Barcelona, Dia Uno: La Fonda, la playa, y mas demasiado vino

I do not even know where to begin. I spent five incredible, beautiful days in Barcelona, and I have so much to write about that it's impossible to do the city any kind of justice. But I will struggle on, and I figure if I'm really boring for the next few days in Vienna I should be able to manage. So check back often! I will try to post every day for the next week.

I could barely sleep the night before my ridiculously early flight, which was good considering how ridiculously early I had to wake up (the U-bahn wasn't even running). I had an entire row on the plane to myself, though - there were eight people on the entire flight - so it was all right, and I quickly got wrapped up in Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle, hardly an inoffensive tome of Canadian literature (though I didn't like the ending). Reading became increasingly difficult as we flew over the Mediterranean, because I kept looking out of the window obsessively for my first sight of the Spanish coastline. When it finally came into view, all I could hear was someone faintly saying, in whispered tones of shock and awe, "I'm going to Barcelona," before the blood came rushing back to my head and I realized that I was talking to myself like a fool. This experience was to be repeated several times.

My host in Barcelona was the Czar, so-called for the shirt he chose to wear when he picked me up at the airport, who proved all too amenable to visiting all of the places I had scrawled onto a very long list. After dropping off my bag at his apartment, we sauntered down the long, wide street that comprises La Rambla, infested with men hawking strange bird-call whistles, cheap kebab joints, and tourists. Oh, and bats.

Welcome to España! Quite a change from having a brocaded and bewigged Mozart invite me to a concert.

On La Rambla, my first stop was La Boqueria, the jaw-dropping, beautiful, awe-inspiring, sprawling, delicious market to which I will devote an entire post. After drooling over the dizzying kaleidescope of fruits and vegetables and dried nuts and juices and oh!, it was off to La Fonda, the best seafood restaurant in Barcelona and thus, the world. I defy you to argue with this:

La Tasca, eat your heart out: this is authentic, stuck-to-the-sides-of-the-pan seafood paella, the most famous of Spanish rice dishes, with lots of formerly crawling critters on top. Between the two of us, the Czar and I ate the entire pan. I don't think I can try paella anywhere else ever again; it simply can't top this experience.

Clockwise from upper left: Our waiter was like our own personal Dali - he poured us shots of orujo de hiervas (and even spelled it out on a piece of paper for me), the bright yellow drink I am holding in front of my eyes like goggles in the second picture, and which he called it the national drink of Spain. The Czar is pleased with the day's catch, and I am ODing on crema catalana, similar to crême brulée, and some kind of delightful chocolate something that was delightful and chocolatey. I was too catatonic after the seafood to remember what it was called.

Afterwards, it was off to the beach with a two-euro bottle of wine to aid with our digestion. This is the view from the stone steps bordering Barceloneta - those boys in the sand on the left were quite entertaining, and were, in addition to the near-toxic level of food in our system, the reason it took us a few hours to budge from the seaside.

Tomorrow: gawdy Gaudi, tasty tapas, and lucious leche de pantera. Also, alliteration.