No bed, no trains, but drugs and hookers
Barcelona is meant to be one of the best cities in Europe: modern, cosmopolitan and edgy enough to keep bleary-eyed twenty-something professionals packing out their bars at 5am yet still trudging into work, inexplicably fresh-faced, just a couple of hours later. It’s popular enough to keep tourists clocking in and out of its airports, sea ports and train stations and parting with their money willingly (and not so willingly – but more on that later). And I don’t get it at all.
I don’t have great memories of Barcelona. Sorry. It’s not a great thing to say, but a lot of the city really sucks. It’s filthy, and overcrowded, and full of people who want to steal the contents of your pocket or have sex with you for money. It’s also full of homeless people who will sit next to you when you sleep in a train station for a night and suffocate you with the musk of urine, faeces and the cumulative smell of what must be years of not washing.
La Sagrada Familia: one of the few good bits of Barcelona
Barcelona was a bad luck charm to me. Every time I went to the city something went wrong. The first time I didn’t have a bed in a hostel in the Barri Gotic. Eventually, after much arguing and some very English sarcasm, they found a place. The second time, I couldn’t actually leave the city – trying to get a train from Barcelona to Valencia on a Friday is seemingly impossible: everyone must want to get out of there. So I slept in the train station, until that closed at 12.30 on a Saturday morning. Then I wandered the streets for four and a half hours until they opened the doors again and let in the unshaved, unwashed backpackers and the slightly loony local homeless.
That morning wasn’t great. At about five past five, I sat down on the cold metal seats (presumably so you can’t sleep on them overnight, even if the station were kept open) and listened in to a conversation between a local homeless woman and an American female tourist. The Barceloneta was quietly mumbling to her about “la problema femenina”, and the American could only reply loudly and awkwardly “Yes. I know.”
Barcelona likes its graffiti, even outside five-star hotels
The third time was better. I’d learnt that Barcelona was something to be tolerated, rather than enjoyed, and had learnt that you don’t go to the train station first thing in the morning, you get to your hostel early to make sure they keep your booking and you do everything you can to get the hell out of Dodge as soon as humanely possible.
You don’t walk down Las Ramblas ever (despite what everyone will tell you about it being a Barcelona must-see: if you enjoy the backs of people’s heads, dirty, wide-spaced cobbles and a rat run of inconspicuous beer sellers leaning into you and offering you weed and prostitutes forcibly taking you by the arm and trying to drag you to their bordello, then maybe it’s worth visiting), but especially at night. Everything around it is amazing: the Barri Gotic, the true old city, with narrow, vaulting streets and a complete lack of Burger Kings, McDonalds and KFCs; Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, a candlewax cathedral on one side and a Las Vegas casino frontage on the other, and his Parc Guell, a play park on a hill with views over Barcelona – where pickpockets and dealers and prostitutes and pimps become insubstantial ants; and the Diagonal, a great incongruent street in the middle of the city. But ultimately, it’s somewhere you watch your wallet – and your watch, counting down the hours until you get to move on to somewhere else.
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