Saturday, July 08, 2006

7-4-06 Tuesday: Gothic Quarter and Flamenco

Tuesday we went into the historic gothic quarter, where everything was stone and cast iron, the streets were narrow and the buildings a high surrounding wall. Everything was beautiful, if maybe a little dirty, but the ambiance more than made up for it. There were musicians on almost every street corner. As soon as the sound from one faded, the music from the next picked up. And there were lots of open plazas made entirely of stone. So pretty. For lunch we just wandered into one of the restaurants in the Gothic quarter, L´Academie, and each got the menú lunch. A menú lunch is a fixed price lunch, sometimes with food options, sometimes without, and it includes an appetizer, a main entree, dessert, bread, and drink; all for about 10€ usually. And its always good. So we got the menú at L´Academie, which offered no choices. The first plate was some kind of soup with a thick pasty chicken base and onions and ...garbonzo beans? Who knows. It looked a little sketch, but tasted amazing. Our main dish was a fish. No really, a whole fish. All that was missing was its head and organs. Put the head back on and it looked like it could have swam off the plate. We had to slice it open and pull all bones out, (and more than once got a mouthful of bones anyways), but the fish itself was delicious. Dessert was some coconut custard, followed by a cortado, the popular spanish coffee drink. It´s really just espresso. As is all the coffee here. Even when you order a café con leche, you still get espresso with milk. It´s all pretty tasty though, so at least they got that going for them.

Played Gobblet in a cute little café. We´re taking pictures of all the different places that we play it. So far the count is Plaça Catalunya and the Gothic District.

After lunch and shopping in the Gothic Quarter, we showered and went out to a Flamenco show at Tablao de Carmen. Flamenco is essentially a Spanish form of tap dance. It involves crazy-fast feet, out of tune singing, and a bunch of sassy attitude. Towards the end the feet were amazing. And the guitar player got a solo that was ridiculous. He played a guitar better than I´ve seen alot of professional violinists. Those fingers were fast. As were the feet of the final guy. Just amazing. Afterwards we went out to a Pinchas bar, which is similar to Tapas. Lots of small foods a la carte. I have no idea what most of that was, but it was all damn good. I ate 10 different pinchas by myself. Then home for some sleep.

Out of time again. Comments are open now, so you don´t need an account to comment.

Love you all. See you soon!

1 Comments:

At 5:17 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hope you get time to see Picasso museum and the local dancing experience at the plaza. Your Unc Steve and I dropped our goodies and joined right in. What a treat!!

Las Ramblas was alot of fun but do be careful for the dark side. Thieves do lurk, we saw them.

Have a BLAST!!!

Aunt Dawn

 

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