Barcelona

I'm in Barcelona for the night before flying to Marrakech tomorrow morning. When I arrived this afternoon, the streets around my hotel seemed eerily quiet as if something had just ended and everyone had left. I'm staying in a hotel not far from the place I stayed in when I was in Barcelona in April. I know this because I can see the same Gaudi building from this hotel window as I could from the other. Thankfully this hotel is of a much higher calibre than the other place, which to this day remains the place where I had the worst night's sleep. Probably because I didn't get any sleep at all. That place (which was actually a hostel) was terrible - I ended up sharing a room with 5 others of which 4 snored terribly (the worst being a girl) and the heating was turned up so high you would have thought that a blizzard was raging outside. You couldn't open a window to let any cold air in, you couldn't turn the heating down and I couldn't sleep due to the cacophony of snoring - it was like an out-of-time orchestra, full of wind instruments.

Anyway the current hotel is far better and I don't have to share the room with anyone else. I would describe the style as modern, all walnut brown wood and muted greys, against a backdrop of white. It's lovely but now I find this modern look so bland and boring. You can't find fault with it but it really doesn't have any character, any heart or soul. If it was a person, it would be that good-looking guy who turns out to be incredibly dull. And I've said guy instead of girl as it's a very masculine room. I look at the room and I want to inject some texture or colour or pattern into it, something to bring it to life. There's nothing really to capture your interest, no surfaces tempting you to run your hands over them, no visual or tactile pleasure. My leather tassle bag is the sole item bringing a bit of character to the room. On closer inspection I did notice that the wallpaper was made up of millions of ridges, like very fine corrugated paper and I immediately ran my hands over it. But you need to get quite close to see the textured quality, a metre away it looks like a plain white wall.

When I arrived in the room, I did what I always do when I arrive in a hotel room for the first time. I dumped my bags and went into the bathroom to see what that was like and to see if there were any goodies there. Once again, clean and modern but overall bland. I glanced over the toiletries, opened the bottles, had a sniff and ear-marked the items I'm going to take with me. I don't actually need anything but I liked the smell of the green tea shower gel and shampoo so those bottles will be finding their way into my suitcase. The soap smelled too normal to lift so that can stay.

After checking in, I went to find some food and catch up on the Sunday papers. I read about that woman Karen Matthews who was behind the abduction of her own daughter. It really makes you wonder what British society has come to. Last week I read about a man who made his own daughters pregnant so he could claim more child benefits, and this week this woman not fit to be a mother, orchestrating the disappearance of her own daughter so that she could "find" her and claim the reward money. Anyway, I ate and read the papers and then had an argument in Spanish about the bill as they charged me two euros for a bit of butter and alioli. It's a bit steep, particularly when a big basket of bread cost half that and most places don't charge for these things, it's quite normal to have alioli with your bread here (but maybe not butter). It was a pleasant experience arguing in Spanish as I could see how much progress I had made - I don't think the waiter was impressed when I called him a robber but in my head, I was just practicing my languange skills with a real-life situation.

I'm off to hear some live music tonight, meeting up with a friend who lives in the city. And then it's up bright and early tomorrow morning for the next leg of the journey - onward bound to Marrakech!