Not another Barcelona blog!

Right now there's another blogette setting off in life, a tadpole recently hatched and swimming in a murky pond with all the other blogettes waving their flags for attention. Much more importantly the weather's warm. It's not raining and there's an intensely blue sky outside on my terrace. Which is one of the main reasons why a lot of people like me come from chilly damp northern Europe to live in Spain. Actually in my case that's not strictly true as I came from the other end of the thermometer scale, from 20 years in the 50º Celsius fry-eggs-on-your-car-bonnet Middle East summer temperatures in order to escape excessive amounts of sun. Barcelona, I considered, would be a compromise between the London in my own country and Dubai.



I arrived eight years ago and wasn't disappointed.  I found Barcelona to be a city with lots of positives and only a few negatives. In the Middle East I suffered achingly from CDS, culture-deficit syndrome. Now I gazed open-mouthed at the splendour of Barcelona's awesome modernist and contemporary architecture, its elegant shops, its museums and galleries, its wide boulevards where people actually walked - you only drove in the Middle East! Its exciting night life with thousands of bars, clubs and restaurants all had me transfixed like a wild boar in car headlights. And within a couple of hours from the city I could be skiing or scuba-diving . It was glaringly apparent why the city ranked high in the most visited cities in Europe list. Perfect you might think.

And you'd be right. It was. But you have to remember visitors and residents are never a homogenous mass. A society is composed of many strata.  Criminals like the good life too, and a city like Barcelona offers rich pickings to its criminal high-life. Lots of money can be made out of prostitution, drugs, money-laundering, robberies, scams - just to name just a few areas of lucrative 'free enterprise' on offer. The city has good zones but also bad zones where after midnight the police patrol in threes. In the eight years I've been here I've seen several examples of violence in the streets and had my wallet stolen twice. Mmm perhaps not so perfect!

I've set this blog up - after abhorting an earlier one (http://spanishflyonthwall.blog.com/ ) I'd had for two years - to write about the city from the point of view of outsider/resident so if you want objective description, this blog is not for you nor for the tourist who is just visiting 'the sights' for a few days. I'll be using newspapers as my main source and adding my comments to their new.  Hopefully the views expressed will be interesting enough to get you to comment.


So please feel free to agree - or just as important - disagree. I look forward to your comments. Let me know too if you are blogging about Barcelona .