Disembarkation


10/20
On our own in Barcelona

We had to vacate our stateroom by 8 AM and be off the ship by 9:30  AM. Our luggage was picked up the night before after leaving it outside the cabin so we took our carry ons and went to breakfast then sat in one of the lounges until time to disembark. We told Barry and Sharon good bye as we all left to get taxis....theirs to the airport, ours to our hotel in Barcelona in the Barri Gotic neighborhood.  As expected, we couldn’t check in so early but they stored our luggage so we could explore the area around the hotel. We went back to the cathedral area where the market was still going on but there were no lines for the cathedral and we spent a lot of time enjoying the art and sculptures.  It's a beautiful cathedral that was begun in the 13th century. A copy of the black madonna of Montserrat is in the cathedral. There is also a cloister where a group of very vocal white geese are kept. The cathedral took up a lot of time and we were ready for lunch afterward. We found a small restaurant that didn't look touristy and lucked into a real gem of a place. A very local sort of place with a tapas menu that offered everything we had hoped for. We had a lunch of tomato bread (toasted country bread that has been rubbed with a cut tomato), pickled anchovies, grilled baby squid (they were the STAR!), potatoes bravas (fried potatoes with a spicy aioli), padron peppers and Spanish beer to wash it down. It was a great first lunch!
After lunch we walked on Las Ramblas, a giant pedestrian street that is packed with tourists but also has a variety of shops frequented by locals. Off Las Ramblas is the Boqueria, a fantastic market that specializes in seafood but has every other kind of food you can think of. We walked through the market regretting that we were too full to try some of the offerings though I had a coconut milk drink that was delicious. The opera house is near La Boqueria so we stopped in to consider a possible opera for the next night but decided that we would buy last minute tickets if we felt like going after a day of sightseeing.
The hotel recommended a couple of restaurants nearby for dinner telling us they were places popular with locals. We checked them both out, found the first one unappealing and then after being seated in the second one we walked out when we found that there was no seafood on the menu and Ira was determined to have seafood paella for dinner. We ended up in a place that had seafood paella and it was fairly good but nothing spectacular. Dick had pizza whilw the rest of us had paella,

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