Beach, Clubs, and Old Friends

Hola hermanos y hermanas! It's a delayed one this time around because I've been on the go non-stop for the past two weeks. Lot's to catch up on. Let's dive in.

On the weekend of May 27th Brendan was gone for the weekend in London and our other buddy Marc was in Dublin, so it was just me and Daan left to tear up the bar scene. Side note: Pretty sick how you can just do weekend trips to other countries when you're living in Europe. On Friday we went to a bar called Temple Bar that's a few minute walk from our place. Apparently there is a famous bar that goes by the same name in Dublin and a bunch of other countries opened up bars with the same name as it to rip it off. Somehow every person in the world has unanimously agreed that Irish bars are the best places to go to meet people when you are in foreign countries. So needless to say we met people within minutes. I spend a lot of time trash talking clubs, but whether I want to or not, I've been ending up at them 50% of the time that I go out. There's a logical reason for it though. Bars here close around 3 at the latest but everyone still wants to keep the party going so the best place to head is to a club. Best clubs in Barca are the ones by the beach.

Saturday was a sports day. Watching the Monaco Grand Prix in the afternoon and Champions league final at night followed by... you guessed it - another club night. Last one I swear.

Sunday was when the real fun was because a surprise visitor came into town - my closest travel buddy Jack. We met back in September in Portugal on a weekend trip to Lagos (I was residing in Lisbon). He's as Red White and Blue as you can get on paper and not surprisingly originates from Georgia, US. We connected over our mutual love of deleting beers, which we did plenty of that weekend. A few weeks later I was in Italy at the same time that he was so he came and met me in Naples (underwhelming city). We rented a car and headed to the Amalfi coast where we spent 3 nights. As two young, single bachelors we quickly learned that Amalfi is not the place you should go to if you want to party. I saw more proposals than I saw eligible bachelorettes. Nevertheless, we saw some awesome places like Pompeii, Positano and Sorrento. A couple months later I'm in Toronto and its December. I get a message from Jack:

Jack: Yo I wanna go to Argentina in February. You down?

Me: I'm already looking at flights.

2 months later we met up in Argentina and split an Airbnb in Buenos Aires for a month. To this day, we're in agreement that Argentina is the best place both of us have ever been to.

Come present day and we link up again in Barca. Jack actually spent some time here because he did an exchange program in Spain in his junior year so he took us to a bar called George Paynes that was supposed to be bumping. It did not disappoint. Turns out it was Karaoke night on Sundays so it was a big one. The great part about it was that it was a giant bar with a great mix of locals, students, travelers, and digital nomads. We befriended a family from some southern US state. The dad of their family - Eric, was floored when he learned that we could work and travel at the same time. "If only I was 30 years younger" - Eric, ~late 50's.

George Payne's is a fantastic bar if you wanna meet new people but don't want to deal with the club scene.

Speaking of bars, we found a sick Barcelona bar that I don't know how every big city in the world does not have something like this. It's called the Dow Jones Bar (yep, like the index). The idea is that drink prices vary and are based on supply and demand. The more people are buying a certain drink, the more the price goes up. If enough time passes and not enough of a drink has been bought, the price goes down. Every so often, when prices get too high, there's a bear market crash when everything goes down. F**kin brilliant idea if you ask me. Put a bar like this in any financial hub in the world and there's gonna be a line up till the next city.

The work week hit me like a truck on Monday so I took it easy that day. Jack left on Wednesday so we hung out again on Tuesday and had a few drinks. The rest of the work week was split between the gym, beach, and work. Regardless of what I was doing, the one thing that was on my mind was the Scuba Diving course that I had signed up for. It was coming up on the Saturday and Sunday. On the Sunday night that had just passed, Brendan from next door had drunkenly agreed to sign up for the course with me so we we're going to do it together which was a relief. On Friday night before the first day of the course, Daan had left back to his motherland for the weekend (Netherlands) so it was just Brendan and I. We agreed to take it easy that night because we had to wake up at 9am to go diving the next day. "Let's just go grab a few". The final last words before another night of debauchery at our new favorite bar - George Paynes. We got back at like 4am and woke up to go diving. The course started at 10am and consisted of 2 hours of theory and about an hour of diving.

Pro tip: Don't get belligerent the night before scuba diving in the morning.

The diving part on the first day was just going around 6 feet (2m) in the sea with all the equipment to practice safety maneuvers. The toughest part for me with diving is equalizing the pressure in my ears. Think about when you're on an airplane and you feel the pressure change as you take-off. Going underwater is the same but the pressure changes at a much faster rate so you need to hold your ears and blow so you're pushing air into your inner ear to push against the pressure of the water in the outer ear. Oh, it's also cold af.

First day went by alright but when I came out of the water, Brendan told me he couldn't equalize the pressure so they failed him in the course and he needs to retake it (350 euros down the drain). Second day was a lot more interesting. It was just me and 4 Catalans who did not speak any English so I had to try and follow along with my novice level Spanish. This day we went down to 30 feet to do the safety maneuvers again and they gave us some time to swim around after. So now I'm officially certified for Open Water diving which means I can dive anywhere in the world without an instructor or having to go through all the bs safety stuff at the start of every dive. The license also never expires which is sick.

Jack came back to Barcelona this Wednesday and this time he's crashing in my studio apartment on my fold out couch until Sunday. We took it easy last night but these next few days are going to be mayhem. Currently crushing a bottle of vino blanco while I wrote this and Jacks working on his own newsletter.

Stay tuned. I think I'll have a lot to write about after this weekend.

Cheers

- MS