Barcelona: When your bag seems smaller and the soles of your shoes thinner...

Travelling can be tough sometimes. The hardest times are when you meet someone who you can share your mind with, someone who won't just ask you where you are from, someone who may not even ask your name until 2 hours into a conversation and then they leave just as soon as they have come. Those are the days that I feel the most lost. Just when I feel that I have found my feet and the city is mine to do with what I will, I fall over only to find that I have no idea where I am.

A few of those moments combined made me realise that traveling isn't really about seeing cities or monuments or churches or streets, its about meeting people and finding parts of yourself in them and in the places that you may visit. At first I couldn't work out why going to see the big tourist things wasn't making me happy or giving me any satisfaction. I can stare at a castle that was built thousands of years ago until my eyes dry up but it is never going to understand me or want to know why I came all these miles across the sea to explore people.

Cities are just cities. You can make of them what you will but the biggest of them all are just churning money in and out. The charm has been lost in cities like Barcelona where people mostly go to drink and take as many drugs as they can find from the Pakistani men selling out on La Rambla. Tourists bleed all the sweetness from the culture with their English and lack of understanding for anything of meaning. You could come here for 6 months and not have to speak a word of Spanish or Catalan. Maybe I don't understand the city but I think the problem is that this city doesn't understand me.

I have no real reason to be here. I'm not learning anything of culture and the struggle to meet like minded people here is sometimes too much. Made harder by missing the people that do make a difference. Travelling is brilliant when you are doing things you would never do at home, when you are seeing things you would never see at home, even when you get to be a person you would never be at home.

What travelling teaches you most is that your friends, the good ones, are very special people indeed. Special to your life and special each in their own way. Those friends that really listen, the ones that will let you put your heart on the table and watch it pulse without squirming. There aren't many people like that around.

At least I always have my guitar.