I probably mentioned earlier what a gringo town Barcelona is. The Sun is sold on every corner, everyone speaks English and there are the usual gringo amenities. There are also a load of Northerners with bald heads and football shirts and for some reason a load of Scottish lads with their toaps oaff… (in summer this must be even worse).

What I didn’t mention was that our visit coincided with a rather important football game.

Barcelona Vs Chelsea to be exact.

At least, our visit would have coincided. But we arrived back into gringo town on Monday night (two nights before the game) to an army of Blue Southerners. Now I know that a lot has been said each way about English football hooligan’s but it’s not so much the violence as just the cultural insensitivity. I know we were in gringo town so I guess it´s to be expected, but I can´t see the return leg prompting general hoards of Spanish marching through the streets of Kensington singing loud and fairly inappropriate football chants. In fact, I´ve never even seen Chelsea fans marching the streets of Kensington….

In any case, it was time to move on.

We decided to bite the bullet and take the night train to Madrid (they were playing away in Jove, should be safe…). How they make a make a 400km trip take 9 hours I don’t know but they did.

Because the hobbits had been doing it a bit easy, they decided to forgo the sleeper (26 euros) for a seat (6 euros). Now it´s ok for me, I’m just a little bear, but though they may be hobbits, they’re just not hobbity enough for that. Pain was sure to ensue…

But before that we had a few hours to kill before our 11pm departure. We made the mistake of heading back to gringo town for one last good dinner and so Nato could catch some of the Arsenal game.

Dinner was sensational again and we discovered a dessert that would have had Tegan close to pshting all over the place (it was called Superchocolate, enough said). The game on the other had was dire, made worse by the fact that we were in a 50 capacity pub with 100 loud and fat Chelsea fans, and stuck between some old guy and his deaf son in law Ken - ´Ken! Ken! Ken! Do you want a beer Ken! I SAID DO YOU WANT A BEER KEN!´ – after about 10 minutes the whole bar was shouting at Ken and he still wasn’t listening.

The night train was starting to look appealing….