Part 1: from a bench in Doha
I am beginning this post while sitting on a bench in the Doha airport, since we’ve got a few hours layover here, and there’s not a lot else to do other than browse the shops for things I’m neither interested in buying nor prepared to pay the prices for.
That I’ve been mostly awake for well over 24 hours hasn’t helped my sense of wellbeing. Our flight left Adelaide at 9.20pm, and I’d gotten up at a reasonable time in the morning; add on a thirteen and a half hour flight to that - I might have at best slept maybe two to three hours on the plane - and it means I’m feeling a little flat. And I’m looking down the barrel of another couple of hours here while we wait for our flight to Barcelona, which I think is about seven hours. I’m very much looking forward to getting to our first hotel and having a good lie down for a while before we do a bit of exploring.
But such is the way of travel to Europe if you’re coming from Australia, and I am required (if somewhat resentful) to acknowledge that, to get there I am obliged to spend a great deal of time on aeroplanes.
This trip, though, there is the novelty of an entirely new airport in a different country, since on all my previous trips I’d flown Emirates, which meant a stopover in Dubai. But considering that most airports are quite alike, this novelty did not last long.
It’s been four years since my last trip, so I can’t remember that much about the specifics of those Emirates flights - but it seems like Qatar are quite similar in most ways. But this plane was newer, which meant that all the bits and pieces (entertainment systems etc.) were as well. But I’m sure I remember getting more food services on Emirates; that might, of course, just be my faulty memory. Still, given how much eating we’re likely to be doing on this trip - it’s one of the reasons we chose Spain & Portugal - maybe less food is a good thing.
To pass the many, many hours on the plane I tend to watch movies, mostly animated - I definitely don’t watch anything I haven’t seen before, since I don’t feel that a tiny screen on the back of a chair and audio delivered through not especially high quality earbuds (I bring my own; I shudder to think what the complimentary ones are like) is the way to watch anything I’m properly interested in watching.
I’d made watching ‘Frozen’ a tradition, so I was a bit disappointed to find that it wasn’t in the Qatar library. So I had to find something else and, after a bit of scrolling, hit upon ‘The Lego Batman Movie’, which I’d seen in the cinema and enjoyed enough to think it’d be a good choice under the circumstances. I followed this with one that I did watch on my last trip - ‘Arsenic & Old Lace’, which I have a particular fondness for after having played Jonathan Brewster in a stage production (the play predates the movie) a few years back.
After that (and more scrolling) I found ‘Clue’, which didn’t actually impress me as much as the last time I’d watched it. It was after that that I shut off the screen and attempted (with uncertain success) to get some sleep.
With a few hours left I started watching ‘The Bourne Identity’ but with a few stops for food and conversation and announcements and so forth, I ran out of time to finish it. I was expecting to be on another Qatar flight to Barcelona, and with that came the assumption that they’d have the exact same library - but it looks like we’re on a partner airline that I’m yet to learn the details of. So, it might not be until the return journey that I get to spend more time watching Matt Damon beat people up and/or shoot them.
Part 2: Barcelona
So it's turned out that we were not on a partner airline after all, so it was easy enough to pick up where I left off. After finishing that I watched 'The Mummy' - the 1999 one with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz, not the appalling 2017 one with Tom Cruise, though that was also in the library), followed by 'Super 8'. The last 15 minutes or so of this were ruined slightly by the fact that we were coming in for landing and the plane we were on had electronically controlled tinting on the windows which had been rudely set to full brightness at the time.
There's not much else to say about the flight from Doha to Barcelona, other than it being mercifully short, at least compared to the first leg of our trip. And it was even shorter than I think we'd been told; I had it down for seven hours when it only took six and a half. I consider any less time spent on a plan to be a win...
Getting through the terminal was pretty easy, though there was a checkpoint (for want of a better word) of Spanish national police that didn't seem terribly formal; they just wanted to check our passports. But, like is the case so many times when I've travelled (apart from my first trip to the UK), once they saw it was an Australian passport and we looked like our photos, we got waved through without a second glance.
A couple of bus rides later - one more than we probably needed because I bought the wrong kind of ticket for the bus from the airport to the city; we had to get the shuttle from Terminal 1 to Terminal 2 - and a short walk later, we'd found our hotel and checked in. We did some stuffing about to get our phones properly connected to a network, since the company I'd bought SIM cards from hadn't given us all the details we needed. But that was quickly sorted out, and we (now that we had the means to find our way back) could go for a bit of a wander.
We were a bit surprised at just how residential the part of Barcelona (a suburb called El Raval) we're in was. The streets, apart from the big main roads, are narrow and pretty much entirely multi-level apartment buildings with shop fronts on the ground floor. And the shops themselves are everything you can think of, with convenience stores and tapas bars being the most common. It has an amazing lived-in feel, and there are people of all ages everywhere.
It wasn't long before we decided we needed to eat, so we wandered back to a tapas bar just around the corner from our hotel and sat down for a meal. And then it was definitely time for bed.
Of course we took some pictures.
This is our hotel:
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