Iberian Spring: Day 11 Madrid to Barcelona

Soundtrack: “Lola”, Spanish cover version

A fairly easy travel day, if any day on not quite enough sleep is easy. I didn’t finish writing the last blog entry until around 2am, and we’d forgotten the hostel does breakfasts in assigned shifts, we’d forgotten to change ours so 8.15 to 9am it was. We’d exchanged pleasantries with one of the other guests, who was from Norway. As it was our last day and his last day we had a bit more of a chat, and introduced ourselves. At which point he says his name is Sven. Sven from Norway. Sometimes the cliches just exist. Nice chap. The other amusement breakfast brought was the soundtrack. The hostel seems to play a lot of slowed down cover versions, and this morning it included a very mellow version of The Kinks “Lola”, in Spanish. It was … interesting, but after last night’s drag show slightly appropriate.

We packed and checked out. We had time on the short walk to the train station for a detour to Le Brilliance. Every night we’d walked home and this place was serving huge rolls filled with calamari, churning them out by the dozens, and while I wanted one, each night I was too full. Today was the day. After a bit of a challenge working out the ordering system (stand at the bar and hope you get noticed) I ordered a calamari baguette for me and a hot chocolate for L. Both arrived promptly, the place has been operating since the 1950s so they’ve got the system down. The result were two halves of a baguette jammed full of decent crumbed calamari. It wasn’t the best calamari I’ve ever had, nor the best baguette, but it was good and if I lived in Madrid and had to walk past every day I could imagine it as a once a week thing, at least until the carbs got me.

Madrid Atocha station is easier to get out of than in to, while the signage is better than Lisbon, it took a couple of goes to find the right security gate to go through, as ours was on the upper level. The train was similar to the one that brought us to Madrid, and we had seats in the same car though the cafeteria section was quieter. We had our pre-ordered tapas and then I dozed mostly as we sped through the Spanish countryside; at one point I looked up and saw we were flying at almost 300km/h. The trip took a little over three hours.

High speed trains are good things. It has certainly been quite easy to travel through Spain on these. Sure we paid a little extra for the good seats, but these have been comfortable, the service good, and they certainly save time over going through airports. Spain’s rail service has been decent to use.

Barcelona’s metro system is a little interesting. There is so much that we do not understand, like how when we went to the ticket machine today, the only appropriate tickets we could get it to issue were free travel. We were only going a single stop, but we could not get the machine to take our money. It was a little scary going up to the ticket gate, what was it going to do? Do we trust these mechanised overlords? But when I put the ticket through (once I got the orientation with the arrows pointing right) it let me through. While we waited for our train another pulled up, and it was almost completely covered by graffiti. It wasn’t unpleasant graffiti, just not something that we see back home. Welcome to Barcelona. The other difference when our train arrived was the carriage floor isn’t level with the platform, there are a couple of steps. Annoying enough with cases, but I wonder how they sort it for accessibility.

Our apartment is fairly central, on the edge of the gothic quarter. We haven’t seen any goths yet. We’re in Catalan country, so the chocolateria downstairs is a xocolateria.

Barcelona has made the news several times over the years for its issues with tourists, and as we headed out to dinner via a bookshop detour I can kind of understand the locals. It may just have been the time of day, but it felt like large chunks of the city were filled with people who did not know how to walk in a crowd. Slow people with backpacks, prone to suddenly stopping and turning; folks who only have eyes for their phones; others who just could not keep to a straight line. If the ETA reformed and decided to take out a few blocks of pedestrians it wouldn’t necessarily be a completely bad thing.

L had found mention of a fabled bookstore, Gigamesh, that appeared to merit a visit. It promised lots of sf, fantasy, gaming, and anime/graphic novels. And it does have many many many of these, it’s got so much that our 10 minute detour barely scratched the surface, so we’ll be going back and likely spending some euro there.

Dinner was at a little place, Cafe Jaime, where we caught up with L’s cousin R and his partner L. R is hoping to make Barcelona his next home. He speaks Spanish pretty well (he’s one of those annoying af folks who can pick up languages in seconds) and L is from Argentina, though there are some regional dialect differences, even more in Catalan parts. We ordered a bunch of awesome food, L is vegetarian (a vegetarian from Argentina, who knew?) and we ended up ordering all vegetarian. I finally got around to the spanish staple, pan con tomate, a bit like bruschetta but the tomato is pureed, and it’s so good; there were eggplant slices drizzled with honey, tasty but very sweet; patatas bravas of course, and the sauce had a hint of heat in the spice that was delicious; spanish potato omelette, and this one was so good, a hint of onion with the potato, I could have eaten another; plus a couple of rounds of vermouth, and here they came with an additional olive garnish. We finished with some sublime catalan flan, silky custard with a crunchy sugar top, part of the whole creme brulee family.

After much good food and good company it was time to head our separate ways. Tomorrow we’ve got another early start with a food tour, but hopefully we’re both tired enough to sleep through the noises from the street outside: the double glazing here isn’t as effective as Madrid. Then we’ll likely detour to our new favourite bookshop.