Weekend in Barcelona
Day 1
Today was our first day of a three-day trip to Barcelona. This morning I was finishing getting the bags ready and we had ten minutes before we had to leave. I put some flax seeds in a Tupperware and put the Tupperware in my rucksack. The flax seeds are in case of dire constipation emergencies. Flax seeds are 27% fibre and guaranteed to make you do a poo if you're constipated, as I often am.
5-year-old has a Lego advent calendar. Every door hides a small bag of Lego behind it. This morning, 5-year-old frowned and said, “Daddy, the door of my advent calendar is empty today.”
Instantly, I felt a surge of irritation at Lego, and I was ready to launch into an angry tirade containing expletives unsuitable for children, about how Lego's advent calendars are ***ing **** and they can **** their ****ing calenders up their ****ing ****". But when I went to look, I realised he'd simply opened yesterday’s door by mistake.
Then we all rushed to the station. We arrived with ten minutes to spare. We had five bags (seven if you count my eye bags), two children, and one pushchair. The train came. We got on and found our seats. The train was busy. A boy walked past wearing a Santa hat with flashing stars. Sitting next to me was a weird man whose jacket was ripped in several places, mostly the cuffs and the sleeves. The sleeves of his jumper had threads coming off. He looked tired — his eyes were just like Droopy’s. I felt sorry for him. Then I realised I was sitting next to the window and looking at my reflection.
I looked down at the sleeves of my jacket. The fake leather was peeling, like eczema skin or a bad sunburn. My coat is from Zara, which is supposed to make quality clothes for rich people, and yet the fake leather is flaking off, exposing the woven mesh underneath. Girlfriend says I should be happy because I got four year's worth of wear out of the coat but I'm not happy. In fact, I'm never buying clothes made from imitation leather again. I still have a real leather coat I bought fifteen years ago and it looks almost as good as new.
The train set off. 1-year-old sat on my lap. Outside the window were hills and fields. The sun was low in the sky. And then there we were: Barcelona. The Big Apple. The City That Never Sleeps. Oh wait, that’s New York. Barcelona is the city with a big cathedral. The city Freddie Mercury sang about for the 1992 Olympics. The Catalan capital.
We got off the train and left the station. Concrete buildings, concrete roads, concrete pavements. People everywhere. Palm trees lining the streets.
We took a bus to the hotel. We checked in. We took a lift up to the hotel room. The hotel room was the same room as last year. 1-year-old immediately busied himself unravelling rolls of toilet paper in the hotel room's bathroom. I didn't care; the hotel was paying for the toilet paper, not me.
I lay down on the king-size bed and breathed a sigh of relaxation.
“Come on, get up," said Girlfriend. "If we leave now we can get to the Seat Christmas village before the queues get long.”
She said 'Seat' like the car company.
So 5-year-old and I took the stairs down while Girlfriend and 1-year-old took the lift. As 5-year-old and I passed the second floor I saw a man in a chef's hat pushing a trolley of delicious food for the hotel breakfast: kiwis, grapefruit, the finest pastries money could buy. Then he whisked the trolley away and he was gone. I can’t wait for breakfast tomorrow. The best thing about our trip to Barcelona last year was the hotel breakfast.
We walked to the Seat Christmas Village. There was a huge line outside.
I went up to a woman near the front.
“Have you been waiting long?” I asked her.
She winced, as if in pain. “Almost an hour,” she said.
Well fuck that then.
So instead we walked down Passeig de Gracia, the most expensive street in Catalonia. In the Barcelona edition of Monopoly, Passeig de Gracia replaces Boardwalk, the most expensive street on the board. We walked past shops like Burbank, Prada, Versace, and Dior. I had as much chance of buying clothes here as a kid in Somalia has of buying a Nintendo Switch. If I hadn’t sold my niche cryptocurrencies three years ago — cryptocurrencies that would be worth three million euros today — I could have walked into any of these shops and demanded to buy a new suit. “And throw my old clothes away,” I’d tell them, and they’d chuck my torn jacket, fraying jumper and stained trousers in a special furnace for poor people’s clothes. As soon as the flames begin licking the fabric, ghosts would emerge from my clothes and fly howling around the room, like the monstrous apparitions that emerge from the Arc of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Arc.
My mouth began hurting; it’s an off-and-on infection that started a month ago. Plus I was carrying 20 kg 5-year-old on my shoulders. And 1-year-old was crying because he was hungry. I was teetering on the edge of my breaking point. I was about to launch into a tirade of expletives when Girlfriend suggested we stop in a cafe so she could breastfeed 1-year-old. So we went into a cafe. Girlfriend ordered a tea and 5-year-old ordered a chocolate drink. I watched a young woman with long straight black hair and octagonal glasses. She was working on a laptop with a look of intense concentration on her face while occasionally glancing at a book. She was the epitome of hard work. I wish I worked like that. When I sit down to work, I get distracted instead, and end up doing some trivial task organising my photos instead or writing this diary. It's probably why I'm poor.
After the cafe, we went to the Barcelona Lego Store. Girlfriend wanted to buy 5-year-old a Lego set of Santa and his sleigh. But when she went to the till to buy it, the shop assistant told her the card readers weren't working today. As we didn't have any cash, Girlfriend had to put it back. A good thing too because the set cost €40.
"The woman at the till said the problem is international," said Girlfriend. "There's an international failure of card readers."
I think she meant just in Lego shops. Otherwise, we'd have gone outside and there'd have been mass looting and panic as society broke down, and huge lines outside ATMs so people could withdraw paper money just to buy groceries.
Before we left the Lego Store, I made a figure at the Build a Minifigure area and then pocketed it when no one was looking. I always steal a minifigure when I come to the Lego shop. It's like a tradition.
For lunch we went to a cafe and ate sandwiches. The cafe was busy. Two teenagers were looking around in vain for a table, so I waved to them and offered them half of our table. I even gave up my seat and ate standing up instead. It was my good deed for the day. Girlfriend wasn't happy though because I gave up 1-year-old's seat too, which meant she had to hold 1-year-old on her lap while she ate her sandwich.
We went to a place called the Paradox Museum, where there were all kinds of optical illusions, like a spinning tunnel that made you feel dizzy, and an infinity dodecahedron that seemed to go on forever when you peered inside it. Unfortunately there was no mirror that could make me handsome; no technology is capable of that yet.
We left the Paradox Museum. The sky was starting to get dark. We walked to a Christmas fair by the Barcelona docks. The walk was down a long, straight street that seemed to go on forever. It was just like an illusion from the Paradox Museum: an infinity street. All the streets in Barcelona are like this. The entire city is built as a precise grid. The streets go straight on for kilometres, without so much as a single curve.
The fair was packed. There was hardly room to move. 5-year-old wanted to go on the Ferris wheel but the queue was too long. The queue for a VR ride was too long as well. There was an exhibition of local aquatic companies with arts and crafts for the kids. And that's how I came to be cutting and glueing card at a table with children. I made an advent calendar. It was only afterwards I realised I only put 16 doors, making the advent calendar useless.
We went back to the hotel. We ate takeaway pizza from boxes while watching The Incredibles on the hotel room TV.
I'm looking forward to tomorrow morning because of the hotel buffet breakfast.
Day 2
Here it was, the moment I'd been waiting for: the buffet breakfast. I carried 1-year-old down the stairs where a woman in a waistcoat greeted us with a smile and swept us into the dining room. There were white-sheeted tables covered in plates of delicious food: doughnuts, croissants, bacon, eggs, hash browns, grapefruit, melon, and pancakes. Unfortunately, I was too tired to enjoy any of it; I just mindlessly shovelled food into my mouth, like a robot eating coal to resupply its energy reserves.
Since this was Spain, there were also some strange foods on offer. You know what everyone likes for breakfast? That's right: jalapeno peppers. And you know what else? That's correct: pickled garlic. Forget breakfast cereals, muesli, and toast: what people wanted for breakfast were chilli peppers and garlic. At least, I was eating them, simply because the buffet was free and I had to try everything on offer.
I ate a big ball of soft cheese, putting the whole lot in my mouth. It was dripping with olive oil. Balls of pure cheese are either really good for you or really bad for you; I didn't know which.
My family finished eating and went back up to the hotel room while I stayed behind so I could eat more food. Eventually, Girlfriend had to call me to ask when I was coming.
We went to the Seat Christmas Village. It was a Christmas Village owned by the car company Seat or something? There were Seat cars in the windows, next to Santa's workshop. There was a conveyor belt of toys going past: a chocolate pig, a giant cupcake made of plastic, a nutcracker, and that timeless perennial Christmas favourite, a pig wearing clothes and standing on a pair of skis.
I waited for Lego to come around but it never did. Maybe the Lego was in Santa's sacks. If I could have just found a way into the shop window display without anyone seeing me, I could have stolen those sacks and had enough Lego to last until 5-year-old's eighteen.
The queue was moving slowly but we eventually got inside. There were displays supposed to be Santa's workshop. In the corner of one of the displays was a little garbage truck made entirely of chocolate and decorated with candy canes, icing, and smarties. I wished I'd made something like that as a kid but all my mom knew how to make were fairy cakes. You can't even call them fairy cakes anymore because it's politically incorrect; you have to call them homosexual cakes instead.
There were fake pine trees covered with hundreds of tiny lights. I wished there was an entire forest like that. I would crawl inside and make it my home.
We had lunch in a barbecue restaurant. They sat us next to a cigarette machine and the chips were cold.
After that, we passed by a food shop called Taste of America. Taste of America? How can you taste America? Do you eat bags of soil with a spoon? I went inside on a whim. They sold US foods, like Quaker Oats and Kellogg's Rice Krispies. This surprised me because I thought Rice Krispies was British. They'll be telling me Corn Flakes and Coco Pops aren't British either.
The woman working in the shop suggested I try a Reese's Buttercup because "they're so good, they're like a drug." It only cost €1.70, so I bought one. I bit into it. It was peanut butter covered in chocolate. Salty and sweet. It tasted amazing at first, but by the last bite, I thought I was going to be sick. I won't be getting another one.
We walked around Barcelona some more. My brain felt numb from cold, dehydration, and boredom.
While Girlfriend and 5-year-old went to see a play version of The Little Prince, I walked around Barcelona while carrying 1-year-old in the sling. 1-year-old fell asleep. I passed a florist where a young woman was making a bouquet. She looked like a successful adult. I imagined she owned the business herself. After work, she'd go back to her nice apartment with her loving boyfriend. I don't know how people have lives, and friends, and jobs. I don't have a life, friends, or a proper job. My life just involves drifting from one day to another. People make me anxious. Jobs scare me. I wonder when I'll change and become a proper adult. Maybe at 36, I'm already too late.
Above the street, apartment windows were lit up with warm yellow lights, while down on street level, I was walking around in the cold with nowhere to go. I felt homeless. One of my greatest fears is being homeless: walking around the streets aimlessly, getting more and more tired, with no home to go to. My fear comes from a situation when I was aged twenty and got drunk one night. I left a club without my coat and ended up walking around Birmingham city centre for hours, lost. It was snowing. The streets were deserted. Nowhere looked familiar. I sat on the steps of an apartment building and decided to just stay there and try to sleep. For the first time, I could see how homeless people must live. It scared me. I've had a fear of homelessness ever since.
Anyway, back to today. I found myself walking down Passeig de Gracia, one of the biggest streets in Barcelona. The street was covered in glowing gold lights for Christmas. The street was long and straight, like all streets in Barcelona, so I kept walking along in a trance while staring up at the lights. I eventually came to one of the famous Gaudi buildings, which was swarmed by throngs of tourists. 1-year-old woke up. He didn't cry. He just sat in the sling, like a baby spider monkey clinging to its mother, and stared out at the lights.
I carried my coat in my arm. 1-year-old wasn't wearing his coat either. Our mutual body heat was enough to keep us warm.
I met Girlfriend and 5-year-old outside the Seat building because it was a convenient meeting spot. Girlfriend said, "The play was amazing. It made us cry. We both cried."
We ate dinner in a pizza restaurant. I spoke to my brother on the phone. We talked about how our jobs are going to be replaced by AI in the near future. However, my brother can always go back to his old job, digging around in the dirt as an archaeologist, while I have no old job to fall back on. My last remaining hope is that I can seduce a billionaire heiress.
Day 3
I woke up in the middle of the night with the feeling of a big poo inside me that needed to get out. I slipped quietly out of bed, careful not to wake my sleeping girlfriend and children, and crept to the toilet. I sat on the toilet and waited for the poo to come out, but nothing happened. I could feel the poo was a big one, the mother of all poos. In an attempt to open my stinker, I tried a relaxation technique where I imagined my perfect life, which consists of playing Minecraft every day and having a haram of women to fulfil my every sexual need. In my mind's eye, there I was, sitting at a computer and building wonderful houses and buildings in Minecraft out of virtual blocks, while a group of bikini-clad women next to me argued about who would be next to massage my wing wong. The fantasy worked, and the poo shot out my bum with the speed of a torpedo. I stood up and looked in the toilet bowl. It was a gigantic poo, perhaps the biggest I’ve ever seen. I flushed it and went back to bed.
In the morning, I woke up tired but with a pleasant ceiling of emptiness in my bowels. We had breakfast, left our bags at the hotel lobby, and checked out.
I saw on my phone that a place called George Orwell Square was only a short walk away so I persuaded Girlfriend to join me in taking a look. It was a little square with cafes. No statue of George Orwell. There was a cannibis shop and a tattoo parlour. There was nothing there related to George Orwell. I guess he has a square named after him because of his book, An Homage to Catalonia, in which he recounted his time fighting anarchists in Barcelona. I've listened to a good chunk of it on audio tape and I remember he used the word "Poum" so many times it got on my nerves.
Finally we went to a strange shopping market where the shops were all little specialist shops, like a Harry Potter shop, a Lord of the Rings shop, a Dragon Ball shop, and a Lovecraft shop.
(I'm now writing this several months later so I can't remember much else. Sorry.) We picked up our bags from the hotel and went home.
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