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.