Autumnal Barcelona, Spain

Sunday in Barcelona and despite all the shops being closed, the streets were packed with locals and tourists out for their Sunday strolls. The air swayed a bit and in the chill shade, it felt decidedly like autumn. The leaves of the Spanish trees fell all day long and filled the air with the smell of dry folliage, but they lacked the bright colors of back home.

I set off with a fearless five, but I quickly found that half the group was in a rush to get to a destination, and I had already been lulled into the casual attitude of the Sunday strollers.

We split from the most determined of the group and let them run to wherever the hell they were so hell bent on going. The remaining three of us found an over priced cafe on Barcelona’s busiest street, La Rambla, and ordered some drinks. The Coca-Colas they brought us were the size of small children and cost $10 each, if you can believe it. We ordered one dish of seafood between the 3 of us, but when it came, it smelled and tasted to me to have come straight from the stale, dark, fishy, foam covered pools of ocean water that sit untouched for years in little alcoves and marinas near big cities. The bill came to over $40 and, like many times before, I vowed never to eat in such an over-priced tourist cafe. Until the next time.

Soon after lunch we found that yet another among us had secretly brought with her an ambition to actually see or do something productive with the day. She too, needed to be purged from the group, and she presently went on her own way to see whatever the hell she was so hell bent on seeing. I sat with my friend on the green, pidgeon-soiled grass surrounding Barcelona’s Placa de Catalunya and watched the homeless men sun themselves around the fountain.

The air was chill, fresh and still held the smell of the falling leaves around us. I worried about what exactly I was sitting in, this not being the most pristine patch of nature I’d every sat upon. When the church bells rang two o’clock the pigeons of the square, maybe 400 of them, took to flight, circling around and around and around the Placa de Catalunya, like some sort of crazed school of fish in a small fish tank. Flying pigeons, to me, are nothing but the Devil’s own dive bombers, and I just knew that one of those flying rats would swoop over and drop me a present right on my shiny dome. But nothing of the kind happened, and if I tried to forget the danger for a minute, the flying circus was actually quite a spectacle of grace.

We lazily walked back to the ship, noticing every falling leave, every street performer and the racks of insipid gossip magazines along the way. Did you know that David Bechham is cheating on Posh Spice? Who is David Bechham you ask? Exactly. Who cares.

I bought a small ring of brushed silver today in Barcelona, and then watched as Spanish police ran after one of our own Indonesian crew members, who was unlucky enough to be walking next to the group of hooligans that the police were actually looking for. Noticing that the crew member did not look like the others, nor spoke the same language as the others, they let the crew member be on his way. I remembered seeing the group of hooligans earlier in the day. They had been shouting across the street to an old, visibly angry Spanish man who held a leather belt in his hands like a medieval weapon of torture and screamed after the youths, shooting them looks out of his eyes like brimstone and knives.