I took a holiday in Catalonia, partly in Barcelona and partly at a beach town.
In Barcelona, shops and metro stations have up escalators but no down escalators so you have to walk down.
Table service exists almost everywhere, which is nice. Except at the places where there is no table service, and often the only way to find out is to sit there until you realise you’re not going to get served. But even if there is table service, the prevailing culture seems to be that waiters do not bother the customer. All well and good, except that it is taken to extremes: ignore the customer; don’t make eye contact with the customer; and especially don’t take any notice of the fact that the customer has been sitting there with empty beer glasses for the last ten minutes. The game of getting the waiter’s attention gets tired fast. They’re equally reluctant to give you the bill, often disappearing completely and leaving you trapped and contemplating theft.
We took a boat trip. The sea was quite rough. There were no safety announcements and few signs. How refreshing! You can’t get on a train in England without constant safety harassment. We rented a scooter. The man wasn’t interested in seeing my driving license and just asked me to ride round the block. In the UK, you have to take a day’s compulsory training to ride a scooter. Maybe all the safety nonsense we put up with in the UK doesn’t come from Europe after all, or maybe Spain just doesn’t stand for it.
Royal Mail make it as difficult as possible to look up a UK postcode while on holiday. My phone’s 3G data worked just fine, but its web browser, which normally copes with anything, did not like it at all. I suspected Javascript, but having looked at the site I’m not sure. Something non-standard must be going on. So much for the web site, but the phone line is a premium 09 number that doesn’t work from within Spain. There is an international helpline, but they just told me they weren’t allowed to put me through to the postcodes line, so tough luck. Eventually I discovered another 08 number for postcodes, but this is only open two hours every evening. It’s all very frustrating — but then, they’re the monopoly provider of that information.