Before leaving to the airport, we went to our arepa place again, where Scott had an arepa and I had the best cachapa on the continent - a sweet Venezuelan corn pancake with cheese. So good!
The flight itself was uneventful and we were back home by evening.
The day started with some wine while watching the sunrise and continued with going to the cafe for cakes and pastries. I had decided that today would be a good day to introduce Scott to all of the Spain, and we went to Poble Espanol, where architecture from all over Spain is represented. Wasn't very impressive. The best part was probably the photo with Olaf.
On the way back, I was starving and we went to the restaurant opposite the hotel, where we had wanted to eat breakfast for several days now. Breakfast proved to be challenging there, because they only opened their joint at noon… In any case, we got the world's best fried plantains and a super megagood burger.
For the dinner, we had a table booked at an Argentinian restaurant - we ate a lot of very good meat :)
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We had morning coffee at the hotel and walked around in the city after that. Headed to La Paradeta for lunch. It is known to be one of my favourite places in Barcelona and I was already very excited about it. We got the second place in the queue, and by the time the restaurant was opened, there were a good 10-15 people behind us.
We ordered deep fried baby octopus (super good), boiled octopus (well, we actually expected grilled or fried…), grilled tuna (melted in mouth), navajos and wine. It was so good. So. Good.
We walked around the old town some more, drank hot chocolate and shopped for some hand painted ceramics.
Later in the evening, we tried again to get churro hot dogs, but it turned out that they are not available at 19:00, tourists should please come back at 22:00. The tourists then walked to a nearby Mexican restaurant and ate tacos.
We had a nice brunch planned to start the long weekend. A quick google led us to La Cremati, a recently opened but very popular eatery. We ordered ours eggs and bacon and pancakes and added the Estonian flag to celebrate the day.
I've probably mentioned it a couple of times, but Parc Güell, one of Gaudi's masterpieces, has never really impressed me. I've been there a few times, each time hoping that maybe this time I'll get the phenomenon, but so far nothing. Nada. Scott, however, expressed his desire to go. When I first visited Barcelona 15 years ago, the entrance to the park was free. A couple of years later, they added a 3-euro fee to access this mosaic platform, and in 2022, entrance fee for the park was 10 euros per visitor.
Pictures of Parc Güell available on the internet are always colorful and full of mosaics. But what a first-time visitor like Scott doesn't know is that the mosaic is only a marginal part of the entire park, and everything else is just a park with a fairly common visual. Like every other time, the park did not impress us today either and we started to look for a way out. The exit was through a pillared platform, which they had taped it off to adjust the number of visitors on the platform at the same time. So we had no other option to leave but to wait in line for 15 minutes to get out.
We walked back through Gracia, which, unlike the aforementioned park, is one of my favourite areas in Barcelona. We saw a family beer joint and had tapas for lunch on the Placa del Sol. Lunch included my favourites, cod salad and crema catalana.
In the evening we went to the beach, watched the sand sculptures and the sunset.
