Severe Jam Damage

Oh dear god, 10 o’clock at night and the taxi driver had brought us to Beirut. We were staying in an area called ‘La Raval’ aka ‘Barri Xino’ aka ‘Chinatown.’
The taxi driver didn’t know where our street was, he kept driving around and around and around the Rambla del Raval making sure we were a target for any of the locals on the hunt for clueless tourists. Eventually he just dropped us on the side of the road while we waited for the lady who had the keys to our apartment to come hobbling out of some side street.
We followed her back down the dingy road and she took us in a doorway to our home for the weekend.

The apartment was grand, all we needed it for was a bed and a shower. It had two bedrooms, one on the ground floor, the second upstairs in a sort of loft.

That night we went out for drinks - sans coats of course sure and aren’t we on holliers in Spain?
The locals were all wearing winter coats and boots, no wonder they were staring. At Las Ramblas we stopped at a restaurant and got screwed by the waiters for the price of a bottle of wine. (20 euros for a bottle of Faustino VII!!) That, for those who are wondering was the LAST TIME we ate or drank anywhere near Las Ramblas.

La Raval wasn’t as bad as we had first thought - it never is really. I’d put it on a par with Smithfield to be honest, one of those places that anyone who hasn’t lived there doesn’t feel comfortable after dark, but perfectly ok for the locals. There were a bunch of half decent restaurants and some groovy laid-back bars on the Rambla del Raval, we were a 10 minute walk from Port Vell to the south (and Las Ramblas and the Barri Gotic if we were heading east) and there was a good selection of restaurants for breakfast and kebab shops still open at the end of the night. Although the only one we managed to stagger into was the Taj Mahal where we met Orlando Bloom - a Scottish guy named Thomas I think - and one of the shop (owners? managers? kebab makers?) was famous for some ad campaign about kebabs. (True story, Clarice took a photo with the poster on the wall behind him.)

We later realised that all those horror stories our ‘friends’ had been telling us about muggings and robberies were happening to the tourists who stayed on Las Ramblas or in L’Eixample. Our neighbourhood may have been where the thieves came back to at night, but we liked to think of it as a ‘Don’t shit on your own doorstep’ scenario.

Anyway by the last night we were comfortable enough in the area to agree that if we came back to Barcelona we’d probably stay around there again. This train of thought may have been helped along by the lovely bar girls in Ambar who were serving us what could almost be classed as triple measures. Ambar by the way was mentioned in my ‘Le Cool’ guide book and was 3 minutes away from our apartment. We didn’t try it until the final night - possibly just as well for, as Lelly said later, “If we’d found that place on the first night I’d be coming home in a body bag.”

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