So Here's Our Vacation Blog...

Barcelona beckons.  After breakfast at the hotel, we walked to the Boqueria (also known as ‘El Mercado de San José,’ ‘Mercat de Sant Josep de la Boqueria,’ ‘La Mercado de Boqueria,’ and many other similar sounding names), the biggest and oldest market in the world, about a hundred yards from our hotel (see why we picked this place?).  Unbelievable sights, sounds, smells, and the absolute freshest food you’ve ever seen.  We spent an hour walking up and down aisles, watching them move meat, produce, and seafood in while people with their pull-behind shopping carts filled them with provisions.

Upon walking in we were greeted with a half dozen vendors selling amazingly fresh fruit in cups, so you could munch while shopping.

Other vendors sold ready-to-eat food like these oysters, clams, and mussels...

and something that looked like a corn dog dipped in rice.

I’m not a real olive lover, but these skewers with different kinds of marinated olives looked great!

They had huge fish on ice that the butchers were carving up into steaks.

Every kind of fish you could imagine, probably half of which I’d never heard of or seen before.  I did recognize the squids...

And octopus.

My favorite was one of the many the cheese counters, where you could easily tell what kind of milk each one was made from.

While walking around ding some shopping we came across some shops with really clever items, like the store that sold nothing but little rubber ducks.  Except that most of them weren’t ducks, but dozens and dozens of different kinds of animals.  Cool!

We also saw several sections of the old Roman walls, which were the foundation of Barcelona.  They stumbled across these over the years, and used to attach buildings to the, so they look a little funny because there’s modern brick interspersed with 2000 year old stone block.

It’s worth a quick read on the following website (let’s see if this link will work): https://www.barcelonas.com/roman-walls-of-barcelona.html.  Then a stop at an outdoor tapas bar for sardines and sangria.

We finished up our shopping trip with a visit to El Raval.  Up to now we’d been carousing in El Gotico, which is on the north side of Las Romblas and more upscale, touristy.  Raval has always been known as the seedier side of town, a little iffy to walk around at night, etc., but has supposedly been cleaned up and has more restaurants and shops.  Well, it’s not there yet.  We saw the greatest number of cell phone stores in one place than I ever could have imagined, and off-beat shops where you could find things to buy, but nothing your wife would ever wear, like this little number.

And so back to our hotel to regroup before going out for a nightcap.  Our balcony is the top floor corner on the front - nice view.

So we finished up at a tiny cocktail bar that has been open continuously since 1933, where there were three older gentlemen in tuxedos and bow ties serving up a wide variety of special drinks in unusual glasses.  None of them spoke any English at all, though, so it was quite a chore to tell them we wanted scotch!  In the end everything worked out and that’s why the blog didn’t get written last night.  Until tomorrow...