Monday, April 18, 2022
We’ve never been greeted by anyone with a sign at an airport before, so we were tickled to find this upon our arrival.
When we left, they were still waiting for:
Since it was only 6:45 a.m. when we arrived at the InterContinental Barcelona:
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our room wasn’t ready, so we walked around the area for a while before sitting in the lobby later waiting to be able to check in and trying not to fall asleep.
Once in our room, we napped for a couple of hours, and then we met the people in our Seth’s Big Fat Broadway Vacation group in a reception at the hotel bar, where we reconnected with Dan who was also on the 2019 Seth cruise, we met a couple of new people we liked, and we identified a couple of people we already know we want to avoid during this trip.
One totally obnoxious guy was at the bar requesting some drink that the bartenders ended up having to get some books out and scour the internet to figure out how to make. He also stuck his head behind the bar to look at the booze on the shelves from that angle. It literally took them 10 minutes to makes this guy’s drink. He definitely put the “dick” in “being a dick.” Avoid at all costs.
Even way before this trip, Bob and I have always joked when we eat late: “What are we in, Barcelona???”—particularly when it’s approaching 8 p.m. So, it was particularly funny to us when, at around 6:30 p.m., we asked the concierge to direct us to a nearby restaurant that we had chosen for dinner, and he said, “It’s just down the street and around the corner, but it doesn’t open for dinner until 8 o’clock.”
Then he added, pointing to a place right by the hotel, “That place has tapas and cocktails, and the food is very good there. You can go there while you wait for dinner.” It was your classic, hole-in-the-wall-looking place that we probably wouldn’t have looked twice at had it not been recommended—and the food was very good.
We ended up making that our dinner, because to be honest, we still weren’t very hungry after eating our way up the east coast and across the Atlantic and then having both dinner and breakfast on the plane.
The place was called Taps and this is a portion of the English version of their menu:
Bob had some red wine, and I ordered bourbon and soda, which turned out to be scotch (yuck!) and soda, but I drank it anyway. Our dinner:
Bread
Patatas Bravas tapa
Small sausages tapa
That sauce on it looks a little nasty in this picture, but it was so good!Mushrooms tapa
We walked around a bit after leaving there, looking for a bakery-type place, plenty of which we’d seen during our morning walk, but didn’t find anything that struck us, so we just headed back to the hotel and in for the evening.
Food!
Nom nom nom!