcelona for, amongst other things the Spanish Grand Prix and, Kathmandu aside, it’s been a long time since I’ve felt like that much of a visitor somewhere.

I think this was due to never having been there before, staying in a place just off Las Ramblas, and it being such an overwhelmingly touristy place where so many people spoke English. My instinct in situations like this, which comes with the whole ‘keys out when the cruise ships come in’ twattishness, is to look as little like a tourist as it’s possible to be. In this case it meant trying to memorise the route from Plaza Catalunya to the hotel (always doomed to failure) so we didn’t have to get the map out or ask someone. Of course, what actually happened was that we (I) misread the map, missed the road and ended up looking, not just like tourists, but tourists who couldn’t read a map.

I won’t go on about the Grand Prix as it’s one of those situations where if you’re not interested in Formula One, you’ll be bored and if you are you’ll be jealous and quite possibly also bored, so no one wins. All I’ll say is that it was fantastic and a world away from the traffic jams, fallow field car parks and general hanging around waiting of Silverstone. Go, if you like that kind of stuff.

A couple of weeks before we went, we decided to do a bit of research on the city, to cram in as much as we could into 2 days. My friend, being good at this type of stuff, read the Lonely Planet guide. I, being far less useful, watched Vicki Cristina Barcelona. Luckily, however, we both saw the Tibidabo Vintage Amusement Park in our respective researchings and decided that should be the first port of call.

It’s built up a on a mountain which overlooks more or less the entire city (which is huge by the way) and has a church, a version of Christ the Redeemer, a few food places and a decent sized fun fair all there. It took maybe half an hour to get to but it was completely worth it. Infact, if it hadn’t been for the Grand Prix, the Sagrada Familia, drinking a coffee while watching the protestors in Plaza Catalunya and the elation of being in Barcelona itself, it would’ve been the highlight. As it was, it just had to settle for being joint top.

The fair had a couple of decent sized rollercoasters, a log flume, one of those quick spinny things that look hugely unsafe at travelling fairs, a pirate ship, dodgems and plenty more. All good fun, allowing us to run around like kids, giggling about which one of us would be the first to say “Shall we go on it again?” when we got off the rollercoaster.

Fun Fairs are one of those good, life barometers I think, in that people who don’t like them can be lumped in with people who don’t like clowns, cheese and the ‘How do you turn a duck into a soul singer’ joke, as people who should be viewed with extreme suspicion at all times.

After the Grand Prix we went to the aforementioned Sagrada Familia, an amazing looking thing, which actually becomes kind of overwhelming to see if you stand too close to it. In reality though, as beautiful as it is, just walking through the city you are spoilt because of how many incredibly good-looking buildings there are almost everywhere you look. Budapest has a similar feeling I guess, but that is in much more of a faded, crumbly way than Barcelona. In Barcelona, there is a definite feeling that, like the football team, they value beauty and style above all else, including money - which may go some way to explaining why it’s Spain’s most indebted region. It also means that, thanks to the ace looking buildings and the distracting nature of the place, it’s not such a bad place to get lost in, although that wasn’t necessarily how it felt at the time.



Pura Vida



Dave

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