Barcelona Day 2: A Few Gross Things

On the second day of our trip, (or first if you don't count time sleeping as a day), we decided to head to Las Ramblas and the accompanying area to explore. I'll have to admit that I was a little afraid after what had happened there a month prior but there were police vans blocking off the entrances to cars and plenty of officers all over the place which made me feel more secure. It's so sad that people can't go anywhere without feeling safe anymore. I really don't understand why we can't just call a worldwide truce and end all of this BS! Granted, I know it's not that simple but all of these terrible things need to stop happening.

Our first stop was to El Corté Ingles which is Barcelona's only department store. It was like a Nordstrom combined with a Sears combined with a pharmacy combined with a Williams-Sonoma combined with a supermarket. They had everything you could imagine. It was almost too overwhelming in that I had no idea what to buy and only ended up buying the one thing I forgot to pack: makeup remover wipes. How lame.

Next, we headed towards Las Ramblas. After looking at the flowers left for the victims at the opening of the street and mourning for the loss of lives, we mustered up our courage to look around. We headed towards La Boqueria to look around and saw everything from sheeps' heads to delicious juices. However, as it was almost lunchtime we decided to find somewhere to sit down and eat.

 

When we did our research to find good restaurants in advance, we didn't really think to check which neighborhoods they were in. Big mistake when you don't have 4G/LTE turned on. I heard that Plaça Reial was a cute, picturesque square with a ton of restaurants and that they were better than the restaurants right on Las Ramblas. We headed there but had no idea which restaurants were good and ended up being lured into Roma Reial. They were offering an appetizer, an entree, a dessert and sangria for only €13.50 per person. Big mistake. I ordered paella for my appetizer, which tasted okay....until I realized there was a mussel beard tossed in with the rice...so gross! The prawn was not de-veined either. I'm not sure if it's normal for places in Spain to not clean their seafood well but we didn't come across that issue anywhere else. The service was also extremely slow. Come to find out, the restaurant only had 2.5 stars on Trip Advisor. Lesson Learned: Research restaurants in the area we are headed before leaving the room.

 

After eating lunch, we headed back to the room and took another long nap. By dinner time, we were still pretty full and a little grossed out so we just wanted to grab something small. After spending a half hour browsing, we came across Las Muns which serves various Spanish inspired empanadas.

It wasn't the type of place I pictured myself eating at while in Spain but it was pretty good.