I’ve been in Barcelona for five days and I’ve decided that it’s been enough time for me to begin making sweeping generalizations about the city, its residents and culture. Before I go into detail though, I want to tell you that its an amazing place and life in Europe is going swimmingly. That being said, there are some things that have stood out for me about Barcelona and the traveling experience over all.

1. Jet Lag

Having done the New York/LA trip countless times, I’ve experienced slivers of jet lag. Unfortunately, flying to Europe is a different kind of beast and it feels like a cruel painful joke is being played on your body. My traveling companion, Caitie, and I took a red eye from New Jerz to Barcelona. We looked like this after the flight:

I blame this on my foolish decision to take an Ambien on the flight. When taking Ambien, I’ve learned that you have to close your eyes immediately after ingesting the pill. After five minutes or so, you’ll be unconscious. If you stay awake, however, you begin to hallucinate koala bears or whatever the fuck is in your subconscious and things start to get real weird. Thankfully, the latter has only occurred once so I had great faith in the Ambien’s ability to knock me out in time for the flight-in movie. So I took it and closed my eyes. After about ten minutes, I started shuffling around and changing positions. After another ten minutes, I was still awake,  frustrated and gave up on the idea of sleeping. At the time, I thought I was fine and was actually pleasantly surprised at how normal I was feeling. After arriving in Barcelona, however, Caitie informed me that I was singing a Pink song, thinking it was playing on the airplane and smashing my rice with my napkin repeatedly. Needless to say, I didn’t get much shut eye. The day we arrived, Caitie and I were in a trance. We took a 3 hour nap and later fell asleep at midnight. After waking up at ten am and doing some exploring, we came back to our apartment and slept from 4 to 8. Oops. I didn’t end up falling back asleep till six am. I think we’re pretty okay now. Except we’ve been going out till five am and sleeping till 3. And Caitie is napping as I type this.

2. The food

Truth: Some of the best Thai food I’ve ever had was at a restaurant in Barcelona. It’s a shameful and surprising secret. One day, Caitie and I were nursing a medium-grade hangover and stumbled upon this ornate lush place called Thai Gardens. Our heads were saying “tapas” but our hearts were saying “pad thai”. Speaking of tapas, they’re totally weird. Turnip and tuna? No, k bye. Paella is life-altering though.

3. Nightlife

Europe is literally turning me into a Gothic vampire because all we’ve been doing is going out till the wee hours of the morning, sleeping in til mid-afternoon, schlepping our hungover asses to a museum, going home to cook dinner and getting ready to go out again. But it’s worth it because the nightlife is incomparable. Our first night out, we went to an ingeniously-named bar called, Betty Ford, which housed a mixture of foreign babes and local babes whilst serving insanely potent cocktails. The next night, we went to this placed called Mau Mau (Caitie and I called it “Meow meow” because it sounded funny even though it actually doesn’t) which showed short films to Spaniards sitting in IKEA couches. Afterwards, we went to this bar called Bodega something or other that served the most delicious Mojitos. Other bars we’ve frequented have been: The Gimlet and Seven Sins. We want to go to Razzmatazz, a huge club that;s open till six in the morning and also to some gay bars. Unless a Spanish man is in a gay bar, I will assume he’s straight because European men are way too ambiguous.

To meet people, we’ve been using this website, Couch Surfing. I was initially resistant to the idea, for fear that it would only attract hippy-dippy types and serial killers but we’ve been meeting amazing people. Who knew the internet was good for more than checking celebrity gossip and writing in your own narcissistic travel blog?