Europe, Day VII

I was the last to wake up on Saturday, mid-morning, and while I lay in my bunk I could hear the ocean nearby and smell the smells curling up from the street and hear Wistar and her friend outside on the balcony eating breakfast and gossiping. My eyes were severely dried out from not enough sleep, too much drinking and too much exposure to smoky Spanish bars. I lay in the un-airconditioned room staring at the ceiling til the girls finally came in to pull me out of bed so we could eat.

For some reason, our host’s other friend—an American expatriate living in Montpelier who’d flown down for a visit—insisted we eat at the Hard Rock Cafe just off Las Ramblas. To avoid ruffling any feathers, I withheld comment that we should be spending our only lunch in the country of Spain at a place so uninteresting I wouldn’t patronize it in my own country. Never mind the menu, the service at Hard Rock Barcelona was what natives explained as customary Western European treatment: the waiter greeted us quickly, sat us quickly, took our drink orders quickly, then disappeared for 45 minutes. When we least expected it, we suddenly got food too, but were expected to eat it for the next hour while the waiter chatted with friends or watched videos on MTV Europe. I noticed this was how meals had happened in France, too.

Where we went and what we saw in the subsequent few hours remains a mystery. I know my crippling hangover had me thinking only of how I would sneak in a mid-afternoon nap without our hosts thinking I was having a bad time. Saturday afternoon in a city that size, especially in the tourist sections, is not conducive to the olympic-size hangover I was experiencing. We sort of swam through the giant crowds, taking it all in without really processing much of it, stopping briefly here and there without much of a destination in mind. Finally we were back at the apartment where I closed my eyes for a bit.

For dinner, we ate in a huge arcade or city square. There were only two or three restaurants available and lines for each stretching fifty yards long. I had a paella that didn’t help my stomach situation, but everything I sampled from friends’ plates was outstanding. Afterward, we walked to a few bars and clubs. One was a hookah joint where we met a friend of our host who’d just traveled to Morocco. She had created a stir with what she was wearing before she was able to find something the natives considered more tasteful and humble.

Later we stopped by an all-ages reggae club to look for a friend (probably the first and only time I’ll ever type a sentence like that one). Suddenly it was like being back in college and finding yourself at a dopey hippy house-party with dreadlocks and constipated dance styles. It was primarily stoned Spanish teenagers and skaters. We watched some kids skate a curb outside before making the long walk toward the apartment, stopping through Las Ramblas on the way. It was now twice as crowded, twice as crazy, and twice the hangout for prostitutes as it had been in the afternoon. It was hard not to feel overwhelmed. We made it back to the apartment mercifully early to prepare for a 7:00am flight back to Paris.

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