Day 11

Wednesday August 7

8:30am CET - woke up just after 8am which is great considering I was actually able to sleep around 11pm! We can't control the a/c here so it was a little chilly in the morning, but better to be a little chilly than a little hot!

9:00am CET - went to Starbucks around the corner for breakfast - I had a chocolate croissant mmmm and they gave me a glass of water - with ice! Woohoo!

9:30am CET - walked to the Placa de Catalunya to find the Tourist info office, got lost a bit but finally found it - it was down an escalator which is why we had trouble finding it LOL. Waited in line for a few and bought 4-day transportation passes for 17.50 euros - was able to use the credit card, always nice. The Placa de Catalunya is at the top of the long main tourist street called La Rambla - where I had read about all the pickpocketing and such. I must say I didn't see any of it, so that's good. Followed the Rick Steves walking tour of the Ramblas and that was nice because it pointed out some stuff just off the street that we never would've seen otherwise, like an uncovered Roman necropolis, a neat little square with lightposts designed by Gaudi, and a really nice Baroque church. The street is wide and pedestrianized down the middle, lined with big trees on both sides.

10:15am CET - finally we made it to the La Boqueria market. OH. MY. GOD. I could've stayed in there all day. There's everything - meat stalls, fruit and veggie stalls galore (with incredibly cheap prices like .90 euros a kilogram for tomatoes), bakeries, bars (where people were drinking beer at 10:15!), fish stalls, and OLIVE STALLS!!!! Instead of trying to order, I bought two prepackaged cups of 2 different kinds for 2 euros each. They look quite yum. I also bought a fresh raspberry juice drink for 1.50 euros that a lot of the fruit stalls were selling. It was like drinking a raspberry… Soooo tasty. See my pictures for the different stands. Pretty amazing stuff and it was quite busy and lively and just a lot of fun. I love the LA Farmers Market and this is kind of like that but times 20 and half the price. A lot of the stuff came prepackaged too, like there were tons of prepared fruits for good prices that came with forks and spoons. We might have to go back down there and get some stuff for a picnic one day later in the week. Really amazing place. Saw some fruit I've never even heard of (see pictures).

11:00am CET - We made it to the bottom and then took the metro, which is clean and fast, to the Eixample district a few stops away. The streets are grand and the stores are expensive, and we then changed lines and made it to the famous Sagrada Familia cathedral that has been built since the late 1800s. It's just absolutely amazing. We didn't pay the 8 euros to go inside but we walked around the entire edifice and just gawked at it. The whole area was incredibly busy, it seemed like the whole city was there LOL.

12noon CET - Hopped on the subway a couple stops back to the main street in the Eixample, Passeig de Gracia. The row houses are pretty amazing, we stopped and gawked at a couple of the Gaudi houses on the street which are just bizarre and stunning at the same time - they are also outRAGEOUSly expensive to get into (one was 16.50!!!), so we just looked from the outside. It was quite humid out and starting to spit rain but never got too terribly bad and at least it was cloudy so it wasn't too hot.

1:30pm CET - after wandering for a while in Eixample we started getting super hungry so we went one block over back to the Rambla de Catalunya where we ate last night and looked at menus. I took out the pages from the Rick Steves book and found El Raco, which sounded like a good option, so we found it and they had a 10 euro meal of the day that included an appetizer, entrée, drink and dessert, including tax (which is not normally included here) all for 10 euros - there were 3-4 choices for each course. We were like SCORE. So I got spaghetti with garlic and oil, something called a "Quizza" which was basically just cheese in a crust, and raspberry sorbet… needless to say I am stuffed but it was delicious and the place was big and bright and airy and kind of neat. At your table there is a swiping card and when you want to pay you just take the card and bring it to the cashier and they swipe it and show you your bill and you pay. Pretty neat. When the waitress took our order, she punched it to a little computer wrapped around her wrist, so it was all very high tech and neat. We decided we would have to go back sometime during the week and see if they had a different menu of the day because it was so much food and such a good deal. We figure we'll be so full all day that having tapas later again will be perfect.

2:45pm CET - came back to the hotel to rest the feet and relax a while. It's not too hot but it's very humid out so being in the a/c for a while and resting my feet feels very nice.

5:30pm CET - read in a couple guidebooks about this store called Vinçon on the Passeig de Gracia where we had been earlier, so we were like sure, let's go spend some time there and go to one of the tapas places we had seen on that street that looked good. So we found the store all the way up the street (of course lol) and it is AWESOME. Almost IKEA-esque it is like a funky department store that sold a bit of everything. It was pretty expensive but we looked around the entire place pretty much, for about an hour.

7:00pm CET - after pulling ourselves out of the awesomeness that is Vinçon, we walked back down to the tapas place on a corner called Tapa Tapa. We sat right at the bar and the menu was just like a paper placemat but the nice thing about this place is that there were pictures so we knew exactly what we were ordering, which was really nice. It was so fun and the food was cheaper than last night. We had olives, which were of course delicious - it was several types all mixed up that were marinated in some kind of mildly spicy olive oil, tastyyyyy. We also had some cheese, a potato cake type thing (no mom and dad not like OUR potato cakes, but still round and still yummy), and two kinds of chicken - one was little chunks of chicken breast that had been like sautéed in garlic and oil and herbs and was totally delicious and the other was chunks of chicken breast on skewers that had been crisped up with sesame seeds on the outside - equally delicious. All 5 of these were under 3 euros each, too, which is pretty freaking cheap - although, they were small, but it was enough to eat considering how huge our lunch had been. Then for dessert I had "mousse of 3 chocolates" which was, obviously, delicious - it was 3 different mousses of 3 different textures layered in a glass for 3.50. The whole thing including our drinks and tip was like just over 10 euros each including tax and a 10%ish tip. Unreal. Better than last night and cheaper. Plus sitting at the bar was fun because we watched the guys doing the drink orders for the whole place (which is pretty big) and they kept switching off and they were all in such pissy moods and yelling at each other - it was pretty funny. So not only is it a little cheaper to sit at the bar - it's also more entertaining! It was fun to try to get the guys' attention when we wanted to order something too.

9:45pm CET - after looking at some of the famous big mansion buildings on the Passeig de Gracia lit up for nighttime, we came back to the hotel and will do laundry. Fun.