Month: April 2012

Santa Caterina Market 2

They had whole booths for eggs:

The goose eggs (at the far left) were pretty big but then we ran across this one:

These are ostrich eggs, only 28 euro each.

The market is mostly fresh food but they had deli stuff also. We plan to make a picnic tomorrow from there. Today we ate at a little cafe in the market. It was very good. They say Barcelona is a foodie town, that seems to be true.

We sat right by the cooks, this guy was friendly and was making jokes with us and took the above picture. He was the grill cook; to the left was the station for the guy who did things in frying pans and pots.

Notice the writing above on the back of his shirt, menjar i beure.  Those of you who know some Spanish know that that is not Spanish. It is a good example of Catalan.  Google Translate tells us it means “food and drink”.

Barcelona Markets

We love to go to markets when we travel. Today we went to the Santa Caterina Market, the has a festive colored and wavy roof which we didn’t get a picture of. This is not the more famous La Boqueria market just off the middle of the Ramblas, our hotel recommended this one. It was an amazing place with beautiful fruits and vegetables:

We got some strawberries for breakfast tomorrow and some tiny little bananas that we heard are really good, from Columbia I think he said.

The market is all food. Here is ome of the meat and fish:

 

Gaudi backlash

Here is the sink in our hotel:

And the toilet is squared off too:

But not as much as the one we saw in Italy last year:

Holy rectilinear Batman!

What is going on in the land of Guadi? We are looking forward to seeing the Gaudi architecture in Barcelona in a few days, and Guadi, as a sort of angular anti-Will Rogers’s never met a right angle he liked.

The sink, by the way, does not really drain well with its flat bottom.

Purple play-doh on a pretty plate

Here it is:

It seems obvious now and probably to you.

We ate at Alfileritos 24, at Calle de los Afilteritos 24 (cute huh?), the guidebooks said “Modern international”. Our hotel manager, Enrique, recommeded it and called it just “24”. I guess that is what the young, hip crowd calls it and Wynette and I, with our combined 125 years, always try to go where the cool kids go. Overall it was very good.

This is the appetizer we got “carpaccio de pulpo” Somehow, despite our hipness, they gave us the English menu which called it “Roast octopus”. When we got it, it seemed like the wrong order. Where’s the octopus I thought. And it seemed kind of small for 10 euro. Wynette agreed although she was looking at it from the other side of the table so I guess it is mostly my error. We were this close to asking the waiter about it when I suddenly realized that the plate was all black and the pattern on it was, in fact, our octopus. It would have been highly embarrassing and a big hit to our hipness if we had asked. Anyway, once we found the cleverly cleverly-hidden-as-a-pattern-on-the-plate octopus, it was very good and we were off to a great start with the meal.

The play-doh does look like a kid shaped it. It was potato and turnips (and purple coloring) and was good too.

I’ll refrain from posting pictures of all the other courses, which we did take.