Asparagus Wees

Short Version:
Beer from above and below ground, plague sores, birthdays and boat people

Long Version:
Our first experience of Barcelona was an attempted Catalan-language GPS navigation.
We visited the port, were told off by a policeman, and eventually made it to Brett y Sylvia y Miquel's apartment overlooking the water in Barceloneta. One of us had never met Brett before, and it was first meeting for both of us with Sylvia and 2 year-old Miquel, so we parked ourselves in the sun and drank beer pre-siesta, then drank more beer post-siesta while eating ceviche and guacamole/salsa nachos, and then we set off out into the night to celebrate Brett's birthday at a bar called Bubo, named after the grotesque black sores that characterize the Black Plague.

Looming massively above the bar was one of Barcelona's many historic churches; Santa Maria Del Mar (Saint Maria by the sea), and we sat and drank sangria with the boat-people and were impressed. Also impressive was the fact that one of the boat-people was incapable of rolling his Rs, rolling his tongue into a tube, or of smelling (or, he believed, generating) asparagus wees, thereby proving the Puppet hypothesis that these traits are interrelated.

Barcelona is the main city of Catalunya; an area which is currently - and often grudgingly - part of Espana. We saw our first evidence of this separateness near the church, as we made our way deeper into the el Born district in search of more bars; an eternal flame in a memorial plaza dedicated to the Catalan dead of the War of the Spanish Succession. Admittedly, that war took place in the early 18th century, but the grudge, and the desire for a separate and autonomous Catalan state remain strong, and strongly evident throughout Barcelona.

For the record, we ended up buying beer from a street vendor and drinking in one of the wide pedestrian plazas. Apparently these guys buy beer (six-packs of cans) from the supermarket and hide it under manhole-covers, carrying just the one six-pack around with them so that police confiscation doesn't wipe out their whole inventory.