Ben Bo's Comedy Journey - Barcelona, Spain

Three months ago my friend Burt hit me up and asked if I wanted to a do a European comedy tour. It sounded fun so I said fuck it, lets do it. Over the next couples of months, he worked on getting venues across Europe to let us host the shows and I had the show flyers updated onto the online ticket link. It was only January at the time, and April 26^th felt like a lifetime away so I didn’t really think about it. Life comes at you fast.

Before I came to Barcelona, I was completing a week of work with System of a Down in Vegas on Sunday at 5am, flying to Austin at 8:30am before catching a 6pm flight to London. Trying to get to Barcelona I would miss my connection (got off the plane at 10:30am Monday and had to wait for a bus to the terminal for a flight that closed at 10:40am) so I had to take the next flight to Barcelona arriving at 5pm for an 8:30pm show Monday night. I hadn't slept since waking up Saturday morning.

So far sleep has been hard to come by, but chaos gives willingly. The first show wasn’t my best effort. The audience was tight and I was delirious (a perilous situation) but the show must go on. Despite my best efforts, the show went surprisingly well. I was able to get some much needed rest Tuesday and was looking forward to that evening's show. That's when the real struggles began.

Right as we’re walking out the door to head to the venue for the show, Burt gets a call from his landlord. Burt had paid his lease there until Thursday, where we planned to stay until switching our home base to Berlin for the next month. The guy he is subletting the place from tells him the owner of the unit is coming back that night at 1am and we have to be out of there by then. With that on our minds we head to the show.

Its me, Burt, and the third member of our show, Boss (names have been changed to protect identities). The show does better than the previous night but we have no time to bask in the after-show glow. We have to head back to move Burt’s stuff out of the apartment and take it to his friend's place to store it and then figure out where we’re gonna sleep for the night. So, we pack up the stuff, carry it down five flights of stairs and carry it out of the Gothic Quarter until we reach La Rambla, where we can call an Uber.

The friend stores the stuff and now we just have to figure out where we’re gonna sleep that night. Burt says he can stay with a lady friend of his for the night which just leaves me and Boss. We try to get a hostel but Boss doesn’t have his passport so they can’t let him stay. I look up hotel prices and there is nothing less than two-hundred Euros a night available, which seems silly to pay considering its already 1am and check out time would be 11am. So Boss comes up with the idea of going out all night and trying to play hobo-sexual. Considering all the options, I agree. Burt heads off and Boss and I begin our night out with no where to return to in site.

We began by wandering aimlessly into Barcelona’s gothic quarter as we pass a place called the Marula Cafe. The door man looks at Boss and speaks to him in his native African dialect. “Only someone from our country can be that ugly, get in here.”

He lets us into a club room that has a great vibe, great music, but no people. The space is devoid of patrons outside of a small group of three guys and two girls, with two stragglers hanging around solo. We grab a drink and start dancing, enjoying the freedom of a truly boundless night. After about 30 minutes it becomes apparent this club will not get any more exciting and its time to find a new spot. We return to our aimless wandering and after about ten minutes we come across a square with some barkers barking us into a club with the promise of free cover and a free shot.

Having no better plan, we gladly accept. The music is reggaetone, the free shot has no alcohol, but there are more people, so we stay. The club starts to fill up and soon enough we find ourselves mingling with the people and dancing with some of the local delicacies. I meet a girl named Anna and we hit it off, as we begin dancing and having a good time. Anna is from France and moved to Barcelona to get out of her hometown. I introduce her to Boss (who spent time in France and speaks much better french then me). They immediately hit it off and I can tell she is much more into him than me.

The night progresses and I dance with a few more girls, but nothing sticks. Boss, meanwhile, has taken things to the next level with Anna as they grind, make out, and whisper sweet nothings into each other's ears. At some point the lights in the club come on and its 5:30am. Only a few more hours to kill. So far so good. At this point I’m assuming Boss is going to take Anna home and I need to figure out what I am going to do solo.

We meander to La Rambla to call an Uber so Anna and her friends (two guys) can return to the hostel. Boss gets in the car and they invite me. Always being one for an adventure, I jump in. At their hostel we smoke a spliff outside and rehash the night. Boss asks to use the restroom and Anna goes to show him. I look at the other two guys and bet I won’t see Boss again that night. One of the guys bets me that Boss will be back within five minutes. I take the bet. Its 6:01am.

At 6:03am Anna walks him back out and says goodnight. We chop it up with the other guys for a few more minutes, but they to go to sleep. Its 6:30am. It begins to rain. The wandering continues, we get breakfast, smoke a spliff, find a cafe and hangout. At some point I bite the bullet and get a hotel for the next night. We meet Burt, run some errands, and check in to the hotel. Boss quickly falls asleep but I stay awake, the energy of the previous night overwhelming my desire for some shut eye.

Showtime comes around its at a different venue tonight. When we get there, the audience is sparse but they are there, so that's a show. I have my best performance of the three shows so far, riffing and freestyling mixed with crowd work, reminding myself why I still love comedy.

The vibe afterwards is dope, so we grab a drink and hangout with some audience members before we say our goodbyes and head back to the hotel around midnight. We stop by a halal shop for some food, yearning for sleep until I get a call from Burt. The girl that he was supposed to stay with was tired and he didn’t wanna go through the conversations necessary to stay. Oh, the struggle of a hobosexual.

So now it was his turn to wander the streets of the night while we kept his bag at our hotel. The tables had turned. We check out of the hotel on Thursday afternoon, but our flight to Berlin isn’t until Friday afternoon, so now we have to figure out a place to stay and hold our stuff for one more night. It's been four days and the tour has already been a debacle, but alas, this was to be expected. What happened next was not.

When Burt’s friend (that he was subletting the apartment from) had kicked us out on Tuesday, he had told us the landlord was a bitch and she was crazy, had called her twenty times and it was her fault that we were getting kicked out early, even though Burt had already paid his full rent for the month. When Burt went to grab the last of his stuff at the apartment, the landlord was there and they began to chat. Turns out the landlord was not crazy at all.

While Burt had been paying his rent to his friend, the friend had not paid the landlord the rent money at all. She was coming back because she had visited in January and the apartment was in complete disarray (which I can attest to upon my arrival Monday, which I had attributed to being in the middle of a move) and they had not been paying her rent and ignoring her calls. When Burt went to retrieve his stuff, his friend had told the landlord that Burt was his mom's assistant helping to move all their stuff out. The landlord showed Burt the text messages between them and confirmed her version of events.

With all this playing out during the week, she messaged Burt Thursday asking if he could help her move some heavy trash out since she lived on the fifth floor and had no elevator in the building. After moving out the trash she explained she had been going through a hard time and the apartment debacle was the straw that broke the camels back. She asked if we wanted to go to a hookah spot with her. So we did and got to know her, and had a great time. In an ironic twist of fate she allowed us to move Burt’s stuff back in and stay in the extra bedroom Thursday night. Fully rested, after breakfast and buying her some groceries as a thank you, we head to Berlin for the tour, part two.

-Ben Bo

Ben Bo is an Austin, Texas based comedian currently touring around Europe for three months. You can follow him on Instagram @BenBosunga