So we go to Las Ramblas and it's like this loooong street. We're walking and Melvin Ely and my wife are really picky eaters, and they only wanted chicken, rice and beans. We're trying to find somebody who speaks English to ask them where we can find it.
But nobody speaks English and the only thing that I can think of is "El Pollo Loco," and at first, I'm asking for "Polo," mispronouncing it. And they're looking at me like, "What? What's polo?"
My wife says, "No, it's pollo." And people in the restaurant are like, "Oh, no chicken here." And I'm wondering, "There's no chickens in Spain?"
So we keep walking and we see Kentucky Fried Chicken. There were these girls in front of it and we asked them if they knew where we could find some chicken. They pointed to KFC and we said, "Yeah, we want that, but not from here. We want it from a restaurant." So, this girl says that she'll show us a spot.
So we start walking through all these side streets, and I'm thinking, "I don't know about this." We're following this girl that we don't know and it's starting to get darker. My brother-in-law just loves people and didn't see any harm in it. I told him that maybe we should turn around, since we were getting away from all of the people. But as I say that, she stops and points, "It's right here."
So, we had a nice dinner and Mel and my wife got the chicken they were looking for.
We walk out of the restaurant and the whole time, I had been taking a bunch of pictures with the camera I had bought. Taking pictures is one of my hobbies. So, I'm taking tons of pictures, running ahead of everybody and getting those angles of them walking.
So after we left the restaurant, I took off, walking faster to get ahead of them and take pictures. I'm taking pictures and all of a sudden, I hear somebody start cursing at me. I'm looking through my camera lens at the time, so I can't see anything but the pictures I'm taking. I come from up under, and this dude walks up to me, cursing me out.
I put my camera down and I'm like, "Am I not supposed to be taking pictures here?" He starts yelling in Spanish and I can't understand him obviously. He looked homeless to me, and I'm saying, "Oh, I'm not supposed to be taking pictures here. I'm sorry."
He's just screaming at me and I put the camera away and walk away. But then he's still going off and I see like 10 more homeless people up against the wall with dogs and stuff. It looked to me like the other 10 people were asking him what he was doing, but they were speaking Spanish, so I don't know what they were saying.
The guy's walking toward me and I'm putting my hand out like, "Stay back." I walk backwards and start to turn around, but then, in the corner of my eye, I see him reach back to throw something. I kinda ducked and all these coins hit me.
He threw a bunch of coins at me.
At this point, I wanted to just go at it. This dude just hit me all over my back with coins, and he's still screaming at me. But I told him, "Listen, you had better stay back."
And I look at my wife and that's the only thing that could calm me down. I see my pregnant wife and realize that I can't have a situation go down like that. My teammates were in shock, because they saw what happened. I didn't want anything else to happen so I tried to calm myself down. I started walking away from him and he kept his distance.
But that just ruined my whole day. And I go back to our hotel and I'm telling Mama Paul and Papa Paul (that's what I call Chris' parents) what happened. And they're like "You gotta be kidding me." And the security guard was down there listening to the story. He told me that I did the right thing by walking away from it, because it sounded to him like a setup. Basically, they sent the dude to start an incident so they could rob me.