Barcelona (and seeking strangerness)

I don’t often travel to the same place more than once, but Barcelona became a secret garden through a hidden door for me. The first time I visited as an adult I had travelled there to get a tattoo at a shop that I had followed for a long time on Instagram (it had suddenly dawned on me that you could travel for tattoos). My only intention to travel to Barcelona was to get the tattoo, but I willingly got lost there for a few days. 


Barcelona was a place where I could walk nonstop for twelve hours a day, sweat through t-shirts, listen to hours of music, explore side streets to find restaurants, look up at the buildings and down at the tiled pavements. I felt like I walked around the streets like a ghost in a Studio Ghibli film. I didn’t talk to anyone for days. My only communication was smiles and happy shrugs to waiters and chefs. 

20 years ago I’d travelled on my own to China before smartphones or even 3G and I remember the feeling of arriving somewhere and being overwhelmed by the thought of being so far away and not knowing where to go. The blood rushes to your head as panic sets in. You can’t understand anything anyone is saying or any signs and you suddenly become aware of how outside your normal 10k step territory you are. I had this image of being like the Little Prince looking out into space while sat on a small rock.


I’ve come to crave this feeling of being stranded on another planet. When I travel to a place I use public transport or walk to get to my accommodation. Negotiating a city’s public transport system is an amazing way to feel like a stranger. Once I feel out of place somewhere, I really start to observe everything around me: the languages that you can hear, the level of comfort some people have with staring at you and the level of city invisibility you might have, what dangerous people might look like there, the food smells, the complexity of their underground maps, how everyone everywhere is looking down at a phone and how other tourists might be standing out. 


The first time I visited Barcelona as an adult, I had separated from my wife of 13 years. We had two kids and I had moved out to live in another house. To say it was a strange time would be a surreal understatement. I have a few tattoos and I tend to have them done at times of my life where I’d like to be reminded of a joy or a pain that impacted me. I was emotionally very lost in the sense of being in a life that I didn’t feel was my own and the one I didn’t want to die having had, so to be physically lost in this city and floating around felt like a moment of pause. 


I felt less comfortable in tourist areas, because it reminds you that you are a tourist and it feels more similar to normal life. You see familiar places to eat and to have coffee. The supermarkets sell familiar products. As an English speaker, you hear the language everywhere and we speak it to the local workers without any hesitation that they won’t understand. In Barcelona this tends to be anywhere near the Gothic Quarter. I googled “dangerous part of Barcelona” and the region of El Reval came up on lots of popular travel websites, so I headed over to it.



El Reval has a reputation for tourists being pickpocketed or tricked out of money by street hustlers. My first impression was that the shops and the people had become more diverse and more locals loitering in doorways. This in itself can make some tourists feel a bit more on edge owing to the lack of familiarity and perhaps a sense of poverty. I grew up in Slough and so I think I had a good exposure to lots of different cultures growing up, so feel quite comfortable in these environments. I do stand out: the pink-faced ginger, but I like to think a lot of people in areas like this are new to the area too. In fact, I came across some people moving home and helped them to put a mattress in their van. The district wasn’t dangerous, but to a lot of people it wouldn’t appear to be a place for people to visit, but a place for people to live and work. These are the areas I seek out the most: the areas I like to photograph, to eat, and often just to sit down and become just another person in their own world.


Stepping back on the place to London felt like stepping back into my old bones: instant atrophy from feeling gravity again. I’m so glad a have a tattoo to remember that time and to preserve that place of mind. 







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