Barcelona Day 2

Today was all about walking.  We wandered around the city, through the alleyways of the Gothic Quarter, down to the quay and the Colombus monument and along the shopping boulevards of Las Ramblas.

Bottom left - cakes made out of towels!

There were highlights galore, but the most memorable one for me, funnily enough, revolves around food.  In fact I'm feeling a bit like Edmund from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe with his craving for turkish delight, only mine is for churros and chocolate, mmm mmmm.

Underneath that pile of cream is Steve's coffee

We sampled this at a tiny but very busy cafe tucked away in a skinny little lane in the Gothic Quarter.  Just about everyone seemed to be having churros and chocolate and not wanting to miss out on this apparent Barcelona favourite we followed suit.  YUMMO.  The chocolate was thick, dark and lightly spiced.  The churros were light and fluffy.  The two together were heaven.  As I said I've been having a few churros longings since, only trouble is finding cafes that sell them, oh we've searched and searched today, but no luck, which has only fuelled the craving!  And it's not just me, the kiddies and Steve are keen beans too.  Tomorrow is the day, will keep you posted!

Of course our churros were for morning tea which was way before midday, so obviously we were a bit peckish around lunchtime.  Only trouble is we sort of got lost (ask Steve!) and didn't end up eating until about 2:30pm.  Lunch today was decidedly better than dinner last night but perhaps the best bit of all was the location.  Nearly all of the streets in the main city area of Barcelona are laid out in a grid, with large courtyards sprinkled here and there. Within these courtyards are cafes, tapas bars, patisseries, restaurants, small super markets and ice creameries.  But the best feature (for us at least) are the kiddy playgrounds.  Both our lunch today and dinner last night were at outside tables overlooking the playground area and while the kids ran amok we ignored them and focussed on more important things like coffee and sangria while marvelling at the ingenuity of the Spanish when it comes to keeping kids out of parents hair!

The view from our table, note kids conveniently placed at their own table a few metres away J  

Re-fuelled and re-energised we hit the pavement again and were lucky enough to bump into a street parade.......


And then we stumbled across a beautiful market, full of fresh, vibrant produce, some still wiggling......

And then it was back to the apartment, knackered and ready for bed and lovely dreams of more churros and chocolate J