Barcelona by night

I came to Spain to make skydive over Castellón de la Plana but in the meantime I visited Barcelona. I came to this city at 9 pm. Next day at 9 am I had a train to Castellón and I decided not to sleep and see how Barcelona looks at night. It turned out, it looks a little different that I had imagined.

I visitied some most famous places, e.g. Placa D’ Espanya, Font màgica, Las Ramblas, Sagrada Familia. How they looked like? Placa D’ Espanya was quite nice. In Font magica there wasn’t any water. On Las Ramblas I was expecting some tourists because I’ve read before that it’s very touristy street, but in fact there were any tourists. Instead, there was plenty of prostitutes and people selling beer and drugs. And police. They were riding from time to time, sellers where hiding then cans of beer in refuse bins and police was riding further… but sometimes police was not so naive and they asked dealers to remove it from refuse bin. I was happy, I was seeing police quite often because the area didn’t look safe.

– Hola, ¿qué tal? – asked some guy
– Bien, gracias – I replied, and it was only I could say in Spanish
– You want beer?
– No, thank you
– Hash?
– No, thank you
– So maybe sex?
– No, thank you (I’m not sure if he wanted to sell me sex or buy it from me…)

Some other guy wanted to go with me to a party, some other to drink with me wine and when I refused and went further he shouted that he needs my help… I’m not sure how really dangerous was this place, no one was aggressive, but I wouldn’t go there once again alone at night.

Some time later I read Antonio Salas book “The Year I Trafﬁcked Women”. He is spanish journalist and he was pretending to be a dealer of women to infliltrate real dealers groups. This book opened my eyes. When I was walking in Barcelona I was sure these prostitutes were just working… Maybe it’s not “normal” work but I didn’t suspect, that most of them are in fact slaves. I recommend you to read this book if you want to know how big is sex business, how many women are slaves and why.

One of the places I wanted to see in Barcelona was also Sagrada Familia. I was glad I was in this city at night because I saw before this building on photos and it looked really nice with lights at night. At home I checked on Google Maps where this basilica is, I printed the map and… I was looking for it in Barcelona and couldn’t find. I was walking in some narrow streets and small squares and was wondering why I don’t see the basilica. My map was small and not accurate but Sagrada Familia is big so I should see it even if I wasn’t exactly there. I was wondering what was my mistake. After long time of walking somewhere around I heard two english-speaking guys and asked them if they knew where Sagrada Familia was. It turned out, it is far away from that point. They explained me how to get there and one of them told it’s about 1 hour of walk, but another one that it’s only 30 min. I believed the second one because he was less drunk, but in fact the more drunk one was true :) After I came back home I checked once again in Google Maps where I was walking and where I made mistake and it turned out it wasn’t my mistake. It was incorrectly marked in Google Maps. Now I see it is correctly marked, but I was there in November 2011. And I haven’t got a smartphone yet.

But finally I got to Sagrada Familia. And what? Dark, no lights… I wanted to make photo of this building but instead I made photo of Sagrada Familia metro station ;) And I sat in stairs to metro station, because my feet were already hurting because of walking and I waited there for first morning metro.