As I mentioned earlier, but have so far failed to blog properly, Sal and I headed off to Barcelona the weekend before last. Ostensibly visiting to see U2 play the Nou Camp on the Sunday night, we also had the chance to eat tapas, drink, and enjoy the sunshine. By the time we reached our posh, plush hotel bed on Friday night, barely a few hours after arriving in the city, we’d already been ripped off twice: once, predictably, by a taxi driver whose circuitous route to the hotel added several Euros to the fare, and once as a result of our decision to eat at one of the few restaurants we could find that was still open at 2am–even the notoriously laid-back late diners of Barcelona have finished eating and hit the bars by then, it seems–but unfortunately all that the tourist trap we’d selected on La Rambla could offer was shockingly bad tapas, and a shockingly large tab. Thankfully our fortunes improved somewhat after that, and by the time U2 took to the stage on a sweltering Sunday evening, we’d already recouped our losses (and then some) thanks to a mixup with la cuenta in a far better restaurant that left us some 50 Euros to the good.
The atmosphere inside the stadium was unlike anything I’ve really seen at a gig before, although probably nothing compared to the reception afforded the ground’s usual performers when they take to the field (shortly after the Kaiser Chiefs had left the stage to an indifferent reception from everyone but me, and shortly before Keane took to the stage to a rapturous reception from everyone but me, something of a commotion came over the crowd. 79,999 people simultaneously turned to the side of the stage, cheered, and pointed up to a small tracksuited figure in a grey baseball cap who had just arrived in a special reserved section of the seated area. Shouts of “Ronaldinho! Ronaldinho! Ronaldinho!” rang out around me, and the buck-toothed superstar waved at the adoring fans, and promptly retreated to the back, out of sight).
When the people we’d all really come to see finally took to the stage, the atmosphere was a bit like the Twickenham gig, but multiplied by about 50. Even from my lofty position, I struggled to see anything on stage for the first four or five songs, as tens of thousands of hands in the air and heads jumping up and down blocked my view, and you could barely hear the band for the roar of the audience singing along.
We were just happy to be there at all, come to think of it, after the stereotypically lax “organisation” prior to the gig on the part of the wonderful pissup/brewery style efficiency of Tick Tack Ticket, the ticket agency responsible for distributing tickets to all the non-Spanish residents who’d purchased tickets off teh interwebs. After queueing at the stadium’s ticket office for over an hour to collect ours, we finally got word that we were in fact queueing in the wrong place, and transferred to an equally long queue around the back of the stadium near the club shop. This was a queue that didn’t move anywhere because, helpfully, the tickets hadn’t actually arrived at the venue. Now you’d think that if you sold all the tickets for an August event in early February, and if you’d told non-Spanish resident ticket holders to collect them from the venue from 3.30pm for a 5.30pm opening, that it might be an idea to maybe have the tickets actually at the venue in good time. As it was, the tickets arrived at 5.20pm, some 10 mins before the doors opened. Through a small slice of luck (and the slight queue-jumping assistance provided by the new friends we made in the ticket collection queue), we made it inside the stadium just minutes before the Kaiser Chiefs took to the stage. Needless to say, we weren’t quite inside the inner circle this time…
Much of the rest of the weekend was spent enjoying some fine food, alcohol, and weather. Fish also played a large part in the weekend for some reason, not least at Barcelona’s excellent aquarium, where they have one of those funky tunnels where sharks swim over your head, but also at the excellent food market just off La Rambla, where you can see live crabs, like these.
Excellent though it was, many of the people visiting the aquarium proved to be bloggably exasperating. It was little wonder that they had to broadcast a message every 30 seconds asking people in several languages not to use their flash. At one point, we made a finger waving no sign to the German lady next to us who’d just taken a flash photograph of a tank of tropical fish, to which she replied “oh yes, I know”. Some other extremely intelligent tourists were amusing themselves by tapping on the glass in front of the sharks making “nah, nah, nah, nah, nah” noises. And not in a Kaiser Chiefs, good sort of way.