We flew into Barcelona, Spain, at around 10am yesterday morning to a chilly 2°C. We had a fairly lazy day from then on, only venturing out of our hotel for an hour or so and not really finding too many interesting things in the immediate vicinity. I was holding the map upside down so lead us in the complete opposite direction to where we were meant to be going to find the nearest metro station. Funny how everything still matched up (well, except that there was no train station at the end...)!! :)
Our hotel is in the El Prat de Llobregat area of Barcelona. Ben got a great deal through EasyJet when booking our flight, and we are very impressed with it - it's probably the nicest hotel we've ever stayed in!
Today we headed first to a food market I'd read about online as one of the top things to do in Barcelona: La Boqueria. It was AMAZING!!!! It was under a large roof near the centre of the city, in an area called La Rambla. It was totally fascinating - beautifully colourful, with foods ranging in appearance (to us) from delicious to exotic to disgusting!
We saw whole pig heads, some other animal heads (sheep?) that were skinned but with eyeballs still in, huge crabs and lobsters on ice and still slowly kicking, enormous octopodes (Google says this is the most accurate plural form of "octopus"!), colourful hanging bunches of chillis, mountains of mushrooms, lots of mouthwatering truffles and chocolates including some shaped like hedgehogs and pianos, brightly coloured lollies in various shapes including fried eggs, all sorts of dried fruit from mango to kiwifruit, lots and lots of beautiful fresh fruit including lychees, dates, pomegranate and dragonfruit (bright pink fruit in third last photo below), a Chinese food stall, a Greek food stall, fresh pasta, pizza, oodles of olives, and much more!
For breakfast/brunch we ate some chocolates and truffles from a mixed box a friendly stallholder assembled for us, two big slices of freshly made pizza, and a fruit salad that included coconut, dragonfruit, kiwifruit, watermelon, rockmelon, grapes, strawberries and pineapple. Yummy!!!
La Boqueria was also a wonderful photo opportunity, and hopefully the photos below will help convey how incredible this place was - although some make it look a bit more yellow than it did in real life! Enjoy...
Anyway, so that was La Boqueria! The rest of the day was excellent too, but I'll put that in a separate blog entry. This one's all about the FOOD!!!!! :D Goodnight!
2 comments:
WOW!! That was certainly some market place. Would put Rocklea to shame!!I would be smiling to if I was buying some of that chocolate!
Cheers from Ma & Pa
That grin says it all Ben (in the chocolate shop)!!!! What a great place to shop for fresh fruit & vegies - i would enjoy that. Yes, sure don't find places as good as that here.
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