Barcelona: Spanish Farewell Pinchos

No, we are not leaving Spain yet. We still have a number of Spanish ports to call on before we begin the crossing to the USA. But this segment of our 26-day cruise has the fancy name of “Spanish Farewell.” So, we thought we’d celebrate it with pinchos.

It was the glimpse of Sagrada Famiglia, the famous Gaudi church — under construction since 1882 — that reminded that we had to get a move on. No, we weren’t planning to visit the church. But we had a 4-mile walk back to the port bus stop and our route would be taking us by Sagrada.

Mui had in mind that we’d have tapas somewhere along our walking route. But after checking out a few places, we decided to go to an old favorite — La Tasqueta de Blai. We’d already walked a couple of miles when we made this decision. Instead of continuing on foot, we grabbed a taxi just so we wouldn’t have to rush through a pitcher of sangria to wash down the goodies we were bound to find there.

La Tasqueta is not a tapas place so much as it is a “pincho bar.” The food comes in individual-bites that you select from the display. You then take your dish to a table — in our case, to one on the pavement outside. Each pincho has a pin that you remove and place in a cup. The pins denote the price of each item and the server uses them to calculate the bill. We got a selection of pinchos, an order of patatas bravas, and a pitcher of sangria to wash it all down. Delicious.

After our meal, we went next door to a gelateria for a sweet treat to enjoy on the walk to the port bus stop. Our plan had been to be on a bus back to the ship around 3:00p. We were a little early at 2:30p, but that bought us some time to take care of business relating to our Australia Panorama cruise before we sailed away from Barcelona and lost our data signal.

Perfect timing as we were done with our work just as Oosterdam moved out of its berth to head to our next Spanish port of call.Read more