The things we ate.

More from Barcelona. This time in the vein of Meals I Have Eaten, a blog whose proprietress I do not know, but of whose epicurean bent I wholeheartedly approve.

On our second night in Barcelona, we took the Metro down to the harbor area to partake of some seafood. Mom had a hankering for paella, and as we are New Englanders, we are pretty much always up for something funny-looking from out of the sea.

Mom and I shared some paella and Bridget ordered what was called "mixed seafood plate." This is what arrived:

A pile of mussels and cockles, a passle of razor clams, a brace of langoustines, a herd of shrimp, and a big, fuck-off sized squid. A bit more mixed seafood than Beez had bargained for. She's a game girl, though, and once she cleared the platter of already-empty shells, she tucked in and gave it the old college try. She managed to get about 3/4 through before the strength of the garlic broth overpowered her desire not to waste food.

I had a giant pile of paella:

It was pretty good. Entirely too much rice, and I object to the school of cooking seafood that dictates you simply steam the bejesus out of it, but when in Catalonia, you've gotta go for it. My mother alleges that I somehow charmed the waiter into giving me the lobster claw (thereby securing for myself the only bit of lobster that hadn't been practically powdered in the shell), but I claim innocence.

Not pictured is the lovely bottle of Sangre de Torro that went with the food that I was allowed to select. Overall, it was quite the fishy meal, so for dessert, I had to have chocolate mousse tart:

And Hayley got a lovely pineapple sorbet, presented in a pineapple skin:

And Bridget, upon consulting the dessert menu, which was written in Catalan and Spanish, selected something with a long and elaborate name. Then, the waiter brought her this:

Yup. That's right. A glass of orange juice. Delish.

And when our waiter saw me snapping pictures of the food, he volunteered to take a little family portrait at the table:

Things that we ate that I did not take pictures of: many slices of yummy bread slathered with tomato and olive oil, some of the best anchovies I've ever had, nice slices of ham, a pudding-thick cup of hot "xocolate" that Hayley had on our first day, properly made tortilla (the omlette, not the bread), and the many glasses of cava I consumed while taking in the ambience at the hotel bar (and by "ambience," I mean bad elevator music and cigarette smoke) while reading or chatting with the fam. We also took advantage of what the patisserias had to offer and sampled chocolates and pastries. And I drank quite a lot of cafe con leche in order to keep up with the Power Tourism schedule. Also, it seemed that every meal contained about a pound of salt, so we did a lot of overnight bloating and daytime water binges. Good times.