Normandy Adventures: Barcelona Day 1

Norm:

Today we decided to walk down a major street in Barcelona called La Rambla as well as check out a popular tourist park called Park Guell. We stopped by at La Bouqueria, which is a food market similar but WAY BETTER than the St. Lawrence Market in Toronto. La Bouqueria had butchers, fish markets, fruit vendors and restaurants serving up fresh seafood and tapas. Mandy and I purchased a good deal of fruit and we had breakfast/lunch at a Tapas restaurant in La Bouqueria. The highlight of that meal: the razor clams! Delicious.

La Rambla - Usually way more packed

Extremely fresh seafood for sale

Our seafood sampler from La Boqueria Bar

Norm having his fave meat kebob

Mandy in fruit heaven

After that, we continued down Las Ramblas, walking by a number of souvenir shops and restaurants. We then took the nearest metro towards Park Guell to see the Barcelona's views from a higher elevation and also see Casa Gaudi, renown for its unique architecture. The walk proved arduous (thank god there were escalators for majority of the way up), but the map of the area was fairly useless and we ended up back tracking a number of times. In fact, we are not even sure we walked (or even fully saw) Casa Gaudi. But, the weather was cooperating the majority of the time, the walk was pleasant and we did see a lot of cool unique architectural structures in the park.

Largest vending machine ever in a train station

Thank goodness for the escalators up to Park Guell. It was a very hot day and a big hill to climb.

View of the city

Not sure what that's for but there were A LOT of people at the top with no railings

No escalator going down.. noooooo!

Antoni Gaudi's work - So unique!

Homeless(?) man with so many dogs that look so sick! Mandy gave him dirty looks.

More of Gaudi's work. TOO many people

After wandering more into the park we found more of Gaudi's work.

Mandy's Throne

Norm's Throne

Afterwards, we began to head to the area near our hotel. We walked around historical district for a little bit and got hungry after a while. We went into a restaurant for a quick bite (I had a hot dog, Mandy has some Shanghai-nese buns. Afterwards we headed back to the hotel to see if the room change that we requested was successful (it was). After chilling for a while, we decided that we wanted some authentic seafood paella for dinner and googled good restaurants near our area. I decided on a place along the seaside called Can Majo.

We headed there around 8 when the restaurant opened to avoid disappointment and was seated in the terrace. We ordered the gourmet shellfish paella and the razor clams to start (razor clams weren't as good as the ones in La Bouqueria. However, dinner was quite good and I left satisfied.

Razor clams (not as good as La Boqueria) and bread with tomato sauce. Mandy thought it was raw meat, lol - turns out it's a traditional bread dish in Barcelona.