It's The One-Year Anniversary of a Wild Night in Barcelona

The 4th of March, 2017 (El cuatro de Marzo, for my Spanish speakers out there, yes I am cultured). My second day in Barcelona visiting my friend Nick for spring break. It started innocently enough. I think we went and checked out a few sites, maybe took a stroll on La Rambla or something. I honestly do not remember what we did during the day. All I know for certain is we got back to his apartment around 5 PM Barcelona time. Two of his roommates, we'll call them Alec and Jameson because those are their names, told us they were going to the FC Barcelona game that night. Saturday night futbol, what a great time to be had! Nick and I took a look-see on the ol' Internet to see if any tickets remained for this matchup with Celta Vigo. And what do you know, there were some still for sale! Now Nick was wanting to stay in for the night and study for exams the next week like a huge wet blanket, but after some good, old-fashioned peer pressure from myself and the five others in the room, we went ahead and smashed that buy button. I was already excited about seeing a real life Demi God play live in Lionel Messi. And then I saw that gate number I would go through in order to access my seats.

Nice. 

So we wait around, play some FIFA and before you know it, its just after 7 and we're heading out to make the trek to Camp Nou. A long Metro ride and some walking later, and we get there. It truly is a breath-taking experience. The four of us head into the marvelous team store they have and bought some swag. Talkin' nice new jerseys for the boys: Neymar for me and Nick (LOL nice call noobs, he left for PSG after that season) and Luis Suarez for Jameson. The other guys had different seats than us, so we agreed to meet up at the beer tent near the shop after the match. 

Nick and I make our way to the seats. Midfield and in the actual last row of the entire stadium. But my God was it a gorgeous view:

Buddy,,, I was hitting that button with a ferocity.

It was a wonderful game. Messi scored twice, Neymar scored, Barcelona won 5-0, I got to chirp my beloved Arsenal:

.@Arsenal watching a real team play @FCBarcelona pic.twitter.com/NzNWC6ABVM

— Khal Fuego (@TheSituAsian508) March 4, 2017

After meeting up with the other two and having a beer, we made our way home. It was probably 11 PM at that point, and we started talking about the plans for the rest of the night.

You see, Barcelona is a weird spot. Whereas places like Boston and London shut down pretty early compared to other places, nightlife in Barcelona doesn't start until like midnight. So we got home around 1130 and put own some nicer clothes, because we were heading to Otto Zutz, a nightclub. 

Now, anyone who knows me in the slightest could probably tell you I am 100% NOT a nightclub guy. I'm large, I'm awkward, I generally despise people, especially people who like to frequent clubs. I think that you pay an exorbitant amount of money for a mediocre time at best. Overpriced drinks, people who think they're better than they are, music that is too loud to be good, things of that nature. The temerity, the unmitigated gall, the lack of couth, Max Kellerman.

None of these things are conducive to being in a club. I mean, look at that picture. All packed in like sardines. You think I was able to maneuver comfortably in there? No. Not my bag. 

Despite this, I'm operating under a "When In Rome" mindset. The guys are gonna take me to the club and have a swell time. We pregame and then get to the club around 1 AM. Myself, Alec and Jameson take one cab and Nick and his girlfriend take another. At this point I would like to point out that I had only met those two Friday afternoon. I had gone for a beer with Alec and Nick Friday night at a place frequented by Americans called The George Payne, in which an aggressively drunk girl fell asleep on me. I'm talking slurring her words to the point it sounded like Dothraki, couldnt stay still and her eyes were rolling back in her head like she's the goddamn Undertaker. 

Not great! So as she's sleeping/possibly deceased on my shoulder, her friend comes to try and drag her away, but 'Taker comes back and just stares at me, saying "What?" a lot, at which point I try and have an intelligent conversation with her about the geopolitical ramifications of Catalonia seceding from Spain. I won't say she was anti-independence for the Catalan people but her silence on the subject was worrisome to say the least. Her friend tried to get her again but then a guy came over out of nowhere and started making out with her, and so the dead girl stayed on my shoulder for a few more minutes. 

Anyway, I hadn't known those guys for very long and had only really had beers with Alec and spent no time with Jameson aside form a little bit of FIFA at the apartment. Our cab gets to Otto first and we finally get to the front of the line. A 10 Euro cover and a free drink, not too bad (it could have been very bad but like I said before, not a club person so I have zero reference as to what cover should be). Well, we get in there and Nick texts us to say his girlfriend isn't feeling too well and that they ended up going home. So now I'm in a club with two guys I don't really know and I'm thinking that I can't leave now. My Spanish isn't great and I don't really want to try and traverse home by myself. Not to mention I have no key to the apartment. So I stayed. 

We grabbed our free gin and tonics and headed upstairs, because apparently downstairs is where you get all your personal items stolen right off your body. Like a newborn cub that cannot protect itself from the elements, except in this case the elements were 42-year-old Spanish men rolling on molly and hitting on girls who were for sure like 18 or 19 at most. We proceeded to spend the next few hours taking too many tequila shots (I have sworn off tequila after this and another instance I may get into later) and trying our hands at trying to romantically attract Spanish women with our poor Spanish and body language. My game in Spanish is almost as bad as my game in English. At least in Spanish I had to just be direct and get to the point, meaning rejection came a lot faster than normal. "Quiere bailar conmigo?" "Le gusta a mi?" "Quiere besa a mi?" (Notice I used the formal tu form, or 'ustedes', because I did not know these various ladies as if they were my friends.) Needless to say, it did not work. It didn't help I am, again, large and awkward and was struggling making it to and from the bar and around the establishment. Alec had the best Spanish of the group and even he was striking out. Jameson was drunk. He was very drunk. 

Finally, a lot of money down and without having a single female express any interest in any of us whatsoever, we exited. It was probably between 3 and 4 AM at this point. We're very drunk, and Jameson had pregamed harder than any of us so he was absolutely hammered. We were waiting for a cab outside the entrance and security says we have to move around the building. So we walk over and a few people follow us. We chat them up and the leader of that pack says he's from Amsterdam. A real nice lad. He pulls out a carton of cigarettes, and Alec and Jameson ask if they can get some Drunk Hoons. I do not partake because I enjoy my cancer to come in other forms, thank you. Meanwhile, one of his companions, a woman, pulls out a tin and pops something green in her mouth. She offers some to us, to which we all wonder out loud, "What in the good fuck is she trying to give us?" We're asking her where she's from to try and get a little English or something out of her. But she's not saying anything, just holding the tin out. We all look at each other and then take a piece (I don't know how to describe them, almost like a fruit gusher shape I guess?). Theres hesitation, and then I drunkenly throw caution to the wind and throw that sucker into my face hole. Alec and Jameson immediately order me to tell them what effects it takes on me over the next few minutes, and they pocket theirs. 

Here's the thing, I said I was bad at Spanish, but I do know it to some extent. The lady was saying "Azucar" a lot. Sugar. That was just a breath mint with sugar in it, I was sure of it. I was hoping it was some wild edible from Amsterdam and I was about to blast off for one of Saturns various rings. While I was disappointed, I was also relieved it was not some sort of cyanide capsule or horse tranquilizer. They taste a little funny though, no biggie in my state at the time though. Ab out an hour and a half later when they kicked in I realized that they were in fact edibles because I caught myself just staring at a street sign for a good 15 minutes and thought I was melting through Earth's crust. The sign was in Catalan too, not even Spanish which I would have had a shot at understanding. 

So, those people leave and while we wait for a cab to come by, Alec has finished his cig and has taken Jamesons. Now, Jameson has said he will not be able to finish his, but lo and behold after about 30 seconds he wants it back. They start fighting over it, shoving each other as people will. I'm Snapchatting this because I am an asshole and also trying to grab Jameson before he gets hurt as the smaller human in this situation. We start drifting, and before I know it we're in a parking garage exit. This one to be exact.

See that gate thats open on the right side? We hit that and knocked it off. And see that little booth on the right? There was a security guard sitting there. We stop dead in our tracks and Alec picks up the broken gate. The guard starts to move, so Alec drops the gate and yells, "RUN!" 

Pal, I've never ran so fast in my life. We BOOKED it. Jameson being drunk as a skunk got caught, the security guard absolutely laid him out from behind like he was Brian Dawkins. 

Me and Alec make it a few blocks down and are sucking in wind. My lungs were really mad at me, that much is certain. And then it dawns on us: "Where's Jameson?" Well shit buddy, he got caught, now I remember seeing him get mollywhopped. We start to walk back to find him and he's with the security guard and two policemen, who showed up with a quickness. A great first step most likely, could probably take Paul George off the dribble and finish at the rim. Alec tells me, "You can stay back if you want, you didn't actually go through the gate." To which I thought, "Yeah, I'll take you up on that and not go towards La Policia." I thought it might take 15 minutes to sort things out. Well 15 minutes turned into an hour. I finally decided to come out from behind the car I was hiding behind because I thought I was James Bond and walk up to the crime scene. The security guard tells the police I'm the other one, and Alec tells them I did nothing, I was just there. A good guy move if there ever was one.

The police don't care and are telling us we either come back at 9 AM to pay for the damages, roughly 200 Euro, or we go to jail. Now I've always wanted to be on Locked Up Abroad, ever since I was a small boy. Perhaps for drug smuggling, maybe arson, who knows. You see, Future's self titled album had just come out a month prior, and on it there is a song called "Scrape" which, after one spin, will make you want to go commit a litany of felonies.

So I was in the criminal mood as a result and ready to do hard time in a Spanish prison, just for sure not breaking a parking garage gate. That shits weak, I would have been mince meat in the slammer with that story. So I am all for paying the fine. Jameson meanwhile is drunkenly telling us we can grab his ID off the officers clipboard and make a break for it. Luckily, Alec speaks very good Spanish despite our night so far and the cops speak no English. Alec does a good job talking to the police while Jameson is saying nonsense that would get us in a lot of trouble with cops who could understand him. We elect to come back later and pay.

Getting in the cab we're all sort of just speechless at what had transpired. It's now 530 AM and we're finally home. And there's a girl at the building entrance. She says her friends from UT-Austin are living "somewhere in here". So we let her in and she joins us in the elevator. She gets off a floor before us and as we are opening the door to our place we can hear her knocking on doors below us. We head in and recap the night to two of the other guys. After about five minutes theres a knock on the door. I go to open it and its the girl. With the door an inch open she walks in like she owns the place and says she can't find her friends room. "I just woke up a random family," she says. She needs to charge her phone so she can call her friend and find the room number. So theres a random girl just chilling with us and we tell her about our night to. She found the general story interesting, us not so much. At least I have checked off an item on my bucket list: Get turned down by two or more women representing different nationalities in the same night. 

She finally leaves and its time to turn in for the night. It's also 7 AM and the sun is coming out. I think I slept until 130 PM before I was awoken by Nick entering the room. Oh yeah, I slept in Nicks bed all week because he didn't use it once while abroad since he slept at his girlfriends apartment down the street. Feels like an important piece of info. 

So to recap a little: I was drunkenly out for an absurd amount of time (like how do they just do 12-7 AM club nights/mornings every weekend? Europeans are a different species, man), ingested an unknown substance that ended up being sugar but only enough to cover 99% of the taste of marijuana that made up the majority of this thing digesting in my stomach, almost got arrested in a foreign country while living in a different foreign country at 4 AM and finally closed it all out hanging out with a random girl in my friends apartment until 7 AM. Perhaps even crazier than any of this is telling my mother what had happened a week later when she visited me in London. I left out a few details at that time, though. 

A night I will never forget, and a beautiful place to boot. Barcelona became one of my favorite places on Earth that week. I also formed a bond with Alec and Jameson through that outing. We will forever be connected by that instance. 

As the lauded poet-laureate Ed Sheeran once said, "Siempre vida Barcelona."

PS-Even more upsetting that anything that happened that night is that I left my towel in Nicks closet and he refused to bring it back to the States for me. On Hanukkah no less! Some friend he is!

PPS-The other time that factored into me swearing off tequila was when I was presuming at this girls apartment in London and she asked if I wanted a shot, to which I said yes. She tells me they're out of shot glasses and grabs a solo cup. And thence just starts pouring tequila in. And pouring. And pouring. It looked like the Alec Baldwin gif but in real life. 

She hands me the cup that is now roughly 65% tequila. My eyes just sort of turned into saucers, I mean was I really supposed to drink that straight? And then she said, "Are you gonna drink that or be a pussy?" It was at that moment I had been challenged and had to respond. So I could either put the cup down and walk out and never be seen again, or I could take that Mexican liquor straight to the face. And so I had a lot, I mean A LOT, of tequila in one sitting and decided right there I was never touching the stuff again. Fuck tequila, shits gross. Give me a nice, locally brewed IPA over the Devils Toxin any day.

Tall boys, its litty fam.