Barcelona

Barcelona was good - not as amazing as I had expected, but perhaps I'd been spoiled by Granada. The first hostel I stayed at was too far out of town, even though the people were nice. So I spent day 2 trying to find somewhere in town to move to. In doing so I bumped into an irish guy called Al, who has lived in Barcelona for 2 years, dj-ing and hanging out with a burgeoning rasta, reggae, hip hop scene, but not managing to learn any Spanish. He was living upstairs from one of the places I was looking at and I asked if he thought it was good thinking he was a guest.

So we hung out - we went to one of the cheapest places to eat in Barcelona, and then the next night he put me on the door for 2 clubs, which we went to. The first was a hip-hop gig that was very cliched, so we left and walked around Barcelona to get to the reggae nightclub. We got a bit lost, but I did get the night tour of Barcelona, which was excellent, including seeing the Arch de Triumph that was presented by France... it looked just like the one in Paris...

The second reggae nightclub was very cool, and very underground.. so underground that not only was it hard to find, but most people there knew each other, or at least pretended they did.

Other amazing Barcelona sights included La Sagrada Familia (Gaudi's cathedral), La Perdrera (his apartment block), the Picasso Museum, Las Ramblas, the old parts of town.. I liked it a lot, but I didn't love it.

Also managed to dip my toes in the water at the beach, but couldn't swim as I hadn't planned to go that far and didn't have my swimming costume.

The last night I managed to find myself in a gorgeous little bar with vermillion walls called Sugar, where I'm not sure if it was a gay bar, or whether people just didn't want to speak to me sitting in the corner looking worried because I had no where to stay in Rome...