My Barcelona Story 2

You cannot avoid the question, "How was the food?", when you have just come from a foreign country.

Unfortunately, I do not have much to say regarding the food in Barcelona.
For one, I brought my own food - my stash of instant noodles, bottled sardines. Not because I expected the food to be bad. I just expected it to be expensive. I ended up saving those Euros, but then you're shortchanged with the stories. :).

For another reason, my mostly Asian contingent was fiercely loyal to eating rice - and for all the other times that we had to eat in a restaurant - it was to be, without fail, a Chinese restaurant. And there was only one Chinese restaurant in the vicinity. So there we were, in Barcelona, eating Chinese.

Our room was also a recipient of left overs from restaurant meals by our other colleagues. Throughout the nine days that we were in Barcelona, we had more than enough food in our mini - ref. I actually ended up bringing food I brought back to the Philippines. That's a lot of food miles for those oatmeal packets. I still have not eaten them.

So I really couldn't say how the food was. We did try some. On our second day, we had our lunch in the hotel restaurant. It took around an hour (or maybe 2) before the food we ordered arrived. Lunch was also served at 1 PM, which was actually an hour early than their usual lunch hour of 2 PM. We started streaming into the restaurant at 12:00. We had to go back, of course, because there was no way lunch would be served at 12:00.


Two of my African colleagues ordered fish and rice, and chicken and rice. All of us agreed that they didn't look or tasted the 15 Euro each that they were worth. The one who ordered fish complained it was bland. The one who ordered chicken was so aghast at the "rice" part of his meal. It was probably a mound of just five tablespoons of rice.



I ordered paella (pork and seafood). I thought our paella tasted better. And my Asian and African colleagues kept on saying, "They don't know how to cook rice.", because  the rice in the paella was what we would normally consider half done.

On our second to the last day, we did get to eat in a Spanish restaurant. We were with an Italian colleague who did the ordering for us. We had steak on a sizzling plate, which did not seem to taste any different from the steaks that I did get to eat before. (Although I did not eat much because it was medium - rare). And then we had artichokes - which tasted pretty much like - the banana "heart" (What is "puso ng saging" in English?) Except you don't have to struggle with fibers when you eat "puso ng saging".

I did get to eat in a "semi - Spanish" household on the night before we were to leave Barcelona. I say "semi - Spanish" because it was an American husband with a Catalan wife who have lived in the UK (and probably other places in the world) with multi - lingual children. We were served vegetarian lasagna, pomegranate salad, and cake. I'd say it was the greatest way to culminate my food experience in Barcelona. It was the best food I ate throughout my stay.