aching feet

My Spansih girlfriend and I walked the old quarter of Barcelona last night. We walked and walked and walked. We walked for so long and far and got lost and didnt care for so long that the bars shut around us, chairs were packed on cobbled lanes and all that was left were the late night revelers and the street dweller stucked up in stone corners below medieval turrets and gargoyles. Our aimless , spellbound, fantasising wandering through these ancient buckled streets lit with lamps, their high stone walls arching above and hiding centuries of stories hidden within  came to an end when the grey-blue slivers of the night sky, ribboning above, faded and we failed to' find an open bar anywhere in this medieval gridsquare of  Barcelona. This the Land of the 'up very late'! What the? We finally found a well earned Mojito  in the old harbour, at the base of the glorious and ancient Santa Maria del Mar on a moored woodent boat, floating on the waters edgea and  alight with candles.

Both Ana and I are huge fans of the magnificent book by the name of 'Cathedral by the Sea' of which medieval Barcelona is another larger than life character in the story. We spent a while sipping and reflecting from our harbour moorings and both acknowledged that we felt like a friend of ours had lived amongst this ancient place during hard times of the reformation and both felt quite personally connected to the history of the Cathedral. Gotta love a good book for that! The Barri Gothi and the seedy, dark Ravel where men passed comment and drugs were offerred and small kids were still up eating icecream at 1 am, and it stole my heart with its living sense of history, gritty and real and yet brimming with life contemporary. Its a masterpiece in modern managment of culture what they have managed here.