The Buzz of Barcelona (Part 1)

I LOVE Barcelona. It's a city in a class of its own - it's got a bit of everything. It has the pretention of Paris, the brashness of New York and the grit of London, it puts these qualities into a bowl, gives a little stir and what does it get? a city of gingerbread architecture, of falic skyscrapers and of marijuana alleyways.
I came quite on the spur of the moment. It all began on wednesday afternoon - the beginning of a slightly surreal and very Spanish few hours. I had decided to go to Barcelona the day before, finally I had my erasmus grant and a little money to throw around. I met my friend Lizzie in the subterranean bus station that is Avenida de America. It's horrible there and as I wondered the dimly light passages that lead to soot covered buses I found my thin artsy Australian friend and we embarked on the process of buying a ticket. We enquired about prices and times at the ticket desk and then wondered whether we might be able to get cheaper train tickets - with the prospect of 8 hours on the bus we thought we'd give it a try so we hopped on the metro out of that hell-hole and emerged in the rainforest. (no, I haven't been on the wacky backy I am talking about Atocha train station) it's a great train station because it has a rainforst in the middle of it (humidifiers and all) as well as tortoises. So, in this bizarre and humid environment we joined the end of a long and stationary queue. We stood and sweated and the novelty of being in a rainforest began to wear off. No worries we thought, soon we'd be on a comfortable train to Barcelona!
When we eventually reached the ticket desk we enquired about the cheap overnight train we had seen on the internet. This is the point where patience for Spanish incompetance wears thin. The woman who looked like she had that rare but serious problem of lacking a brain stared at us as if we had asked her to multiply 45670 by 230. She then did something on her computer which reminded me of a certain travel agent in a Little Britain sketch and turned to us and said in the Spanish equivalent of "computer says no".
We persisted being sure that this train existed so she called over a neanderthal who seemed to know more about the art of incompetence than her. He typed in a series of coded numbers which came up with the same answer - this train apparently did not exist. By this point the 3 million or so people in the queue behind us were starting to get militant so we decided to adjourn to my place, make a nice cup of tea and prove these idiots wrong.
Once at mine we found straight away the train we were looking for, we rang up and the pleasant Latino lady told us yes of course there was a train and that we should book up fast. Unfortunately after all that the train was actually full so we had to resign ourselves to the fact that we would be traipsing those soot covered hallways again to get on a bus.
After nearly 5 hours of trying we got a ticket within about 20 seconds at the bus station. We could finally breathe, relax and look forward to an 8 hour trip of numbness.