Purple Dragon Adventure

For the past three months I have had the privilege of using Glasgow, Scotland as my hub to get out into the vast and beautiful wonders of Western Europe. Among my great adventures has been Barcelona, Spain...a place whose culture cannot be completely understood in the four days I had to take it all in. Sure, Gaudi pervades the city, capturing the Gothic quarter and stretching to the infamous 'La Sagrada Familia'. And yes, the Picasso museum is a "must see" for any tourist. But, Barcelona has a much more vast and complicated artistic culture, and as I navigated my rented purple cruiser bike past the traditional tourist hot-spots, I found it wrapped up in the form of graffiti and grub.

To explore the narrow cobble-stoned backstreets of Barcelona is to literally walk in the canvas of thousands of artists, each one rivaling the next in talent and style. The graffiti culture of Barcelona stains hundreds of stoned alley-ways and smothers every shop-keeper's door, but it serves only to add beauty to the city through explosive colour and deep expressiveness...something I felt completely immersed in while riding my old-school cruiser (or the 'purple dragon' as I fondly referred to it) through the graffiti headquarters of 'old-town'.

As I took the dragon in search of what other hidden gems Barcelona had to offer, I was surprised and delighted to find the colours of the graffiti artists mimicked so beautifully in a food market entitled 'La Boqueria'. Looking for an imperfect piece of fruit in this place would be to condemn yourself to a 'needle in a haystack' mission. The colours I found here were so perfect, they might as well have come from the spray cans of the graffiti masters...or perhaps the colours of their spray cans were simply splotches of the pure strawberry-reds and mango-oranges within the market. Standing among the rich colours, the intoxicating smells, and the comforting sounds, it was hard to discern one from the other.


the market felt like an enveloping labyrinth of beauty and wonder, truly rivaling what most tourists find in the typical guidebook top 10's. But isn't that what an adventure is about...searching for the wonders that are capable of producing an inspiring and beautiful memory for those who experience them? And now, with the purple dragon returned and my bags packed for Glasgow, it is only the memory I have to fuel the inspiration that Barcelona created.