One Hundred Grams

The last time I saw Mary, she put her mouth right up to my ear and whispered: "Whatever you do, please sit next to him."

The him she was referring to was Brian, a 35 year old man from Louisiana. He had come up to me at the bus station in Santiago, looking for his bus, which, as luck would have it, happened to be the very same one that I was catching. Mary and I were in the middle of our goodbye, as she was leaving on a different bus bound to Granada - the result of a last minute coin toss decision.

Brian was a giant, but a stooped one due to a neck that thrusted out at a right angle from his shoulders. His arms could easily wrap around a tree trunk and break it in half with a flex - one arm at a time. However, any sense of danger or threat immediately melted away the moment you looked into his eyes. Eyelids hung at half-mast across summer grass orbs, giving the impression of a lamb staring docilely at that friendly metal rod flying towards its temple.

The bus ride from Santiago to Barcelona was 17 hours long. As the sun floated towards the horizon, a familiar landscape flashed past; a roll of film sucked through the spools of a projector at too great a speed, rewinding the scenery of my last five weeks. Nightfall hit over the meseta, burning the celluloid into darkness, and my camino was officially completed.

That left just Brian.

"I love ham, Jimmy, you know?" Brian said, taking a piece of chorizo out of his bag, "and the ham here is fantastic, just superb, you know. What you have to do is go into a supermercado, like El Corte Ingles, you know, and buy yourself a nice pack of ham. All you need is 100 grams. In fact, remember that Jimmy, 100 grams of anything will do you quite nicely over here."

Brian patted his not-too-shabby belly and grinned at me. His eyes still remained lamb-like.

"So, Jimmy, have you accepted Jesus into your life?"

In that instant a building shuddered and collapsed somewhere inside me, killing millions.

It was still 16 hours until Barcelona, and I was helpless as the grinning, ham-obsessed sheep spouted verse after verse of biblical scripture, telling me about the joys of being born again and that "you have to look to the nation of Israel, Jimmy, its fortunes are the clock that counts down to the end of days - think about every nation that has gone against God´s chosen people. Every empire has collapsed, but the Jews have carried on."

Brian´s sermon ended by about the ninth hour of the bus trip, when we were joined by two Nigerian born agains. One of them, Ojo, misheard me and introduced me to his friend as Jimmy the Christian from Sweden (I had earlier made up a story about coming to Jesus so as to get Brian to shut up). Having found the flock he´d never had, Brian and the Nigerians proceeded to chant "Praise God!" and "Hallelujiah" at every stop.

My first experience of Barcelona was a grid of empty streets, flooded with blinding sunlight, and a stumbling attempt to find my hostel, despite having not slept at all. When I finally found the place, I discovered a locked door that refused to open, no matter how many times I buzzed my way up. Luckily, a resident left it open long enough for me to sneak through.

The next challenge was to get into the hostel itself, as it was part of a larger building complex. No amount of knocking achieved anything, until the door opened of its own accord to reveal a startled girl doing her best to find a toilet. Unfortunately, the shock of seeing me appear on the doorstep was too much, and she had no choice but to vomit all over the floor.

Welcome to Barcelona.

A trick that I´ve learnt in hostels is, if you don´t know anyone, just go to bed during the day. Every time I´ve done this, I´ve been woken up about half an hour later by a very apologetic person. The apology is enough to start a conversation, during which point you discover common ground and make plans for the evening.

This is how I met Bianca.

Somehow we ended up at an "Australian" pub, called Hogan´s, in La Rambla, where the Swedish girl behind the bar didn´t understand what Coopers Red was, but swore that Fosters was enough to make it an Aussie establishment. I opted for a Newcastle Brown instead, and at this point was introduced to Jarred, a commerical diver from Adelaide, but more recently of Long Beach, California.

A funny thing I´ve learnt about travel stories is that the other person always tells the better tale. Bianca´s and my eyes goggled at tales of deep sea welding work in the middle of the Atlantic, and of near death experiences in Romania, and yet Jarred whooped with excitement when I told him about walking across Spain.

"Maaaate, I wish I´d had the chance to live your life," Jarred said, having just finished telling me about how he´d been traveling the world and getting paid silly amounts of money since he was 22.

It was an early night for me that day, mainly because somewhere between jumping over a pool of vomit and being woken by Bianca, I had decided to explore the city.

The map I´d been given at the hostel mentioned some place called the "Museum of Comics and Illuminations". This obviously was the most interesting place in the city, so I set off, navigating the grids and streets to find the museum. Another trick I´ve learnt, so as not to look completely like a tourist, is to make a note of the important streets I need to find, and do my best to memorise the general shape of the route ahead. This means that I don´t have to pull out a map on the street, and it works especially well on grids.

But not with maps that don´t list every street you´ll come across.

Having brutally murdered a few hours, I arrived at the non-descript, mirrored glass building that supposedly housed the comic musuem and found it to be empty. A security guard on his smoke break grabbed my map and pointed out Montjuic - the Mountain of the Jews, which is located on the opposite side of the city from where we were standing. It had moved.

I´ll look at comics tomorrow, I decided, thanked the man, and made my way back to the hostel. However, the clouds immediately burst into rain, causing my sleep-deprived mind to pull me aside and offer the most valid counsel ever:

Jimmy, the only option you have now is to go and drink in a bar until the rain stops, and then climb up to the top of La Sagrada Familia.

Trusting in the better judgement of my higher consciousness, I found the nearest cafe-bar, sat it out until the rain stopped (only a half hour later) and promptly skated my way across wet pavement towards Gaudi´s incomplete cathedral.

I don´t usually suffer from vertigo, and the climb up the tower was definitely lovely, awe-inspiring, and filled with all sorts of naturally-inspired architecture. But, when it came to climbing back down, especially down the madman´s bowel of a spiralling staircase, I found myself in the grip of white knuckled terror. Definitely enough to evaporate the warm glow of alcohol from my veins, yet without doing a thing about my sense of balance.

The experience must have driven any desire to see Gaudi´s further works from my mind, because the next day was spent exploring the works of Dali and Picasso instead.

Of the two musuems, Dali´s was by far my favourite exhibition. I didn´t know too much about his work, beyond his interest in drawing his wife nude, lots of surreal landscapes and his interest in cannibalism. However, it´s his work in pen and ink, around the mid 1960s, that I really admired. Ironically, it was his religious ilustrations that I loved the most.

The Picasso Musuem was also great, especially its temporary exhibition about how many artists have been fascinated with Velasquez´s Las Meninas. Also, being an art neanderthal, it was interesting to see Picasso´s earlier works, and to finally confirm that despite his famous work looking like something Ken Done could´ve painted, he actually had a lot of classical skill and talent behind him.

This was, for the most part, my experience of Barcelona. Despite my disappointment with the Camino´s tourist epidemic, I fully embraced Barcelona´s, having always known what to expect there. There was only one time that I had a truly local experience.

Catching the tram from the city centre, I made my way to the outer suburbs of the city, where I was greeted by Carlos, from the camino. He´d invited me over to dinner at his apartment, where he had prepared a Catalonian-style meal.

It turns out that I was the guest of honour here, as Carlos´two young daughters greeted me at the door.

"When they heard you were coming, they went straight into their rooms to put on their make-up and dresses. I think they like you." Carlos said, with a cheeky grin (his daughters were 9 and 11).

All throughout our walk together, Carlos had always told me that he cooked an amazing tortilla. He was not proven wrong - it was by far the best tortilla I´d tasted, with zucchini as an extra special ingredient.

Carlos´youngest daughter was overcome with excitment by my arrival, and ended up having a heated "discussion" with her dad in her bedroom. Shortly afterwards I heard her ask how to say "buenas noches" in English, before she sheepishly crept out to give me a kiss goodnight.

Before leaving that night, I asked Carlos if he had kept to his suggestion of spending each day as if he were walking the camino. He nodded and smiled, saying, "Jimmy, I can´t stop walking at all."

Neither could I, really. My last day in Barcelona saw me climbing Montjuic in an effort to finally see the comic book museum. Obviously it must´ve been a massive collection, to have been moved to such a prestigious location. Yet, it was strangely not listed on the map, and no-one in the tourist information had a clue what I was talking about. In the end, I was directed to the Military museum, where I was told that this castle held the comic collection.

I paid for my entry, navigated through the impressive fort, and came across my goal. There, sandwiched between some stones from an ancient Jewish graveyard, was a small collection of glass cabinets. Inside were some yellowing sheets of comics; pirates, cowboys, knights and soldiers from the 1950s. All in Spanish, and completely out of my grasp.

In an attempt to cheer myself up, I decided to check out the Miro Foundation in my last hours before the bus to Granada.

A large swarm of bright colours and sweet smells, bleating in American accents, surrounded me once I was inside. They leapt from room to room, walking up to paintings and sculptures, cracking jokes about how bad they looked, before grabbing a friend to take their picture next to "the painting that Miro obviously made for his fifth birthday".

I couldn´t help but think back to Brian´s rule about 100 grams. Just enough culture to say you´ve done something, but not enough to really get it. The Americans must have it written in their constitution.

Memories of Brian were hard to eject from my mind when it came to catching the bus to Granada. Though I knew he was safely back in Louisiana, my eyes kept avoiding contact with any potential anglophone.

Instead, I ended up catching the bus part of the way with a Catalonian called Jordi. He wore a "dreadlock mullet" - the trendy shaved head with dreadlocks spurting out from just above the neck. I couldn´t help but ask him what it all meant. In an effort to practise his English, Jordi told me that he was an "okupo", a Spanish squatter, and that rasta culture is a big part of that scene. Funnily enough, I´d actually passed his squat on my first day in Barcelona, when trying to find the Comic museum.

I showed him the picture I´d taken at the front of his building - a piece of grafitti saying "Tourist Terrorist".

Jordi nodded sadly, but then smiled and said, "If you like grafitti, you will love Granada. Just ask around."

I wished him well and we parted ways. In another 11 hours I would have the chance to see if he was right or not.