So there I was, minding my own business in Barcelona's main train station, Estacio Nord. It was the day after Christmas and I was scheduled to go that day to Italy.

I'd been in Europe for just over a week, with no problems - other than the fact that I'm basically unilingual - to report. Frankly, it was starting to make me nervous, being that I've got that whole cursed-when-traveling geas going on.

It had really been a fantastic trip so far. I'd been to Paris, Barcelona, and Valencia and was going to go to Italy for a few days, then back to Paris for New Year's Eve.

Paris was absolutely great. I'd been kind of thinking that nothing as highly rated as Paris could actually live up to expectations, but the reality was even better than everything I'd heard about it. Partly that was helped by the weather, which was cold but clear, with blue sky, so I was able to walk around and see things rather than taking the subway to discrete locations and not getting a sense of the city as a whole. That day, I had walked from my hostel near place de la Bastille, along the Seine past the Louvre and the Tuileries, then up Champs Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe. Then I had taken one of the tour busses and seen a lot more - the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Ile de la Cite, the Opera House, and a bunch of other really fantastic places.

Then I went to the train station to find out about a ticket for Morocco the next day, and found out that wouldn't be happening. This, I thought at the time, was the curse, and if this was as bad as it got, great. They said that the only way I was going to Spain before Christmas was if I left that night, and it wouldn't get me to Morocco in any kind of good order - I was going to take the train to Barcelona, then transfer to the train for Madrid, then spend two days there, then go to Morocco, which would get me there Christmas Eve, and no one knew for sure what the schedule for the ferry from Algeciras to Morocco was going to be. But I decided to go anyway.

The trip to Spain was uneventful. I slept all the way to the border, where we changed trains for Barcelona, and then watched as we went through the Pyrenees. After living in England for almost 3 months at that point, I was missing mountains, so it was nice to see them again, and seeing little tiny villages of stone and the occasional castle just gave it all a kind of storybook feel. You definitely get a feel for the fact that Spain has a very small population for its size. The countryside is almost empty - there are places I was where it was empty for the visual radius, except for the road. I didn't see many small towns at all. It was really either the villages in the Pyrenees or large cities, like Barcelona and Valencia.

Then the curse set in. I got off at the wrong train station, a stop before I was supposed to, and since the train was running late - this was to be a constant occurence in Spain - by the time I figured out where I needed to be and got there, I'd missed the train to Madrid. This wasn't so bad, though, as I'd been thinking that I didn't want to bust my ass to get to Algeciras, only to find that I couldn't cross to Morocco that day, and plus it was a lot of traveling in a very short time. So I decided to stay in Barcelona for a night and go to Valencia to visit a friend the next day.

Barcelona during the day was great. I was just walking around looking at buildings, particularly Gaudi-designed ones. In Paris - for those who haven't been there - the buildings, at least where I was, all seem to be either these great huge marble palaces or else these medieval wooden houses, so you get used to walking around in kind of a giant architectural preserve. In Barcelona, the architecture is much more mixed, so you're walking down a street of not-very-exciting 1950's architecture and all of a sudden a Gaudi-designed building is right across from you. Kind of a visual wakeup call.

My supplies were running low - I'd been eating basically bread, cheese and fruit juice - so I stopped in a market, then walked around the city some more and eventually made my way to La Rambla, where the hostel I wanted to stay at was. One thing to be said about Barcelona is that it's very hard to tell where you are. Some of this, it turned out, was the map I was using, which seemed to indicate that north was a different direction, but more of it is the lack of street signs and the fact that the old city is composed of small twisty streets that take you in unexpected directions. But during the day, it's still a nice walk, and the feeling of adventure - "Where will this street take me?" - is fun.

At night, Barcelona is a bit of a different story. La Rambla, it turns out, is where all the tourists and a lot of the locals hang out, so it's fairly busy, and you're not sure who's who or what they're doing. A lot of people are scamming, or seem like it, and a lot of other people are wandering around looking at all the wonders available. There's also an incredible amount of poverty - all the banks have these walk-in foyers (which we don't have in Seattle, for this very reason) where their ATMs are - every single one, by 10 pm, had at least two homeless people sleeping in them.

In the center of La Rambla is a raised divider - about 3 or 4 lanes wide - and at night, it suddenly becomes a strip mall of portashops. Where I was, it started out being all flower stands. There must have been fifteen or twenty of these flower stands, all just gorgeous. Then, suddenly, it was pet shops - mainly fish and birds, but some chickens as well. I didn't go past the pet stands but walked through the side streets back to the hostel.

Being American, I have a definite sense of personal space, and a wariness of anyone whom I can't understand when they speak. I was a little on edge walking around at night, but honestly it wasn't anything that the people there were doing. It was more that I didn't know what I was doing, and it made me a bit nervous.

I made it back to the hostel and passed an uneventful - though cold - night. In the morning, I was catching the bus to Valencia, since the trains were all full with holiday travelers. I was at the bus station bright and early, had a chance to check my email and get coffee, and then off to Valencia. For practically the first time in my life, I found myself in a situatiion where no one assumed that I spoke English. None of the Spanish people tried to speak to me, so they didn't know, and the couple in front of me, who were English, didn't either. If they'd said anything I shouldn't hear, I would've mentioned it, but it was fun enjoying the anonymity. Here in Oxford, regardless of their origins, everyone speaks English, or at leas the people that I come into contact with do, so I'm used to people switching to their own languages when they don't want others to know what they're saying, and lapsing into it when alone.

The road from Barcelona to Valencia runs roughly parallel to the coast, so I got to see the Mediterranean for the first time; other than that, in a lot of ways it was like the trip from the border, with vast spaces of open land, the occasional castle, and some farms and small towns.

We finally pulled into Valencia, where some friends of mine met me. I immediately got to find out what all the fuss about Spanish driving is, as I watched my normally calm friend turn into a road-rage maniac to rival anything I'd seen in the US.

We spent a few days together, and then they were leaving the city, so I found a hotel in a dodgy part of town near the train station - where I planned to call home the next day, which was Christmas - and then was going to go back to Barcelona and on to Italy to visit another friend.

One of the fascinating things about Valencia that I found out that night is the architecture. Or rather, not the architecture of the buildings but of the streets. I was wandering around the city that night, looking for a doorway that my guide book said should be seen, as the architect of it had died insane, and on viewing the doorway, no one would be surprised. I wasn't. But as you go through the streets - which have a tendency to get mazelike - you come across these little tiny squares with fountains in them. I must have seen three of these. It was really quite nice - you're walking through a dark street, in a city that has a lot of the physical signs of urban problems, at least to my eyes - graffiti being the biggest - and the roads are nearly deserted, since it's Christmas Eve, and all of a sudden, you hear water splashing and there's a teeny park with maybe a couple of benches, and then this fantastic fountain. One thing I learned is that the Spanish don't believe in a simple marble basin. Instead, they do colored lights or fantastically carved spouts - leaping fish and the like. Gradually I wandered back to the hotel and went to sleep.

The phone call home was really funny. I hadn't had any trouble with anyone trying to take any of my stuff at any point - the curse usually only extends to transportation - and then while I was on the phone, someone tried to take my bag twice.

The first time, I heard something that sounded like zippers being pulled and jerked around to see the man in the next booth walk away. He had managed to open a couple of the pockets on my backpack but hadn't taken anything - all my valuable stuff was in my other bag anyway, but the pockets he'd opened just had my toiletries in them. I took the bag off and set it on the floor where I could keep an eye on it easier and resumed my conversation. A while later, I looked down when my bag started to move away very slowly. I kicked the hand that was pulling it and the guy from earlier leaped out of the next booth and ran away with his hand over his face. I didn't have any more trouble with him, but it kind of set it up for what happened later, as I started thinking that if the vaunted theft of Europe was this poorly attempted, I wouldn't have any trouble at all stopping it.

My phone call over, I got on the train and went back to Barcelona. I stayed at the same hostel and went back out on La Rambla - there were a few places open, even though it was Christmas, but it was slow enough that I went back and did my laundry instead. 'Cause I know how to party.

So there I was, waiting at the train station. The thing to bear in mind is that Estacio Nord is big. It's the main train station for Barcelona, and has regional and national/international trains arriving and departing. It also houses a major stop on the subway network. It's a multi-level complex filled with quite a few shops and a lot of people standing around smoking and waiting to be helped by the customer service desks. Everything in Barcelona proper was closed that day, so I'd gotten there very early, and was having lunch - I figured waiting in the restaurant would be better than sitting on the concourse with my bags, waiting for someone to try to take them - when some guy sat down at the next table and started yelling at a cell phone. I looked over at him but dismissed him; then he grabbed my sleeve and said something about the "aeroporto". I pointed out that I didn't speak Spanish and started to turn away, at which he said "No."

I suppose I thought that meant he'd figured out what language I spoke and he did speak English, so I kept looking at him, but he just went back to jabbering at the phone - I'm pretty sure whatever language he was speaking, it wasn't Spanish - so I got bored and went back to my book.

It wasn't until almost an hour later that I realized that I didn't see my black bag in my peripheral vision.

This was the bag with the important stuff in it - my train pass, my camera, most of my exposed film, my passport, my house keys, etc.

So after a brief while of freaking out, calling home, filling out a police report - this is a recommended experience, particularly if you don't speak the language - and finding out that Eurail wasn't going to refund my pass, I decided to go home.

When I told my parents this - they had a very full house, with every bed taken - the pause was audible. Then the question "What do you mean by home?" I could hear my mother thinking "Oh shit, where will I put her?"

I meant, of course, Oxford, since I can think of nowhere else on the planet where your personal space is so large. I really couldn't deal with the idea of being in a country that has such a small personal space bubble, right after having half my shit ripped off. However, England being England, they don't want to get near you, and they definitely don't want to talk to you. I could think of nothing better.

I wound up staying another night at the same hostile hostel I'd stayed at before - mainly I went back there because they write down your passport number when you check in, and I was hoping to get it, as I thought I might need it when I went to the embassy to get a new passport. The only problem with going to the embassy that day was that it was St. Stephen's day, and everything was shut until the next day.

It also turns out that the American embassy is way the hell and gone in Barcelona. The nearest subway stop is something like a mile from the embassy, and it's all uphill. To add to that, there's no numbers on buildings, so you don't know exactly where you're going as you walk down the street. But I managed to find the place, and got a passport that would allow me back into England. Since I didn't have proof of identity on me, considering that it was all stolen with my bag, the passport's only good for a month, and then I have to get it renewed. (In fact, I guess I should do that soon, before I'm trying to get back to the US in April.)

I felt better about the whole situation when I saw how many people there were waiting to get new passports - there were eight while I was there, one of whom was a woman who'd been living with her husband and family in Morocco for the last five years - they'd never had a problem there, but come to Barcelona...

I got an EasyJet flight out the next day. I will never, ever fly EasyJet again. They are evil. Not only are they not particularly cheap - I was stressed and scattered or I would've done some comparison shopping - part of the reason for any cheapness they may have is because they have no staff. When we landed at Luton, the luggage was delayed for something like half an hour because they had no baggage handlers - this was after it had been delayed for 20 minutes.

Finally, however, someone pulled their thumb out, we got our baggage, went through customs, and I got a bus back to Hemel Hempstead, there to transfer to Oxford. About the only thing I can say about that trip was that it gave me a chance to sleep.

While still in Barcelona, I'd emailed one of my housemates to make sure that he'd be there to let me in - I was extremely lucky that he'd stayed in Oxford, since he was debating going home.

It won't be so easy to pull that stunt on me twice, but once again, I've got the feeling that I shouldn't plan on travelling anywhere ever again.

This story will probably be rewritten at some point to emphasize the funny parts - there actually were funny parts, especially once I got some distance on what had happened - but right now, it ain't as funny as I'd hoped. Just the facts, ma'am.