Hopelessly Lost in Barcelona

Being a shisha dragon

On Tuesday this week Dale, myself, Todd, Heather, Anne, Caillan, and Chris had a shisha night at a little tea garden in front of the Liffey. We went straight down steep, winding stone steps from the street and then had a little booth of our own with pillows to sit on. It only cost about ten euros for the raspberry shisha and midsummer tea. When I first sucked on the hookah I was very surprised by how light the shisha was to smoke, and it had a strong raspberry flavour that I enjoyed. It was the last night we got to spend with Chris before he returned to Germany, and it was a very relaxed evening.

A photo from Heather's céilí party

On Thursday I had a huge job trying to convince Heather to come out for drinks in town. Anne and I had planned a surprise Irish dance party for her, and she had been out late and up early the entire week. In the end I convinced her that there was a new pub to see and we met her at 8:00 for a very intimate party with two hosts. We had lost a number of people to work, so the women made an exception for our party of seven rather than ten and gave us an hour of  Irish songs, some history, and some group dance lessons! Ocean and Anne looked a little like hillbillies with their entwined arms and elbows up in the air, and Dale made me laugh because of the intense look of concentration on his face as he tapped his way towards me. Afterwards the two Heathers, Anne, Dale, me, and Sammy went to the Hard Rock Café. Most of us had a few girly drinks, and then Dale and I turned in because I had work at 6:30 and then we needed to go straight to the airport.


Dale met me at work on Friday and we walked to the appropriate bus stop. While Dale went in search of a sandwich, I had a ten minute conversation with an elderly lady who charmingly said when I sat down, “Use your head to save your feet, that’s what my grandmother always told me.” The line has been echoing in my head all weekend. Everything went well with the flight, but I seemed to have managed to tell Danielle the wrong time for our arrival. Luckily we brought along the laptop so I could fire away at Nanowrimo on the plane, and I checked it as soon as we found a MacDonald’s upon arriving. She had sent us a message saying to meet her, Tyler, and Ignatius, our English relative in Spain, at a restaurant. But Dale and I didn’t know how to get to our hotel, and the cab drivers were not helpful at all. We tried a train, and then had to follow it up with a cab. By the time we were checked in it was very late and I was very upset. I hadn’t even finished Nanowrimo because the stupid flight attendant made me turn off the laptop when I would have had a good half hour to finish up!

The view as we made our way up to Gaudi's park

In the end Danielle and Tyler came to our hotel room, which was a smoking room and had a spare cot bed. They sat on the cot like a couch facing us, and we talked and did some catching up until after 3am. I was determined to finish up my measly 700 words in the morning, but all the back and forth trying to figure out where Danielle and Tyler were had finally killed the battery. The hotel had no adapters, so I was determined to find one the next day and take the hour siesta time to finish. It sounded perfect.

Familia Sagrada in the distance

Gaudi's lookout

We went to the covered market for breakfast, where we shimmied through packs of people down tiny aisles and bought freshly squeezed juice smoothies (mine was kiwi-coconut) and little pizza-pocket-type foods. Then we sat at some high chairs off to the side at a tiny coffee shop and sipped café au lait. It was quite cold, so I was glad to warm my hands on the mug. Afterwards we walked to Gaudi’s park, Park Guell, which was up a steep hill, and checked out his architecture, which uses shapes found in nature. Despite it being morning, Tyler found himself a beer. As we walked to Gaudi’s Familia Sagrada, a cathedral that is still under construction, Dale went into a wine store were they let him fill up an empty bottle of water with wine for just over one euro. I will quote him on this one: “Let’s move here.”

This reminds me of dinosaurs for some reason

Me and Danielle

Pterodactyl nests?

Gaudi's Familia Sagrada

We shared plates and plates of tapas for lunch in a cheap restaurant that was one of the few not having a winter day’s siesta. My favourite was the toasted bread with melted cheese on top, but the plate of garlic shrimp was delicious too. Danielle and Dale tried fruitlessly to talk me out of finding an adapter and popping into the hotel for an hour to finish Nanowrimo (on the last possible day), but Tyler helped me out by saying I should just go do it, and eventually Danielle gave me a handful of

directions and said to meet them at a pub where they would be watching a rugby game. We found an adapter for 5 euros, then I had to get on and off the metro three times, then I was supposed to go left for one block, and right for three. Well over two hours later it was dark and I was sick of wandering around and around alone. I had asked a cab driver where the Confortel Hotel was, and he had no idea, so my last resort wasn’t even useful. Eventually I went into another hotel to ask for directions, and the receptionist said he was glad to help.

I was frustrated beyond human endurance when the laptop then decided it wouldn’t hold a charge. I had to go back downstairs to get another wifi password because you could only have one per device. I messaged Danielle on my otherwise useless phone to say I was safe and now that I’d finally arrived there was no way I wasn’t going to finish my writing. I grabbed the piece of paper the internet code was written on and ripped off the 633 words I needed. I still couldn’t believe I wasn’t going to be able to validate it on the Nanowrimo website. Then I grabbed a cab and got dropped off on La Ramblas, the pedestrian shopping street, and made my way to the pub where Ignatius was apparently waiting too. I had only met Ignatius once before, so I was seriously annoyed that the second time was on this night, when everyone was waiting around to find out if I was alive and getting more and more angry as they waited around.

However, Danielle insisted I have two shots of jager in a row, plus the rest of Dale’s cider, before we moved on to the next stop, which was a tapas pub down a small alley. Ignatius pointed out sights along the way, and we ate tapas and drank rosé standing over a decorative wine barrel outside the skinny glass French doors . The bizarre thing was a girl in the group of Canadians next to us was from Sardis, the town right beside our own, and happened to know Cameron, Julie’s brother.

A blurry photo of me and Ignatius

The next stop on the apparent pub hop was an oaken bar down some more cobbled alleyways. We sat or stood at the bar and had some more drinks, then Ignatius headed home and we decided to make our way back to the hotel. I’m pretty sure we took the Metro, and we ended up in Danielle and Tyler’s room before I ended up in front of the toilet.

When I woke up the next day it was to find that the laptop had a bit of a charge, and Dale had typed up half of my handwritten page. I set to work typing the rest up, then altered my Nanowrimo account to Hawaiian time in order to finally copy and paste the entire novel in for validation. At long last my efforts were rewarded with the “Winner!” title, and I can say that I did, in fact, do all the 50,000 words within the month of November. Against all the freaking odds imaginable.

Me and the Mediterranean

Sunday was warmer than the last days, so I left my light scarf and gloves behind and we headed for the beach. The sun was bright and the sky was a clear blue as we walked along the boardwalk and across the sand to touch the Mediterranean Ocean for the first time. I know the Spanish police were wearing balaclavas, but I’m pretty sure we could have swam in that water if we wanted to. Eventually Danielle and I were walking along in tank tops. I had a run-in with the ocean as I tried to pick up a bright blue seashell, which got everyone laughing because I managed to criss-cross my legs like Bambi while running from the wave. Luckily it barely got my shoe, and I did get the seashell. Tyler had a run-in with a homeless man. The guy handed him a disgusting chunk of coconut, then demanded payment for it. Tyler told him to get lost—incidentally, the “f” word is apparently world-wide—and the guy threw an empty water bottle at his back. I think he was crazy to pick a fight with a clear rugby player and he was lucky Tyler thought he’d dropped the bottle himself. He just picked it up and we walked away with it.

The duck pond in the middle of the church

We ate lunch sitting on the patio at a seafood place near the beach. The payaya, which was rice with prawns and mussels on top, was a hit with everyone else. It wasn’t my favourite food, but it was enjoyable. I do love seafood, even if it does stare back at you with large black eyes. After lunch it started to get dark, but we found another market, this time outdoors. I loved to see the Christmas decorations hanging from the booths, whether it was garlands for sale or chunks of plant life, not to mention the Feliz Navidad signs. I hadn’t thought about how close to Christmas we actually were on this vacation to Spain, and it was a delightful surprise. Because it was Sunday we were also able to go into two churches for free. One was a fascinating combination of duck pond and palm trees in the middle of an old stone catholic saints’ worship space. The other was a cathedral with high ceilings that were somehow illuminated with light.

Inside the cathedral (at night)

On La Ramblas again, Danielle and Tyler tried to bargain their way into a metallic bull decoration, but the vendor didn’t end up going cheap enough. As it got later we made our way to another tapas restaurant where we had a very enthusiastic waiter, spent 18 euros in Nestea’s, and ate ourselves into food comas. We went for a siesta this time, Dale actually falling asleep in the bathtub while I crashed fully clothed over top of the bed. Then we went for drinks in a little pub we found on a nearby corner—I had a mimosa—but since it was Sunday there wasn’t much open late. When it closed, we stopped in a corner store for snacks, then went back to the hotel and watched a little Spanish television. Before long the food coma made a reappearance and we all crashed again.

Feliz Navidad!

In the morning we went to the same place for breakfast as the day before, and all ordered bacon and eggs. Bacon is not the same in Ireland as it is at home, so it was wonderful. We had our café au lait, then Dale and I said goodbye to the two of them and got back on the Metro, then the train, to the airport. It was a bumpy ride, and I was full of dread about going back to work again the next day. However, I am very grateful to Mum, Jonathan, Grandma, and Danielle for the early Christmas gift of Spain. We couldn’t have done it without them! And today after work I found a letter from Taiwan! I was so excited to hear from Emily, a university friend who is teaching out that way. She gave me some advice on being away from home for Christmas, and generally made me smile. I loved getting her letter!