Thieving Barcelona

Every year people from around the world come to Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress (the largest mobile phone show in the world) to meet, see the latest technology, do business and get robbed. I was amazed at the sheer number of people who warned me about the street crime in the city. So I was careful, very careful. After my experience in Milan last December I was determined that no one was going to get the better of me. I wore a neck pouch with my passport and cards in it the whole time and kept my specially chosen bag strung over my far shoulder which meant it would need to be cut off rather than just wrenched. The whole experience was an entertaining challenge in how to move from location to location without undue exposure. Security at the show was high but the minute you stepped outside to into the square to wait for cab you were into the usual Southern European cesspit of vagabonds and psychos that prey on foreigners. The police were out in force too, with their skinhead haircuts, Alsatians and submachine guns waiting to let loose-“Nice neighborhood!” I grunted under my breath.

Luckily the neighborhood in which I was staying was a little nicer. I was in an apartment across town which to all intents and purposes was a perfectly nice outer city area. I walked around it and felt as safe as I would in any other urban area in the West, although half way through my stay the apartment’s security was compromised and all the keys had to be changed.
The apartment was near Sagrada Familia church and on Friday I had 30 minutes to do something touristy. I set out at a fast pace with an eye on my watch wondering if I could make it to church in 15 minutes. I got lucky and the results are below. The thing the struck me the most about the place was that like many churches and cathedrals build over hundreds of years the building style and materials change. So it was with this building, but unlike cathedrals that were built 500+ years ago where all of the differing architecture has taken on a similar brown/grey pall making its differences indistinguishable to the untrained eye the differences in style and materials on this church are stark. You can’t help but notice the stone versus concrete battle that rages before the eyes.



Non Flash folk can click here

15 minutes later I was back at the apartment and then hailing a cab for the airport.
This year the Barcelona underworld scored one laptop and one iPhone from ARM which was a pretty minimal haul based on the conversations I heard from fellow delegates in the taxi queue every evening. (I don’t think the other laptop that got left in the taxi by the ARM security product manager counts.)

My colleague from San Jose who had warned me at such length about the street crime didn’t get out unscathed. They stole his plane tickets between security and the gate!