Second Time Lucky

Day 2 - 21st September

“TRING TRING TRING!!!!!!!”, the alarm went off at 7 am in the morning and I woke up hearing the murmurs of abuses received from my fellow dorm roomies (8 in all), some of them who had slept at 6 am or later after a night of booze and partying, something which Barca is so famous for. Like XL, the parties here start at midnight, but unlike XL, they go on till dawn, especially at the time I was there, because unknowingly, the week I had arrived here was the week of the La Merce, the biggest party of the year in Barcelona, for which people from entire Europe, forget Spain come to have the most rocking party of the year. More on the La Merce later on as first I need to go to the airport to figure out how the hell am I going to locate my luggage. So, Padosi and I leave for the airport using public transport, something we plan to use everywhere as it turns out to be much cheaper than taxi rides.

My First look of Barcelona

A Picture from the flight

The public transport in most of Europe is simply amazing and Barcelona is no different. With 11 metro lines and more currently being made, frequent buses, trams and ‘continuous buses’ (Yes, there is a bus every 30 seconds from the central place to the airport, talk about frequency). By the time people board the bus, there is the bus on the same route lined up behind, sometimes even two, something very amusing yet commendable.

When we reached the airport, we were in for a huge shock; something we never expected to happen. The lost and found baggage counter had not only put our request forward for the baggage claim, not only contacted the airlines and got my luggage tag numbers, not only located our luggage lying in some corner of Istanbul, but also had the luggage departed for Barcelona Airport via a flight which was to arrive in 30 minutes. All this without even a reminder; forget pleading, begging or offering money, something which we are used to and all of this within 16 hours, SHOCKING isn’t it? As said by the desk, the luggage arrived after half an hour and as it was approaching me on the conveyer belt slowly and steadily, the bags suddenly seemed like a Bollywood heroine running slowly towards the hero. The joy of getting more than expected is indeed something.

With the luggage sorted out, our next quest was sorting out our accommodation for the next three months. ESADe, my college for the next three months being in Barcelona, a metropolitan cannot afford to provide accommodation, and this was a huge task for all the incoming students. We had contacted a person through a website for housing searched when in India itself (Google rocks!!!) and he has a unique system which he runs here for providing houses on rent. I don’t know how many people he has under him, but he has a person running different streets who show you all the possible flats on that street and if you don’t like any if them, he will just ask you to go to another street where another care taker will show you around until you end up liking a flat. After looking at a couple of houses, we finally found a decent house where we felt we could survive. Not the biggest of them, but it was a good deal considering we only got it for 3 months. The location of the house is alongside a very popular street in Barcelona, Passeig De Gracia, which is among the central locations and also close by to college as well as the other fun places in the city.

The saying of a new day bringing a new beginning could not have been more apt. After the tremendous first day, the second day had almost been perfect.  With my luggage back and accommodation sorted, in one of my best friend’s words, I was now ready to HIT Barcelona and the other parts of Europe.