I’ve joined a Krav Maga club in Barcelona earlier this week. For those of you that don’t know it, Krav Maga is an Israeli developed fighting sport, focused on efficience and without the kata/ki/chi/whatever bullshit found in most asian martial.

The training was tiresome, especially for me, since I’m (a little) out of shape. Or not, since round is also a shape. I’m not in the right shape, anyway But the hour spent in the gym gave an basic understanding of what Krav Maga is all about: ultimate efficiency.

The club also teaches Krav Maga to private security forces and even to Barcelona’s “Guardia Urbana” police force. It also has a really cool shop with weapons, knifes, urban combat gear, teasers, pepper sprays and so on. And even a Facebook page.

I can’t wait to go there again.

Last night I went to a club in Barcelona. It was one of my flat-mates’ birthday, we had a party at home and afterwards we went to a club to dance. Well, they went to dance, I just went to watch. I don’t really dance, mainly because when I do, I look like a rabid chimp performing some sort of dark ritual – invoking rain or something – rather than a person dancing. And, in my holy book, dancing is just the vertical frustration of a horizontal desire – not necessarily a sin, but definitely something that people should refrain from doing.

Meri, my other flat-mate, asked me if I don’t have any black shoes and she pointed out that one might be banned from entering barcelonese clubs if wearing white sneakers. Which is mind blowing for me. Here they have one of the most open minded and liberal societies in the world. They have freedom of speech, freedom of choice, freedom of religion – like real freedom of religion, not the “you’re free to believe anything you want, as long as you believe in God” freedom of religion that is heavily promoted throughout Romania – gay marriage and so on. But not white sneakers in clubs. That’s going one step too far. I can almost hear Spaniards debating “what am I going to tell my children when they ask me why there are people wearing white sneakers in our clubs!?!”.

The reason for this ban is the fact that white sneakers are mainly worn by garrulos. A garrulo is a Spanish wigger or a light version of the Romanian cocalar. And nobody wants them around.

Anyway, I had no problem getting in. But that might be because of the carnival they have these days in Barcelona – El Carnaval de Barcelona. A lot of people were dressed up as pirates, Santa Claus, KISS members, Borat and so on. So maybe the club’s staff thought that I came in dressed up as a garrulo and that I don’t usually wear white sneakers and that’s why they’ve let me in. It was around midnight and the club was almost empty, because Spaniards & Catalans usually go to clubs later, around 1 am or so. But it got full in no time. So, if you want to go to a club in Barcelona, don’t rush into it. There’s really no point in getting there before midnight. Another thing that needs to be noted about Barcelona’s clubs is that usually the entrance ticket is also a drink coupon, so you don’t pay “just to go in”, you also get a drink. Although the ticket is €7 and you get a €3.5 beer, it’s still better than nothing. €3.5 better…

In the end, it was fun. Happy birthday Ivan.

I had a haircut today. And it opened my eyes. I know now why a lot of Spaniards wear long hair and dreadlocks. It’s preferable to a haircut, which, first of all, takes forever. The guy cut my hair for over an hour. And since I don’t really have that much hair, that’s a lot. Second of all, it’s expensive. Like really expensive. I paid 16 euros for it. Back in Romania, I used to pay the equivalent of about 2 euros for a haircut. And since I usually cut my hair every three months, with the money I spent today I could have had haircuts for the next 2 years.

Or if the “Jesus will come back in 2012 and sabotage the Large Hadron Collider into creating a black hole that will melt the icecap and drown humanity because the Mayan calendar said so” retards are right, I could have used that money to get haircuts until the end of the world. That’s what I call saving

But it’s okay. My hair doesn’t look that bad…and in the end, that’s all that matters.

Today I went for the first time to see a movie in Barcelona – Sherlock Holmes. Which sucks, by the way. It’s a really boring mixture of Murder, She wrote, old Chinese kung-fu movies and lame “2 police officers save the world” movies.

We went to Yelmo Cines cinema, where I paid 6 euros for the ticket and another 7 something for a medium sized bag of popcorn, a Coke and a hot dog. Basically sitting for two hours in a room and get bored by caucasian kung-fu fighters faking British accents yielded a final toll of around 14 euros. Great!

Of course, that wasn’t money totally wasted. I mean, the food was decent . And I’ve learned something new about the city I’m living in. In Spain, most movies are dubbed in Spanish, so if you don’t speak Spanish, is generally a bad idea to go to see a movie at random, without some prior research. Pictures marked as VOS or VOSI are the ones non-Spanish speakers should look for. These acronyms mark pictures that haven’t been dubbed and have Spanish / Catalan captions. Of course, it’s a little confusing in the begining, since one might try to read the subtitles – it’s a habit I guess – and not understand what’s written there. But it’s easy to get over it and look “at the movie” rather than “read the subtitles”.

Finding a place to live in Barcelona is quite easy. The first thing you need to do is your budget. If you have €3-4000 available then you can consider renting a place on your own. A decent rent is somewhere between €700 and €1000 per month, but the tenant must pay a fee to the real estate agency that’s roughly equal with one month’s rent and to pay another 2 months in advance as a “security deposit”. So, even if you choose a really cheap flat, around €600, be prepared to pull at least €2400 out from your wallet.

If you don’t have that kind of money available, there’s an obvious solution: sleep in the railway station. It’s located near the Placa de Saints subway station. Just kidding :p The solution is to share a flat. It’s quite popular here in Barcelona for students and young professionals to share a flat in order to cut down the costs. You can look online for potential roommates. A popular site for this is www.easypiso.com.

It’s there that I’ve found my current roommates – 2 Catalans – a female journalist, you can see here in action here and a male lawyer. They’re both great, funny and friendly people and now I’m glad that I got to live with them, since they’ve showed me around the city and gave me an insight to Barcelona that only a local can.

Usually one should be able to find a suitable place to live in Barcelona in about one to two weeks. There are a lot of flat sharing related scams, where people ask money in advance and insists that the tenant can’t see the flat until he makes a deposit. But if you use common-sense, it’s quite easy to avoid scammers and find a great place to live. I did!