This morning we were woken up by the circus coming to town.  They weren’t outside but up stairs. We’ve heard the thundering of a herd of baby elephants above us all the time we have been in the apartment today. As Nikki  said “how did they all fit in the lift?”   This is a perfectly valid point as the 5 of us can’t fit in in one go. (Well we can but the alarm goes off).  We have a lift rota now.  4 in, 1 goes up the stairs. The person on the stairs usually reaches the top first. Anyway, back to the baby elephants. We think it’s just a small child, but the noise it is making it sounds like a heavy child. Mind you the amount of times it is running up and down the apartment it will soon have the physique of Mo Farah.  Just a shame they start training at 7:00 am.

Today we headed out to “The Spanish Village”. This is an open air museum in the area of Barcelona where they had the exposition in 1929.  Some crazy architects visited 1,600 villages in Spain to look at their architecture and then created a village made up of all the styles as an exhibition. So this village has all these contrasting styles from all over the country and different centuries, all in one place.  It’s a bit like Birmingham really.

It’s now home to craftsmen and women and there are jewellery makers, glass sculptors, jewellery makers, ceramic makers and did I mention the jewellery makers?  We stopped off for some churros. These are like long doughnuts which you dip in chocolate. Often you buy them from stalls in the street or at fairs, but this was a proper cafe, and proper slow. I’m not sure if he was just making sure that we didn’t burn our mouths by giving the churros time to cool down and chocolate to congeal, but it was a leisurely service, especially considering we were the only people in the restaurant. This couldn’t be said for the place in which we had lunch.

We were heading back to the apartment and we remembered that there was a restaurant on the recommended list which perky girl had given us (just a shame we no longer had the list). Luckily I had a note of it on my phone.  It was called L’Olive (or something like that). It was on the same street as the metro and Nik and Karen were walking ahead looking for it. I was at the back making sure we didn’t lose the parents.  I could see the restaurant on the left (well I could see the L’O.  A few letters on the sign were missing.  That wasn’t a good omen but it was recommended. The guide said it got busy at lunch time and that it did a very good set menu for 12 Euro). We went in.  It was chokka.  We were quickly sat by a rather hassled looking waitress who seemed to be running the whole restaurant herself.  She thrust 4 Spanish menus and one English menu under our noses.  Shame she gave the English one to Nik and the Spanish ones to us. It was a set menu, but had gone up to 14 Euros.  It wasn’t going to break the bank so we stuck with it.
Sometimes the excitement of eating abroad is having no idea what you are going to get.  I ordered what was described as chorizo, egg and potatoes.  Now I know I like that.  Scrambled eggs with chopped up chorizo and potatoes is one of my favourite meals.  What I received was sausage, fried egg and chips.  Still it was tasty. And quick. Food was thrown on our table and empty plates cleared with a certain gusto that gave you the impression that the waitress wanted rid of us.  Perhaps she had a date later.  We left after having a hearty, if not exceptional meal. We crossed over the road to pick up some stuff from a little supermarket and it was only when we came out we realised that the restaurant we actually wanted was next door to where we had eaten.  Oh well. One out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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