K & L's Travel Blog

Day 2 Barcelona

12/18/2017

Day one is always exciting. Time to get settled, go shopping for basics, and settle in with what we need.

We stop first to get the grocery cart at Abundance II. Then onto the neighborhood grocery store. It is adjacent to a high school, and there are hundreds of kids mulling about in the street and in the store. This must be their daily routine—11:00 break.

I remember how overwhelming the store once felt. Still a challenge, but generally we know what to do (I can even weigh and mark our veggies with the best of them, an initial challenge I remember well as elderly shoppers impatiently waited for us to figure it out!). K. gets enough food for dinner and some basics. We wheel the goods home and unpack before striking out for the phone card.

It’s a cloudy day, one of our first here. I love it as it allows more for photography, but find I’m just not in much of a picture-taking mood. Still have that residual or free-floating anxiety that keeps me from relaxing and really seeing. Still it is a lovely walk down the Ramblas Cataluyna to the store. Getting the SIM up and running is simple.

We wander into a soap store (“Sabon”). We had been in one in NYC—they treat you like queens and let you scrub your hands with special stuff. The woman is very nice—seemed happy to have customers. We buy a bar of soap to use while we are here. I still have my eye on an older store in the Gothic district for gifts, but this place could do well.

We stop in Mauri bakery for our “Lorena” mini quiches. I try to say no as we are on our way to lunch, but K claims it as a “first-day tradition” and I defer. We get them “to go” as a compromise.

We head up towards Diagonal. I work to get some better photos of the giraffe sculpture while K browses kid clothing stores for her great-nieces. We stop in the Zwilling  knife store so we have something sharp to cut with (our one complaint, a very limited kitchen). 

We eat lunch at Flauta II at about 2:30 (I think jet lag works for BCN time). The place is crowded and we have to wait. We had totally forgotten the BCN rule that if you eat bread for breakfast early, you are supposed to have a second breakfast later.

We are impatient and hungry, but manage to wait about 20 minutes to be seated. Once we sit, the waitress is upon us wanting to know our drink and meal order. We get the pricier set menu for EUR 23. We start with ham and clams and then had grilled steak and calamari. K got flan for desert and I decided to try a dish I had watched them prepare and had read about—cheese with honey. Wow! It was delicious! Very mild cheese (like a queso fresca or curds & whey) and deliciously flavorful dark honey. The flan was great as well. And the clams and the calamari. And the wine….

We have a siesta between 5:00 and 7:00 before heading back out to the Born and Gothic area. It’s a nice combination of familiar and strange—I know many of the streets, and we’ve ridden this same bus before.