Mexico, cycling Britain, then Barcelona

day 15

http://www.gurneysjourneys.com/barthelona.htm

I think i’m nearly there. I went back to the good English teaching job and because they haven’t got any classes right now they have offered me a weeks work on a residential course. This is one of the strangest jobs i have ever heard of. From what I can gather, I go to a hotel in the mountains where there are hiking tracks and quad bikes, I get fed three hearty meals a day, including plenty of wine and baileys if i fancy it, and my only responsibility is to give English conversation lessons for four hours a day. In total there will be me, one other teacher, and just the one student! And for my trouble I get paid 700 euros!!! That’s a phenomenal wage. Plus, as i might have mentioned I am homeless at the moment. Does it sound too good to be true? We’ll see.

Today truly is a day of celebration; I got paid 34 euros for my flyering job! I have no idea how I wangled that. I went to the club to get paid and my contact Nadine, had been sacked. I was sent downstairs to an office and after accidentally walking into the kitchens I found a grumpy man sitting behind a desk smoking a cigarette. He bluntly asked me my name and then tried to give me 6 euros. This man had never set eyes on me before, and all he had was a list of names. Luckily I spoke enough Spanish to query the rate he had given me per flyer, and then somehow he recalculated it as 34 euros!! Result!

Then… I got to talk about GCSE Maths text books for half an hour with a lovely man called James. It turns out there are people in Barcelona looking for English speaking Maths tutors and they sometimes ring you out of the blue. Unfortunately, with my enthusiasm, I lost all business sense and not only gave him my advice over the phone for free, but also told him he could probably work through the text book without my help for the first few weeks. Hmmm.

All the bad news came from my friend’s boyfriend who, after being delayed at Gatwick for four hours was finally told that his flight was cancelled. He has been bussed to Brighton and is currently enjoying a few hours of sleep at the Ramada Inn. Guess which airline? Yup, Easyjet obviously.

day 5

http://www.gurneysjourneys.com/barthelona.htm

After rising early to send applications for “conference sales person” and “AVIS reservation agent”, including such terrible, desperate phrases as “I believe I would be a valuable addition to your team” the day was mostly spent wandering around Barceloneta.

At the Marina the tourists were milling around. Occasionally they would wander into the “100 years of Barcelona Buses” exhibition, but they would soon realize it was all in Catalan and not meant for them. At makeshift stalls black guys were selling  fake designer bags and sunglasses in between being chased off by the police. It is quite a spectacle watching how quickly they swoop up all the handbags, throw the sack over their shoulder and run off, only to spread them out on the ground again a few hundred meters down the road. If you are bargaining with them as the cops close in you can get a pretty good price.

The beach was filled with foreigners; gangs of English lads singing Happy Birthday and waving family sized bottles of beer, leachy, hairy men in small trunks chasing women, and loads of people were braving the apparently very polluted sea . We ate chorizo and bread and trawled through the rooms for rent in a classifieds paper. I have stepped up the search, I am now only going to see flats of genuine interest and I have a list of key questions to ask before viewing. Unfortunately no one is answering their phones today.

This is my last night in Ian’s flat, tomorrow I start paying 20 euros a night. We spent it watching the first half hour of “Y tu Mama Tambien” without subtitles. It does nothing for my confidence when I realize that although I claim to be an “advanced” Spanish speaker, I would only understand the dialogue if I sat inches away from the screen and had regular dictionary breaks and chances to regain concentration. That’s nowhere near fluent. Damn.

day 4

http://www.gurneysjourneys.com/cycling_blog.htm

Unbelievable, and rather scary. My “friend” Ian has asked me to leave this flat in two days. I wasn’t going to be cheeky and stay for ages (honest!!), but i was kind of banking on a week here. The hardest part for me is that he has said to Jane, my traveling buddy and best friend, that she is welcome for as long as she wants. What did i do wrong? I know phoning all the International Schools while he was asleep in the next room might have been a bit annoying, but it was 10:30am!! He should have been awake. Or maybe it was the pilfering of too many precious English tea bags.

I spent the morning on the internet with a slightly anxious butterfly feeling in my stomach. What am I doing here? I haven’t heard back from the English teaching interview, and my best prospects are an application I am making through a friend’s brother’s girlfriend, and possibly getting some substitution work at one of the five International Schools here. At this point i discover the cheapest temporary accommodation available in Barcelona is a 14 euro a night hostel way out of the city, or 140 euros for a double room for the week. That is a lot of money that i don’t have.

Our plans for picnicking on the beach went wrong when we found ourselves trailing to random corners of the city to look at rooms. The 140 a week place is booked, and I learnt that asking a few key questions on the phone could save you a lot of traipsing around . The 350 double in Glóries was a decent flat in a dodgy looking area, the 480 room with sea view and terrace was not all it was cracked up to be. I was imagining (for that price) a beautiful modern apartment - lovely tiled floors, all mod-cons. In reality there was a 70’s kitchen with tatty curtains where there should have been cupboard doors, a room which “will be the lounge” was piled high with boxes, junk, and bed bases, and the bedroom itself was average - apart from the sea view. I didn’t realise they cost that much. The last place I saw today was a gem, a double room in Poble Sec for the absolute bargain price of 260 a month. To enter the flat you had to open the shutter of a small sewing workshop that belonged to Julia. The room itself was locked, via a tiny padlock. I couldn’t actually see in but the chipboard door said enough. Towards the back of the flat was a table and chairs and an opening onto a dark patio/washing area. The shower faced the patio and had a short swing door - which meant I would be able to wave at my greasy Ecuadorian flat mate whilst washing, and the toilet was out here too. So there you go, there are places in Barcelona  worse than nearly all of the accommodation I saw in Mexico.

For a top quality night I snubbed drinks with the flat mate who wasn’t letting me stay, and spent the evening alone, trawling the telesales jobs in Metrpolitan magazine for the ones that didn’t sound too hideous. There weren’t many.

www.gurneysjourneys.com

day 3

To solve the shower problem we paid 4 70 to visit the Olympic pool in Montjuic park. The  swimmers were extremely keen types, with goggles and teeny little trunks. They ploughed up and down - front crawl at all times. We spent less than fifteen minutes in the pool and were the only people who didn’t put our heads under the water. On the other hand we made very good use of the sun beds around the pool, and in the second changing room we discovered a jacuzzi and a steam room. On leaving we felt relaxed, and had clean hair - ready for our lunch date with a friend of a friend of a friend.

We really did scrape the barrel looking for contacts in Barcelona, but Kirsten works for Time Out and actually gets paid to go out to lunch so it was an opportunity not to be missed. It must have felt a bit like an interrogation for her though.. advice on this please… how do we do that.. etc, and you can’t help but feel looked down upon as the newcomer. In fact according to the BCN Week, an American free paper, we have arrived about five years too late. The theme of this week’s paper is explaining why Barcelona is past its prime; overrun by tourists because of budget airlines, but most offensive to the proper “local” foreigners are the stag and hen weekenders which bombard the city. It is now the second most popular “hen” city, and many references are made, just to reinforce our stereotype, about Brits throwing up drunkenly in the street.

This afternoon I started on the flat hunting.. just to gauge prices. My first stop was a small but homely three bedroomed place where another contact of ours used to live. After chatting in slightly stinted Spanish to Andrea for half an hour, I discovered she was from New Zealand. And then you have the dilemma… carry on in Spanish for practice, but feel like a twat… or switch to English. Neither of these options is good for a housemate. (My master plan is to move in with Spanish speakers and thus become fluent). The other flat we viewed today was “2 Spanish girls” looking for a flat share. When we arrived it turned out they were Mexican, this was great for a rant about Mexican Independence Day, but the kitchen was tiny, and the girls clearly hyperactive.

Tomorrow I’m biting the bullet and going to look at places which are way out of my budget, just to see what’s around you know?

day 2