My Favourite Place: Marbella & Barcelona

I left my heart in Barcelona…

There is something about Barcelona, Spain that makes falling in love easy…more than easy: unavoidable. In the month that I spent there this winter, I fell in love more times than I have in the 22 years I’ve spent living in Calgary. A lesson I learned almost immediately upon arrival was that all you need to do is sit on a bench and draw and eventually beautiful boys/men from all over the world with different careers, accents and expectations will find you, ask you on a date and make your life feel like a romantic comedy. In this article, instead of telling you about the restaurants to eat in or sights to see, I’m going to walk you through all of the loves of my life that I met in Barcelona. I hope that is OK.

(ALSO, all names have been changed for privacy.)

Pedro was the first guy i met in Barca. No, wait. Rewind. My first night, I met an entire Norwegian football team and ended up dancing with them until 5 in the morning. My friend Stefanie and i were sitting in a bar on Calle Ferran and noticed two tables full of the most beautiful men we had ever seen. I couldn’t even look in their direction without blushing.

“Don’t trust them,” Stefanie said to me. “Never trust that many babes in together in one place.”

As they put on their coats to leave and began to walk out the bar, I yelled, “BYE!” and they whipped around and insisted we go with them.

Norwegians will set your life on fire with their irresistible good looks, amazing style, carefree attitude and sense of adventure. I highly recommend spending as much time with norwegians as possible. I also recommend going to the woods with handsome norwegians you have just met…this is a whole other story.

PEDRO
Anyway, I met Pedro at a tapas bar in Born called Sagardi. He asked me which tapas were good and I couldn’t figure out his accent. He turned out to be half Brazilian and half Portugese and in some kind of business that involved him working in this tower.

He insisted on having me over for dinner. “I make you romantic dinner with champagne and candles!” he exclaimed with his hands flying all over the place.

I laughed and thought he was joking. he picked me up the next night at the placa de catalunya
in his bmw and drove me to his condo which ended up being bigger than my parents house in suburban Calgary and overlooked the beautiful catalonian coastline.
“Yeah, 3 fc barca players live in this building,” he said as he pulled into the underground parking where there were ferraris, porsches etc.

We walked up to his place and it became clear that he was not at all joking. There were candles, there was champagne and there was (he had seen that i posted a video of them performing one of their songs on my wall and found their album for me). It was too much. all too much. Well i think it became too much when he told me that he just got divorced three weeks before our date, only after he invited me to Andorra to go skiing for the weekend, to Cirque du Soleil and to Lisbon to spend Christmas with him and his family in his other home. That week, he proceeded to call me at 40 minute intervals and send me text messages that read, “i miss you, if you lived here I would love you everyday.” Oops.

JORGE
To clear my head I went and sat at the dock at the end of La Rambla. There I sat,drawing when Jorge came to talk to me. He was doing his masters in archiving, worked as a librarian and was a Barcelona native who lived in Barrio Gotico. He wore nice jeans and a nice smile.  He asked if he could see me again and  I said yes. It turned out that he enjoyed spending time with books much more than he liked spending time with people and our time together consisted of mostly awkward pauses my broken Spanish and his broken English.

SAMUEL
A couple days after, I went to MACBA to go check out the exhibition. I decided to go on a Tuesday and didn’t realize that Tuesday is the only day during the week that the museum is closed. Luckily, the square directly in front of the building, plaza dels angels a kind of out door skateboard mecca where professional and amateur skaters congregate on days that the museum is closed. There are these giant, smooth ramps that stretch for days. I figured  that I might as well make the most of the situation and sit on a ledge in the square to draw/write/watch the beauitufl sk8er boiz ride by me.

The sun was hot and I was wearing short shorts in November. One skater fell off his board right behind me and as I turned around to look, I saw that there was a cute curly haired boy sitting against the museum wall, watching/smiling at me. I blushed, turned away, kept drawing and before I knew it  I heard the sound of those little plastic wheels (an international, aural indicator of approaching babes) riding towards me.

“Hola?” I heard, spoken in the most unusual Spanish accent. I looked up. This is how i met Samuel.

He was an Austrian skateboard videographer and film student at CECC http://www.cecc.es/ waiting for his friend, Barcelona local and professional skateboarder,  (the guy who fell down behind me) to warm up so they could film for the day.

He and I spent our time together watching Wes Anderson and David Lynch films, drinking too much beer and listening to music. He invited me to ski the alps of Austria with him and his family over Christmas.

I’m not sure if this is something that happens often in Barcelona or if it was just something that happened often to me, but it seemed like every guy that I met wanted to take me to another country…romantic or creepy? You be the judge.

ALVARO
Late one night or more like early one morning, after a night of aggressive dancing with my beautiful girlfriends I walked myself home from Raval. Now, I know you are probably thinking that walking home at 4:30 in the morning from Raval(one of the sketchiest neighbourhoods in BCN) is probably pretty scary but I felt more safe than I do walking home in yyc.

As i stumbled the few kilometres uphill I found myself stumbling into Alvaro. He was a Barcelona native and one of the many men of my dreams. He worked in fashion marketing and dealt with all of the biggest retailers in BCN. We talked about life and love and animals. I told him  about all the trouble i got into on my trip to India and he told me about how he woke up to find a bus driver masturbating while staring at him on a bus to the Costa Brava.

I told him to stop yelling masturbating and he said, “in Spain you can yell masturbating all you want! Watch, YO MASTURBO POR LA NOCHE!”

I laughed so hard i thought i was going to cry. I’m not sure how the rest of the Passeig de Gracia felt about our yelling.

We talked about cats and dogs and he told me that he liked dogs more because while cats will only love you if you feed them, dogs will love you even if you don’t. Dogs will be your partner if you let them.

He told me, ‘fuck yes I want to be in love.” because being in love and having someone you think is fantastic think that you are fantastic also is probably the best feeling in the universe.

He walked me to my door and I kissed him on the cheek. I didn’t ask him for his phone number and he didn’t ask for mine.

GUILLOME
And then there was Guillome. Oh, Guillome. I was walking down to the beach from my apartment in  Gracia, through Eixample, Barrio Gotico, Born and eventually to Barceloneta. I sat on the beach and wrote/drew for a while while men approached me and tried to sell me coconut. When I politely declined, they offered massages instead.

As I began to walk towards Raval where my friend Stefanie was living (we were going to make soup together) I stumbled across this hilarious, lively band with upright bases, horns, guitars and one, disarmingly handsome, french saxophonist named Guillome.

Guillome took me on a night tour of Barca and held my hand as he took me to places I had and hadn’t already seen before. His apartment overlooked La Rambla and was half recording studio half living space. There were instruments everywhere. he made me tea and showed me his book collection. I learned that we read a lot of the same books though his were in French, of course. He gave me a key to his apartment after two dates and cried when i gave them back to him.

GIOVANNI
Giovanni was a beautiful, Italian, creative, brooding, skateboarder/musician/artist. He proposed to me in a square and told me he would wait for me until I returned and that if I didn’t return he would find me in Canada, we would rent a convertible, play rock n roll on the radio. He would drive us to California and I could wear my hair long and my shorts short.

MIGUEL
Last but not least, there was Miguel. Miguel barely spoke any English. He was Stefanie’s roommate and I remember saying to her the first time I met him, “i am going to marry your roommate.”

He was an artist and musician born in Figueres. We stayed up all night dancing to 90s hip hop and spent all afternoon listening to radiohead,  playing guitar and singing to each other. We made lists of our favourite movies, music, and books and tried to have conversations in Spanglish but gave up and opted for looking/smiling at each other for not long enough.

He made me coffee and kissed the top of my head and promised that the next time we saw each other that he would be able to speak more english.

Barcelona is a place of pure fantasy. The architecture and the people contribute to its surreality. The people stay up all night, eat lunch in the late afternoon and dinner at midnight. A beer (una canya) is only a Euro and everyone drinks every day but no one ever seems really drunk, just really happy. There are mountains and ocean and art and beauty and love everywhere you look.

Go.

You will fall in love. With the city, the men, what happens to yourself as soon as you get off that plane or maybe even all three.

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