Early jaunts, haunts and head taunts

OMG ... I've been here a week already... so much to tell ya... here's a tidbit

LA RAMBLA RAMBLE
On my first Sunday night in Barcelona I went out to La Rambla - well you gotta, right?

Why? It's just a really long, very busy mall with muy touristy market stalls, the irritatingly shrill whistle of men selling fake bird call thingies.
As I walk along, my head rings with paranoid thoughts about bag snatching - everything you read E-V-E-R-Y T-H-I-N-G harps on about bag snatching and pickpocketing in Barcelona - esp in tourist zones (eg La Rambla)...



There were many, many street performers of the "statue" variety. The costumes and concepts for this kind of street art are far more elaborate in Barcelona BUT the skill at statueing/miming is far weaker - not sustained.



Eventually I sat on the edge of a garden bed and watched - ahhh much more like it. Observed bickering families, a group of teenage boys posing and greeting each other - they are far more physically affectionate than our "lads", touching and kissing (as well as complicated handshake rituals that seem more universal)... there was a little girl so intent on climbing a statue she just kept wiping the bird shit from her hands onto the side of her pants... until her mum realised what she was doing. Sun-blistered tourists, tottering twenty-something uni students on high heels... bored stall keepers. Then, to interrupt the pleasant art of people watching...
" blah blah blah (in Espanol) when not understood...
you beautiful lady, sexy woman - you talk to me I am Simon (oh crap!). We be friends come do coffee (much resistance and suspicion - rightly I still believe) ...."
The conversation skeetered on - me repelling thinking "oh fuck now I'm the target of one of the tourist con-jobs up there with purse snatching" - eventually when I made it very clear he started trying to keep going but incorporating his girlfriend - we just be friends - he offers to walk me to the Metro (like fuck!) ... then he says he has to go to meet his girlfriend after uni...
Okay - suuure, it's the European hols AND it's a SUNDAY night at 8:30pm. SImon says ca-ca, Lisa says good riddance
On the way out of La Rambla I bought 3 herb plants (mint, sage and basil) partly for cooking but mainly to put some "life into my room" ... for less then 4 Euros!


RANDOM THOUGHT -
When everyone around you is speaking foreign languages its amazing how sure you are that they're, for some reason, talking about you. What is more telling is how negative they are being - back to therapy for me, me thinks ;)