Barcelona, day 2

today was a GREAT day. we went to La Boqueria. it is a HUGE market in the heart of barcelona. it was on Andrew Zimmern's "Bizarre Foods" program and it truly is an amazing place. there are merchants as far as the eye can see and once you're in side it's hard to find your way out, or even to make sure you've seen everything. there's everything from meats (cow, pig, chicken, etc...), seafood (eel, different varieties of fish, shrimp, lobster, mussels, oysters, etc...), fruits (any type you can possibly imagine and a whole lot more that many of you have never even seen in america), nuts, etc... i can go on and on, but really it's a big marketplace of street merchants that sell anything and everything you can imagine in the food department. so not only do they sell these things, but they also sell cooked foods and packaged foods that are made up of combinations of what is found in the marketplace. for example, the fruit stands not only sell the whole fruit but also sell packaged fruit assortments, and also juiced fruit on ice that one can buy and drink right there in the marketplace. there are also actual restaurants in the marketplace, in the form of a bar/counter, like a sushi bar in LA, but with cooked food behind the counter with a chef and a grill. La Boqueria is really too good to describe in words and i'm realizing now that my description doesn't do justice to what the place is really like. you must experience it for yourself, but i am trying my best to put the experience into words and pics.

so we spent a couple hours in this place, just walking around and trying to see all the merchants that were there. we talked to alot of people and probably annoyed most of them, and we found the most beautiful girl in spain (i'm sure of it, although the picture doesn't show it at all, but she was), who's picture is just above. also, you'll notice in my google pictures that there is beginning to be alot of pictures of girls, and you should know this was a special request from someone, so that they could live the experience of what i told them is a place with the most beautiful girls they'd ever seen. there will be more and more of these pics as i also enjoy taking them, so i invite you to enjoy the beautiful people in spain (because they truly are).

at la boqueria we bought a couple juice cups of mango and papya juice (if i remember correctly), and then also bought some cut up coconut and i also bought some amazingly tasting salted macadamia nuts. we also had a slice of pizza (the pizza here is ok, nothing special, but the average pizza slice from an average pizza vendor is alot better tasting than the average pizza slice from LA's average pizza vendor. again, though, it's nothing compared to those slices we had in Italy a couple years ago (especially in Florence and Venice).

enough about La Boqueria; i'll just say, if you're in barcelona, go there for sure and spend a day there. i didn't need to see it on "Bizarre Foods" to know i had to go there, because as it turns out, this market is at the end of that street called La Rambla, which i said had the street performers and was a very popular street here in the heart of the city center, so i would have found out anyway just by walking that street. so if you go to barcelona and find yourself on La Rambla, be sure to walk to the very end because La Boqueria is the prize at the end of your walk.

afterwards, we came back tot he hotel for some "reset" time, which i always like to do, hang out in the hotel's lounge/bar area, which is very nice here and catch up on some internet time (i know, total geek, but what are you gonna do?!) resting until the night time excitement.

at night we wanted to have paella for dinner; people talk about this dish so much it's like if you don't have it while you're here then you've sinned. i have to admit it looks good in all the pictures the restaurants have of it, though. so we found the place we wanted to have it at, but turns out this place is a Chinese restaurant. they have outside seating where you can't tell it's a Chinese restaurant AT ALL, but their outside seating (which is also on La Rambla, for great entertainment while having dinner) was full, so we decided to have dinner inside, which is when we found out the food coming to the outside seating was being supplied by the Chinese restaurant. go figure, a chinese restaurant in the middle of barcelona. so we sat down and figured we'd order one paella (which looked really good on their picture board outside) and the rest Chinese food (i know how this sounds, but keep reading). once we got in and wanted to order the paella, the waitress said that's only for outside and inside is ONLY Chinese food, so since we were already sitting we figured why not try Barcelona's Chinese?! long story short, it was DAMN GOOD; i felt better about sitting there ordering Chinese food when i looked int he back and saw that all the chefs were Chinese (the whole time i was thinking they'd be Spanish). so, the Chinese here was awesome.

we left the restaurant and caught the end (middle-end) of a really funny guy doing his act in the middle of La Rambla. he was an Irish (or some UK country) guy and was very funny and entertaining, so we stayed 'till the end (he was swollowing stuff and doing fire tricks and all the while made funny jokes and fun of people so it was funny, what can i say).

then we got back to the hotel to get our car so that we may go out on the town and find a club or something. we found one but it was packed and the bouncer wasn't letting people in, but i convinced him to let me go in for a minute just to check it out, and he let me. WOW! it was great inside, the only bad thing was that you couldn't see through the thick cloud of smoke. EVERYONE SMOKES HERE!!! it's like a prerequisite to living in this country. it's really unbelievable the sheer concentration of people that smoke here. they are also allowed to smoke in the restaurants, which i am glad CA law prohibits becuase it's just nasty to smell that while trying to eat your Spanish Chinese food. the club wasn't like a night club in LA or cancun for those thinking that it may have been (i'm sure many of the clubs here ARE like that, but this one wasn't); it just had really nice music inside (local, not american, which was very nice since i like spanish music) and it was definitely PACKED (the bouncer was right). i couldn't walk without pushing someone out of my way.

so we left and just drove around the city, which was nice. we didn't have a map with us but our hotel is on the water, so we just had to drive back to the beach if we got lost (which we obviously did). we saw many interesting things, including a really nice style of architecture this city inhabits, as well as a street where there is nothing but prostitutes. it wasn't like Amsterdam's (or any other country's) red light district, it was just a few city blocks that were inhabited by very obviously, indiscreetly-dressed female (and transvestite male) prostitutes. so it turns out this night had many interesting things to offer the eyes, as well as some things we won't want to see again (but that's for another blog, lol).

overall, at this point, my opinion of the city has still not been formed, as it is too early, but read the next post.