ieat19meals: Barcelona: good & gross

These photos are in reverse order and I'm too lazy to fix them. I went to Barcelona for 4 days last week. Lots of good food, and also some bad food. I learned to mostly only trust Rick Steves. And to always bring a list of restaurants so that you don't get roped into a gross one. And to warn other customers if they try to come into the gross restaurant you unfortunately got stuck in.

Paella!
The waiter tricked us into ordering 2 orders of it, which was awful because we had enormous appetizers. But it was still excellent. I pushed past the wall of pain as much as I could.

This is like a whole package of Despar lox. Nobody gets what that is probably, but it's like one of those things you can pretend everybody gets while secretly knowing nobody does so they maybe think it's something great and special but it's not.
ANYWAY, that came with bread. Eryn's came with avocados.

Melissa's mushroom crepes with duck bacon

Not totally sure what this is

There is this great great market called La Boqueria. It's super crowded and has lots of tourists, but who cares because it's greaet and has lots of food stands and raw meat and seafood and lots of food bars. The best one, apparently, is Pinxoto (I think that's how it's spelled), which is right when you get into the marekt.

This is fried lamb

Eryn and Melissa cut the empanada before I could take a picture

Chickpeas

Sausage

When I see people in Rome in those touristy trap restaurants by the Pantheon or where ever, I never understood why they would go there when they could just look in a guide book or look something good up online. BUT now I get it. Because sometimes the restaurant you picked only lets 140 people in a day and you can't get in and it's like 10 PM and you're really hungry and you don't know where else to go except for the busiest places with the touristy restaurants so you just pick one so you can finally EAT. And that's how this gross dinner happened.