Day 10: Travel day
Welcome
Yesterday we travelled from Dublin to Barcelona.
We thought that two hours would give us enough time to get checked in for a short hop to northeastern Spain. At 8.30am we lined up at the Ryanair counter, which wasn’t terribly busy by airport standards. The check-in operator was flummoxed by our situation, which as usual involved checking in thirteen large pieces of luggage and paying a fee for oversize/overweight pieces. It took about fifteen minutes for her to devise a plan of action and the supervisor was consulted for advice a few times. The toughest thing was explaining that we now had one more bag than was on our booking, and we wanted to pay for an extra bag. This was well outside the design specifications of the Ryanair luggage management software.
Here we are, very patient and enjoying the check in process.
She got the ball rolling by weighing each bag and tallying the weight on a piece of paper. Then she had to put us on hold for fifteen minutes because we had already held up the queue for half an hour and there were other customers who needed to get to their flights. Our check-in operator returned to us, and she was now determined to make this happen speedily as there were 50 minutes until our scheduled take-off. She contacted baggage-ops and told them to hold the plane until our luggage had made it through. The bag tags were printed, and she speedily attached them to each of our pieces, getting quite flustered in the process when she didn’t recognise our bags and thought we had introduced several new pieces of luggage. 30 Minutes before take-off our bags were all dropped off and we were on our way to security, where miraculously we managed to find a secret lane that didn’t have a queue. We sprinted to get to our gate which was of course at the very end of the terminal, arriving fifteen minutes before take-off, right as the gate was closing.
It was a warm day, but not unpleasantly so, as we disembarked onto the tarmac at Josep Tarradellas Barcelona–El Prat Airport and boarded a bus for the ride to the terminal. Immigration was a breeze, and we went to baggage claim to find that to our surprise every piece of luggage had made it to our destination. Primavera festival takes care of all the transportation and logistics, so we were met by a van to take us to the hotel. This was not a large vehicle, and it took a couple of tries to get the pack right but in the end, we filled every single square inch of the boot, from the floor to the ceiling, and we felt very happy about it.
After an hour in some fairly heavy traffic, we were delivered to our hotel, an oval shaped building just a few minutes up the road from the festival grounds. It is a very comfortable hotel with the exception of the interesting situation Tristan and I have in our room, a bathroom with a glass door.
The oval design of our building means that there was a corridor ring road around each floor.
It was 4.00pm and none of us had eaten yet, thanks to our challenging check-in at Dublin Airport. We breakfasted at a local tapas restaurant where I enjoyed a number of different snacks as they were gradually bequeathed to us from the kitchen. On my plate you can see patatas bravas, bombas, sausage, cannellini beans, battered calamari, fried squid, anchovy, shrimps, and a side of Estrella beer.
Tristan and I went for a run in the early evening, passing by the Primavera festival which was on its opening evening, and just getting revved up. We got all the way to the Besós river where we saw the epic towers of La Canadenca, the power station that was shut down in 2011 but remains an iconic part of the Barcelona skyline.
Late in the evening we headed out for dinner, making use of Barcelona’s metro rapid transit system, and visiting a Tapas spot in the neighbourhood of Vila de Gracia. Our good friend and good saxophonist JY Lee is currently travelling in Europe and came out to join us for a meal.
We headed to Primavera at midnight, arriving just in time to witness Le Tigre play a raucous and dancy set of tunes. After that we stayed out for a while longer, heading over to the mainstage to watch the famous English 90s rock band Blur keep the crowd singing along for a full hour and a half. We were well ready for bed after this, but felt good about doing our best to adjust to the festival time zone.
Le Tigre.