The second day in Barcelona I met the spintop collectors club "Amics de la Baldufa" = "Friends of the Spintop" (I now know that the reason we did not meet the previous day was the Eurocup final ;-) If you have not yet seen their excellent site, check it out. They started in the spring of 1996, have organized lots of events and have published more than 24 issues of their very informative magazine.

If you ever visit, be aware that the street address is misleading: after a relatively long walk from the hotel, carrying my tops and Figaro, I arrived at a . . . construction site! The even numbers on the facing buildings were the correct ones and the following block street numbers were what I expected. It took me a while to figure out that the place was the building standing in a square in the previous block. There, a civic center, they have use of a large room with closets where they store the club belongings.

The six members of club present at the meeting were: Ferran, Dani, Josep, Ton, Carles and Jaume (left to right on this video still). In addition, there were some young guys from the yo-yo club of Barcelona, who contacted me through Pulp; in particular, Jordi, who can do some basic tops tricks. So, in a strange way, I helped these two groups get together which are from the same city but had never met.

Now I know what celebrities must feel: they all had cameras pointing at me at the same time, what was a little disconcerting. They also took lots of pictures of Philippe's tops, Figaro and the Eiffel Tour gyroscope. There is no doubt they are excellent at documenting anything related to tops.

After the meeting they took me for dinner to taste a variety typical catalonian foods, "tapas" style: I was living the "top life" :-)