Drunk posting

Okay here's what I love about Barcelona. You go out with your friends for a quick, post-work drink before, apparently, coming home to eat dinner with your friend's pregnant wife. You meet up with your oldest, and let's face it, favourite friend Monica and before you know it, you've had a couple too many Mojitos. Enough to have a devil-may-care attitude to dinner. Said friend that got you into this mess decides to go home and now it's midnight and you're walking the streets home after several cocktails.

Your friends always insist on walking you home despite a million explanations that you know where you're going. There's always that moment of doubt however because every street in Barcelona has two identities. The day time and the night time identity - defined by a shift in grey metal shopfronts that appear without warning to change the face of every street that you know. I did know where I was, but this freedom of streets that shift their faces is my favourite part of the whole city. Gone are the narrow shops full of fruit and wine and in their place only dingy, smokey bars, unrecognisable shop fronts and scores of foreign-looking people holding six-packs for sale.

This mutation of identity is the best bit of this place not because of the several cocktails that you've consumed that make once familiar places unrecognisable but because the city shifts when you don't notice. It's like going out with your husband and coming home with a gorgeous stud that you can't wait to have sex with for the first time. The element of surprise is overwhelming; each street a potential new lover that consists of unexplored terrain that you can't wait to stroke with your fingers or your tongue.

In England, when I've had a few I can't wait for my bed, but here going home feels like a grief, a reminder of the unexplored territory that lies within reach, a desperation of more, new, now, drunk, don't care, let's keep going beyond all reason.

It's probably a good job my friends decided to walk me home despite my many assurances that I knew exactly where I was. I did; I know this barrio of Barcelona well - I've walked its streets at night and at day and know enough road names to figure it out even if my alcohol consumption makes me choose the long way home. If they hadn't insisted with such chivalry, to see me to my door, I'd have gone in that still-open-since-10am cafe/bar at the end of the street and introduced myself to the cute young men at the bar. I'd have made extra trouble for myself when, god knows, I don't need it.

'Escapamos' I said to Xavi when we left the building at 8pm tonight. I meant it; let's escape. Every trip here is an escape for me, from my life, my language, my loves, my hard times. I love it.