Trapped in the Stairwell

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The owners of the apartment seem to have gone out of their way to make sure that they've catered for all tastes. There are four books on the coffee table; three of them are guidebooks on Barcelona and the fourth is a text book on nuclear physics. They must have some interesting guests.

We've heard from several sources that we need to be very careful of pickpockets here in Barcelona. I try on several different pairs of shorts with a range of pockets. Some of the pockets are deeper than others; some have buttons and some don't. Issy tests them all out to see how easy it might be to take my wallet out without me noticing. I think it's just as well for us that we don't have to rely on her skills in this area for our income.

We walk towards the Sagrada Familia and queue up to get on a hop on hop off bus. We hope this might be a good way for us to get our bearings and to find out which of the Barcelona sights are worth further exploration. We start up in the hills and then gradually work our way back towards the waterfront and into the old town. The views from Montjuic over the waterfront area are particularly stunning. We pass Camp Nou, the home of the Barcelona Football Club, which is apparently the largest stadium in Europe and is said to hold as many people as the MCG. It somehow doesn't look to be nearly that big. Issy says that maybe they pack them all into standing room. We pass the stadium where they held the athletics, and the opening and closing ceremonies, for the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games.

We get off in the maze of alleys and classic old buildings of the old Gothic Quarter, which has apparently been here since the Romans founded the city somewhere around two thousand years ago. We have tapas in a bar in one of the alleys, and then continue on into Las Ramblas, which we've read is the most famous of Barcelona's boulevards. It's a hive of activity, with street artists strutting their stuff every few metres. There's also no shortage of the same African street vendors that we saw trying to sell their wares all through Italy and France last year. As we walk past we see three of them very suddenly and efficiently gather their wares up into sheets and move quickly away. Next we see some policemen in hot pursuit. We kept hearing that their activities were illegal in Italy and France, and that we shouldn't buy anything from them, but no one there ever seemed to be trying to do anything to move them on. It seems they take this a bit more seriously here in Spain.

We catch the metro back to the apartment where I'm looking forward to having a traditional Spanish siesta. It seems that my siesta will have to wait; we can't get the door of the apartment to open. We spend a long time jiggling the key backwards and forwards in the lock, but it won't budge. We're not quite sure what we're going to do. There's a phone number in England attached to the key. I'm not sure how quickly someone from England is going to be able to get here to open the door, but we don't seem to have a lot of other options. We dial the number and a lovely English lady tells us that the owners of the apartment are on holiday. She then gives us another English number, which we ring to find has been disconnected. I go down to the ground floor to see whether there might be any numbers on the door plate that we can try. No luck there either, although I do find a number on a sticker on a wall near the door. We think that this is probably more likely to be the number of the local brothel than anyone who might be able to help us get the door open, but we're running short of options, so we ring it anyway. A recorded message in Spanish followed by an engaged signal doesn't leave us any closer to a solution, and we're now completely out of ideas. We have visions of sleeping in the stairwell until the next set of guests arrives with another set of keys in a week's time. Just when all seems lost we jiggle the keys again and the door miraculously opens. Disaster averted, although any enthusiasm I might have had for my siesta has now evaporated.

We find a restaurant in a square in the El Born district which is next to the Gothic Quarter, and is a similar maze of narrow alleyways between classic old buildings. I decide to try out my rudimentary Spanish which I've been trying to learn on an app called Duolingo for about three months now. I suspect that some of the few sentences I've picked up aren't likely to prove all that useful here - "yo soy un penguino, hablo espanol" which means "I'm a penguin, I speak Spanish" - is one that immediately springs to mind. One of the sentence that was used to teach me about some obscure tense was "I had died". Really? They couldn't come up with anything more useful than that? What happened to "where's the bathroom" or "can I have two beers please"? Languages aren't my forte, but I summon up some courage and nervously approach the waitress. I mumble "mesa para dos, por favor", which I hope means "table for two please". She seems to understand me, which is both surprising and satisfying. My satisfaction proves to be short-lived - she responds in quickfire Spanish and I have no idea what she's said. She sees my blank looks and asks me in English now whether we'd like to sit inside or out. Issy says she could have worked that out, and she hasn't been trying to learn the local lingo for three months. I think my Spanish needs a lot more work. We order tapas washed down with some sangria, and agree that this is a diet that we could probably happily live on for the rest of our days. We finish the evening off with some drinks on our enormous terrace back at the apartment; it's extremely pleasant.

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Comments

[COG]

I'm loving Barcelona!