Americans (or maybe anglophones in general) really like their Eves: Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve.  That concept doesn’t really exist over here.  Europeans don’t celebrate New Year’s Eve.  They celebrate the New Year.  The party doesn’t end when the clock strikes midnight; that’s just when it begins.

Somewhere between 9 and 10 o’clock Saturday night, Jacqueline, Stephen, and I started making our “New Year’s Eve” preparations.  We picked up drinks and grapes at a market near the hostel, and grabbed dinner at a cheap (borderline dive) tapas place that ended up having the largest serving sizes we found in Barcelona.

We made our way down to Plaça de Catalunya after 11, with a new Japanese friend from the hostel in tow.  A few blocks away we were accosted by a couple of Americans who wanted to know where we bought our grapes.  They ended up buying an extra bag off of our new Japanese friend.  As we near the Place, dozens of men meandered around the crowd with bottles of bubbly or 6 packs of beer, trying to sell booze to the flocks of tourists.  In comparison with the hordes of Europeans grasping entire bottles of wine, we three tourists were downright tame, with our discreet bottles of Coke or Tonic water laced with Smirnoff (although the lemon might have given me away…).

Hanging with our new friend in Plaça de Catalunya. Borrowed from Stephen Traversie.

It’s a Spanish tradition to polish off 12 grapes on the 12 strikes of midnight for good luck.  Unfortunately, somehow Stephen, Jacqueline, and I got it into our heads that it’s the 12 seconds before midnight.  Now that, that we accomplished, even though I almost gagged and choked on the overly sweet grapes and, of course, the seeds.  So do we get some good luck for a good effort?

At midnight people went nuts, popping bottles of champagne and spraying the crowd.  There wasn’t a real fireworks display, but some crazy dudes ran through the street with some glorified sparklers, and set off a handful of underwhelming, do-it-yourselfers.  But I actually liked that the focus wasn’t on some big fireworks display, it was on being with the people around you.  We stayed in the streets for hours, celebrating more with our neighbors, a group of twenty-something Frenchies, incidentally.  Yes, even in Barcelona I find ways to do things in French…

Stephen took a video of the countdown and some of the ensuing madness.  If you listen closely, you can hear me say “oh my god”.  That was after I choked down the grapes and felt kinda ill.  Then, when Stephen says we did it, I get really really excited: I’m the squeaky, unbearably annoying girl shrieking in the background.  Try to ignore me:

More highlights from the night:

– Not one, but TWO French people asking me if I’m pregnant.  No, not because I look it (although this has made me even more aware and embarrassed about my Nutella love handles).  It was because I was drinking out of a water bottle.  I ended up asking several of them to try it just to prove it “wasn’t just water”.

– Learning a French drinking game.  A sing-a-long drinking game.  A gaping hole in my Francophone experience has now been filled.

– Bonding with the bum outside of our hostel who tried to sell us “Coke, hash, weed, beer, marijuana”.  Stephen even snapped a photo of us posing together.

– Going back to the hostel and trying to play King’s Cup with a bunch of non-anglophones.  I had no idea that game was so complicated, but it was worth a few laughs.  One guy suggested, for a round of Categories, “The best thing you ever did with your ex”.  All we wanted was to list cereal brands…