In Au am Rhein, Germany, the weather steadily devolved from festively snowy in late December to bitterly cold and overcast by mid-January. My old friend Cheeseman, still on break from his university in Kingston, England, was sightseeing in southern Germany with me. But the freezing weather now had us fantasizing about warm beaches and palm trees, so we booked a flight to Barcelona, Spain through the notorious budget airline Ryan Air. While our seats came to just €32 each, Ryan Air charged us both €50 more to check our backpacks, plus another eight percent fee to pay with a credit card (how else can you even buy a ticket online?).

Another catch to Ryan Air’s cheap ticket prices is that they only fly to the smallest most obscure airports in Europe. So on January 16th, after a three-hour flight from Baden Baden Airpark in Germany, we landed at the Barcelona Girona Airstrip. True to Ryan Air form, this tiny airport was about a two-hour bus ride away from the actual city of Barcelona and was much too small to have things like actual gates or air conditioning. The plane came to stop, opened its doors half a mile away from the airport itself and a man wheeled a wobbly set of metal stairs up to the exit. But all the faults of the airline were quickly forgiven as that first step off of the plane into the warm Spanish sunlight was simply sublime.

After collecting our packs, Cheeseman and I hopped on a bus that took us into downtown Barcelona. The bus ride was not terribly scenic, and in fact took us by some pretty rough and run-down areas on the outskirts of the city. We compared places to stay on Hostelworld.com during the journey, eventually agreeing on a trendy looking place called the Rock Palace Hostel that advertised pictures of instrument lined walls.

The bus dropped us at the main station downtown, and we decided to hike the three miles to our hostel to stretch our legs after so many hours of cramped seating. On the way, we walked by a stunning fifty foot archway reminiscent of Paris’s Arc de Triumph, though this was much more colorful. Underneath and stretched out in front of it was an expansive paved promenade where a dozen or so skilled roller-bladers and skateboarders were entertaining a small crowd of onlookers. We joined the crowd and watched the skaters weaving quickly in and out of lines of cones, performing all manner of impressive tricks, and dancing more gracefully on wheels than I could ever hope to on my two left feet. The skaters were a sight to behold, but the afternoon was fading quickly to evening so we continued our hike into the city center.

We checked into our swanky modern rock hostel for only €10 per night, and after locking our packs in the lockers provided in the dorm, we set out into the city to find some dinner. We were ravenous after having eaten only airplane pretzels that day. The first place that met our of food quantity to price ratio wasn’t a Spanish tapas restaurant, but a typical Chinese joint. The menus were in seven languages but the staff wasn’t as linguistically inclined and so we had to order with a mix of bad Spanish and hand gestures. As the waitress walked away shaking her head in frustration, I had to laugh. Somehow, in all of our discussions about coming to Spain, Cheeseman and I had never really acknowledged the fact that neither one of us spoke much Spanish. Both of us had spent the last few months traveling in Great Britain where the language barrier was minute, save for a few exceptionally quirky accents in places like Liverpool, northern Wales, and rural Ireland.

After dinner, we returned to the hostel where a sign emblazoned with the words “BOTTOMLESS SANGRIAS” caught our attention. For €7, we would be provided a goblet of sorts and be privy to all the sangria we could drink in the hostel lounge. There was one catch though—we had to help make the sangria first. After paying, we were sent to meet a young hostel employee who introduced himself as Partyboy Dave. He exuded a happy-go-lucky aura in a tank top sporting a big yellow smiley face that showed off colorful sleeve tattoos. He had the hostel bar loaded with all the fruit and fluids needed to make enough sangria for a small army. When we asked if he had a punch bowl to mix in he laughed and produced a large garbage can out from behind the bar accompanied with a giant wooden spoon. We emptied countless bottles into the bin, constantly stirring in freshly chopped fruit. We kept sampling our work as we went, and by the time we had finished the mix we already felt like we had gotten more than our seven euro’s worth.

More and more people materialized in the lounge and the sangria spurred some splendid social interaction. We made fast friends with some other vagabonds including a Canadian named McKenzie and a fellow American named Sam. We joined them in playing some classic card games that go hand in hand with bottomless booze. As our second round of Kings Cup was coming to a close there was an announcement for a hostel pub crawl for €12. I checked my watch and saw it was 11pm. “A little late for a pub crawl, isn’t it?” McKenzie laughed. “You haven’t been in Spain before, have you? “By Spanish standards, this is probably still considered too early to go out.” So along with our new friends, Cheeseman and I traded €12 for fluorescent yellow wristbands and followed Partyboy Dave into the warm Barcelona night.

There were a couple of nice bars that the pub crawl introduced us to, but it was a weekday night and there was not a lot going on. Partyboy Dave eventually brought us to Barcelona’s little metro system to reach the beachside nightclub scene. We came to a heavily neon laden club called Opium, where our group of about a dozen people effectively doubled the size of the party. Drinks were overpriced, and we all came to the conclusion that the hostel most likely got some monetary kick back from bringing their pub crawlers here. The most memorable thing about that club was a man in a wheelchair break dancing on the mostly empty dancefloor. He was exceptionally talented, doing wheelies, spins on one wheel, and even a cartwheel at one point. When he finally left, he did so to thunderous applause.

When 4am rolled around Cheeseman and I left the loud nightclub and other pub crawlers behind in favor of the quiet beach outside. The soft sand was still warm and we followed a mile stretch of the coast until the sand came to an abrupt end at a shipyard. We navigated our way to a metro station where we were surprised to find a set of locked doors barring the entrance. We consulted google maps and made our way to the next closest station only to find another locked door. Another google search revealed that the metro in Barcelona closes at midnight in an effort to reduce the prevalence of homeless squatters. Then came the sudden realization that we now had an hour long walk back to the hostel ahead of us. We made it back just after 5am, right as the sun started to peek over the buildings.

The next day we met our Canadian friend McKenzie from the night before in the hostel lounge. He decided to join us in exploring Barcelona’s old town and hunt for good tapas. We went on foot, meandering through a couple of outdoor markets and stores before coming to the oldest district of the city where the buildings were packed so tightly together that the hot Spanish sunlight could not reach the narrow alleyways below. All of the stores here were geared toward tourists, full of quirky knick knacks and I <3 Barcelona T-Shirts. We were wandering aimlessly through the old town in search of a place to eat tapas when all of a sudden we found ourselves back at the beach. A crowded pedestrian zone paralleled a golden strip of sand full of sunbathers and volleyball players. I noticed there wasn’t a single person in the water though. I thought it might just be too cold to swim in January but Mckenzie enlightened us that the water around Barcelona was notoriously dirty. It was here that we found an outdoor tapas café nestled pleasantly in the shadow of a large surf shop. On McKenzie’s recommendation, we all ordered the local Estrella beer which came ice cold with an assortment of seafood tapas. McKenzie also introduced to a delicious Spanish drink called Carajilo, which was strong mix of brandy and coffee served with a flaming spoonful of sugar. It was a little piece of paradise sitting there on the beach mid-January in shorts and a tank top, and exactly what I had been daydreaming about in the frozen German countryside.

We continued exploring, taking the traditional tourist photographs of things like the towering Christopher Columbus statue, smiling shrimp sculpture and colossal La Sagrada Familia. We found our way to the popular La Rambla boulevard lined with shops, bars, and restaurants. On this road, we particularly enjoyed a visit to the house of international beers, where we got to try an assortment of foreign brews. We also made a stop at the Museum of Eroticism, which was actually much more educational than I think any of us expected. Afterward, we visited a large outdoor food market where we pieced together our dinners at bargain prices.

As we continued along the crowded La Rambla, each of us keeping our hands on our wallets as we walked, on the lookout for the notorious pickpockets, we were approached repeatedly by guys offering to sell us every drug under the sun. They would try first in Spanish and would then switch quickly to English with their clandestine propositions. When I tried my old tactic of responding in confused German to brush them off, I was surprised to hear an offer for “sehr gutes ectasy” come back at me in fluent German. Since when are drug dealers so linguistically gifted? When yet another guy came up to us, I tried a different tactic and responded in gibberish that sounded vaguely eastern European. The man shook his head and asked “English? Francais? Russkiy?” to which I responded, “Dovakin borat appalachian kruschev.” He threw up his arms in frustration and left. “What language was that?” Cheeseman laughed. “Whatever it was, I think you hurt his feelings,” laughed McKenzie.

Before returning to the hostel Cheeseman and I stopped in a men’s barbershop to smarten up our appearances. The place had a unique flare to it, looking more like a tattoo parlor inside and playing a mix of dubstep and rap music over bassy speakers. The two guys working there spoke no English, and after a lot of hand gestures and hopeful miming, Cheeseman and I sat down and took a gamble on how much the guys had understood. It was the first haircut I’d ever gotten that involved a straight razor to draw sharp angles into my sideburns. I came away with my hair dramatically faded on the sides and long and styled on top like a soccer player, while Cheeseman was transformed to have a coif of hair reminiscent of a 1940s swing dancer—appropriate as Cheeseman does in fact swing dance. We couldn’t help but laugh at each other.

I got in touch with a friend of mine in the area named Maçel, who I had met while traveling in Ireland about a month earlier. He was excited to hear I was in town and met up with Cheeseman and me later that night. He brought us to a fantastic hole in the wall called L’ovella Negra (The Black Sheep), which was a very spacious and aesthetically lit wooden pub overflowing with college students. On our way there Cheeseman had gotten a hold of his old swing dance swing dance partner, Alix, who was studying abroad in Barcelona, and arranged for her to meet us too. It was a fantastic reunion of old friends and we treated ourselves to pitchers of a local favorite Marçel recommended called Calimocho. It tasted similar to sangria but was less fruity and lightly carbonated. When I asked Marçel what Calimocho was, he surprised all of us when he said it was a mix of red wine and coke.

Our time talking and laughing in L’ovella Negra passed effortlessly, and when a change of scenery was in order Marçel lead the way down La Rambla to a small square home to three nightclubs. We visited each one, surprisingly without having to show any ID or pay entrance fees, and eventually doubled back to the first one that looked like an underground cavern and played nostalgic rock music instead of the standard pop fare. Cheeseman and Alix outshone everyone on the dancefloor when they elegantly fell into one of their swing dance routines. Marçel and I were chatting near the bar when a girl in a short glittery dress bumped into me and dropped her glass of red wine. I caught the glass as it fell, but not before the entire contents emptied over my white shirt. She said something in Spanish and then stumbled off giggling as I looked down in despair at my ruined shirt. “She said you can keep the drink, she’s had enough,” Marçel translated, suppressing a grin.

When 4am rolled around we reluctantly left the club. Alix had classes in a few hours she needed to rest up for and Marçel had a 45-minute drive back to his little village on the outskirts of Barcelona. After saying goodbye to Alix, Cheeseman and I expressed interest in visiting Marçel’s village of Torrelles de Llobregat. He proposed to just take us back with him that very night. Seeing no reason why not, we picked up our bags from the hostel, checked out, and drove to Marçel’s family home in the sleepy village of Torrelles de Llobregat.