Dave Hall lives and works in Barcelona. You can read more of his great posts on his blog, and his guest blogging posts here on Notes from Spain. He is currently somewhat of an expert on life in a Spanish office:

After listening to the Notes in Spanish Advanced podcast about life in a Spanish office recently, I thought I´d write a little about my experience of some of the most striking differences from my viewpoint as a long term UK office worker now working in various Spanish offices over the past 18 months.

The biggest (and the most obvious) thing that I still struggle with at times is how to get my head around the well publicised relaxed attitude to timekeeping.

In my old UK company, we would routinely receive emails reminding us that 9 am was the start of the “working” day, and not the time you should be stubbing your fag out against the wall outside and thinking about dragging your lazy, no-good, workshy carcass into the building only to then go for an unfeasibly long pee, get a coffee and chat to your colleagues about last night´s television (OK, I´m paraphrasing). Something along the lines of “You should be at your workstation, ready to work at 9 am” was the usual message.

Lunch time was a fixed 45 minutes and the same rules applied then. In fact, this was so well drummed into us that, if you strolled back in 5 minutes late, your own dear colleagues (from outside your department) would look at you with scorn and pass comment either behind your back, or to your face in the form of a lame joke. The management had clearly done their job on us, as the staff were effectively policing each other in the form of an internalized company Gestapo!!! (Although, we´d of course swapped finger screws for finger pointing). A sad situation indeed.

Here in Spain, it´s very different. Last week, when I asked what the hours were in my new job, my boss kind of shrugged, expelled a lot of air, umm´d and arr´d , then finally said, “Well, come in about 9am ish, lunch is roughly 13.30 until whenever, and most people start leaving about 18.30, or earlier if it´s a Friday.” (She then immediately asked if I wanted to go for a coffee with her). Ah well, that´s clear then, thanks!

So, not a bad situation, but totally useless for an anally retentive, logically minded Virgo like me who can only cope with life if there´s a “rule” of some kind to help avoid unnecessary confusion! I still find myself rushing back to work after lunch, only to find an empty office, and then chastising myself for being such a pillock. For someone who prides himself on having done a reasonably good job of fitting into Spanish life, this work timetable thing is an irritatingly persistent problem that I still need to shake off before my hair falls out or I start cultivating a stomach ulcer.

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In today’s guest blogging post, Dave Hall, who can also be found blogging at pepino-bcn.blogspot.com, asks if there is life beyond Barcelona’s Parc Guell:

Everyone who comes to Barcelona should of course be sure to check out the many Gaudí designed buildings and parks that the city has to offer, with Parc Guell probably very high on their list, but how about all those other parks and gardens that don’t have the guaranteed draw that Gaudí’s name brings? I decided to head away from the crowds today and take a closer look at a hidden gem of a garden that you might just recognise..!

El Laberinto de Horta is located on the mountain side of the city, set back just a little further than Parc Guell, and is a relatively small, but nonetheless stunning neo-classical park dating back to the 1700s. It used to be the home of Joan Antoni Desvalls who was the Marqués de Llúpia i d’Alfarràs, but was acquired in 1971 by the local authorities and subsequently opened to the public. The centrepiece of the park is an immaculately manicured maze made up of cypress trees overlooked by a Romanesque style balustrade complete with classical statues and stone pergolas.

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In today’s guest blogging spot, Dave Hall writes in with another great taste of life in Barcelona Dave can also be found blogging at pepino-bcn.blogspot.com:

Has Barcelona been earmarked for a G8 summit? Are the Olympics back in town again? Or is it that the Queen is coming to make a white-glove fingertip dust inspection at any moment?

Well, maybe it’s none of these, but you could certainly be forgiven for thinking the mother of all events was on its way to Barcelona given the sheer scale of improvements and roadworks going on around the centre of the city (apparently concentrated on the Eixample districts). It seems that I can’t step outside my front door these days without being almost swallowed up into a monumental-sized cavern that’s suddenly appeared courtesy of the local authority planning department. For example, where I live is just 4 short blocks from La Rambla de Catalunya, but navigating a way through on the most direct street has become a real chore. And then when you get there, you’re faced with more of the same between La Diagonal and roughly until you get past Aragó.

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If you’re looking for a restaurant for a special occasion and the budget isn’t a problem, then you won’t go far wrong in the restaurant within the Hotel Omm, just off the Paseo de Gracia in Barcelona.

Some of you may know that my flatmate has 24 carat gold “enchufes” and can always be relied on to get me into some pretty classy places that I’d normally never get to try, and that was the case again this weekend, as a friend of his that I met at a party a few months ago invited me to celebrate her birthday in this restaurant. At first I was a little reticent as, knowing this particular lady, the venue was never going to be within my budget, but the magic word to listen out for from a Spanish person is of course the verb “invitar”, which instantly helped me to relax as it automatically has the assumption built-in that the person doing the inviting is genuinely happy to pay.

The restaurant has a very exclusive air and the security is firm but very discreet, but the most important thing was the quality of the food. Each of the 6 courses comes with an individually selected and matched wine, so when the food arrives, each of you is brought a different bottle, and the waiter explains the reasons for its selection. Now, I’m no connoisseur, but I know what tastes good, and each wine was truly excellent and accompanied the food perfectly. There was even a white rioja at one point which went down particularly well!

For the dessert course my flatmate, being Cuban, homed-in on Recuerdos de Havana which included an amazing chocolate-coated ice-cream “cigar” which somehow had been infused with the taste of a genuine Havana cigar! It was truly unique and very highly recommended - and we all tried some of course. The second dessert course was the house speciality, a type of perfumed mousse which strangely came with a small pot containing pieces of card, the idea being that you eat a little of the mousse, and then waft the card with a complementing perfume under your nose. Very odd indeed, but incredibly effective! I caught a glimpse of the bill when it came and couldn’t help but let out a tiny gasp, but if you do ever get the opportunity to eat here, I thoroughly recommend it. And as if a bonus was needed, a little “free extra” for us was that, just across from our table, was the extremely easy-on-the-eye Spanish TV presenter Jesus Vásquez having dinner with his partner and friends. ¡Que aproveche!

Dave Hall lives and works in Barcelona.

As you’ll already know, Saturday was the day of the 3 Kings in Spain, and here in Barcelona on Friday there was a huge procession (La Cabalgata) through the city lasting about 3 hours, to welcome the Kings (Melchor, Gaspar y Baltasar) and to distribute sweets to the crowds. I went along with some friends, and got a good spot just by Plaza Universidad. The Kings pass by one at a time on giant floats all decorated with lights and fireworks. The parade was fantastic, and the large groups of dancers that accompany each King were all excellent - the effort that must go into organising so many costumes is unbelievable.

I’d been told that some of the floats have ladders so that they can climb up and give sweets to the people on the balconies of apartments along the route, but as I was in an open Plaza, I didn’t see this in action unfortunately. The crowd was full of parents with their children, and it must’ve been really magical for the kids to see all this going on, and especially so given that the Kings have “helpers” who walk along the edge of the crowds and collect the letters from the children to the Kings with their requests for gifts.

When the sweet-throwing reached its peak, it was like feeding time at the zoo! Children everywhere scurrying around to collect them from the floor like a pack of hyenas! (I, of course, made sure I got one to eat for good luck too!) The final float contained a display like a giant coal fire, which I didn’t understand until my friend told me that the children who have been bad during the year only receive “carbón” (coal) from the Kings! How awful! Although, it’s good to know that parents in Spain torment their children with similar behaviour-control methods as back home in England!

All in all, the only downside to the day was that my camera was broken so I don’t have any pictures to share. But if you ever get the chance to be in Barcelona for a future Cabalgata, I thoroughly recommend it, especially if you have kids (or indeed, if you are a big kid like me!)

Dave Hall lives and works in Barcelona.

If your image of Barcelona includes plenty of hustle and bustle, then you’d of course be absolutely right, and it’s all part of what makes the city so much fun to live in, but this does tip over to extremes in places. The picture above shows the typical weekday morning view from my balcony overlooking just one of the many crossroads in the Eixample district of the city. That’s a school directly opposite, and I also have a major hospital just behind me. The noise is unbelievable at times, thanks partly to the ambulance sirens, but also to the city’s drivers obsession with their car-horns. An occasional (and very British-sounding) “beep beep” clearly doesn’t do the job over here.

When the lights change at this junction it’s like the Wacky Races, and there’s no mercy shown if the driver at the front takes more than half a second to pull away! Events reach fever-pitch when the parking slots that you can see along the 4 edges of the crossroads are all full, and other drivers park across them, blocking them in. This causes a torrent of crazed beeping from the “trapped” drivers on their return, until the offender eventually shows up, has a brief row (lots of arm-waving), and then moves on. It can be great entertainment at times, but this early in the morning… I just want to sleep a few minutes more!

Update: I couldn’t believe the irony of this, but I finished this post during the evening rush hour last night, and literally seconds afterwards, I heard a crunch from outside, went to have a look, and saw that a bus in pretty much the same position as the one in the pic had smacked into a moto driver. He was OK but was limping slightly afterwards, and his moto looked a bit damaged. I rushed to get my camera, but by the time I got back to the balcony, someone had already wheeled the moto out of the way and the guy had got on the bus to argue with the driver.

Dave Hall, who lives and works in Barcelona, is our first new contributing author.