La Vita é un Sogno Senza Fine

Or so say the handpainted words on the door of my hostel room. 'Twill do as a motto for the day, although it does make me want to start singing 'this is the song that never ends...'

Well, it's midday on my first day in Barcelona...and here I am on the internet. Oh dear. But I already feel like I've been here ages...and I am shortly going to go and consult my guidebook to decide what to do this afternoon, so I had to come back to the hostel anyway. I thought I might use this as a bit of a diary...but an attempt to create a written diary last night took me three quarters of an hour just to describe yesterday completely, so I won't subject you to the ordeal of reading that sort of rambling, but will just describe a couple of the things I've done so far today.

I have spent the morning wandering around the neighbourhood of Las Ramblas, picking my way through the Barri Gothic, all old medieval buildings of just the variety I adore (and they do better bridges than even Oxford or Cambridge...;) ), and then wondering at all the human statues along Las Ramblas - there is a devil who does a rather fantastic vanishing act into a box, a head on a platter, several angels and gods of various types, Obelix (who was basically just a tubby man with two beer mugs), and rather intriguingly a guy who was setting up a toilet. Will have to go back and see what he does with that...also many outdoor pet-selling stalls, where there was the rather amusing phenomenon of all the street pigeons clinging onto the outsides of the budgie cages to snaffle their food. I also had a wander around the Mercat de le Boqeuria, and I think I may head back there shortly to acquire a rather yummy-looking drink of kiwi juice. I shall avoid the Icelandic stalls of salted fish, though.

So far I am finding Barcelona a little hard to get - maybe this is because I've never been to Spain before and have never been exposed to the language even in Britain. But it feels somehow that much more foreign to me than Berlin or Paris or Milan or Rhodes ever did...I don't really know why. Maybe it will start to make more sense to me as I'm here longer.

Okay, time to go out and actually experience it a little more, methinks.