BIG NEWS: Julia Roberts has been fired from her ghost-writing job on this blog, for revealing that she was indeed Julia Roberts. A nay if you are in the line of ghost-writing. It’s okay, I’m sure she’ll find other work elsewhere.
Also: I’m in Barcelona. My next new potential home.
Now before I get into this city, and why it’s sexier than your mom than 2 cent-wing-night at the strip club she performs at, let’s tissle up a little closure from my last weekend in Madrid, which was also my first weekend in Madrid, but hopefully not the last weekend in Madrid.
Friday night I decided to take it a little “easier” than most Fridays, seeing as I had something big planned on Saturday night. The night was all about cañas and tapas. Cañas are basically little glasses of beer. Meant to be consumed in tandem with something to munch on, which is what makes tapas the perfect supplement for the booze. Ya see, when you go out and are drinking a bit and eating small plates of things like ham-bread, potato thingies, and cruncher-bunchers (still learning the names), you can skip the dinner. You are just constantly keeping your mouth satiated, and it’s an interesting approach to a night out.
My Venezuelan and Mexican counterparts added to the enjoyment as we would take turns paying for each round before going off to the next tapas spot, in what was apparently “the street” for tapas. We ended at a pretty nice nightclub called La Que Faltabas, which had like an 80:20 ratio of girls to guys, a free coat-check, and a band playing Spanish classics for the crowd to all wail along with. It had just started getting crowded as we left, but I had to catch the final train at 1:30 AM and had to give myself at least 45 minutes to get on my train out to my Couchsurfer host’s spot next to the airport. Of course, I was able to squeeze in a ride on a discarded office chair down the street, which ended in a complete fucking wipeout with me and the Venezuelan’s bodies strewn across the street. A bit extreme, but nowhere near as extreme as the next night.
Saturday night I got to see my favorite DJ play in one of the best clubs in Europe. It was called Fabrik, and it was so big that it had to be built in the suburbs of Madrid, reachable primarily by a shuttle bus run by the club. The Mexican girl from Friday night joined me and we had big aspirations for this night. With time to kill before the midnight shuttle bus to the club, we took a stroll through Lavapies, one of the more seedy areas of Madrid, where you can supposedly buy drugs from African guys loitering on the street just by making prolonged eye contact. Well, we did just that, and bought a half-gram of MD (and a pack of gum) before getting on the bus to the club.
The club was brilliant. The sound system was the best I’ve ever heard, the lights were mind-melting, and there was a drink holder built into everything. Plus security was the least pretentious and most freedom-yielding security I’ve ever seen. They barely checked my bag and let us do whatever we wanted. After doing a few lines of the MD and redeeming our two free drinks given to people who arrive before 12:30, we met a Spanish dude named Damien asking us for some gum. When we found out it was because “these Instagram pills have me chewing my mouth off”, we shared our enthusiasm in chewing our mouths off and he gave us 2 pastillas of our own.
By the time our beloved DJ Claptone took the stage, we were rolling our dicks off. We closed the place down at 7 AM and then got on the shuttle back to the city, where we ran in a nearby cerveceria and hogged down some beers as a group of old men sat next to us drinking their morning coffee. The idea of being able to drink a beer anytime is still one of the most liberating experiences available.
And then me and someone I brought with me from the club banged under a tree in a park next to the royal palace at 9 AM. It was freezing cold but we needed to stay warm, so we ignored the joggers and asian tourists passing by us and banged like it was going out of style. This would mark the second time in the past few months that I would have sex with a Latin girl on a park bench in Europe.
So I left Madrid with a literal bang and made my way to Barcelona where… well there’s been more banging here.
I got in on a Monday, arriving via Blablacar (like Uber for long distances) and I was prepared to chill that night. I went out with my hostel, Hostel One, which has hostels in 6 big European cities and was the same one I had spent a couple nights at in Madrid. It touts itself as a social hostel, and it absolutely is.
A few of us started playing drinking games at the hostel and then things quickly escalated. They let my friend join us, which was nice, as I had not seen her since we met in her home country of Venezuela 6 years prior. She’s somewhat of a political refugee, and I’m hoping I can interview her at some point to share her story, but we’ll discuss that another time. We rolled into the hostel with a couple of beers, and then people start introducing wine and sangria into the mix. It only got worse when the first bar we go to is a shots bar (called chupitas in Spain, which is hilarious because that means “little blowjob” in Latin America), and all shots are 2 euros. Most of the shots required something to be set on fire, and at any given moment the bar top was covered in flames.
Around 2 or 3 in the morning we go to a club, as Hostel One rules dictate that every day of the week the hostel goes to a different bar, followed by a different club. The club, City Hall, went harder than it had any right too. I woke up the next morning thinking “if that was Monday, I’m not gonna make it through the week.”
The next day I met up with my Mexican concert buddy and that was the day I decided that I would move to Barcelona. With a joint in one hand and a sexy-Mexi in the other. Now I should mention that I’ve probably renounced Mexican women in past blogs, but I’m going to have to take it all back after spending most of my week with this one girl. She’s gorgeous and a big travel enthusiast, and we get along just great. Today we walked around a kid’s toy store store with T-rex masks on and it was hilarious (for us; probably horrifying for small children). She’s leaving back to Mexico on Sunday, so it will be a love affair with a timer on it, but for the time being we are enraptured by each other’s presence and high-capacity for adventure.
I’m loving Barcelona and every single day is an adventure. Walking around and discovering new things does not get old. Today we stumbled into a design museum and looked at tactile examples of how machines on Mars would use wood in precise ways to create elaborate pieces of furniture. Then we took photos near a giant colorful dildo looking building, rode city-mandated bikes around, went rock climbing, and saw the la Sagrada Família, the famous Gaudi church.
Today begins the weekend and I’m sure it’s going to be another fucking shit show so I’ll save those stories for another blog. I’m also considering a trip to France next week, as a 36 euro flight there sounds like I couldn’t ever pass that up, but let’s see how enthused I feel in the morning. I wanted to do another Educated Guy’s Uneducated Guide to Spain (Barcelona Edition), but the fact is this: Barcelona is not Spain. Madrid and here feel like two different countries, and I couldn’t even begin to compare. But my breakdown of the Catalonia region will come. As soon as I stop having the most fun time of my life.
PS: not having a phone anymore is awesome. It makes life so much more gumptious. If you can, try it.
