Buying A Bike in Barcelona

Well all my time spent on the Internet trying to contact bike sellers in Barcelona went by the board. In the end our International cycle host, Adrien, and expatriate Frenchman living in the city and working as a tourist guide, turned out to be a real goldmine. Apart from giving us somewhere to sleep and recover from the horrors of long plane rides, he knew all the bike places in the city and marked them on our mud map.

First stop, a bike rental place with a heap of worn out bikes for sale. The owner, a woman with a good sense of humour and a very adequate command of English, allowed me to take it for a test ride,
¨I will leave my wife as security´´
´´Ah but you may ride off to find a new one!!´´
It had plenty of gears, was lighweight, the seat had no adjustment following some past repair job and the deal was 100 euros with option to return it if we did not get a satisfoctory mechanical report. We wheeled the animal all over Barcelona looking for a shop I´d located online with a good reputation ( as endorsed by my international cycling buddies). Koos´s mechanic (Koos owns the shop), also Dutch, shook his head and tut tutted numerous times over the fact that the bike should not be sold with a seat that could not be adjusted ´´We saw this bike advertised on the internet and sent them an email telling them that it should not be sold in this condition´´. He had nothing in the secondhand line, but added his weight to our host´s suggestion that Tomas Domingo, a ¨Bike Warehouse´´, may be worth a try. We bought some fancy pink ´´Ortleib´´ panniers for Val, a bike pump and rejoined the streets of Barcelona with our less than healthy bike in tow, busting for a pee and discovering that Barcelona does not supply public toilets with any degree of generosity.
Arriving at Tomas Domingos, we found him away at Siesta, so we filled in time drinking a couple of beers on the pavement cafe opposite and watched with great interest the workings of an automated city bike hire system. Hirers swìped a card over the reader, one of the bikes was released and they rode it around to another rack in the city and plonked it back into the self locking recesses. There were hundreds of them all around the place.
Tomas had a good siesta, we used the cafe toilet (several times) and were first in the door when the shop opened.
They had the bike we needed, the salesman learned a new word of English when Val described his glasses, which broke in half across the nose piece, as ´´Freaky¨. They were held together magnetically, and when reading, he gathered both pieces from the string round his neck and clicked them together over his nose. All the other staff shared his amusement.
´´Domingo´´ is proving to be a good workhorse and has fallen madly in love with Val´s ´´Ginger´´. Ginger is feeling a little vulnerable as Val is now thinking that she needs a new touring bike too.