20 years ago today - Day 56

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April 28 - Barcelona adventures

In spite of our late night, we are up and awake by mid-morning. Sonja is soundly asleep so we scrounge a breakfast of sausage and cheese from our panniers. We wait the rest of the morning for Sonja to get up, prisoners without a key. Mike writes his aerograms and I read more of Anna Karenin.

Sonja emerges sometime in the early afternoon and makes us coffee. Sonja's mother is returning from out of town tonight and we have to stay somewhere else, she tells us. I feel a sense of relief.

She drops us off with our bags downtown at the Placa de Catalonia where she first met us. We catch the Metro to the train station and pick up our bikes from special baggage. Mike tried to find us a Servas host to no avail. The only host willing to take last minute requests is in the process of moving to Indonesia and we are in no mood to help him pack. So we cycle down Gran Via to search around for a room in Hostel Bienestar near the Rambla. We shower, dress and go exploring the city our separate ways, agreeing to meet at la Café de la Calle at 8:30 this evening.

It’s a gray, chilly day, all the reason I need to seek out Thermos, a three level sauna highly recommended in Spartacus. It has all kinds of facilities – a TV lounge for movies, another TV lounge for sports, swimming pool and deck lounge, a large whirlpool, a restaurant, two shower rooms (one lighter and one not), darkened hallways, darkened playrooms, darkened porn room, darkened saunas and a huge darkened steam room. With all the money spent on heating, management had to cut corners with the lighting.

The halls are full of handsome young men cruising around, who I soon find out are mostly rent boys. I decide to check out the facilities instead of the roomettes. I grope my way across the pitch-black steam room and discover that I am not the only one groping. I find a man with a lovely, defined body and to save energy we grope together.

All in all, I have fine evening. Just before I leave I meet a handsome lad named Llorenc (Lawrence in Catalan), a student of architecture who beams at me from ear to ear. I am already going to be late to meet Mike so we make a quick arrangement to meet tomorrow. I accept his offer to take Mike and I around on an architectural tour of Barcelona.

It is raining lightly outside. I rush to meet Mike, feeling slightly bad for having kept him waiting for half an hour. Just in the nick of time, I meet him leaving the Café de la Calle, and we decide to go elsewhere. I notice he isn’t himself. I ask him what is wrong, and he explains he has just come from the police station an hour ago. He was strolling around the old section of the city, deserted because it was Sunday morning, with a map and camera wearing his hot-pink framed sunglasses looking like bait in a piranha tank. He attracted two men with a rather large knife, who relieved of him camera and 1000 pesados.

It doesn’t matter where we go. I choose a gay bar named Monroe’s because it is mostly empty, unlike the busy café we just left. Mike is quite distraught, humiliated and angry at himself for being so stupid. It is very hard for know-it-all perfectionists to seriously fuck up like this. We talk for more than an hour, or more accurately he talks and I keep encouraging him. This is more than he has spoken in the whole trip so far. I feel good in this new consoling role, especially after last night’s fight which only I seem to remember.

We have dinner in a Pakistani restaurant (my treat) and walk back to the Hostel Bienestar. We are enjoying one of our better moments as friends and traveling companions. I hope is learning something about being there when the shoe is on the other foot. I tell him about meeting Llorenc and his offer to give us an architectural tour tomorrow, and Mike thinks that would be good. He is feeling notably better.

PHOTO 1: the Rambla
PHOTO 2: Old Town (the Gothic quarter)
PHOTO 3: the cathedral in Gothic Quarter
PHOTO 4: the train station