Barcelona Day 2

As if you hadn’t had enough of my Day 1 post, here is your next thrilling installment of ‘someone else’s holiday pics’ – you lucky things, you!

So, day 2 we woke up and it was all looking a little murky and grey outside. I know – how freaking rude, right? We’d had loose plans to do some shopping anyway though, so it was no great loss. Heck, I was in a city with a Zara on every street corner for heaven’s sake, if I couldn’t entertain myself here, where could I?? And boy, could I have entertained myself for a little but longer in those Zara stores. Zara is already one of my favourite stores, and in it’s Spanish homeland the prices are a decent bit cheaper than here in the UK, so I couldn’t resist picking up some bargains. Mainly this pair of trousers:

Well yeah, they’re nautical, and are cheap enough at the best of times, so I’d been tempted by them a few times over here already, but in Euros rather than Pounds? Come to Mama! I also fell in love with this skirt:

Unlike the trousers I hadn’t seen this in UK stores, but for reasons best known to myself I couldn’t quite decide whether to buy it or not. Which was really stupid, because, well, more on that later. You know what’s coming though, don’t you?

Next on my list to visit was Mango, another high street Brand that originated in Spain (Barcelona itself in fact, fashion fans). For some reason I don’t visit all that often, and now I’m not really sure why, because the clothes are of a similar price and quality to Zara, just a little less ‘edgy’, which to be honest suits me fine because as we’ve already established – I’m just not cool. Anyway, I do love myself a strappy cami top, so I couldn’t resist picking up this little pastel beauty:

Last up was this rather fetching, and yet again nautical, blouse from Bershka, One of Zara’s younger sister Brands which is less widely known back home. I’d been eyeing up a similar one in Primark the other day since there really is no urgent need for me to add to my blouse collection, but I’d been put off by the cheap material. This one, though, cost pretty much the same, but is made of a lovely, silky fabric that feels far more expensive than it is, so in the basket it went!

We didn’t just shop of course, that would be really amazing boring. We… Oh wait, no, we pretty much did just shop. And eat. And drink beer, but no real surprises there, huh? I did discover that there appeared to be a whole back street passion for Vintage style frocks in the Gothic Quarter, finding quite a few boutiques stocking Collectif, Lindy Bop and Hell Bunny. Unfortunately, being British brands, they cost almost twice as much, so no bargains to be had in that department. Still, it’s always nice to see the frocks in real life rather than on a computer screen.

This was also the day our Dog Spotting game ramped up a notch. See, we all know how I feel about dogs. Such a fan am I that I feel the need to point them out to anyone in the nearby vicinity. It’s almost involuntary, to be honest, like a weird, canine induced version of Tourettes, and being abroad makes it worse, because – SPANISH DOGGIES! So much more exciting that regular British doggies. After a while it wasn’t even a requirement to verbally alert my companion to their presence, a quick squeeze of the hand would do, and it became a competition of sorts, because thankfully I’m not the only strange one in this pairing. Apart from when I shouted ‘BEAGLE!!!’ excitedly in some poor Spanish woman’s face, I was definitely the stranger person at that moment in time…

To recover from a hard day’s retail therapy, we decided to swank it up that evening by having dinner on our hotel’s fancy rooftop terrace, where I had the best Seabass I’ve ever eaten and he had a steak that was basically as big as my head. It was the kind of setting that normally makes me feel a little uncomfortable, particularly as I’d tried to pretend I belonged in such a place by wearing a dress and heels – namely that dress I bought in every colour I could get my hands on and my Kurt Geiger ‘Isadora’ heels, which bear a remarkable resemblance to all those Dolly heels I told you about in the very same post (because they basically are exactly the same, except they have studs instead of sequins. What of it??) but you know what I decided while I sipped an Aperol Spritz and gazed at the view? I could get used to this. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it!

Bet you thought for a moment there that you’d got away with only having to look at a few pics of my purchases, didn’t you? Don’t be daft. Cue photo overload….

March

Love,