Barcelona and La Merci Festival 2019

Tuesday 24 September
An early start today saw us on the road to the train station at 0730. Our clean and modern hybrid taxi arrived on time and drove like a taxi does in most places but delivered us to the station in plenty of time for the 3 hour journey to Barcelona, at speeds of 300 kph. Our Home Exchange greeter, Leira (the hosts sister) met us and for a while there we thought she may have been sent to mind us as she settled in to watch TV while we got ourselves organised. She was not here when we returned luckily. The wonderful old apartment is a four bedroom, two bathroom, renovated apartment on the third floor, with a retro-fitted, cute cage lift that holds one skinny person. We are only here for a short time but it is very comfortable, even if we only use half the space. As we are only a few blocks walk from the centre of town, We stroll off towards the Rambla and encounter many bars and restaurants along the way. There are also KFC, Starbucks and McDonalds, so, as we have observed before, you could really be in any capital city. After a tapas and a drink, we continued in the glorious 27 degree sunshine, following the crowds. Lady P spied a Desigual store and like a retriever with its tail up, charges towards what proved to be a closed store. Ah, siesta, we think. As the rambling continued past 4pm, we noticed a degree of festivity and correctly interpreted the posters indicating that, yes today, was the last day of a week long festival of summer's end. So, of course stores were closed. As we had walked a fair distance in the hot sun, we decided to keep going and find a little craft beer and tapas bar recommended by Truus and Patrick. And yes we did locate it and gave the products a reasonable test.

Seven out of ten from Flashy. On the way back towards our apartment, we heard some music from what proves to be a 17 piece big band, with a great brass section and a couple of quite young lead singers, belting out some groovy jazz, to which some in the large crowd were jive dancing. Then the female vocalist starts up with a popular song and all this in English. As Flashy has at least a foot in height over most in the crowd (we did mention that the Spanish tend to be short?), he can see it all even from the rear. As we wander off again the band breaks into Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water, so a pretty versatile lot. As we catch the end of a procession along la Ramble, with very tall figures on stilts, we take advantage of closed roads to navigate towards home. Stopping at a little bar for some delicious Galician tapas and Rioja red, a single man beside us in our prime footpath table, engages us in conversation. He is Mongolian, but has been living and working in Germany for 20 years and is visiting Spain for a three day break. There you go, he speaks Mongolian, Russian, German, English and his Spanish is pretty good as well. Our charming hosts give us the English menu and are very warm and friendly. It’s been a nice welcome to Barcelona and we finish the night with a cooling drink in our apartment .