figarofigaro1 | Barcelona Vacation, Day 4: La Boqueria

Breakfast at the hotel was excellent. They had real croissants! (And lots of other good stuff.) I discovered a Spanish Nutella-esque thing: Nocilla. I liked it better than Nutella. It seemed more chocolatey and less oily.

We met up with Sandy only, as George was still ill. The day was rather dreary and gray and there were occasional rain showers. We went to the big food market, La Boqueria and strolled and gawked. I was both in love and awe with everything there. I still cannot make sense of everything we saw. I took over fifty pictures while there. Here are some highlights.

Lots of jamon whole, sliced, in cones; and many other types of cured meats:

Bones:

Fruits and vegetables:

Spices:

Candy:

Foie gras:

Insane amounts of seafood:

Some of which we had no idea what they were, like these things on the right side below. The sign says "percebe candabrico". They look like little monster claws.

Later on in the trip, we saw some people eating a big bowl of them at a sidewalk tapas place, but we didn't want to be rude and stare to see how they were eating them.

When we got home I investigated and found out that they are gooseneck barnacles. They are only eaten (and considered quite a delicacy) in Portugal, Spain, and Morocco. They are steamed and then one twists off a leathery outer coating of the stalk and bites the meat that was inside that is still dangling from the shell. The meat inside the shell is the sex organs and they aren't considered good. There's a YouTube video of how to eat them here. We didn't eat any.

And, of course, they had padrone peppers! (We loves these thanks to those Half Pint Farm folks.) We ate them several meals and they were exactly like how me make them at home.

That's probably enough about the market. If you want to see everything, go to my Flickr set for the trip.

After we left, we wandered and explored and shopped. We found a little bar with montadito tapas slices of baguette with tapas items piled on top, secured with a skewer. Many places are self-serve and they count your skewers to tally the bill. We ordered by pointing at things on the bar to get the three anchovy-egg ones and then said to surprise us with the other three.

We wandered a bit more and found a bit of home.

I was fading so we went separate ways. I crashed in the hammock and Bruce went exploring a bit more.

We met up with Sandy and George (who was feeling better) and we walked up into the Eixample for drinks and dinner. We found a bar at the Axel hotel and had drinks sitting outside. Then we had an excellent tapas dinner at La Flauta, thanks to David W. for the recommendation. We ate padrones, fried artichokes, jamon, asparagus and mushrooms, sardine fillets, foie gras, tomato bread, and creama catalana. This was probably the most upscale tapas we ate on the whole trip, and still it was pretty casual.

When we left the restaurant it was raining, a steady soaking rain. Nobody was very happy about getting soaked on the way back to our respective hotels.