Week 31

Will

I have always had a pretty low opinion of coach drivers. They are the losers of the HGV fraternity: not man enough to drive a lorry, not free-spirited enough to take to the open road as a trucker. But now, they have gone too far.

As we approached the car park, it was immediately clear that we would not be spending Sunday at the beach. Where once the Astra had stood alone, surveying the sea like a green sage, row upon row of coaches waited, their fat, sweaty pilots staring dumbly into the middle distance. The car was gone – but, thankfully, not far. It had been towed, along with all the other cars in the car park, to a scrap of waste ground on the other side of the road. Like every other car that had been relocated to make way for the vehicles of men who lack the social skills to drive a bus, it had been broken into.

Calm yourselves – calm. I know you want to find a coach driver, to physically slap him, to shout at his incomprehending face “why couldn’t you have parked your big stupid fridge of a vehicle over there, you fat berk? What was the point of moving everyone else's cars to an unlit car park, just so you could all park together?”, but it would be the futile. You would be Ahab, the tragic hero lambasting the great white whale, for nothing. No – we must rebuild.

Happily, this should be fairly straightforward. For one thing, the thieves broke the smallest pane of glass in the car, the quarter glass. Having found a more suitable parking spot, I spent Monday afternoon fashioning a new window for the Astra, from a piece of wood. This morning, I took delivery of a second-hand replacement pane that I ordered from Rotherham, which is about as close as I plan to get to ever going to Rotherham, so I have been spared the terrifying expense of visiting a mechanic as a foreigner.

Best of all, the thieves only escaped with one thing – my sat-nav. This device has been known to lead me up to sixty miles in the wrong direction, and was once unable to find the city of Leeds. They won’t get far.

"Ooh, you have a wooden window? I've been saving up for one of those for my Porsche."

Christina

Following on from Will's rant last week against Barcelona's alternative types, we found ourselves in a swarm of them on Saturday afternoon when we happened upon La Fira de la Tierra (the Earth Fair) in Barcelona's Parc de la Ciutadella.

There was a pop-up north African cafe where we enjoyed some mint tea in the sunshine, there were drums being beaten with a passion, digeridoos being played, colourful trousers billowing in the breeze, stalls selling organic beer and wheat-free cupcakes, a meditation tent - you get the idea. We passed an area where people were lying on the ground, being massaged by barefooted masseurs.

"Ooh, that looks really nice," I said, contemplating getting in the queue. 

"It looks bloody disgusting," Will spat. "I can't think of anything worse than being pummelled by some man's hairy foot." 

We pressed on. I was enjoying the laidback, happy, hippy atmosphere until we came to a stall promoting an all-natural, eco-friendly birthing method. At least, I think that's what it was. I can't be sure because I was too horrified by the promotional photographs, depicting a woman in the throes of having a baby, with everything on show, the husband weeping with joy (fear?) in the background. Why, oh why, would you let anyone take pictures of you in this state, let alone allow them to be displayed at a public festival? Far from making me think "okay, I'll pop one out without the help of drugs" this has only served to put me off having children indefinitely. So I'm sorry mum, but there'll be no grandchildren from me. 

P.S. You may have noticed we're running a General Election to see who'll be Prime Minister of our flat. I was enjoying a comfortable lead earlier this week, with five votes to Will's three. Someone has since changed their vote from me to Will. I will find out who you are. It shouldn't be too difficult considering a total of eight people have voted and most of them are probably members of my family.

Week 30

Christina:

This week I had my first taste of pintxos, snacks on cocktail sticks which originate from the Basque region of northern Spain ('pintxo' means 'spike' in Euskara, the language of the Basque people). They usually come in the form of slices of bread topped with chorizo, ham or cheese, and the one I had was like an exotic sausage roll, if you can imagine such a thing. Pintxos are usually left on platters at the bar, you ask for a plate and then help yourself - a bit like a wedding buffet except you don't have to dance to Come on Eileen after stuffing yourself silly with chicken drumsticks.

The buffet concept is ideal for someone like me, someone who can't leave food alone if it's there. Will has started referring to me as a 'snaffler' because sharing a packet of Doritos turns into an extreme eating contest to see who can hoover up the most orangey crisps. But in my defence, I come from a big family. As fun as dinner times are when there's seven people around the table, there's always the underlying fear that if you take your eye off the potato for just a second, someone else will have it. Usually Dad. So eating takes on a competitive element and if you can leave the table having eaten everything on your plate - and ideally off someone else's - you're a winner.

This attitude is something that Will and I have always bonded over. Neither of us really likes sharing food which is handy when you're living in a country renowned for sociable dining. Whenever I've been for tapas here or at home, I pretend to enjoy the laid-back free-for-all but in reality, I'm compiling a mental spreadsheet of who's had what and if I don't get my fair share of patatas bravas then dinner is, quite frankly, ruined.

The grand hall of the Museu Nacional de Arte Catalan

Will:

I love Barcelona’s large population of alternative types. I enjoy the unusual haircuts, massive trousers and multiple piercings of this distinctive tribe. But while non-conformism is generally a positive thing, you can go too far, and that point comes when you start eating rice cakes.

Rice cakes, for those of you who don’t know, are circles of expanded polystyrene foam which have been impregnated with farts. When you crack one in half, the farts escape, and everyone in your home or office looks about and says “eurr, have you let one go? Who’s done a fart? Who’s – ohh, false alarm. It's Jenny, she’s having a rice cake.”

I observed a horrendous example in a bar the other night, while idly watching a couple over Christina’s shoulder. The man, if you could call him that, was a particularly strong example of someone who has gone too alternative. Not content with having bought some alternative-looking shoes, he had them up on the chair, in that self-conscious way that people lounge when they want to let everyone know that they’re alternative lounging types, and he was munching on some rice cakes he’d brought from home, presumably because the bar didn’t serve anything alternative enough. Even in a smoky Spanish bar, the farty whiff of rice cake was all too detectable. The two of them were just sitting around, talking – not drinking, like proper people – while their beers sat, half-empty and ignored, on the table. In half an hour, I never saw either of them take so much as a sip. For them, the bar was nothing more than a public place in which to consume rice cakes. 

Worse was to come. When the lady went off to the loo, the bloke started industriously picking his nose, rolling the bogeys up and dropping them on the sofa and the floor. Now, I’m not above a pick, we all do it. But on a public chair? Why don’t you just smear one on my arm, you disgusting beast?
          Then came the real nightmare: when his missus returned, the hand – the minging bogey hand – returned to the bag of rice cakes. He even offered her one – mmm! a snotty fart-cake! Yes please! Shaking with disgust, I could not help but watch as she munched away on her boyfriend’s nasal detritus. “We’re leaving,” I announced to Christina, the hot tears stinging my eyes as I choked back a throatful of vomit.

We returned to the same bar last night, but my apprehension was dispelled when I discovered that the Alternatives had moved on. They were replaced by a brown labrador in a neckerchief, with whom I spent a good part of the evening.

A bag of rice cakes can cost over a pound, but contains barely a few pennies' worth of rice. If you eat rice cakes, your breath will smell of farts.

Week 29

Will:

This week, a warning: cyber criminals are everywhere. Give them a chance, and they’ll gain access to your computer and invade your privacy. I found out the hard way when, this week, it happened to me.
            When you think of a cyber criminal you probably imagine a lone male, a geek turned to the dark side, surrounded by screens in a darkened room. You never suspect the enemy could be nearby, perhaps even in your own home.
           The warning signs were there all along. Every now and then, my ‘recent items’ would contain files I couldn’t remember opening. I’d leave my computer unattended for a while, and return to find subtle changes – things arranged differently, windows open or closed. In real life, I can sometimes leave a few clothes lying around, but in the digital realm I keep everything carefully arranged, and I can tell when someone’s been rooting around in there.
              Then, this week, the miscreant was unmasked. Returning from a trip to the bakery, I saw Christina exiting the spare room where I work. Her normal confident stride was replaced by the sort of guilty scuffle that a naughty spaniel adopts when it has been interrupted helping itself to some unattended leftovers. Glancing through the door, I noticed that my screen was on, indicating that it had been used within the last two minutes, and that my webmail was open.
“I haven’t been reading your email,” blurted Christina, “I haven’t, and anyway, if I had, then that’s completely normal and everyone does it. But I wasn’t.”

Clearly, any attempt at interrogation would have been pointless – I was dealing with a master criminal.

“I haven’t done it before,” she protested. “You’re not going to tell anyone, are you? Please don’t tell anyone! You can’t prove anything!”
 
“No,” I sighed, “I can’t prove a thing. Your secret’s safe with me.”

Castellers – builders of human towers known as castells – on the Portal de l'Angel this morning

Christina

Celebrity spot of the week: Dev from Coronation Street on the Barcelona Metro! Don't worry, you haven't accidentally stumbled across Heat magazine; this is, indeed, Will y Christina Barcelona.

For those of you wondering who on earth I'm talking about, Dev is a character in a popular British TV programme who runs a corner shop and who looks like he's deposited an entire tub of hair gel onto his head.

Yet for some reason, I find him strangely attractive. In fact, Dev is just one in a long line of unlikely celebrity crushes I've had over the years. There's been David Brent, the excruciating, tie-fiddling boss in The Office, and smug football pundit Alan Handsome. I mean, Hansen.

One celebrity it is perfectly acceptable to fancy is Dominic West from The Wire, a show which Will and I have become unhealthily addicted to. While Will appreciates The Wire for the script-writing, the drama and the other brilliant characters, I'm in it for lusting after Jimmy McNulty, West's flawed but loveable cop.

At first, I didn't have a bloody clue what was going on. This wasn't helped by the fact that I'd fall asleep as soon as the opening credits had ended. I have mentioned before how I'm not really suited to late nights and TV has a soporific effect on me, anyway. We'd usually start watching an episode at midnight, so it was game over for me after the first 10 minutes. It also takes a while to get to grips with the dialogue but once you understand what a 're-up stash'* and a 'shit bird'** are, you're fine.

We have finished watching the first two seasons and this weekend my sister, Catherine, was supposed to be visiting and bringing us season three. However, that's been scuppered by the volcanic ash fiasco. Never mind the British couples who stare forlornly from the pages of the Daily Mail because they were supposed to be tying the knot in Barbados, I want my Dominic West fix!

* According to the Urban Dictionary, this is when drug dealers are running low and they replenish their supply.
** An annoying person.   

The people on the castell get smaller and lighter as they go up, with the very top person (known as the 'exaneta') being small child – in this case a girl of about five or six years old. The castell is a success when the exaneta holds up a hand with the fingers spread, and returns safely to the ground

Week 28

Christina:

"Camping can be a real pleasure if you bring all the right stuff," Will told me a couple of weeks ago during a camping trip in which we brought a camping stove that had run out of gas (my fault, apparently) and a punctured inflatable mattress that was too big for our tent. The Baden-Powells - founders of the Boy Scout and Girl Guide movements - would have been disgusted.  

Our destination was Siurana which is about a three-hour drive south-west of Barcelona. Getting to the village and campsite involves driving up steep, twisting roads and you're rewarded at the top with stunning views of green valleys and sheer cliffs. The area is very popular with rock climbers - in fact, Will and I were the only people at the campsite who weren't wearing technical clothing (actually, my leopard-print top could well be moisture-wicking but I can't be sure).

Everything was going quite smoothly until it was time to cook dinner on the first evening. Will lit the stove and it sneezed a trickle of gas. It had run out. Will threw the lighter to the ground in a rage and we had to abandon sausage and lentils for dinner at the campsite cafe.

Bedtime brought more kerfuffle. To compensate for its inevitable deflation during the night, we over-pumped the punctured mattress. This meant that it took up most of the tent and I felt as claustrophobic as I would on a packed underground train. I needn't have worried. By morning, we were lying on flaccid plastic, our bones chilled by the cold, hard ground. Next, it was time to trudge from tent to the communal bathrooms. This is another thing that troubles me about camping: people - strangers - can see you first thing in the morning. It's bad enough that Will has to witness my morning mouth crust and unkempt hair but I hate that other campers can see this, too.    

But enough of my whingeing: Siurana is a beautiful, idyllic place, it's great if you like walking and the local wines and olive oil are highly recommended. Just make sure you bring the right camping equipment for added enjoyment.     

This is where you have to sit when you forget the camping gas

Will:

This week has been Cinema Week. Christina and I went to see Shutter Island on Monday, which I would recommend, although it's not as good as the other, amazing, Scorcese/DiCaprio film, The Departed. The film's confusing psycho-drama was added to by the Cinema Verdi's popcorn, which contains an hallucinogenic quantity of salt, and the fact that we turned up after it had started  – the films at the Verdi start at the time on the poster, not after 45 minutes of adverts, so we missed a couple of minutes. What happened in those minutes? Crucial plot developments? Or just a long shot from a helicopter flying over the sea? No idea.

On Tuesday, I went to a film club in a bar in El Raval. Here I met a bloke who was from Barcelona, but had moved to Swindon for a while a few years ago. Why anyone would move to Swindon from anywhere, let alone Barcelona, is beyond imagining, but he told me he moved because he'd been offered a sweet job in the events centre of a big hotel. In Swindon.
          "It was crazy," he told me, "just absolutely crazy." I bet it was.

The film on Tuesday was Mediterraneo, which is a film of the novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin, but released two years before the book was published... about the same time it was being written, in fact. Still, it was funny and enjoyable, unlike Harry Brown, which Christina and I watched last night.
    Bleak is hardly the word for Harry Brown, a film in which sweet old men are murdered by drug-peddling rapist hoodies (and vice versa) on a massive council estate. It may have been well acted and beautifully shot, but I couldn't tell, because I was so depressed I could barely see. Films like that should come with a warning label, and a complimentary copy of Kung Foo Panda to watch afterwards.

Shutter Island: Good film, followed by salt-induced renal failure and a discussion about what the hell was going on. 4/5.
Mediterraneo: Decent Italian pacifist comedy, confusing thoughts of Swindon throughout. 2/5. 
Harry Brown: So depressing I cried myself into a dehydrated husk, like a big, sad pork scratching. 0/5.

Kung Foo Panda: Superb. 5/5.

A train of caterpillars walking nose-to-tail

Will:

I always knew my mortal enemy was out there, waiting for the moment to emerge as my nemesis. And now I have met him: he works in the internet/photocopying place on Carrer dels Canvis Vells.  

Like any city where there are lots of tourists, Barcelona has a lot of rip-off merchants. Go into the Carrefour supermarket on La Rambla and you’re likely to see a bloke carrying as many frozen pizzas as he can carry: dine in a restaurant on the same street, and you can eat one of those pizzas for €12 or more.

The man in the internet shop is a thieving scoundrel of a different order, a black-hearted scumbag of pure evil. His racket involves writing his prices on a tiny sign at knee level, at the back of the shop where you can’t see it, then being on the phone when you try to talk to him.
Oh, he’ll cheerfully print your document, but then, like Satan, he’ll ask his terrible price: THIRTY-FIVE CENTS A PAGE. Is it printed on sheets of platinum, you may ask, or the canvases of Renaissance paintings? Is the ink distilled from the venom of some rare desert spider? “Printed already,” he said, unable or unwilling to engage me in Spanish, “good paper. Printed. You pay, eight forty.”

Unlike the poor diners of La Rambla, I was not content to munch upon my supermarket pizza. I refused to pay more than twenty-five cents a sheet (and even that, I informed him, was daylight robbery). The miscreant’s reaction was to issue a threat: “Okay. You will not pay it now,” he snarled, “but you will pay for it. Later in life, you will pay.”

And so it begins. The carefree days of my youth are behind me, and my life is now a mortal battle between me and the man from the photocopying shop. Each time I walk down a dark alley, I will sniff the air warily for the whiff of copying toner, and my nights will be sleepless for the imagined rustle of Post-its. I will not dare to enter a branch of Rymans unarmed. How long before I am wounded in a stapling ‘accident’, before I lose a thumb to a dangerous biro? If anything should happen to me, at least my readers will know: it was him. It was the bloke in RJA & Sons Telecom.

 Leave anything lying around in Barcelona, someone'll paint something on it

Christina:

SPOILER ALERT! If you haven't read Carlos Ruis Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind and you don't want to know what happens, DO NOT read this blog entry. 

One of the nice things about living in Spain is reading books that are set here, as it's exciting when you recognise the streets and the landmarks described; it makes the book feel more personal somehow. Before coming to Barcelona, my friend, Fiona, lent me The Shadow of the Wind, an epic page-turner set in Barcelona after the Spanish Civil War. Will and I drove into the city on 26 September last year, and while he sweated over the terrifying traffic, I was gazing up at Mount Tibidabo which I instantly recognised from Zafon's descriptions.

A couple of months into our stay here, Will had started reading the novel and one evening, we decided to walk over to the church on Carrer de Santa Ana which the book's protagonist, Daniel Sempere, lives next to.

"Oh, that's the streetlight where Daniel sees the man with the burnt face," Will observed as we headed back towards Portal de l'Angel.

"Yes, Julian Carax!", I blurted.

Oops. Will hadn't got to the bit of the story where the man's identity had been revealed, so I'd ruined the entire novel for him which he won't let me forget in a hurry. Will is now reading another book I've already read: The Woman in White (just to clarify, it's set in England not in Spain), so I'm currently living in fear that I'll reveal all whether it be in my sleep or after a vodka drinking binge.

So yes, it's lovely reading books about Spain but only if you don't have a loose-lipped girlfriend who tells you what happens at the end.

Caterpillar plant, Parc del Garraf

Week 25

Will: 
A significant feature in my daily routine here in Barcelona is the Mercat St Josep, or La Boqueria. I know we’ve mentioned this market a few times before, but it’s where we get most of our food, and when you move abroad it’s important to go on about how wonderful it is buying fresh ingredients from a market stall, and how sorry you feel for all the idiots trudging around supermarkets back home, so that you can forget about how you haven’t got any money or friends or central heating and there isn’t a proper pub within a thousand miles.
        La Boqueria is also a big tourist destination, and while most people want a picture of the great stacks of fruit and veg or the weird and wonderful creatures on sale at the fish stalls, the offal stalls are also a draw. Here, there’s a wide variety of animals’ bits on sale: hearts, lungs, kidneys, heads, cakes of pressed blood and whole livers, surprisingly massive, hanging from shiny hooks and drawing horrified gasps from some (typically American and British) onlookers.
    It’s a classic case of ‘one man’s meat’ – there are things are eaten by these very people that would turn the stomach of a Spanish butcher. Chicken nuggets, for example, which are made from the eyes, brains, reproductive organs, skin, feathers and faeces of chickens, beefed up with maltodextrin and water (and beef extract, for flavour). By the time the mashed skin and faeces have been salted and fried, they taste okay – like something that has been salted and fried. They are even shaped to look like chicken wings or drumsticks, giving you a strange, rubbery, boneless imitation of what was once normal human food, at a fraction of the cost (to the manufacturer, that is: if you can get people to pay you to eat turds, you’re hardly going to pass the saving on to your customers). But if you find meat and offal to be disgusting, what else are you going to do? You can either inure yourself to the icky meat, or you can be a vegetarian, or you can eat chicken nuggets – which, as I may have mentioned, are made out of shit.
    On the other hand, it could be that the Spanish butchers are a little too relaxed about plunging their gloveless hands into piles of carnage: normally when paying at the carniceria, I get my change handed back with an added smearing of meaty goodness. If I’ve been buying mince, any bank note the butcher hands me will have a few little chunks stuck to it. I then have to try to remember which hand is covered with meat-germs, and try not to let it enter a pocket (or, worse still, a nostril) until I get home. Usually I forget, and end up affectionately stroking Christina’s hair while thinking oops, that’s the beefy hand, but it still beats going to Tesco.

Montgat, a town 15km up the coast from Barcelona, where quite a number of cats live on the beach in some sort of cat hippy community

Christina:  
I have always harboured notions of being an air hostess. I like the idea of being perfectly made-up, smiling a lot and offering beverages and perfumes to holiday-makers. The only thing holding me back is that I'm absolutely petrified of flying. As I write this, I'm 40,000 feet in the air and my pen keeps slipping out of my sweaty hand.

I'd never set foot on a plane until I was 18 and until that point, I thought flying was a very glamorous mode of transport. These suspicions were only confirmed many years ago when one of my siblings - who had gone with dad to collect mum from Stansted - reported seeing Pat Butcher at the airport. Pat Butcher! Off Eastenders! Off the telly! A place of glamour, indeed.

But it seems the more I fly, the more terrified I become. As I board the plane, I sniff the air for signs of burning engines and I try to get a good look at the pilot and co-pilot. Are they drunk? Have they had enough sleep? Do they look capable of getting us to our destination safely? As the plane taxis towards the runway for take-off, my stomach lurches. Is it too late to get off the plane now? Yes, it's probably too late. Here I must sit for two hours with my entire body tensed like a Christmas cracker waiting to be pulled. Can't we just stay on the ground? The plane has wheels, we can just drive there. Why has no one thought of this before? I'm not sure what we'll do when we get to the English Channel, but we'll sort something out. Have the cabin crew closed the doors properly? What if they haven't closed them properly and we all fall out of the sky? Oh God!

It's because of this reasoning that Will drove us to Barcelona. We pretend that it's because we wanted the adventure of driving through France, but we both know the real reason: flying reduces both of us to a pale-faced, jibbering mess.

Anyway, I have to stop writing now. The plane has jolted slightly and we're probably all doomed. I'd rather be anywhere other than here right now. Even if Pat Butcher was sitting next to me.     

Week 24

Christina:

Some pleasures in life are best enjoyed alone: listening to a Richard Marx album, for example. Similarly, I've developed a Dunkin' Donut addiction which I've been hiding from Will. From Monday to Thursday evenings, I babysit four Spanish children and on my way there, I often steal into the Las Ramblas branch of Dunkin', select their most fattening, chocolatey offering, squirrel it into Liceu Metro station, where I sit at the platform, often letting a train go by so I can snaffle away in peace.

I've been furtive about this because Will and I are trying to be healthy since we've become one of those couples who've moved in together and developed portly eating habits such as eating a whole wedge of cheese after dinner. I also realise I should probably be buying dried apricots and pulses from the market instead of giving money to fast food giants like Dunkin' and McDonalds. 

Aah, McDonalds. On New Year's Day, I had a raging hangover and nothing else would do but a Bic Mac with all the trimmings. I found myself alone in the flat as Will and our guests had gone for a walk. It was the perfect opportunity to sneak down to Portal D'Angel's branch and bring my meal back to the flat for an undisturbed meat-fest. I had just bitten into the first delicious chip when the doorbell went. I sighed, put down my chip and answered the door. To three vegetarians. Had they been sent by the Locally-Produced-Organic-Additive-Free-Foods-Watchdog to lecture me on the evils of Ronald McDonalds' stinking beef empire? Thankfully no, it was just my friends who were staying in hotel down the road. That said, there are many ways to enjoy a Bic Mac meal but under the watchful gaze of three veggies is not one of them.

Still, at almost 7 Euro for a Big Mac meal over here, it's not exactly cheap dining. You're better off going for one of Barcelona's menus del dia (menus of the day); they're a real bargain and you can get a decent, three-course lunch with a drink, sometimes for as little as 7.50 Euro. I think I'll keep my doughnut habit though, you've got to have some vices.

A pocket for poo-bags gives this coat an extra touch of chic

Will:

We returned, a couple of weeks ago, from a day out in the Catalan countryside to find that the only free parking space remaining in Barcelona had turned from white (the colour of free parking) to green (the colour of envy, and parking fines). An hour later, we pulled into a desolate-looking patch of ground overlooking Mar Bella beach, to the north of the city centre.
      
“Is this fine? I don’t know if this is fine.”

“It should be alright. None of these other people have parking tickets.”

"Maybe they live here. Is that rusty lamp-post going to fall onto the car? It's probably fine."

And there it has stayed. I feel a strong sense of guilt about my car, parked some 4 miles from our flat. This is the workhorse that carried Christina and I around France on our way here, moved us into our flat, and has taken us on a number of nice trips since then. It has put up with Christina’s use of the side door pocket as a rubbish bin, her refusal to admit that the sat-nav is better with a map than she is, and her incessant complaining and messing about with the radio. Every time Christina, who cannot drive, has said “Will, those traffic lights are red, you’d better stop”, the car has held its tongue, and every time she has waited until we are just a fraction of a second past the turn-off before saying “that one!”, it has patiently waited for the next turn-off before turning around. The car is a trooper.

In fact, I was just thinking about how reliable the Vauxhall Astra is the other day, as I was jogging along the beach, on my way to check up on it and run the engine for a bit. Which is probably why the bastard wouldn’t start. Still, at least it’s got a sea view.