Why DId We Think Tattoos in Spain Were a Good Idea?

1/29

Just a couple hours of sleep, a 35 minute cab ride and 2 hour and a half flights and we were in Barcelona! We hopped on a metro (this city has amazing public transportation- US needs to learn something from them) and stepped out onto a wide street, buzzing with people and full of energy. I’ve never seen anything like it. You take New York City, widen the streets, take out the giant amount of people, take away those people who bump into you and rudely stare at you, substitute skyscrapers for beautiful architecture and Gaudi’s crazy buildings, take away the unnecessary technology and you’ve kind of got Barcelona, at least in the area where our hostel was located. Our hostel was really nice- we shared a room with people from all over the world, some from Germany, one guy from China, and woke up one morning to guys from France sitting on the bed next to me.

So once we dropped our things off, we got some tapas, of course, one of our best meals for sure. We had planned on getting our tattoos in Spain, since it’s probably the safest country we’re going to for tattoos, so we decided this was our first stop today. We hopped on the metro, cruised around some streets trying to find the place and as we moved closer we were like oh this is a nice area. Stopped in front of the address and had to double check to make sure it was right- a black door with a skull and cross bones on it but sure enough this was it. Walked inside to loud, screamo music, a dark dark room with a woman with black hair and piercings around her nose and mouth behind the counter, on the phone, yelling at someone on the other end. While we waited for her to get off the phone we scanned the room and on the walls were examples of tattoos- yes, the majority of them were swastikas and hearts with knives through them. No big deal. I look to Perez and I’m like you need to talk because I don’t speak Spanish and I’m not about to get a tattoo by talking in broken Spanish. She is like a deer in the headlights. Thank GOD they didn’t have an appointment spot for us, I think we were more relieved at that than we were in the fact that we couldn’t get our tattoos like we’d been planning for so long. But bible verse tattoos in a place like this just did not seem right. We walked out and continued walking down the street, now seeing that the stores were carrying gothic items, like leather chaps and leather boots…studded belts…you get the picture. It was intense. We walked along La Rambla (a street kind of like the Santa Monica promenade) for a while and, needless to say, we didn’t calm down for a good 20 minutes we were so freaked out. We walked into a market, searching for color and happiness, but nothing could make us feel any better. We walked all the way down to the end where we hit the pier and walked along the water until we found the gothic quarter, which is completely different architecture and style than where our hostel is located. So we wandered and we got lost but eventually we found El Museo de Picasso which was incredible! It was so great to be able to see all of his works together and to realize that his crazy weird works weren’t the majority of his career. And we got to see all his recreations of Las Meninas, fascinating. At this point we had probably walked a good 3 or 4 miles and were exhausted and cold, so we hopped on the metro and got back to our hostel, found some internet and crashed for a couple hours. We had problems with phone service and couldn’t find the friends we were supposed to meet up with so we waited for a long time, but it doesn’t matter anyways since the Spanish don’t go out until after midnight. There was a funk band playing in our hostel and we enjoyed getting in some facebook time and then headed out to meet friends. A greeeat day!