Any of you guys live in Barcelona?

I'm going there tomorrow for a student's exchange thing, preparing a small exhibition and such, will be there for 8 days.

Time schedule is pretty tight already, but it could be fun to meet up, if time allows for it. Another watmmer is with me.

Does anyone live in the area and are there any super cool underground places that are must-see and nobody knows about?

(although I don't like beer tbh)

Rulohead lives in Barcelona, contact him I'm sure he's a delight to be around

You could lie on the grass together

If you ever come to the south hit me up tho

Which area do you consider to be "the south" ?

The southest of south, Cádiz

lol hi

Only 2 months late, yay! - I'm in Town again, me and my girlfriend spent the entire last night looking for some kind of bar or club with decent danceable music, no luck. Looked around Placa del Sol and walked the whole of Diagonal without finding any.

Only here for two more nights - There's gotta be something somewhere ... ?!

we'd rather have affordable housing and decent jobs rather than clubs and pseudo-local food (especially the fucking tables on the bloody middle of the street are really getting out of hand as of lately...) sort of losing the battle at the moment, sadly, but you can't force people and as the general sentiment is 100% against an entertainment-oriented economy (there have been even demonstrations against tourist apartments this week), it won't be long before the tables turn. man, this august has been fucking unbearable.

by the way, i still remember that time one or two years ago i think when i told the guys at the tourist flat there used to be on the other side of the street to be quiet as it was 3am and i had to get up early and they told me to fuck off. nice.

or that time i found a completely coked up (white) jamaican guy who, after approaching me out of the blue (something you just don't do in barcelona or in any place with a population over 3, for god's sake) and making fun of how i looked like a wet rat because it was raining cats and dogs, proceeded to tell me that he was paying for a flat in the old town and that he didn't want any arabs near him because he was paying some good money for that trendy flat. bloody hell.

or that time i saw some disgustingly posh russian guy dancing and taking pictures of a beggar who was singing on the metro. god, that one was probably the most disgusting one.

or how erasmus students who fail all credits and spend their 4 months drinking demand that all university courses they attend be imparted in spanish (and get away with it).

basically if you ask locals to show you around, if they're honest all answers you're going to get are pretty much like this one. but catalans usually don't want to be that guy.

anyway when i originally saw this thread i thought i'd just ignore it and maybe that's what i should've done this time, so please excuse me.

dunno man, you kind of just sound like a bit of miserable bastard. Im not saying the tourists you met werent dicks, but i dont see what actively not wanting people to visit and enjoy your city achieves.

  On 9/8/2014 at 2:30 PM, messiaen said:

dunno man, you kind of just sound like a bit of miserable bastard. Im not saying the tourists you met werent dicks, but i dont see what actively not wanting people to visit and enjoy your city achieves.

no, what i mean is tourism is interferring with the economy and culture of the city in a very negative way. dealing with tourists (which is extremely unpleasant due to the fact that we're expected to play the role of a fantasy that's as far as possible from the mainstream idea of what locals wanted their city to become) is the least important thing. this is the standard position amongst locals anyway, maybe we're all miserable bastards (would be a very catalan thing anyway.)

the thing is that on the one hand there's what this city achieved, which was uncompromisingly modernistic in a way and which nobody seems to give a fuck about, and on the other hand is what is expected of us nowadays, which is a huge hotel where everything else is neglected. nothing works, and "what this city achieved" is not on the agenda of the authorities, which are more concerned with changing zoning laws. hotel owners have even used mafioso tactics (the mayor of the old town got death treats and her flat broken into after closing down an illegal tourist flat, and had to step down after that).

but what can you expect? the olympics, which were at the root of all this gentrification wave, were organised by a card-carrying fascist militant from the franco times who owned property in the city he couldn't move. a miserable rat who even joined the republican army for 5 minutes just so they would spare his life while he was on his way to the nationalist area. should've been executed long ago, but died of old age.

anyway, but nobody wants that, so it will change. as i said there have been demonstrations against tourist flats and the head of an organisation that advocated having people who had been evicted squatting unsold yuppiedromes is running for mayor, and she has a good chance of at least entering a coalition government.

as for tourists themselves, or exchange students, they are just the unwitting agents of the new fantasy the local bourgeoisie has set on carrying out: a backwards city of entertainment where nothing works and locals are expected to die as they're just not needed, so no jobs, no housing, no anything, nothing to do, just clubs, clubs, hotels, sangria, more clubs, and a couple of "creative quarters" for lame petty bourgeois artists from mitteleuropa. the general feeling is we've lost control of our own enviroment. very alienating. good thing everyone is ready to stop it and will vote accordingly.

what i want is not expulsing visitors, what i want is a working economy, and less blatant class differences when it comes to housing (because a 80sqm flat is 800 a month for a local, but 800 a week for a tourist, which is screwing things up big time)

Fair enough then, i didnt know barcelona was like that. all my spanish friends are from madrid, and have never mentioned this sort of thing. i dont actually know a great deal about spain apart from its too hot for me to want to go there.

Homage to Catalonia 2: Fascists Never Die

Edit: all my Spanish friends are from Barcelona and they all talk like this if you mention certain subjects.

Edit 2: Recommend me a good tapas place, m8?

it's the price we all pay for being steinvord!

re tapas, lel!