It's Steve (now in blog form)

I’m in Paris between events and have a few more minutes to myself.  No time like the present to complete the Barcelona recap.  The food was good, but what makes Barcelona really special is it’s ability to brilliantly combine the incredibly cool with the incredibly stupid.  Don’t worry.  I have examples!

Happy Pills are cool- This is a great store front.  Had it been a pharmacy it would have been very very clever.  As it was only a candy shop, I’ll give it only one very.  Very clever.

Rhinoceroses in denim gas masks are stupid- Clearly, there is no way that denim will act as an effective barrier to most toxic gasses.  That doesn’t make any sense at all.

Barcelona epilepsy puppets are cool- Remember the Japanese cartoons that kept giving kids seizures?  These are their wooden puppet equivalents.

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Mr. Christmas Log is kind of stupid (but I still like him)- I have no idea what this guy is about.  The holiday market in Barcelona was chock full of Mr. Christmas Log.  He is, obviously, a piece of wood with legs, a face, and a hat.  I suppose I could look up his origins, but it’s almost more fun not to know.

The Gothic Quarter is really cool- The Gothic Quarter is my favorite part of Barcelona.  It’s a maze of narrow streets winding through the old city.  I basically head over there and get lost.  It’s great.  I really like when you happen to glimpse open spaces down narrow corridors.  It’s like stumbling on hidden worlds.  It makes you wonder how much of the world you’re really not seeing everyday.

The Sagrada Familia Church is amazing- This thing is unreal.  Gaudi started construction of the church in 1894 (I think that’s right), and it isn’t slated for completion until 2023.  For a few extra euros you can go to the top of the spire and walk down.  The view is unreal and the architecture is just incredible.

I can’t recommend Barcelona highly enough.  If you ever get the chance absolutely give it a visit.  Ok, I’ve got to crash.

I was in Barcelona last week as a part of my Euro travel extravaganza.  It is one of my very favorite cities to visit (Beijing is probably the other in my top two).  It isn’t that there is so much to do exactly.  It’s just a beautiful city with a really cool vibe.  Check out all of my Barcelona pics here.  Anyway, this post is just about the food.  Some of this stuff is just weird.

Tapas?- I go back and forth between loving and hating tapas (Pupus to my Hawaiian friends. For those of you in the south, think hot wings for foreigners).  For the first couple of days, it’s really fun to have meals where they keep bringing a variety of small dishes to sample family style.  After a few days however, I want to punch the waiters in the face for their inability to bring me a substantial dinner that doesn’t look like it came off the kids’ menu.  It’s really a question of timing.

Frigging fish…- Tapas choices one evening included this poorly translated gem: “Frigged little fish in andalusian style”.  I wonder if they have a professional little fish frigger in back, or if they buy them already frigged.

So fancy it hurts- We had a round of tapas at a fancy joint that ran from 8:30 to midnight over 14 courses (hey Amit, this is the place we couldn’t get into last time).  Some of it was very good, but I kept getting distracted as my ass was falling asleep.  Their specialties included gold covered macadamian nuts and gold covered chocolates.  I find this to be a pretty poor practice.  Gold doesn’t taste like anything, and I worry that it won’t digest leading to an eventual “golden egg” on my end so to speak.

They also brought out some sort of goo delicately presented in an egg shell.  I unfortunately tried to eat some of the garnish which turned out just to be a pile of rock salt (I had been drinking).

Screw you, hippie!- Barcelona is a town of meat eaters.  Iberian ham is absolutely delicious.  It would be like prosciutto’s cooler older brother.  They serve it at every meal as best as I can tell.  They also have real butcher shops where you can tell that meat comes from animals the way god intended, rather than giving the misleading impression that it grows in Styrofoam trays wrapped in Saran wrap.

Spain has great wine- Spanish wines are excellent and relatively cheap.  That spells good times in my book.  Unfortunately, I don’t have any pics to show around the wines in Barcelona.  For some inexplicable reason, all of the photos I took while drinking wine came out crappy/blurry.  There must be something wrong with my camera.