Europe, Day VI

Friday morning, we woke up at the craqué of any dawn I’d ever experienced to grab a 7:00am flight. This required a complicated route from our apartment to the subway to the tiny intra-European carrier handling our flight to Barcelona.

It’s a little hazy, but among the smaller European carriers there are standards and practices involving where you sit on the plane and when you leave. The departure time was bumped forward three times, each by an hour, and depending on how fast we were to jump to attention when the flight was announced via loudspeaker, we stood the chance of being placed somewhere on the back of the plane or on a different plane altogether. The process bore similarity to the stand up / sit down / go here / go there frenzy of placing bets at the dog track.

As it turned out, the plane did not actually leave til around noon so we got some shut-eye on the dirty airport floor off and on for four hours. Sound awesome?

Once in Barcelona, we took a bus downtown to meet an old friend of Wistar who lives and works as a writer there. She showed us her cool, small apartment on the top floor of a building in Old Town. Out on her balcony there was a rickety ladder leading to the rooftop and its spectacular view of Barcelona. At the time, I didn’t know how to do a proper panorama shot or else I would have attempted on.

We went out in the early afternoon to tour the neighborhood which led us to a beachside bar where we had a few beers and caught up. The beach was crowded and a little cold, and the sand was darker and chunkier than I would have imagined.

After that, we hung out on the front patio of a tapas joint with some fellow expatriate friends of our host. By sundown, things got pretty hazy. I know on the way to one bar we stopped at another tapas place and somehow ended up with a ton of food for about five euros each. We stood shoulder to shoulder and were barely able to raise our handfuls of food to our mouth. Our plates had some seafood and there was a bottle of fruity wine involved too, but that’s all I could tell you. I know I drank too much of it.

Our final destination was a murky, candle-lit rock bar that I would have gladly frequently if it were here in Charlottesville. More friends of our host showed up, an Australian expat crew who all worked for a web music/media service in Barcelona. I was too incapacitated to make any meaningful conversation about it in this crowded bar, but it was nice to meet web geeks from another hemisphere.

We had gotten up so early that day it was time for us to retire equally early. We left the bar and hailed a cab, during we we confused and angered our cab driver with our inability to give directions, but I had him let us off about a hundred yards away from Old Town, just feeling lucky we’d managed to arrive somewhere within range of the beds we couldn’t wait to collapse onto.

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