Robbed, Wrecked, and Revived

Happy Monday folks. Another action packed week and a bit so let's get into it.

As I mentioned in my last post, my good buddy Jack was visiting me from Wednesday - Sunday (8th-12th of June). Luckily my studio apartment had a fold out couch so we didn't need to cuddle for 4 nights. Though he did make me read him a bedtime story every night before bed. And he's a Georgia guy so it had to be one from the bible. My apartment is pretty big for a studio but when you fold out the couch there is almost no space for anything so working on the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday was less fun than the thrill it normally is.

Jack happened to have other friends who we're in town as well so we went to the beach to meet up with them. The friends in question were a group of 15ish people that Jack had mutual friends with back in Georgia. We spent the day at the beach but the real action took place at night. We met up with another one of Jack's friends named Ben that he made at his hostel in Sevilla right before coming to see me in Barcelona. The events of the night are blurry to say the least but we went to one of the most popular clubs in Barcelona called Opium which is right on the beach. Somehow I got split up from the fellas and ended up in the Mediterranean sea at 3 am. I put my phone and wallet in my pant's pockets which I left on the shore. When I came back to shore, I found that I was phone-less and wallet-less. Some opportunistic individual must have seen me leave them there and took them when I wasn't paying attention. The only things I carry in my wallet when I'm abroad are my ID and my wise card (similar to a loadable credit card) which I use to pay for stuff. The phone is the harder thing to lose.

So what do you do when you lose your phone and wallet in a foreign country?

Step 1:

Call your dad at 4am and scream incoherently into the phone until you wake your roommate up and he tells you to shut the f**k up.

Step 2:

Wake up in the morning and problem solve.

Luckily for me, I came to Barcelona without a credit card because I lost it the week before (are you seeing a pattern yet?) and it didn't come to my Toronto address in time before my flight out. So I ordered a credit card to Barcelona through my bank and BMO actually pulled through and sent it in 10 business days free of charge.

I was solvent again.

Trickier part was the phone. I went to an apple store to check out phones and stayed maybe a total of 30 seconds when I saw the prices. So I went to a few shops that were selling used iphones instead. Prices were at least half of a new phone. The guy selling me the phone also turned out to be Romanian so I made sure he wasn't selling me a toy phone disguised as an iphone. Setting it up + getting another Spanish sim card was probably the longest part of this ordeal.

Nevertheless, within 24 hours of losing everything I was back in business with a decent dent in my chequing account.

The next night was even more interesting. Asides from Jack being in town, my buddy Daniel (fellow Torontonian) who I'd met in Mexico this January was also in town. Dan runs an e-commerce company based around selling baby products so he can make his own work schedule and work from anywhere he wants unhindered by time zones. And he's only a year older than me. We had quite a few crazy weekends in Mexico and hung out in Toronto as well after so I had to see him while he was in town. I'll also be meeting up with Dan again in a few weeks in Montenegro so he'll be a reoccurring figure here.

So that night (Saturday night) I went out with Jack who I met in Portugal, Dan from Mexico, and Daan & Brendan & Ben from Barcelona. Talk about worlds colliding. I went on an absolute tear because of how fired up I was from getting my identity back earlier that day.

I wake up to a phone call from Jack at like 3pm who was now in Athens because he had a flight at 10am that morning (Sunday). The conversation started with him being like:

Jack to me: "Bro, do you remember anything that you did last night?!"

Didn't like where this was going already.

Apparently I was still wrecked when Jack's alarm went off at 7:30am to catch his flight and I immediately jumped out of my bed and body slammed him. He threw me off and I preceded to blast reggaeton on the speaker at full blast - as you do for your house guests. He picked up his bag and stomped out. The buffoonery didn't stop there because after that I apparently broke into Daan's apartment and went to his room to body slam him as well. Luckily, Daan was pretty much comatose so he didn't wake up but Brendan did capture the aftermath below. I've managed to salvage the friendships with everyone involved.

I took 24 hours off from drinking until Monday at dinner, and pretty much got back on the wagon throughout the week. The real action began again on Wednesday when Daan & Brendan's friend - Sophia, that they had met in Dublin on exchange earlier that year, arrived on Wednesday. They wanted to show her a good time because she was only staying a week so we went out "just for a few beers" on Wednesday night which turned into a not so surprising 4am-er. The general course of the next few nights were having a pregame till 11-11:30 then going to a bar where we almost always met a decent group of people who we then hit the clubs with at 2am when they start to get good. One of the highlights of this weekend was having a beach day on Saturday and playing pretty intense volleyball with a bunch of French medical students who were in Barca celebrating the end of their exams. I also watched the F1 Montreal Grand Prix with Daan who knows a lot about the sport which makes him a good person to watch it with because otherwise it just looks like a bunch of weird cars going around a track.

I've got one last weekend coming up in Barcelona before I head back to the motherland (Romania) next Monday. About to head to the bar with the fellas to get the week's debauchery goin. I hope everyone is having a great summer so far!

Stay tuned

- MS