Dr Rancho’s Completely Made Up Life in Barcelona
Unlike some of my other posts, this is an attempt at prose based partly on some of my own experiences and a mixture of many others around me. Real life in Barcelona can actually be a lot crazier than I make it out. If you haven't been there, I recommend you go. Some of the stories I have heard and events I have been involved in are almost impossible to capture in the written form. Spending a day with some of the people I have lived with and befriended would amaze a lot of people. Story telling in the written form can for me rarely compare to that of a tale delivered by a good aurator. Know though that what follows is not a direct admission of myself, in regards to emotion, illegal wrong doings. It has been a long while since I wrote something fictional and despite this I hoped to capture at least a little of the zeitgeist of Catalunya's capital. I ask you to not to read this too critically or build a picture of me based on what you read as I write through the eyes of my good friend, the famous and fictional Dr Rancho.
A question I get asked about six times a day is “What made you come over to Barcelona?”
Truth be told, I’m not quite sure. Since the end of my University life I have been intending on travelling as much as possible. Due to family circumstances, I had to shelve many of those travel plans, but as many of you may already know I have seen a good bit of Europe over the last year or so. This has largely been linked to the obsession I had with a certain geeky card game (Magic) and with me coming over to Barcelona there wasn’t much of an exception apart from particular differences. Leaving Belfast was harder than I thought it might have been. When home has a lot to offer in terms of friends, family and female companionship it’s hard to wonder why one would bother leaving. Yet, I was restless. The desire for adventure in my heart is hard to quell. I love the gradual swing from the surreal to the mundane. Not knowing a single street in a city to knowing the town like the back of your hand is challenging and rewarding. I wanted this with Barcelona. That and to play cards. When I went over a month in advance, I held the intention of finding employment, a place to live, a social circle – generally just a whole new life. I had been over for a few days with my parents three years prior to my second coming and been amazed by the city but being that it was a family holiday and I wasn’t quite as experienced in exploring new cities, I hadn’t felt the opportunity to ditch the tour bus and find some good watering holes. This time I was taking the chance to do things largely my own way, step into the bubble that is Barcelona and learn its intricacies.
So I came over at the beginning of March. For literally the first month, I partied like a lunatic. I slept on either a couch or a mattress of an apartment rented out by two girls. The two girls had a habit of collecting live-ins. On that first week that I joined the crew, there was the girl who rented the flat out from her landlord, a couch-surfing rogue who had been there for several months, Caldogs (who had been picked up after a walking tour by one of the girls and eventually became one of my best friends) and a mutual friend of the couch surfer and me. I had initially planned on staying with a friend of my parents who I hadn’t really met. I was to go stay with him and shadow him as an English teacher. Having failed to get in touch prior to my stay, I ended up contacting the mutual friend who I knew was staying in Barca and asked if it was possible to crash in the flat. After a month of good times, mad times, awkwardness, amusement and general drama between various groups within the flat, things had to change. When you end up with about ten people in the same flat, several of them sleeping with each other, it’s only a matter of time before shit hits the fan.
I got to know a bit more of the city month by month. When you first get to Barcelona it’s not hard to see why you would want to stay for a while. It is by definition the city that never sleeps. Every night there is always something going on, whether it’s a big musical festival a street party or a secret rave that you know might just be the greatest night of your life. If you’re a morning and afternoon person, you can experience the amazing feel. During the Spring and Summer you see it all – you can hit the beach, walk up a mountain or see any number of weird and wonderful cultural exhibits. The first month you’re there will almost always feel like a holiday. The freshness and exuberance that the hustle and bustle of streets will give you the sense of wonder that so many yearn for. For this reason and many others it’s easy to see why it takes everyone so long to get their national insurance documents and a real place to stay. At least that’s going to be my excuse. Or maybe the partying just took over.
Before I get too carried away in describing what other crap went on during my time here, I’ll give a few words of warning about the streets of Barcelona at night. By and large, you won’t find a fight unless you go looking for it but there’s a lot of other evils you might experience or should be prepared to deal with. Pick pocketing is rife in the city, particularly around Las Ramblas, Raval and the Gothic Quarter. That’s not to say you’re out of the woods whenever you are in another part of town but it’ll be the dimmer, smaller streets where the pick pockets can stalk the unaware outsider. Mugging does happen to unguarded women as well but from what I gather rarely to men. Most of the theft you’re likely to experience is pick pocketing and the chances for anyone spending any extended period of time being a victim of the crime are fairly high. It’s almost a rite of passage. I got caught stupidly unaware when I was near pass out drunk in my second week of being in Barcelona. I think it was late one Tuesday night when I ran around like a drunken man searching for a kebab shop in the Gothic quarter. I must have been so pissed that I believed myself to be invincible or Jesus Christ himself. When some dark skinned guy came up to me asking for a hug, I thought it was all gravy. I thought I would be winning because I thought my wallet was cunningly hidden in an inside jacket pocket and that I would get away Scot free. I would walk away laughing about the whole encounter as if I had gotten one over some street rat. Serves me right. Thankfully I only lost 20 Euros and cancelled all my bank cards, kind of stopped me from spending every penny I had like an idiot and forced me to go out and find some form of cash in hand employment. Perhaps I should have taken it as a sign to come about drunken idiocies.
The pick pockets of Barcelona do operate during the day but just don’t be an oblivious tourist and don’t dilly-dally. If you’re moving from A to B, walk quickly and you’ll be unlikely to be seen as a target. Hide your valuables too. Common sense prevails here people. This is going to sound racist but of the pick pocketing that I experienced personally or witnessed about to take place tended to be carried out by either small Morrocan gangs, Roma-Gypsy men or the big black prostitutes of Las Rambla/Raval area. The latter group aren’t even the slightest bit subtle about it. I lost count of the number of times I saw two or three big black women hanging off some poor bastard too drunk to even know his name whilst another one would rummage through his pockets take him for everything he’s got. Maybe there’s a ton of white professional pick pockets but they don’t make it as obvious. I wouldn’t think there would be many educated white middle class folk moving over to Barcelona to begin a career in theft but I could be wrong. Nor can I imagine many Catalans with all their pomp and swagger decide to take up lowly pick pocket work to fund their snobbery.
Speaking of the Catalans, I’ve generally got mixed feelings for them. Some are ok, but the desire for independence in Catalunya creates in many a massive sense of defiance and a desire to be separate from the rest of the Spanish state which economically depends on the region. I’ve encountered many who hate outsiders and will try and get one up on foreigners by speaking in Catalan even if they’re aware the other person speaks perfect Castellano (regular Spanish). They don’t tend to be fighters though. They’re the quintessential Jack Russells that bark worse than they bite. Don’t rise to it. Even if for some mad reason they do attack you, defend yourself but striking back will always end up working against you with the three police forces that patrol the streets. Spanish police aren’t like UK police. They rarely have any qualms about using violence, sometimes eschewing the regular police procedures and dishing out a beating instead. Fuck paper work when a quick flick with a truncheon gets the message across quicker. A friend and I were out tagging around Raval once when what appeared to be a Raval rudeboy got out of his black Seat Ibiza, demanded to have the graffiti pen were using from my friend and dished out an open palm pimp slap right across the side of his face. His head bounced right across the bonnet of the car and thank God too. If it had been a pussy slap, Cal dogs would probably have pissed himself laughing and we would have ended up in a whole lot more shit than we would have cared for. On another occasion I inadvertently advised an officer of the Mossos at El Prat airport to “fuck off”. That’s a story for another time that involves drunkenness, missing flights, sleeping in a ditch and wandering around farms trying to walk eleven miles back to Barcelona.
Any way, when the shit hit the fan in terms of living arrangements, I got looking for a real place to live, at least for a while. At the beginning of April after a few nights in and out of various hostels, I found a room in another flat and the girls who rented out the flat found a new place to rent having been evicted for constant noise complaints due to the amount of partying going on.
A flat overpopulated with young people on couches, floors, nooks and crannies is a far from unusual thing in Barcelona. The squat culture here is massive, landlords often renting out borderline derelict apartments revamped to be just about liveable. On top of that, it’s typical to see a lot of people having their friends sleep on their couch or floor for extended amounts of time, often rent free or a sublet unauthorized by their landlord. When I moved into my new room, I paid E175 in deposit plus E350 a month for the room. A double room for E350 in a major European city is a pretty good deal, one could pay the same in London and get a single bed in a dive apartment. What you get in Barca for the money is usually pretty decent. Life in my first flat was fairly decent, despite a steady stream of new flatmates in every month and having to deal with a mad-hatter old English man who claimed (amongst other things) to have trained with Bruce Lee for five months and to have snorted cocaine with Jerry Garcia for a year in Amsterdam. I got evicted after about five months of living in that apartment. I had two friends from England came over and we went a little bit too mental for our own good. When you put your converse in your mouth and wear your pants on your head in the middle of your own street, you should probably take care not to wake up every neighbour.
Getting into the party lifestyle is all too easy in Barca… drink is cheap, drugs are everywhere, women are beautiful. I might have drank more than I should have before I moved here but I wouldn’t have necessarily described myself as an alcoholic. Within a month of coming here, well meaning intentions of getting a good job, earning some money and seeing more of Spain and mainland Europe had largely evaporated. The dream was still there, but it had devolved into the status of a whisper. What replaced it was a beer gut, head hurting hangovers and an awful daily routine. I would wake up and spend hours on the internet, blowing savings playing card games online badly. After scrubbing out several times a day and ending up poorer for it I would head out to grab some over priced fast food then go back to the flat to continue living a sedentary lifestyle. The only job I had at the time was that of pub crawl leader.
Pub crawl leader? Alcoholic babysitter more like. Pub crawls in Barcelona started roughly five years ago, since then more and more have popped up each year, only a few living to survive the tale. Most of the pub crawl companies have their promoters taking to Las Ramblas so that they can approach young tourists on holiday to deliver their pitches. The premise is pretty simple, those tourists wanting to go on the crawl pay something like 12 euros and our taken to three bars where they receive a shot in each and afterwards the night is concluded in a nightclub where entrance is free. With the company I worked for, I had it easy. Instead of potentially wasting our time and energy on Las Ramblas, we headed straight to a series of hostels the company had an agreement with. It’s a helluva lot easier to recruit young travellers for a party in Barcelona when they’re relaxed in a hostel bar than picking them up off the streets. I can’t exactly say it’s a hard job, work started at 10 PM and the drop off at the club was between 2 and 2.30. At that point I could either choose to go home and sleep, or get drunk in the club, dance and try and pick up whatever American/Canadian/Australian slut was either naive or horny enough to be taken back to my apartment for a quick fuck. I had my way with a few and I’m sure I could have had a few more if I didn’t end up carrying such a superiority complex with me, one that had to be quelled with gratuitous amounts of free alcohol for me to want to listen to some horrible accent on those kind of women. “Ron y pina, por favour!” was a catchphrase I would utter almost eight times in three hours. Ever seen how they pour a spirit measure in Barcelona? Put a stopper on a bottle then start pouring it into a glass, begin counting. Stop when you get to ten. Yeah, that’s about a quadruple measure. I don’t want to even consider what percentage I’ve increased the likelihood of having a stroke in my fifties.
For some this might sound ideal, apart from the fact it rarely pays the bills. On a good night you get about E40 for four hours work but on average I was coming home with E25 a night. Hardly to be sneezed at whenever life can be lived so cheaply in Barcelona but I wasn’t living life cheaply. Eating out and drinking out all the time adds up really quickly. If I spent only E30 on food a week here I would have been laughing but laziness when it comes to cooking doesn’t cure itself. Alternatively, I could have started taking walking tours. Walking tours are actually pretty lucrative in Barcelona. My company’s walking tour was all tip based, with commission based on number of heads given to the company. If I had gotten myself out of bed for an eleven am start every morning I likely could have earned a bare minimum of forty euros for two hours work and on some days as much as E140. Regretfully rather than getting myself into gear, I accepted hand outs from my mother and maintained the sedentary lifestyle. Another two months would pass before I had to do something to alter my employment status.
A lot of the basic running of the pub crawl had come into conflict with me. The doormen of one of the pub crawl’s clubs had been pretty much blatantly racist to a number of customers on my crawl one night. The fact this happened to take place on the one year anniversary of the death of my father meant I pretty much boycotted the nightclub, only ever returning to it twice afterwards. This meant I was only prepared to work half of the nights the pub crawl operated. If I had been working the walking tour as well, I would have been afforded some leniency but due to this and the fact I arguably took a few too many holidays to see my mother back in Belfast meant that I wasn’t in much of a position to keep hold of my job when I missed a flight back to Barca from Prague. Totally worth it mind.
Without even this meagre source of pocket money I was forced to pavement pound. It didn’t take too long before I found some legitimate employment. By mid-June I was working forty to sixty hour weeks in the probably the most overly touristic Irish bar – “Molly’s Fair City”, you’ll ever find yourself swilling pints of Nigerian-brewed Guinness in. Put it this way, the level of an authentic Irish bar experience might be a bit lacking when it’s run by a camp bald Austrian in his early forties already on to his forth trophy wife – though admittedly she was a truly stunning German brunette. It became a turning point in my Barcelona life. I had to get myself to work on time and dressed smartly for long shifts, learning new skills. When I first started the job I worked stupid hard to become a half way decent bar tender. Both my Spanish and French improved drastically and within a few months of working there my self esteem was at all time high. The next few months have me witness a few ups and downs though. Most of my nights off would begin in me characteristically going to a few different Anglo-phone filled pubs and consuming pint after pint of rum and fruit juice based concoction. I picked up the odd girl that made for an easy lay along the way and but generally I was largely unattached. Apart from the odd lonely night making me long for what I had back home, I was actually fairly content with the way things were going. No worries except my old fear of not using my time effectively in terms of advancing myself academically, artistically, intellectually, spiritually and setting myself up for the future.
At this moment in time, I think it would be wise to take a step out of Barcelona. My plan for months was to complete my six month contract at Molly’s, walk away with a nice tax rebate, massive tips for working so close to Christmas and a fat pay cheque. Unfortunately for my bank balance, things were never going to last too long.
Despite never missing a shift, my last month working for the Irish pub was rife with minor offences that the company saw as treason. I probably should have tried to keep on top of these things better but this was when I was going through the transitional period I experienced when I was evicted and forced to move to a new apartment. Not having access to a decent washing machine or iron meant that I was walking into work with slightly creased shirts. Due to my Y chromosome proving a lack of enthusiasm to go shoe shopping for new shoes I was tramping around the work place in a once pristine graduation shoes were now scuffed and bouncing off my steps like flip flops. In addition, there were some minor late offences. I had I met another girl, who when we initially met did little more than smoke weed and have sex. Having had a little more than mediocre sexual encounters since picking up a French girl in mid-August, I was now feasting to make up for the famine. Part of that meant that I was prepared to be late ten-fifteen minutes just to get one last shag in before I had to go open the bar. To be honest, this was very rarely an issue but to an angry Austrian man, small failures in tardiness add up, big ones are gas chamber worthy offences. However the thing that finally killed my stint with that job was carelessness with alcohol consumption.
Appearing to be “under the effects of alcohol” in any way in Molly’s was an absolute no-no. I know I’m not the only one who would say this but I think to anyone who isn’t Austrian and obviously trying to hide his blatant homosexuality with trophy wives, looking hung over isn’t a bad quality in a bar tender. As its said in one film “Never trust a bartender that doesn’t drink.”. It’s almost the norm in Barcelona bars for the staff to drink behind the bar. In America when you order a shot, it’s almost expected for the bartender to do one with you. I almost never drank behind the bar in Molly’s, mostly because that was the rule and I stuck to it. If I was ever guilty of being drunk behind the bar, it was down to one of two things – one too many the night before or one too many on the break of a split shift. I’d seen supervisors looking far more fucked than I had ever been, even committing that cardinal no drinking behind the bar sin, just they managed to not get caught by boss baldy.
I on the other hand made the mistake twice (the getting caught bit, not the drinking on a school night). Any bartender that can stay in on a Friday night that they have off and not drink should be made a saint. If after three thousand words of this crap you still believe I’m a saint, get your head examined. I got on it one Friday night when work finished for me at eleven. I had work the next morning but I felt as long as I got a good six hours sleep, I would have been fine. Unfortunately though I chose to listen to the little MDMA devil on my shoulder that evening and raved my little titties off until about seven in the morning, leaving me about two hours to sleep off effects of both drugs and alcohol. Surprise, surprise if your boss is in the bar the next day, he’s going to catch you looking like a bag of dead dicks. This however wasn’t the final nail in the coffin. On another occasion, I started drinking at about four one Saturday morning after my Friday night shift, with the intention of staying up to watch the 7 AM Ireland v Wales rugby match. This would have been fine if I didn’t go home at 9 AM to a flat full of partiers. Having two drinks stuffed in my hand meant that I wasn’t hitting the hay until noon. If I had set my alarm for a reasonable time, I wouldn’t have had much of a problem. It would have meant I would have gone to work looking dishevelled but a hangover rarely stops a half decent bar tender from doing a half decent job. The alarm though was never set and I woke up twenty minutes into my shift. I was almost forty minutes late by the time I got into work. Not a problem for my co-worker but a serious problem for aforementioned bald cunt.
I don’t know why I expected any leniency. I knew the place was stupidly strict for an Irish bar but due to the fact I had been pulling 54 working weeks on a 25 hour contract to fill in for my co-workers I thought I would get the odd by-ball. No such luck. It’s not like I can only be angry with the owner of Molly’s, there’s a lot I could have done to handle the situation better. Being knee deep in complacency is never a place you should feel comfortable. I made that mistake all too readily. Ever work a job and think “This is ok, but it’s beneath me. I should be making X doing Y”, yet the whole time you stick to the original job? You think you can make X, go out and make X just be prepared to look for Y. There’s always an excuse why you don’t and it doesn’t get you anywhere. Either be comfortable at what you do and work at least hard enough to get you by, or go bust your ass trying to find your dream job or at least a job you want to do for a comfortable period of time. Somewhere along the line I decided Homer Simpson was some kind of guru “If you don’t like your job, you don’t quit. You just go in every day and do it really half assed. That’s the way! That’s the American way!” That doesn’t work for long. You take that advice and you risk never being truly happy. Same applies to almost everything else. Relationships, lifestyles, you name it, it probably still stands.
If I’m to take my own advice, I need to decide where I want to be for the next while. I wouldn’t say I’m done with Barcelona but I would say I’ve run myself into a rut. I live in a flat with two drug dealers and a 19 year old vagabond with his gigantic Alsation. I make pocket money handing out flyers for another Irish pub and I might have a job working behind the bar coming up there, but do I really want this? If I’m to settle in Barcelona for the next few years, I realistically need to be doing something constructive that will develop me in different ways for a long term career plan. I want to live in a nice apartment where I have a big room and my own feel to that room. I want to be living with people that I will not just be having fun with but will advance my way of thinking, spur me on to better myself in as many ways as possible. I want positive influences around me at the same time as the devilish ones that tell me to get wrecked when I need to. The problem is this, whilst I know my life motivations should come from inside, I make every excuse to not go out and change things. You can have a great idea for an invention for dragon’s den but having the balls to go out and implement the production of said idea is another story altogether.
My thoughts often drift to travelling then returning to Barcelona with more skills, experience and money under my belt. I could go teach English in Asia, work in some mining town in Australia or pick fruit in New Zealand. Every time I hear of someone doing something I haven’t done, I want to go do it. Motor bike through South America Che Guevarra style sounds amazing. Maybe more of the same through Cambodia, Laos and Thailand would be great too. Of course, that would require me to learn to motorbike first and get to Asia but maybe it could be done.I want to go out and learn things intensively somewhere it’s cheap to learn and different to the rest of the world. Six weeks Thai boxing training in some camp near Phuket is something I think about every day. Maybe I could even learn professional masseur skills or Thai cooking when I’m out there. Imagine ladies, a tall handsome Irish man that could kick just about anyone’s ass then feed you noodles as he cracked your back into place. Would be hard to beat, no?
Seriously though, it’s about time I got my act together. I’m going to head back to Belfast next month. Whether this ends up for a meagre four days or a month or two, it’s got to be done. Sometimes you miss the comfort of what you know best too much not to go back to it. Sometimes what you know best has its own surprises you don’t expect.
Anyway, if you have read all of this complete rant then you’re probably dumber than me for writing it. Remember though, Dr Rancho lives only in your mind.
*If you’re conservative enough that if you read the words “drug dealers” and thought “scum bags” then you probably shouldn’t live in Barcelona. They’re just normal dudes who happen to make their living selling drugs to people that want to buy them. Even if I don’t take a lot of drugs, I don’t decree anything unethical in the simple buy and sell transaction of them, aside from the number of deaths it takes you to bring you your gram of cocaine which largely could be avoided with the correct legalisation and control model.
