As we flew into Barcelona from Venice, there were many architectural landmarks pocking the cityscape. Over the course of the next several days, we had a fantastic time discovering them. We also had a spectacular time enjoying the food of Barcelona, including excellent seafood and tapas bars.
During our first evening in Barcelona, we rambled Las Ramblas, a wide street with a large market-type area in the center with everything from tacky tourist things to pet birds for sale to flowers. Off to one side is the famous Boqueria meat and produce market, where we saw lots of fresh seafood and meat, gorgeous fruit stands, and fantastic arrays of olives (see Ben trying to decide?), nuts and dried fruits as well. However, since both of these places are so famous, they are also QUITE crowded. (Our hotel was just a block or two from the Boqueria, but it was far enough away to be quiet.) Once we got to the end of the Ramblas, we were basically at Barcelona's harbor and we spent a bit of time examining the boats in slips, including the racing sailboats in town for a regatta.The next two days were mainly spent taking in one of Barcelona's main draws, the Modernista architecture that Antoni Gaudi (among others) made famous in the early 1900's. Ben and I thoroughly enjoyed seeing how Gaudi apparently designed nary a straight line in his life, and took the majority of his inspiration from the waves and swirls of nature in things like the nautilus, bones, honeycombs, etc. Additionally, he was excellent at using new designs to serve a purpose that was what we would now call green or repurposing or recycling, etc. This was clear in his use of recycled glass for mosaics, and creating items that collected and reused rain water. Some of his creations that we saw included Casa Mila (La Pedrera), Casa Batllo, Park Guell (next pic), and the very famous (and very unfinished after 100 years of work) La Sagrada Familia cathedral. (Since we were in Barcelona and some of us are Olympics fiends, we did have to check out the site of the 1992 Olympics, which was pretty cool, though somewhat unused now.)
Finally, we had an excellent time in Barcelona discovering the true meaning of tapas bars :-) On Sunday afternoon (when apparently nothing is open in Barcelona-seems to be true most afternoons, actually), we stumbled upon a small bar/restaurant that was open. We (and when I saw we, I mean Darla with her excellent Spanish) asked for a few plates of typical Spanish tapas. (Tapas are basically small portions of food on toothpicks, appetizer-style.) She brought us a plate of small toasted bread rounds with a bit of tomato sauce and a small square of egg/potato bake toothpicked on top, plus a plate of meat, a plate of cheese, a plate of sausages, a plate of fried fish pieces, a plate of baked sweet potatoes, and continued on until we'd told her at least 2 or 3 times we had plenty (see below). We were thrilled to discover that it was very inexpensive (1.67 euro per plate!) and that she essentially gave us a few on the house. She definitely seemed to be enjoying bringing us all kinds of new food :-) (We were all the only ones there in the middle of the afternoon :-)) One other evening we hopped back and forth between a couple of excellent tapas bars (in which you sit at/near the bar and pick however many tapas you like, and at the end they just count the toothpicks). We decided that we'd definitely have to try a tapas party when we got home :-)
We never made Steve write a blog post!
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