Big Bad Barcelona Blog

Welcome to the mother of all blog postings. I am in Madrid, but this is not about Madrid. It’s a Barcelona blog so big there is actually a table of contents. That way you can skip ahead to a different section if I start boring you, or if you simply don’t have time to read it all.

Table of Contents

1. The Hostel

2. The Food

3. The Sights

4. The People

5. The Nightlife

6. The Seediness

Kabul Hostel

Let’s begin with maybe the best hostel I’ve stayed in during all my travels. They do everything in their power to accommodate any needs you may have. First of all, the cost is awesome for what you get. I paid 13 Euros/night over the first few nights in a 10-bed room, and then paid 17 Euros/night when I switched to a 4-bed room. I only changed rooms because I had booked the first 3 nights in advance, and when I extended my stay (which happened 3 different times), they had to switch my room. The extra 4 Euros was worth it for a quieter, less busy room. One negative on the rooms was the temperature. Even with the windows wide open, it was grossly hot every night. There’s nothing satisfying about waking up drenched in sweat. Every room had security lockers with magnetic keys, the same key you used for the room door, the hostel door and to make the elevator work. Definitely the highest tech system in any hostel so far. No negatives for the bathrooms as the showers, toilets, sinks were all clean and I could actually get hot water whenever I needed it.

The location was perfect. Right off Las Ramblas, which has to be the main tourist street with all those street performers I showed in my last blog. It’s also only a 15-minute walk to the beach, and a Metro station is 100 feet away to connect to the farther away sightseeing areas. More than enough food & nightlife in the area as well.

When booking my hostels, I do take into account whether they include free breakfast or not. This hostel did, but I’m now realizing it didn’t matter since I only woke up 1 morning out of 8 in time for breakfast. They shut it down after 10am. More importantly, however, is that Kabul did free dinner every night. This was key and definitely the first hostel to do it. They made great food each night, and never ran out even when close to 100 people were in line for the dinner. The portions weren’t always big enough so once in a while I had to go buy a “supplement” such as Asian noodles, fries, or a kebab. Ahh, but we’ll devote an entire section to food later.

The most important thing about the hostel is that it had a bar. And I mean that for more reasons than just drinking. Yes of course it served that purpose, especially since it was open from 6pm - 1:30am, and happy hour from 6 - 7:30 was 1 Euro beers (also only 2 Euros per beer during non-happy hour, so definitely cheap). Anyway, the key to the bar is that it makes the social aspect of staying in a hostel so easy. For a solo traveler like myself, I need the bar. It’s the best way to meet people because everyone’s sitting around having a drink. I’ve struggled a bit more to meet a bunch of good people when there hasn’t been a bar. Even when there’s just a common room, but no bar, people tend not to hang out as much.

Another thing I haven’t seen any hostels do is organize nightly club-going activities. At Kabul, they took you to a different dance club every night of the week, and all but 1 night they would get you free entry. Ahh but we’ll get to the nightlife in a separate section.

Finally, I thought the hostel staff was amazing. Typically you get mixed reviews on whether they are nice, helpful or assholes. We all loved the staff to the point that by my 6th night at Kabul we were inviting a couple of them to go out with us for drinks, and they usually did. So to Chris, Alex, Scott, Yolanda, Joanna, and even the sorta asshole morning guy, thanks for the great time.

(The hostel bar decorated for Halloween):

The Food

The free dinner at the hostel happened at 8:30 every night, but people would begin forming a line at 8. Like I said, they never ran out of food before everyone was fed, but if you were towards the end of the line, you were likely to be left with only 1 of the 2 food options they had. The typical dinner at Kabul was a bowl of pasta with meat sauce or rice with some vegetables mixed in. It came with fresh bread each night. Whenever we wanted to supplement that meal or to just eat somewhat quick and cheap we usually got either Doner Kebab (I think it’s lamb or pork in a pita with a bunch of sauce & veggies) or Asian noodles from Wok to Walk. I didn’t find out about this place until Saturday (Halloween), and I still had it 4 or 5 times over my final 3 days. It was that good.

The most important thing I read in my travel book so far was about an all-you-can-eat sushi place not far from the water in Barcelona. On my 2nd night in Barcelona, I found it. I thought maybe it was just a myth, a dream that I’d never realize, but no, it was perfect in every way….a conveyor belt with plates of sushi, noodles, vegetables, beef, and other seafood rotating around the restaurant near all the tables. I ate here 2 more times during my stay, both at lunch which was only 9 Euros and included a soda & ice cream. My final time here I recruited 4 other people from the hostel to come. I’ve never seen a group of people so excited to eat. And I felt like I should have gotten my meal for free for the recruitment effort. Oh well.

Now before you start making fun of me for only eating Asian food when I’m in Spain…yes I had tapas several times, and every meal of it was fantastic. My first experience with it was a bad one and not because of the food. On Wednesday, I was going to eat a late lunch and this guy Dave I had been hanging out with convinced me to go get tapas with him. With our meal, we both ordered soda and the waiter asked “small or large?” When the large came to us, we were psyched it was a big mug because we both agreed every other time ordering soda in Europe it’s been the tiniest amount. We ate our meal, drank our Diet Cokes, and enjoyed ourselves…until the check came and each soda was 12 Euros ($18)!!!!!!!!!! One thing I’ve read over & over is to make sure you ask the exact price of everything you order at a restaurant. I get that we messed up by not asking, but how could any amount of soda cost $18? We were pissed. We both decided we weren’t paying for it. We talked to the manager & he just said, “You drank it and that’s how much it costs.” Dave told them we weren’t paying and he threatened to walk out without paying for any part of the meal. He also encouraged the manager to call the cops. I told him I had no interest in dealing with that, and we should probably suck it up and pay for our mistake. He told me he wasn’t paying so I should leave my money and walk out before the cops got there. I left enough money to cover my food and what I thought a soda should cost, and then walked out. Nearly 1 week later I still have no clue what happened to him and how the situation was resolved. He was leaving that night & I didn’t see him again.

The Sights

If you read my previous blog post, you’ve seen my favorite sight in Barcelona. It is La Sagrada Familia, which is a gigantic Church still under construction. An apparently famous architect, Antoni Gaudi, designed it and began building it, but like it seems with everything else in Barcelona that he started to build, he died before it could be completed. It won’t be finished for about 20 more years, but if it already looks this amazing I can’t wait to see how it will be when completed. There’s an incredible amount of detail on all the facades & entrances to the building; enough that you could spend hours just looking at the outside of the Church. Inside the columns are designed like trees, and the whole inside sort of gives you the feel of being in a forest. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.

A close 2nd for favorite sights in Barcelona was the tour I did of F.C. Barcelona’s soccer stadium & museum. I didn’t know until that tour on Saturday just how good this team has been both historically and currently. Unlike Olympic Stadium in Berlin, Camp Nou (the stadium’s name) isn’t anything incredible to see on the outside; mostly because it’s in the middle of the city surrounded by other buildings so you can’t get that one great view of the entire stadium. But inside is awesome. It fits 100,000 people and is just gigantic compared to the other 2 stadiums I’ve been to (Berlin & Rome). After walking around the stadium (with an audio guide of course), you go into the club’s museum, which is pretty cool. It has all the trophies they’ve won, and walks you through a brief history on the team & facilities. Also, if you want to spend a crapload of money, you could do so at their souvenir store/gift shop. A ton of soccer paraphernalia to choose from.

Also on Saturday night, me and a bunch of the crew from the hostel went to see the “Magic Fountain.” I somehow hadn’t heard about this until Saturday morning, but I’m glad I eventually did. The only way to describe it is by saying it totally puts the water show in front of the Bellagio to shame. It happens only on Friday & Saturday nights, and it begins every 30 minutes, lasting for about 15. It’s a combination of multiple fountains, crazy lighting, and music all choreographed together.

A quick general note about sightseeing in Barcelona: Saturday was the only day when I managed to see “multiple sights” in the same day. This is why 8 days in Barcelona became necessary. I definitely saw less sights in Barcelona than Rome or Berlin, but it takes much longer to see everything when you are out until 4 or 5am and sleeping until Noon.

I believe in my blog about Amsterdam I gave the Van Gogh Museum “2 enthusiastic thumbs up.” If that’s the case, then I’d give the Picasso Museum in Barcelona “1 ¾ enthusiastic thumbs up.” Still an amazing collection of art, but a step down in my uneducated mind from Van Gogh.

Parc Guell--with more interesting structures designed by Gaudi--was worthwhile. And it was free!

Every day except one while I was in Barcelona would have been beautiful beach weather. I actually only spent 1 day at the beach (2 if you count me wandering around near it while hung over last Tuesday). It was still a pretty busy beach for the end of October. People were still in the water (including me), and women were still taking their tops off to sunbathe. Wasn’t that quite the surprise when I woke up from a nap on the beach to see this going on all around me!

I wrote in my last post that Barcelona was competing with Rome & Berlin for “best city I’ve been to” status. I think I have to put it on top now. When comparing the sights, it gets a nudge over the others based on the beach & its soccer stadium and team being better than the others.

The People

As a solo traveler, the cities I end up enjoying the most are based on multiple factors. So please don’t think I am saying Barcelona definitely beats Rome & Berlin only based on sightseeing. The people I meet and hang out with are also a huge part of it. Well, I would say Barcelona wins this category as well. I haven’t met so many good people or spent so much time around the same group of people as I did in Barcelona. Of course there were hostelers coming & going within the group, but for about 5 straight days there was a core group of us hanging out at all hours together. As a matter of fact, in no other place have I spent multiple days sightseeing with people. Typically I’m always doing that on my own, and then meeting up with others at night. Not the case here.

There was Lindsay from Tampa, Nick from South Africa, Guilllaume from France (people kept calling him William and I’m not sure why), John from Australia, Matt from Nebraska, and Jared from Reno/Carson City area, Nevada. It was very cool to have this consistent group (until a few started leaving Barcelona) to sightsee with, eat lunch/dinner with, go Halloween costume shopping with, and of course enjoy all the nightlife with. If it wasn’t for Lindsay, I would have never found out about the “shot bar” (details coming next section). And if it wasn’t for Jared, well I would have had far less entertainment on the trip.

Let’s spend a few minutes on Jared, especially since he’s the one I am most likely to keep in touch with (based on proximity to where I live & how well we got along the whole time). Oh and Ben, Neil, whoever, please spare me the “does Ross have a man crush?” jokes. Thanks. Anyway, I know Jared’s a good sport so even if he reads this he won’t be too mad/embarrassed by the stories. When we did a pub crawl on Thursday night, I learned a lot about him. Like how many girls he can fall in love with in 1 night. And the best was when 3 girls we were hanging out with (who all go to Northeastern by the way) were finally leaving the last club to go home, Jared was so in love that he was determined to go find them when he realized they were gone. Even though I reminded him that our only info on their location was “a hotel in Barcelona,” he would not be denied. Luckily he got distracted by falling in love with a new girl. I also heard from someone else at the club that he fell down at one point & I had to pick him up (fuzzy memory of that one). On a down note, he did lose his wallet the night of the pub crawl. Sucks. I thought maybe it was an isolated incident but learned the next day he had lost his Eurail Pass a few days before. Also I think 1 full week into his stay in Barcelona, he still wasn’t entirely sure how to get back to our hostel. So I guess scatterbrained might be an OK description here? He also had no problem getting made fun of when he said things like, “I feel so weird right now…like my arms feel like they’re ahead of my body.” (He was not on acid or anything like that at this point)

(Pictures from pub crawl night):

(pictures of the main group I hung out with all week):

You know who I love? (Warning: paragraph drenched in sarcasm) I love the people who feel the need to be over-the-top anti-American. The people who do the whole “Oh, there are just way too many Americans at this hostel. This is awful”(in their stupid accents). And I love these people who try to make fun of all American political & social issues, and who give you the “you stupid American” look every time you open your mouth. And they are so awesome for pointing out that American rules for card games are so much worse than theirs. And I also love how these same people decide to spend every waking moment over a few days with a group of, yup, Americans.

The Nightlife

I don’t even know where to begin. The nightlife & schedule of going out in Spain is crazy. Ah yes, might as well begin at the first night. Last Monday I became aware very quickly how this past week might go. At the hostel bar, the bartender asked if I wanted to sign up for that night’s club they were going to. I said probably and asked what time they leave for it. He responded, “1:45.” I think I told him that’s impossible, isn’t that last call? Obviously Spain is quite different from what I’m used to. I did go to the club that night, and I am being honest when I say I went to more dance clubs in Barcelona (5) than I have in my entire life up to this point. I’m really not a fan, but the choice is either go with everyone or stay back alone/go to bed. The clubs are typical: loud, crowded, hot, and drinks that are outrageously priced.

The nice thing about my week here was how frequently we changed up what we did at night. I had a couple nights of going to Irish Pubs to watch soccer, and on Sunday I actually convinced a group of 8-10 people to come to the pubs for American Football! That was the night Nick convinced us to go to a Pub for 9pm because trivia night was going on and you could win a crate of beer. Since dinner happens at 8:30 at the hostel, we had to eat quickly and literally sprint to this pub. That became little more than for exercise purposes when we found out it was the wrong pub. There are 2 with the same name.

I mentioned the “shot bar” earlier, and I have to call it that because I don’t remember the name. The rumor was they had over 300 different shots, and they were only 2 Euros each. At every other bar, liquor is way overpriced, so I wasn’t sure if this was true. It was. We had a great time on Friday night going there for a few shots. We only stayed for 90 minutes because it got crowded & hot, but great times. At first we picked out the fun named shots, but then when we saw them light some shots on fire, we started ordering by just yelling, “En Fuego!” And they’d bring us a shot on fire.

I already alluded to the pub crawl night. That was on Thursday. It was the worst of the 4 pub crawls I’ve done in Europe, but it wasn’t like it was bad, just the least amount of people and not as fun of bars. Oh, and no free t-shirt either.

There was also 1 or 2 nights of just playing drinking games at the hostel bar. The best thing about Barcelona was how you could basically combine all these things over 1 night. On Friday, a group of us started drinking at the 6pm happy hour, went to the shot bar around 11, went to the beach with beers for a couple hours, and still made it back to the hostel to join up with the group going to the dance club (I slept til 1pm on Saturday to pay for this night).

I guess I should put Halloween in the nightlife category. Some people were calling it the biggest night of the year in Barcelona, but it didn’t seem too much crazier than all the other nights. The hostel decorated the bar area and said they’d be throwing a party all night, and they did indeed keep the bar open until 3am on Saturday. We all bought cheap costumes on Friday. No one wants to spend money on something you’re going to throw away the next morning anyway. I found a Zorro mask and decided to go that direction. And since a decent amount of people were asking me all night if I was Batman, I’d say I did a shitty job dressing up. I guess you can decide for yourself. The club on Halloween night was supposed to be the best one in the city, on the biggest night of the year, blah blah blah. I didn’t go. And I got a lot of crap from a lot of people for that. I didn’t see the need to pay 15 euros to get in when I was already ready for bed.

The Seediness

We’ve reached the final section in what has been a novel of a blog posting. I just want to note that Barcelona has been the “seediest” place I’ve been so far, meaning the place someone is most likely to get pick pocketed, mugged or worse. I actually didn’t find it too bad myself and never had any close calls I don’t think. But I heard so many stories about Spain and Barcelona from fellow travelers. A couple people from the hostel said they got their maps taken out of their back pockets, luckily that’s all they had. I heard someone tell a story about the same guy getting pick pocketed twice in one day. There was also the story about the person on the Metro train who tried to exit it, then 2 guys closed the doors on him so he was out of the train but his backpack was still inside. The 3rd man in this operation was in the train, opened the guy’s bag and took anything of value out of it. There was a rumor I heard several times before showing up to Barcelona that in crowded areas a woman would literally throw her baby at you, forcing you to catch it, and then they’d grab your wallet at the same time. Again, I never saw any of this. But at least all these stories will keep me alert in the future. Oh, actually one guy kept trying to steal beers from me & Jared when we were drinking on the beach one night. That is all.