Now, some of you may be wondering what the hell's going on with me. I mean, come on! I'm writing all these updates for my blog, and they're not even months & months apart! Well, perhaps I'm just feeling a bit efficient at the moment. Stranger things have happened.

So anyway, I didn't just celebrate my thirty-fifth birthday on the day itself. Oh no! Christian & I had a long weekend in Barcelona (there was, conveniently, a bank holiday just after my b/day). I love the place, but - imagine! - Christian has never been to Catalonia. So I had loads of fun sharing my enthusiasm for the city with a newbie.

We did SO MUCH! And we had an apartment slap bang in the middle of the Gothic Quarter, which was pretty damn handy. We ate, drank, walked, admired, and ate & drank some more! Here are a few highlights:

On arrival at Barcelona airport, we headed straight for the first snack bar and had a tallat (or cortado in Spanish), which is basically a half-size café amb llet (café con leche), or big-ass triple espresso with hot milk. And to nibble, what else but an entrepá de truita d'ous (bocadillo de tortilla), a baguette filled with Spanish omelette. And of course, this being Barcelona, the bread was amb tomaquet (con tomate), i.e. rubbed down with fresh tomatoes and olive oil. Oh yeah.

It started to rain just as we got out of the bus at Plaça Catalunya, but it was still warm so we didn't mind the walk past the cathedral and to our apartment. And after sorting out payment etc. we headed out for a wander through town, via the Plaça Reial and the Rambles to the Maremagnum. We had dinner in a small Basque place called Txikiteo, then walked home.

Our first full day was a Gaudí day. After breakfast in the place opposite our flat (where the waitress was astonished that I could speak Catalan, especially in light of the fact that my appearance gave me so totally away as a tourist, as she pointed out - in fact she called me a guiri, which is the word in Spain for Anglo-Saxon tourists, and which took me back to the happy days of my year in Santander...) we went on the Metro a few stops to Gràcia.

First stop Casa Battló (being renovated). Next stop La Pedrera (did the whole tour). Then a quick coffee & snack. Then Sagrada Família (went up one of the towers and down another). Loads more has been built since the last time I visited this church, but it's still a long way from complete.

We headed back into the Barri Gòtic and found our way to Granja Viader, a milk bar & delicatessen that's been in business over 125 years. They sell delicious milk drinks, as well as a marvellously broad selection of cheeses and meat products from all over Catalonia and the Balearic Islands. Which, needless to say, we tucked in to with gusto!

After getting changed for the evening (you don't want to be wearing the same sweaty rags from sightseeing for an evening's entertainment, do you?) we headed out to a few bars in the Gothic Quarter. We started with tapas at Bar El Tropezón, which was an authentic greasy spoon of the sort I liked to frequent in Santander. Then we went to Valentina, a very dark bar with an eclectic taste in chairs and a waiter who looked like an Arab version of my friend Pepe (but he didn't speak Arabic; Christian dropped a tell-tale phrase but there was no response).

The second full day we had in Barcelona started with breakfast at Nemrud Café, just up the road from our flat. I just can't get enough of that café amb llet / suc de taronge (zumo de naranja) / croissant combo!! It's a pity the vibe of the bar was so put out of joint by an English couple with very loud small kids and a very loud laptop running some Barbie film that neither screaming child was in the least bit interested in. There were also lots of Germans in. Tourists everywhere!

As we walked onto Ferrán road to head to the Metro, we ran into a parade of Leonese flag-wavers. There were loads of them, the women in traditional national costume and the men in team-style teeshirts, and their flags were HUGE! We followed them up towards the cathedral, then went into the cathedral's inner courtyard and thence into the church itself. Lovely, but full of tourists. Of course.

We walked from there to the Plaça del Pi (recommended by Lisa in Dublin, but sadly full of scaffolding and workmen and so not as peaceful as she remembers) and then to the Boqueria covered market. Many many many fish! And lots of everything else too, including yummy ice cream. Then we caught the Metro to Plaça Espanya and walked up the hill to the Palau Nacional. It was turning into really quite a baking hot day, so we enjoyed an entrepá de pernill serrà (bocadillo de jamón serrano) and I had several horxatas (horchata, as it's called in Spanish, is a drink made from tiger nuts - no, really! - which tastes almondy) as well as the obligatory tallat.

Next we headed in to the Palau Nacional, which recently became the home of the Catalan National Art Gallery. There are some real treasures here, including the frescoes from a number of Romanesque churches from across Catalonia, which were carefully removed and remounted in their original shapes in the museum. Quite amazing. We were up for more culture, so we headed across the hill to the Fundació Miró. To be honest, the permanent Miró collection wasn't nearly as good as the exhibition of contemporary Chinese art that was on in the temporary hall!

After all that art, my head was spinning. We went for a walk all over the Montjuic Hill - by this time it was a hot hot sunny cloudless afternoon - and ended up outside the Olympic stadium, on a huge open space that was dominated by a series of yellow vertical monster-size lamps. It was empty and felt quite weird; we could see the aeroplanes coming in to land at the airport in the distance. The sun set majestically behind the mountains that hem the city in against the sea.

Then, suddenly, the square was full of people. They had emerged from a concert in a big hall on the far side of the square. Where there had been a vacuum, now there was a throbbing, pulsing mass of life. In this spirit, we walked back down the hill (using the open-air escalataors - don't you just love that?) and met up with my friend Olga the soprano at her studio near Paral.lel Metro station. From there we walked with her to one of her favourite restaurants on the Rambla del Raval, which is a swish new pedestrian precinct built on the site of what were some apparently dingy nasty dangerous streets. Olga's boyfriend Jordi met us there and we had a lovely dinner. We were already nearly home when it started to rain...

...and it didn't stop for a whole day!! Day 4 of our visit was a wash-out. Luckily, there was plenty to do indoors. We started by walking across to the area of town called Born. There we had a coffee in a bar that was run by someone who had the face of a serial killer. He really freaked me out! He didn't do anything, but ooh that look! I had to leave and have another coffee in another bar, just to calm down. (Christian was amused.)

We glanced inside the church of Santa María del Mar before heading to the Picasso Museum. That was chocabloc with tourists - of course - but quite good, despite apparently missing out a whole chunk of his life. I'm assuming those pictures are in the Picasso Museum in Paris (I was there a number of years ago and have to admit to not having total recall of what I saw there).

When we came out - past a queue of tourists (who clearly thought a visit to the museum would be a good way to to avoid the rain) that stretched about ten times as far as it had when we got there in the morning - it was still raining, so we dived into a trendy coffee bar called Babo for a caffeine fix, then wandered back past the church to a Basque place that had caught my eye in the morning. It's called Sagardi, and it's AMAZING!! The next time I'm in Barcelona, I'm SO going back there.

All the pintxos (that's the Basque style of tapa) were piled high on the counter, each one held together by a toothpick, and you just paid for the number of toothpicks left on your plate. The food was fanTAStic! So many things I hadn't had since living in Santander, including anguilas (teensy weensy baby eels) and txistorras (super duper yummy sausages, like a cross between merguez in France and chorizo).

Sated (and happy after quite a lot of wine), we headed back to the flat for a bit of a siesta. Then, when the rain had eased off a little, we went for a long walk through Barceloneta (past a freak in a fish costume) and all the way up to the Port Olímpic marina area, where we had - you guessed it - café amb llet. Then a short Metro ride took us back into town, and we headed back to Valentina for another drink and a nibble. The Arab-looking dude wasn't there, but in his place there was a coterie of chain-smoking plain-looking women of a certain age serving.

We finished off the evening by walking the streets of the half of the Barri Gòtic that we hadn't already seen. These streets turned out to be well dodgy! But thankfully we survived, and found ourselves in yet another Basque place, called Mikel Etxea, where we got stuck in to some good red wine.

And then it was our last day. Boo hoo! I miss Spain! We had an early start, with a coffee at Nemrud, a search for an internet café in Born, a quick shop at the Kukuxumusu teeshirt shop by the murderer's café, then back to the flat to hand back the keys. We'd only just left the building when the guy came running out after us with my phone charger in his hand. Phew! How did I miss that when I was tidying up? Then we walked back past the cathedral, had one last coffee in Pans & Company, then caught the bus back to the airport, where we had another last coffee - well, rude not to! - and a final sandwich at the coffee bar we had first stopped at on arrival. Did I mention it's called "Ars"?