sangria

3 Comments Posted on by dapperdaveanddinkydi Family history, Food, Travel

If you can’t beat them, join them!

And so today we wandered La Ramblas with all the other tourists!

I loved the flowers – roses, orchids etc and herbs as well. We were surprised to see a couple of Australian native plants. Can you spot them?

Many people wander the streets trying to sell items to tourists but they don’t appear to have much success. You see a variety of people dressed as characters and posing for photos with the crowd, hoping for donations and these seem to be more successful. Standing still all day in the costume and war paint must be difficult.

There were two demonstrations in the street. One around the statue of Columbus appeared to be part of the feminist movement and the other was something to do with Russia. Not being able to read Spanish particularly well, we weren’t really sure.

Here we are doing the ultimate tourist activity – lunching in La Ramblas with a huge glass of sangria and watching the passing parade.

Our last full day in Europe! We’ve had a wonderful time and we feel very lucky to have been here. Will we return? If so, when will that be? Who knows? But we have loved being here.

Tomorrow we begin that long flight home.

Leave a comment Posted on by dapperdaveanddinkydi Cruising, Food, Travel

Our life on the Oceania Marina is over! So sad!

This morning we had to leave our beautiful Marina. We had a great cruise – loved every minute of it. I don’t think I’ve ever slept so well. The king size beds are the most comfortable beds I have ever slept on and I slept like a baby most nights. They have the most amazing pillows. You can actually buy the bed, mattress, pillows and bedding and have it delivered to your home anywhere in the world. I’d love to but there’d be no room for anything else in our bedroom so I have to give it a miss.

The food on Oceania is outstanding. I think their claim to have “The finest cuisine at sea” is justifiable. Red Ginger is still my favourite restaurant on board but all the food we had was delicious. David loved his breakfasts and for a man who has coffee and tomato on toast most mornings at home, he did very well.

Can you see his plate? Lamb chops, crispy bacon, eggs, tomato to be followed by two pieces of toast and marmalade and he’d already had a plate of berries and an orange juice! Incredible!

We enjoyed the evening entertainment and I think we went for twelve out of the fourteen nights. The entertainment crew put on six singing and dancing evenings and we thoroughly enjoyed them all. We had a British comedian on two nights and he was very funny. David laughed a lot. A very clever pianist entertained us,again for two nights. He could play anything. Last night we had the crew’s salute and the end of the show and we couldn’t believe how many chefs there were.

I was concerned about how long it would take for us to get off the ship, go through border patrol, get a taxi and get to our hotel. I needn’t have worried. It was a very efficient operation. (Not like it was in Copenhagen in 2016 where we were in the taxi queue for two hours. No exaggeration!) Our time to disembark was 9am and by 9:30 we were stowing our luggage at our hotel and heading off to La Boqueria, the famous Barcelona market. We are very familiar with it as it was where we bought our food to take back to our apartment when we were here in 2014.

It’s amazing eh? I forgot to take a photo of the fruit. There’s so much and it all looks so fresh. We will be returning to the market shortly to buy our food for dinner.

We have a lovely hotel room at Citadines Ramblas right on Las Ramblas, the Main Street of Barcelona. We have tea making facilities, a microwave and cutlery, crockery etc so we will be able to buy fresh food at the market and eat in if we wish.

The weather has turned against us today – it’s raining and only 15* but we are not complaining because every other day has been fine and sunny. We decided to visit El Cortes Ingles, the large department store to get out of the rain while we waited to check in. It sells everything you could possibly want. When we were here before, there was no plug in the apartment and we went to a few shops trying to find one. Eventually we went to this store and managed, through some mime, to find the right area of the shop and bought a plug. So we affectionately call El Cortes Ingres The Plug Shop. David was going to buy a plug again as a souvenir but instead he bought two shirts.

We found a pleasant cafe to have lunch – seafood paella and a glass of sangria. Very nice? And they had soy milk so I could have a very good cappuccino. Yes!

A. Great start to our short stay in Barcelona!