Tarantula count for David: 0. There are how­ever turtles, teensy-weensy turtles. Lots of them. Cutest ever. And squir­rels. And ham­sters. And pigeons that seem to be either trying to lib­er­ate the finches in the cages or get in there with them, I’m not sure which.Yes­ter­day was inter­est­ing… the morn­ing saw a visit to the Museu de la Xocol­ate for my Dad. Can I just say Omigod, that was the most divine hot chocol­ate I have ever had in my life?

The after­noon was spent on the beach. The water was fine, the Jewish girl from New York was gorgeous.

And this is for Jonathan, if he’s read­ing. A while back, Jonathan gave me a mix tape. For anyone who’s seen High Fidel­ity, you under­stand the del­ic­acy and effort that goes into cre­at­ing the per­fect mix tape. In it was a note that said, pres­ci­ently, that if any­thing went wrong between us, the tape would be a record of how we had been at that point. I haven’t been able to listen to the tape since we fell out in Feb­ru­ary, but I brought it with me. I love the tape. It’s per­fect. So I listened to it for the first time again yes­ter­day even­ing, and all the words mean dif­fer­ent things now or the same thing with an extra layer. It’s still a per­fect tape. Thank you for that, Mister J.

I planned to go to a Sene­g­alese hip hop band at the Apollo but it turned out that cost ࢓š¬18. I’m hem­or­rhaging money right now, so that wasn’t going to happen. Tried to scam my way in (“I’m an Aus­tralian journ­al­ist… see, here’s my MEAA card… ”). Didn’t get in but did meet two Span­ish freel­ance music journos who took me to a bar where they played some very funky ambi­ent stuff with a bit of spoken word over it… sim­ilar to some of the stuff that Jonathan plays but without the dub. More along the Patti Smith line.

Bar­celona was sup­posed to be this big party city but so far – apart from the influx of Har­leys for some con­ven­tion – it’s been fairly low-key for me. Every time I have tried to go to a big bash, some­thing has inter­vened. I think the les­sons so far are not to worry when things don’t work out the way I planned… I need to learn to go with the flow a little more.