Had the most wonderful day today with the lovely Miss Kelly Venables! Kelly & I worked together at the Body Shop for about a year a little while back before she moved over to Ireland to work. She is a truly wonderful, bright, bubbly person & she breathes light & life into every place she goes! :) Ever the scatter-brain, she delivered me the very specific info that she would be arriving on "Wednesday morning" :P So I found myself waiting, jittery with excitement on Wednesday morning for her arrival…in true Kelly Venables style she arrived about 5 minutes before midday!

We quickly set out to explore the streets of Barcelona, keeping our bags close & our eyes peeled for pickpockets…didn't see much evidence of this is the busier places & you could clearly see cautious tourists clutching their bags close, so perhaps all the hype around pickpocketing has left pickpockets out of a job…somehow I doubt it though!

We strolled down La Rambla, one of the main strips in Barcelona, to the gothic quarter, which is a beautiful older part of town with lots of little cafes & shops. We found a place for Kelly to have lunch & both enjoyed an afternoon Rose - at only 2.50 euro a glass!! :D We talked and talked and talked and talked for what seemed like hours, & yet the time flew by…it's amazing how much 2 gals have to catch up on after not seeing eachother for a few months! Then we continued on in a sort of Spanish "pub-crawl" type style, stopping for Sangria and tapas a while later & wandering through the markets, marveling at the variety of meats, chocolate, sweets, & fruit on display…even a whole pig's head!!!

We then had a rather bizarre experience in a small tapas bar one of Kelly's friends had recommended…it was a little off the beaten tourist track, down a small alleyway near the harbour & given our inability to read the menu or communicate an order we relied on a local to order for us. We just asked him to order two glasses of wine & a selection of tapas…well! It seems they were only serving one type of wine…a sparkling Rose that is apparently a Catalan & came served in old fashioned champagne saucers. Then came our tapas…a plate of sausage! Haha Assorted chunks of sausage piled high on a small plate…thank goodness neither of us are vegan :P We huddled at the side of the very crowded bar nibbling our sausage, sipping our champas, & wondering how on earth we were supposed to pay…& what it had actually cost us!

As it was near impossible to actually get through to the bar, I made a guess - based on the prices on the board behind the bar - that we owed about 5 euro, & we left that on the bar. However, halfway down the street outside, a very formidable looking security guard stopped us in our tracks, calling out after us. We were summoned back to the bar feeling very embarrassed & conspicuous…I apologized profusely as the man yelled at me, what I thought was, that we owed 16 more euros! I produced a 20 & was ready to bolt on outta there, but he yelled at me to wait for my change…which amounted to 19.40 euro…so…we had owed an extra 60 cents!!! Quite an incident really given the innocence of the mistake & the fact that it amounted to about 10% of the bill!! We walked away laughing hysterically.

Kelly & I wandered along the harbour & back up La Rambla to the hostel, enjoying the evening light of Barcelona…I'm loving the fact that it stays light until at least 8:00PM here!! Why oh why didn't we introduce daylight savings in Perth! :P