Today is our trip and overnight stay in Barcelona. We got to the bus station for the 10.45 bus and although they’d told us the journey is supposed to take one hour they must count that from the time the bus actually moves off. They obviously don’t count the 15 – 30 minutes spent loading the bus and the bus-driver-standing-around-smoking-and-jabbering time. Good journey though, nice and easy. The bus dropped us off at Placa de Catalunya, the main centre square in the city and once we’d got our bearings we found our hotel was a few minutes walk down a side street just off La Rambla. Pauline had booked the place from home using information gleaned from ‘The Rough Guide To Barcelona’ and we knew that our rooms were fairly large with shared toilet and bathroom facilities on the landings.
In fact it was a Hosteria. More of a Pension than a hotel, with a narrow frontage squeezed in between a café on one side and a shop on the other. Huddled outside the small double door entrance we soon discovered that we had to press a buzzer by the door before it would be unlocked and you could walk in. After a few minutes of pressing the buzzer, trying to pull open the left door, nothing happening, pulling the other door, pressing the buzzer again, pushing the right hand door, pulling the other one, nothing happening, pressing the buzzer twice in case it wasn’t working properly, looking for some instructions, giving the buzzer one long buzz and two short buzzes in case there was a secret code, I pushed the left hand door and it opened – the only thing we’d forgotten to try.
As I’d given up on either of the doors ever moving at all it came as a bit of a surprise when the door flew open and we all fell through the door in a noisy tumble, bags flying all over the place. The reception desk was so close to the entrance we were all wedged up against it unable to move until one of us managed to release our body vacuum and we all started moving again.
The reception area was small.
With the four of us and our few bits of overnight luggage it was like standing in a lift.
The receptionist girl looked at us and said, “Ere in Barthelona, the doors they push.”
Your bloody right door didn’t, I thought to myself but decided not to make an issue of it.
Every time she saw me after that she started giggling. Don’t know why….
Our rooms were up a small metal spiral staircase, along a narrow corridor just wide enough for one person at a time and then onto a landing where four rooms were so close together we all had to take turns to go in and out otherwise we’d be stumbling into each other and the other residents on the landing. Our room wasn’t that big, it certainly wasn’t ‘fairly big’ as it had been described to us over the phone but by now that didn’t come as a great surprise. It had one of those floor to ceiling French windows with iron railings across the outside of it to stop you falling to your death in the yard below and a lovely view of the wall of the building next door which was so close I could reach out and touch it.
Still, it had air-conditioning and it was remote controlled from the bed.
It was a big fan on a wooden chair in the corner of the room and using the remote control, a long stick provided by reception, I could lie in bed and switch it on and off. It had a multi-directional air flow too. I could use the stick to move the chair around and into any position I wanted to.
Because of the general smallness of the place, getting out of your room and out of the building was a bit like being in one of those bedroom farces. Quietly open your door, push your head out to see if anyone was on the landing, if they were smile and nod and duck back inside. Try again and if the coast was clear, make a dash for it running and bouncing off the sides of the corridor, clattering down the spiral staircase and into the street before two or three other people appeared and the place was too crowded to move again.
Once all four of us were outside leaning against the wall puffing and panting we made for a nearby café for some lunch. The idea was to use the rest of the afternoon to stroll around the town before moving on in the evening to see the famous Barcelona fountain displays which were situated a little further across the city.
Leading off from the Placa de Catalunya is a very long boulevard called Las Ramblas and it’s here that you find every tourist in the city at some time or another. It’s very much like Covent Garden only in one very long, straight and wide road, stalls along its length and street entertainers every few yards or so. It seems the most popular form of entertainment is ‘Statues’. There are two types. People are either dressed to look as much like a real statue with their whole bodies and clothes covered in makeup and dye to give the impression that they’re made of metal or stone and the other sort are dressed up as a well-known character, Charlie Chaplin, Michael Jackson, Mickey Mouse etc. Whatever they’re supposed to be, the routine is just the same. You have to stand motionless for as long as it takes until somebody throws some money in your hat and then, if you’re a statue you perform a few robotic movements or if you’re a character, you perform a few of that character’s famous moves or mannerisms. The statues outnumbered the characters easily. There was even one bloke made up to appear to be a statue in white porcelain sitting on a white porcelain toilet with his white porcelain trousers around his white porcelain ankles reading a white porcelain newspaper. I never saw anyone put any money in his hat so I don’t know what he suddenly did when that happened. A shit I suppose.
Most of the statues did look remarkably effective but spent most of their time standing around motionless looking bored.
Pauline went into a shop and when she came out I’d collected 20 Euros in small change.
One of the most realistic was the toilet man but the effect was ruined for me when I saw him later in the afternoon off-duty, trudging along the street pulling his toilet behind him tied on to a small shopping trolley. Nobody gave him a second look – and there’s a thought – if I can get Pauline to do something similar when we’re shopping in Maidstone we’ll never have to waste time trying to find the nearest toilet every ten minutes or so will we?
It was a good afternoon, we walked around the town, visited the cathedral and then back along Las Ramblas again. We stopped off for a snack and then it was off to see the fountains which started at 21.30.
We decided to get there on the Metro, it was just three stops away. At the ticket office we asked the girl for four returns. “Where to?” she said. “Back here,” I said – no I didn’t. But she did charge us 4E for a single and then only 5E 80 when we asked for a family return. She only gave us one ticket for the four of us and once Pauline had got the hang of it and didn’t keep walking off with the ticket leaving the three of us on the other side of the ticket barrier every time she went through, it was a very quick journey.
The hill of Montjuic, rising to 699 ft. above the commercial port on the south side of the city is Barcelona’s biggest recreational area. Its museums, art galleries, gardens and nightclubs make it a popular place in the evenings as well as during the day and it’s here, in the middle of the Placa d’Espanya that the Font Magica are to be found regularly illuminated in colour and featuring a 15 minute son et lumiere presentation.
The fountain display was repeated every half hour and as we actually arrived at about 21.35 we’d missed the beginning and decided to go to a nearby café to wait for the 22.00 display. Emma and Camille wanted chocolate cake but by the time it came we’d missed the 22.00 display so we had to hang around for the 22.30 display. At 22.15 it started to rain slightly and at first we just thought it was spray from the fountains. At 22.25 it was coming down in that sort of tropical sheet rain that pours down for five minutes and then abruptly stops. Only this time it didn’t.
So with camcorder poised to record the display, the rain came down by the truckload. Like a true professional I kept the camera running until the end of the display at which time we belted back through the deluge in squelchy shoes and saturated clothes, down to the Metro where we slowly steamed off on the platform. By the time we emerged four stops later our clothes were bone dry. We travelled one stop further on the way back so we could get off at the nearest station to our hotel but when we reached street level we didn’t recognise where we were at all. Nothing looked familiar. I even had doubts as to whether we were still in Barcelona. The trouble was, the metro station had so many exits, spread over such a large area underground that although the station was the nearest one to us on the map some of the exits took us miles away. After wandering around and getting nowhere we had to ask directions back to La Rambla, the only place we knew that was close to our hotel, and make our way back from there.
We reached our rooms eventually as it was pretty congested on the stairs and landing. By now though I had a well-planned method. A quick run up the clattering spiral staircase, stop off in the broom cupboard until it was clear to go, bounce down the corridor at a brisk trot, stand in the toilet with the door open to give the fat German more room and then a short leap across the landing and into the room. Brilliant. Works every time. The thing is I never saw Pauline and the two girls doing any of this, it only ever seemed to be me. How they always reached the rooms before me beats me.
I swear they’ve made our room smaller while we’ve been out. The bastards are moving the walls in slowly. I examined the walls for any signs that they might be on rollers but they seemed solid enough. I’m even walking around now with a permanent stoop, not because I keep hitting my head on the ceiling, it’s high enough, I just feel like I’m going to.
Got into bed, turned the air-conditioning on with the remote stick and stretched out, my feet hanging a good six inches over the end of the bed. I discovered that if I put my arms above my head I could touch one wall while my feet touched the opposite wall. Those bloody walls have moved in again, I swear they have. I went to sleep and dreamt that I woke up in the morning with my head, arms and legs poking out through the door and windows like Alice when she took the ‘Eat-Me/Drink-Me’ stuff.
I really think that everything in this bedroom is made to 4/5ths scale to try and give the impression of spaciousness.
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