“Do you want to go to the gothic quarter?” my friend asked. I thought it must be a mistranslation, or her interpretation or something, but of course I said yes. But no, there’s a gothic quarter in Barcelona, as in the place filled with gothic cathedrals.

I can’t people honestly ask me sometimes “what does Europe have that the US doesn’t” when I talk about how I like to spend a lot of my time overseas.

Anyhow, most of these photos are just of wandering around the above-mentioned gothic quarter. The first one after the cut, though, is from a festival I went to to celebrate the Basque language. I love that there are people arguing for localization who are still fiercely anti-fascist and therefore not a bunch of nationalist assholes. Anyhow, at the festival, a few hundred of us followed this young ska-punk band around the city as they played third-wave ska versions of old radical songs. I kept waiting for the cops to show up (since we were marching through the streets and blasting punk music), but they never did and instead we all had a really good time.