minimunchkin: Barcelona

I loved Barcelona the last time we were here. I'm not sure what is was about this city that stood out in my mind so vividly, maybe it was the beautifully quirky and colourful Gaudi creations, or perhaps the taste of my first tapas, or maybe it was the afternoon siestas but whatever it may have been, I was really looking forward to coming back again. We were extremely sad when we heard about the terrible incident a week before our arrival. At that stage, we were seriously considering not coming here at all, partly because we were uncertain of what it would be like in the city, what security measures would be in place, but also because we were in some way afraid for the safety of our kids. But we decided to go ahead as planned and we were really glad we did. When it was time to leave, I think Mia and Ryan were just as sad to leave as we were.

Kids' first taste of tapas...

They loved it!

We did a city tour the following morning. I'm sure we've seen many of the sights when we were here last time but we were on a student budget then and walking around with just the Lonely planet in our hands. Incredible how little we knew of what we were looking at doing it that way. Our tour guide this time was a Spanish history scholar so we got ourselves a fantastic history lesson on this tour.

Waiting for the tour to start. Not happy with the early morning wake up call!

Who needs a chair when you have Daddy's feet seat?

We saw many of these Catalan flags hung on balconies around the city, a show of support for the

More tapas for lunch

We stumbled across this place after our tour and decided to stop here for lunch after checking the TripAdvisor reviews. The reviews were right, food was tasty but thank goodness we did not order any of this jamon. Tiny roaches were feasting on it!!

Before we discovered the insect situation 🙂😱

We stayed in a very local neighbourhood in I'Eixample, about 10 minutes drive from the city centre. It was the perfect place for us, lots of tiny eateries, bakeries and supermarkets nearby but what the kids loved the most about it was the playground across the street!

That's our apartment block in the background, the yellow building.

Ryan was so happy that we finally found some space to kick his footy.

We had a fantastic tapas dinner one night at this small restaurant, La Flauta. The queue to get a table was so long that we almost left but somehow we got a table after waiting for around 10 minutes. Kids loved the food so much that they were already planning to come back here again tomorrow when we were half way through dinner!

Ryan voted these the best garlic prawns he's ever eaten (I'm writing this post several weeks later and we've eaten quite a few more garlic prawns and he still insists none of the others could beat this!)