Barcelona

After my week in Sitges, I travelled north to Barcelona to spend a few days in the Catalonian capital. I found Barcelona to be a vibrant and cosmopolitan city, with beautiful modernist architecture. The weather, as in Sitges, was superb. I did not, however, find the Barcelona people all that friendly. There was a touch of big-city/cultural-city attitude, that I had not experienced in Madrid. I've since been informed that this could be because I visited Barcelona at the end of summer. Spain has a population of 40 million people, and 50 million tourists each year. Millions pass through Barcelona, so there must understandably be some exhaustion in the tourist service industry by the end of the season.

Top of my must-see list was Antoni Gaudi's La Sagrada Família (slideshow), a Roman Catholic basilica. Begun in 1882, and worked on by Gaudi for more than 40 years, the cathedral is still not finished. Visitors can walk around the cathedral, explore the museum in the basement, and take an elevator up one of the spires. The view is sensational, and not just of the city. There is a wealth of detail in the architectural design, some of which is only revealed when the cathedral is viewed from a variety of angles, and distances.

Gaudi is responsible for two architecturally significant residential blocks in Barcelona: Casa Batlló and Casa Milà (aka La Pedrera). On this trip I visited Casa Batlló (slideshow), mostly because of its convenient location slap bang in the middle of Eixample (slideshow). As with the Sagrada Familia, the beauty of Gaudi's design is in the details. Little things like the fact that there are no conventional 90 degree angles anywhere in the building. Three other interesting places I visited are Plaza George Orwell (slideshow) celebrating the author's residence in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, the Basilica De Santa Maria Del Mar (slideshow), and the Gothic Quarter (slideshow).

I never leave Spain without experiencing a drama at some point during my trip, and this trip to Barcelona and Sitges was no exception. I stayed in a homestay arrangement on Ronda de Sant Pere, diagonally across the road from one of the main gay clubs called Salvation. Because of the ludicrous operating hours of Spanish nightclubs I went to bed around 10pm on Saturday night, woke up around 1am, and got ready to go out. Salvation is interesting in that the club is divided into two rooms named Hot and Cold. The music, the bartenders, the uniforms, and, most significantly, the clientele is very different from one room to the next. In the Hot room are what the Spanish describe as the musculoso, and in the Cold room the twinks.

I had a good time at Salvation, but decided to move on around 4am, when the crowd started to thin out. In Salvation, I was handed a reduced entry pass to Souvenir, an after-hours venue which I presumed to be nearby. It was not. On the street I met a Brazilian/Spanish also heading to Souvenir. They said the cab fare was expensive, so it made sense for us to share. By the standard of London cabs, the fare was cheap at only E30, but it was a long 25 minute drive. I watched from the front passenger seat as the high rises turned into low-rise, followed by tract housing, and then industrial sites. Next we were on a highway that cut through open farmland. I only started to worry when we passed the turn-off for the airport, but drove on. By now, we were halfways to Sitges!

Eventually, in the distance I spotted a speck in the farmland; a small industrial area that revealed itself like the first approach into Mos Eisley. The taxi turned off the highway, pulling up outside a non-descript warehouse. A few odd people loitered around the street, mostly looking like extras from an early Almodovar film. This was warehouse city. Apart from the distant staccato of heavy bass, there was nothing that suggested we were near a nightclub. Butonce inside the warehouse I could see what all the fuss was about. Souvenir is an amazing and exceptionally well-appointed club with a huge dance floor punctuated by massive cages for go-go dancers. It's a film set approximation of what a nightclub should look like. My favourite detail is the 8x2 matrix of round screens built-in to one wall. The reason it's so far out of town is to escape the licensing laws of the Barcelona metropolitan area.

I woke around 1:30pm later that day, feeling very seedy and surprisingly anxious, but not sure why. I sensed I needed to check the time of my flight back to London. I remember sitting on the sun-drenched terrace nursing paracetamol and coffee, and feeling relieved to discover that the flight was scheduled for 10:30pm. Then a nanosecond later feeling I couldn't breathe because the flight was scheduled for Saturday, the day before. I spent the next half-hour in a frantic state - despite of my hangover - trying to sort out how to get home. RyanAir had no seats available until late the following day, when I was due back at work. British Airways wanted to charge me €730 for the one-way flight in business class, as that is all that was left. I found a seat on the last EasyJet flight for £140 one-way. To put that price in perspective, my original return flight with RyanAir totalled £35. I was paying 5x that to get home, one-way. But given my hangover I would happily have paid much, much more.

All of my Barcelona photographs can be viewed on Flickr, either as a browsable set, or as a slideshow.