My travels to Spain: The Seafood Experience

Ah, another day and more experiences to share (but, much shorter today as I enjoyed a much needed siesta for four hours). We began our morning at breakfast munching on toasted wheat bread and jam, scrambled eggs, pineapple, and salami and cheese along with a nice cup of cafe con leche. We then set out for our morning walk to IQS to learn about the Financial side of Spain and our field trip took us in to the Financial District where we visited Caixa, a savings bank (primarily for families, not businesses) and a place for the older citizens of Spain to purchase life insurance when this type of welfare service did not exist here. The bank has a strong commitment to work for the general interest of the citizens and any type of dividend earned would be placed in to welfare projects. After our discussion and tour we were then released to go spend the day as we chose, so four of us (Nicki, Val, Colleen, and myself) headed back to the hotel to take a much needed siesta. Before we got back to the hotel, though, we stopped at the grocery to buy some staples to keep in our room for small meals (pan or bread, a couple of different cheeses, salami, bottle of wine - a necessity, no?, a bag of cookies - yet another necessity, and water).

Colleen woke us up after sleeping for four hours and invited us to dinner down in the seafood area so we stumbled out of bed, freshened up and then headed back down to La Rambla to begin our hike to the port of Barcelona. Enersto, one of the students in our group, speaks Spanish very well so he bartered us a meal at one of the local restaurants. For 17.50 Euro he swung us a glass of sangria each, a free bottle of wine, a bottle of water for myself, four appetizers (bread, mussels, these little fried baby fish that reminded me of minnows, and potatos bravas), the main meal of something that reminded me of a gumbo as it contained shrimp, crawfish, a mussel and paella (a rice like substance) mixed with chirizo and mushrooms and a dessert of either mandarins, melon or strawberry or vanilla ice cream. Most of chose the mandarins as our next destination was to find gelato for the dessert we were truly seeking.

Don with his own canteen of sangria.

After dinner, Val and Ernesto found a cab to head back to the hotel as Ernesto was exhausted and was about to fall over at the table. The other six of us headed back over to La Rambla to seek out our gelato. We were nearing our train station and were becoming quite despondent as we had not located a dessert shop when we spied it off to our left. I purchased a caramel type gelato in a cone which was quite sublime I will admit and then we journeyed on to the metro station. We were back, safe and sound by 11 and then the girls down the hall broke open the bottle of champagne so we convened for a quick drink and some fun chit-chat.