Barcelona 2026

 

Sometimes I’m such a lame traveler. My first impression of Barcelona was simply the three hours I spent trying to get through the airport’s border control. The line stretched hundreds and hundreds of people deep. It reminded me of Cairo and I’d have taken pictures of the chaos, except I have been questioned before about why I was taking pictures at customs. Getting your passport stamped by a customs officer doesn't seem to happen anymore. I waited hours to stand in front of a machine that only worked a small percentage of the time. It took a retinal scan and recorded my fingerprints. The machine did give the option to refuse to do that. Yet after three hours of waiting in line I just didn't care. I gave zero f’s about my privacy at that point.

It made me happy to have one of the machines finally work and after another hour I got through the next line and collected my luggage. All I said was thank you and went off to find a taxi. At that point I'd forgotten any Spanish and spent the next three weeks still pretending I don’t know any. There were a few times when I'd have missed a train if I didn't suddenly regain my little aptitude. As a native English speaker I find Spanish intuitive to read, except the one time I accidentally bought goat kefir and I paid for that mistake. 

My trip to Spain was for a screenwriting thing. I’ll tell you about that in another post. I went solo and truth is, I love solo travel. I can do whatever I want whenever I want. It thrills me to get on a plane and get off somewhere where everything is new and mostly different. I can even pick a hotel that’s right next to an Aldi‘s. I can spend the first 24 hours eating the best tangerines EVER, drinking gallons of water to rehydrate and have a twelve hour nap. By myself I can spend a day just looking out my hotel window or reading and doing absolutely nothing if I want to. I highly recommend it.

After that, I just wandered lamely around Barcelona and tried to figure out how the hell to use Google Maps in walking mode. I am most definitely not capable of using Google Maps in walking mode. If it told me I was going to need five minutes to get somewhere I promise I’m going to need 20 to try every direction that I think that that little triangle arrow is pointing. I need a map app that tells me whether I need to go right or left at the Swatch store and that occasionally alerts me to the fact that I’m going completely in the wrong direction. Chat GPT told me it could do that for me but it was lying again.

After I was there for a few days, and people asked me what my favorite thing about Barcelona was, I had to admit that the secret truth is my favorite thing was all of the 100% gluten-free restaurants. When I first arrived at the airport, I had decided that I was never coming back to Barcelona due entirely to the airport. After I ate at my first gluten-free restaurant, it's a given I'm going back and I’m talking 100% gluten-free and I could pick anything on the menu—people who don’t have food allergies have no idea how lucky they are to get to do that all the time! In Barcelona I could have any damn thing I wanted. And I did. I spent every day deciding which gluten-free restaurants I was going to go to and a lot of time looking them up, and most of my time getting lost trying to find them.

Mostly, I’ll tell you about those restaurants in another blog post too. But I will say that I don’t care how long I stay in Barcelona, my favorite thing would always be all of the gluten-free restaurants. And second from that it would be all of the gluten-free bakeries. And after that it would be that you can get gluten-free and even vegan gelato in a freaking cone that is also gluten-free. 

Besides all the things I ate, my next favorite thing was the Banksy Museum. I didn’t even know that there was one in Barcelona and happened upon it because I spent an hour walking around looking for where Google Maps told me the nearest mailbox was. And I didn’t even get lost that time. It was just that far away. Later I realized there was a mailbox like three minutes from where I was staying.

Anyway, when I found that mailbox, which was beautifully graffitied I must say, I looked across the street and saw the Banksy Museum. It was a delight. It's large and full of surprises too.

My favorite part of the Banksy museum in Barcelona was the fully functioning graffiti bathroom.

I’m 90% sure I was actually allowed to pee in there. At any rate I did. Unless you're not allowed to, in which case I didn't. 

One of the reasons I never got to several of the big tourist spots in Barcelona was because while I was there they were having massive flooding and hurricanes off the Mediterranean Sea that they called Medicanes. I’ve been in a couple regular hurricanes and  I have never seen rain like that before. It was terrible and you had to shelter in place. That happened several days of my trip. Luckily, it didn’t happen during my screenwriting or travel part of the trip.

It is disconcerting to get an emergency phone alert when you’re traveling in another country. The messages came from the Generali with that honking noise we're probably all familiar with and it really was that bad. That rain threatened to flood my second floor balcony and come into my hotel room. It beat my umbrella flat and soaked me from top to toe as I sloshed around with Google Maps trying to figure out where I'd left my hotel anyway. 

I'd like to go back someday soon and see the touristy things I missed. The public transportation is easy-breezy to use. The trains are convenient and spotless. The people were lovely and friendly. I could live there, especially with all those gluten-free restaurants.