Barcelona Travelogue: Day 4, Dec. 26

Day 4, Dec. 26: Boxing Day at the Aquarium
The day after Christmas is also a holiday in Spain, but the subways were running, and we walked along the water-front and took a cable-car ride over the harbor.

After dipping our toes in the Mediterranean for the first time, we toured the Barcelona aquarium – a nice enough facility, but the admission fee raised my expectations a bit higher than the displays could support.

I was feeling under the weather, so we hailed a taxi and retreated to the apartment for the afternoon. I rallied at dinner time (as is my way), and we took the kids on another forced march through an as yet unexplored neighborhood. The kids were especially mutinous, egging each other on to ever greater acts of insolence and whiny-ness. When we finally found a promising restaurant, we had to duck-walk Lee through the door and to our table.

But what a meal it turned out to be: we had stumbled on a neighborhood joint and although it was relatively empty when we went in, it filled up quickly and by 9:15pm (dinner hour in Barcelona) the atmosphere was raucous and festive. The menu was completely un-intelligible to us, but we managed to secure spaghetti for the kids, and a pitcher of sangria for Ceil and I (delicious!), and having covered the basics, we were free to risk some random selections off what seemed to be the appetizer menu. We wound up each four huge plates of food: two salads with wonderful and strange dressings, punctuated with hunks of raw fish; a platter of grilled vegetables, some of which we recognized; and a plate of tomatoes, peppers and a mild cheese topped with delicious anchovies and smothered in olive oil.