If there is one thing I love more than travelling, it is feeling safe. I like to know I can go out there and have a good time soaking it all in without having to make a late night visit to a foreign (or local for that matter) emergency room or make a gunpoint phone call to my family for ransom money. There are enough random occurrences in this world to make life interesting, why go calling attention to myself unnecessarily?
Having said this, after reflecting on a trip to Barcelona with friends a while back, I’ve come to the conclusion there are a number of things we could’ve done differently to avoid unpleasantness. While nothing ultimately did go… terribly wrong… we would’ve lacked sympathy from casual onlookers if anything did.
So if you are planning a trip to Barcelona and want to avoid getting shanked, I offer you the following advice (in the order they happened to us):
1. Don’t go looking to score illegal substances
I try to follow this in everyday life, but just because you’re on vacation it doesn’t mean your morals should be too. I would like to stress that I was not the member of the group looking for said substances, but as I was a member of the group, I likely would’ve been involved in any fallout. It went like this: buddy asks shady looking guys selling after hours beer for drugs, shady looking guys offer him some, buddy asks for something else, shady looking guy confers with his group and agrees they have some, buddy changes mind, shady looking guy gets quiet and stares unpleasantly in our direction until we slowly walk away. Nothing like making enemies five hours into a trip!
2. Make sure you have accommodations
We had a place to sleep for the rest of our stay, but not the first night. “We’ll just walk around all night and party! We’ll be so pumped up we won’t be able to sleep!” was my buddy’s justification of not securing a hostel for our arrival. My initial reaction was total agreement – I was so stoked for the trip I couldn’t imagine wanting to sleep.
The only problem is, I enjoy having a place to sleep and I remembered this fact soon after dinner when exhaustion set in. While you think you’re going to be so jacked up on adrenaline and the novelty of it all, if you have just gotten off a train or plane and have spent most of that day in transit to said place, you need a place to crash. Even if it’s just for a few hours to decompress, but especially so you don’t have to carry your bag around the whole night.
Which leads to…
3. Try not to nap on park benches at 4am
Of course you likely wouldn’t do this if you had a safe place to sleep indoors. 4am in Barcelona is primetime for thievery – it’s still a few hours from sunrise when they return to whence they came to avoid the sun’s judgmental rays. We experienced this by finding a bench just to rest our eyes, but one person stayed awake to keep an eye on things and read. Want to know the ironic part? It was her bag that got stolen! Those of us sleeping used our bags as pillows, but she, thinking being awake and reading a book was safe enough, had her bag by her feet and someone walked right up behind the bench and took it without her knowing.
4. Avoid confrontations with party-folk going through pre-dawn withdrawal
Around 5am, after the bag incident, we decided to keep moving, making our way to the beach to watch a sweet Mediterranean sunrise – still one of my best memories to this day. Before we took in the splendour of light’s first emergence, we came across another early morning light – the falling phoenix of the narcotics user. He met us at the entrance to the beach, inquiring quite urgently as to whether we had any hash or failing that, anything else, that he might use to stave off his withdrawal. We did not, and, possibly due to a lack of energy, he went on his way. Uneventful, yes – but you never can be sure with such individuals.
After witnessing the magnificence of the sunrise and departing the beach, we saw our burnt out friend huddled up on a bench, shivering in what was already a very warm day, no doubt preparing to rise once more in a blaze of glory
In summary, don’t do anything illegal and have accommodations booked and you’ll be well on your way to avoid being shanked.






















