Barcelona, yes you can sail the seven seas

Published on Tue 1 Jun 2010

I'm sat in a hot hotel room in Chicago having recently endured 8 hours of the dickhead in front of me on the plane having his seat fully back and the woman next to me being under the impression that the armrest, rather than being the border between the two seats, is a rest for your wrist while you stick your elbows out chicken style. The films were good this time though - The Damned United which I've been meaning to see for ages, Youth in Revolt which was a little weirder than I expected, but good, a weak romantic comedy called Leap Year which is exactly the kind of thing I like (though I always feel a bit bad for the existing boyfriend that gets left for the new exciting man) and Informant which was enjoyable enough apart from the 20 minutes in the middle that I slept through (which may have also been fine). Not sure how much of this I'll get done because I'm off to watch a baseball game in a bit, but until then I've got to keep myself awake.

Before I came here 5 of us (me, Chris, Mike, Dave and Emily) spent the week in Barcelona and I had the nicest time I can remember having for ages. We were there for Primavera, a music festival that you may or may not remember Chris and I going to 2 years ago. It's a shame myspace doesn't let you link to blog posts any more or I'd do just that and all you newcomers could read about Chris falling violently asleep in front of Dinosaur Jr (though there is a fair amount of falling violently asleep action to come, never fear). We stayed in a hostel then but managed to end up with 2 apartments this time. The journey was fairly uneventful, other than me being laughed at for managing to get 6 days of stuff into my hand luggage (what?) and Chris and I failing to complete a lot of unsatisfactory crosswords from a puzzle book he bought at Stansted. We did finish a wordsearch at least.

The apartments were really quite nice,

and we also had use of the building's roof terrace which had picturesque views of the city's forest of TV aerials.

Once we'd settled in a bit, connected our iPhones to the wifi and got to grips with the fact that we could watch British TV, we went off to a bar just off La Rambla for some beers and (excellent) tapas. I discovered I quite like marinated anchovies - I may start stealing the rollmops off my brother when we go home for family meals - and I think I ate close to my bodyweight in squid over the course of the holiday. That said my bodyweight is probably significantly more than it was beforehand due to the amount of beer that was drunk. I digress. After an exploratory trip to the supermarket we went off for some paella and sangria in a quiet square that I didn't find out the name of. We also had toasted bread which we rubbed raw garlic and tomato into then poured olive oil on. I'd not seen that done before  but it was very nice indeed, though we must have absolutely reeked. Then we went to the Irish bar near the town hall in a pilgrimage to the spot where Chris almost knocked himself out last time by standing up hard into a huge low oak beam, but it was full of ghastly Americans on an organised pub crawl which I suspect consisted of the first 7 drinks of each of their lives so we met up with a couple more people and moved on somewhere a bit trendier, but we were all flagging from the early morning (not as early as today though bloody hell! 5am for an 11am flight!) so went back and relaxed on the terrace for a bit then went to bed.

I have to go - The White Sox are calling. I don't think I'll care about them as much as I cared about the Hiroshima Toyo Carp, but we'll see. Actually, I don't even know who they're playing.