I love this place.

It´s noon, on a beautiful sunny day in Valencia. Instead of energetically exploring this beautiful place, I´m lying on my bed in the hostel (obviously not right now, as I´m busy talking into the computer, but it was true as I was scribbling this). I´m absolutely knackered.

I´m only five days in, folks - but if Spain keeps being this much fun, I´m not sure I´m going to last the month.

WARNING: This post is going to be very long. Get a snack, and settle in. If I was a good blogger, I would have done little entries every day. One morning I might wake up a good blogger.

(And I hope s/he isn´t too pissed off. Boom tish! Thanks, I´m here all week).

So, I arrived in Barcelona on Monday, and immediately started wandering the streets of the city, a pattern that was to continue the whole time I was there. I missed the vast majority of the important, essential tourist sights because it was just such an excellent place to wander in. I did see a few things:

La Ramblas, the central promenade, which is like the Magic Faraway Tree in that as you walk along, each section becomes or sells something different. Tourist crap, then goldfish and turtles, then canaries, chickens and doves, then portrait painters, then old men smoking on chairs, then flowers and kumquat trees. There are crazy street performers in elaborate costumes dotted along the way - a guy doing an impression of a tree, two guys on bicycles with skeletons, a (very hot and) highly skilled puppeteer, a guy in a dog suit who curls up in a cardboard kennel and barks at passing dogs, driving them insane. There´s a guy in a bubble suit, a flower suit, a guy sitting on a toilet in the middle of the square. My favourite was when you caught a glimpse of them out of character - one chatting to his friends in full costume while on a break, and another one sitting cross-legged on his little box, putting on his makeup before he got started.

The whole street teems with tourists, and I spent hours just wandering along and soaking it up. You turn a corner and come across something amazing: a dense network of winding alleyways jam-packed with people, shops and restaurants or a sunlit open square. I loved the Boqueria Market - a cavernous hall of whirling colours, sounds and smells. Pig´s heads, whole fish, neat stacks of gleaming fruit, baskets full of loose brown eggs, pastries, olives, sausages, and cheeses. There were whole skinned rabbits, red and forlorn with neat little heads and dead grey eyes, yellowed pig´s trotters with pinkish toenails, and glistening piles of offal in dark red slivers. It reminded me of something Greenie once said about festivals, that this sensory overload must be ´what it must be like every day for a dog.´ Utterly amazing, and completely overwhelming.

I loved the cathedral, too - it was dark, ornate and sombre in just the way a cathedral should be, with vast arched ceilings and gilded altarpieces lit with tall red candles. The windows of the confession booths were open so you could see and hear the priest´s solemn words.

I went to the Picasso Museum on my final afternoon, which I had been looking forward to. It covers works from each phase of his life and career, so there´s lots of very well executed but relatively boring stuff from his early years. Then, he goes to art school and his paintings start looking like those of other famous artists. Only later did he start to get interesting. As I wandered through, looking at the early work, I thought ´well, Pablo, it´s good but I know you can do better. It´s like you´re not even trying.´

(I confess that I adapted that joke from a new friend who said something similar after seeing an exhibition of Dali´s early work, so credit where it´s due - hi, Will!)

So, having covered the necessary travelogue aspect of this entry, I will now proceed to the other kind of stories: wherein jLo becomes drunken (you guys know these ones).

I had a couple of uneasy moments on my first day travelling alone, faced with the prospect of:

(1) potentially going an entire month without speaking to anyone more than to say, "One, please", and "thanks", and

(2) missing out on the excellent Barcelona nightlife I had heard so much about because I´m too gutless to go drinking on my own (also, the small issue of having no idea where to go).

So I decided to take drastic action to address both problems, and signed up for a pub crawl a put on by a local traveller´s pub.

You know what? It was awesome fun. I made friends. And a friend, if you know what I´m saying (and I think you do). The pub crawl kicked off what was to become several solid days of late, drunky nights. Remind me sometime to avoid booking and paying for hostel beds that I apparently have no intention of sleeping in. And no, that´s not how it might sound (hi, Mum!). I´ve behaved (almost) impeccably so far. And that´s about all I´m going to say about that.

The most hilarious member of the crawl crowd was Tommy the 19-year-old Swede who talked of nothing but his favourite band, Guns´n´Roses. When he asked me if I liked them, I told the truth and said that I used to listen to them a bit when I was in high school, say, around fourteen years ago. When Tommy was FIVE. He has a GnR tattoo on his shoulder, is going to see them play in Stockholm in the summer, and couldn´t be more excited. Once he had established me as a fellow fan (!), I couldn´t shake him off. He would come up, throw his arm around me while I was in lively conversation with an interesting stranger, and start singing, begging me to join in. It was very amusing. He stripped off with little encouragement so that I could take a photo of his tattoo - I promise I´ll share it with you guys as soon as I get back to London and my computer.

So, Barcelona was wandering by day, drinking by night. All too soon, it was time for this weary, hung over traveller to move on - so, promising myself that I´ll be a proper tourist in Barcelona when I return at the end of the month, I hopped a bus to Valencia.

There wasn´t a need for a pub crawl this time. I had time to dump my gear, go for a quick stroll around the old part of the city, buy some groceries and cook myself dinner before the overwhelming friendliness of the international travelling community took me by the hand, poured me some wine, told me some exquisitely dirty jokes, and we were off again. We were thrown out of the hostel at midnight for being too rowdy, so it was off to sample the Valencia clubs. It was like the beginning of a bad joke: an Australian, a Canadian, an Englishman and a Jamaican walk into a bar....

And had a great time. The young Canadian gentleman of the group had a flight out of here first thing this morning, so he and I resolved to stay up through the night until he had to leave.

(This boy, incidentally, you guys would love. Imagine a male, Canadian version of jLo who likes to climb things. He´s even almost as funny as me, which I realise is difficult to believe but is in fact true).

Having long outlasted the Englishman and the Jamaican, and after being kicked out of our second bar at 6am, we wandered down to the dry riverbed that encircles the centre of Valencia to watch the sun rise. What used to be a river is now public gardens, and it was beautiful: bridges and sculptures, orange trees and fountains. I picked an orange (because it seemed the thing to do) and tried to eat it: it was so sour that my face folded in on itself.

The highlight of our morning sojourn was trekking down to a giant statue of Gulliver lying prone, tied with ropes. It´s a playground, and his arms and legs and torso are giant slides. If I were a good blogger, I would find a link for you so you can picture what the hell I´m talking about. You might have to wait for the photo.

When we got there, it was 8am, and the gates were, tragically, locked shut. But it looked really, really cool (and many of you know how much I love slides).

So we decided to break in.

We launched into covert mode, surveilling the area and planning our operation. Eyes peeled, we lingered in a deliberately nonchalant fashion as we waited for park staff to pass by. When the coast was clear, I threw my bag over the fence, and started to climb over. I had one leg on each side of the fence (and I´m wearing a skirt, people) when I heard a loud rapping on the window of the security booth right behind me. There was a freaking security guard right there the whole time, watching what must have been highly suspicious (and very amusing) behaviour, and we hadn´t noticed him at all. I particularly liked that he had waited until I was actually almost over the fence before stopping me.

After much pleading (I needed to get my bag back, if nothing else), he graciously let us have 10 minutes inside the park. It was brilliant - clambering up all over the statue and sliding down again and again, the whole place all to ourselves.

Needless to say, I´m exhausted. We made it through the night, and Mr Canadia was dispatched to the airport. It was excellent fun.

I´m totally going to have a nap, and then reform my behaviour immediately. I don´t want this to become a drunken revelry blog (or to simply drink my way through Spain). I´m going to become a model tourist, and will return here to regale you with tales of museums and galleries, Spanish culture, and healthy living.

But first I´m going to have a nap.

Oh, and you know what they have here in Valencia? The Holy Grail! I´m going to go visit it later, and you can rest assured that I will not miss the opportunity to remark loudly to anyone that will listen that this is not the cup of a carpenter.