Day Five - Magic Fountain and Churros

Hi everyone! Me again! I'm still not posting from my own laptop - it seems to have gone missing in all the different overnight stays in the run up to the wedding! I am back home though, so writing this from Liam's laptop instead. Our journey back to England went smoothly, and both children were very happy to see us. Poor baby is absolutely covered in painful-looking chicken pox spots though :(

They are both in bed now though, so I am going to re-live our last full day in Barcelona. I'll write about today once I get a chance to upload the photos to my own laptop, but there's not much to write about anyway.

As I mentioned earlier, I actually managed to sleep past 9am yesterday! My body obviously needed the extra sleep to start repairing my burnt skin. I woke up starving so it wasn't long before we headed to breakfast! I didn't bother eating anything savoury (in fact, rather disappointingly, I soon lost my appetite and started feeling queasy again...stupid stupid stupid) so started with cake - a slice of black forest gateau and two mini apple custard muffins...

This was the only plate I managed to eat, and I didn't drink my coffee - it just tasted of dirty water to me yesterday morning. Odd. I did however drink lots of orange juice, dehydrated much?!

As we were both pretty burnt from Thursday's trip to the beach, we decided to spend yesterday morning in the shade by the hotel's rooftop pool. The pool is pretty small, and only waist height at it's deepest. It was also really cold - not ideal for a summer holiday, but perfect to soothe our poor skin! Liam was a wimp and stayed on the steps up to knee-height, but I spent about an hour fully submerged under the water, bliss until my teeth-chattering and shivering forced me out of the water!!

We then headed to Las Ramblas for lunch and shopping. First up lunch, obviously. We'd actually only planned to eat churros con chocolate - I'd had that on a school trip years ago and lovingly remembered the fresh doughnuts dipped into thick hot chocolate. Unfortunately, with the exception of one local cafe we came across that had stopped serving churros by mid-afternoon, the only place we found selling churros was a Spanish fast food chain - La Poma. By the time I got there, I actually fancied more savoury food than just churros anyway, so we ate lunch first. I had a delicious salad with lots of different leaves, mango, goat's cheese and a mango-honey dressing...

This was so good! I'd got to that stage in the holiday that I was starting to crave veggies (whilst obviously still eating cake for breakfast!!) so this lunch was perfect :)

We followed lunch up with the planned churros con chocolate...

This was a bit disappointing. The churros were chewy rather than doughy, and the hot chocolate was in no way thick enough...the downside of not being on a school trip with teachers to show you the best local cafes!!

We then did a bit of shopping, to pick up gifts for the children and my parents. Although we were struggling to walk too far because of our sunburn (say it with me...stupid, stupid, stupid) so after we'd picked up a gift or two for everyone we headed back to the hotel, and supplemented the gifts with sweet treats from the airport duty-free! Not as authentic, but we got some nice turron for my parents, and daughter was delighted with the huge tube of sweets! (more so than the t-shirt or wooden jewellery we bought in actual shops!)

On the way back to the hotel we picked up these amazing cupcakes I had spotted earlier in the week...

I think these may have been the best cupcakes I have ever tasted!! (even better than our fantastic wedding cupcakes that I will post about once I get my professional photographs back!) Liam's was oreo-cookie flavour, and mine was lemon-cinnamon.

The cake itself was delicious, but the winning aspect was the icing - soft, liquidy, sweet, but with a delicate crust on the edges which helped the icing keep its form. Ah-mazing! A fabulous way to honour the sweet-treat tradition on our last day!! :)

We then slept for a good few hours before getting ready for the last evening of our honeymoon! We wanted to go to the Magic Fountain of Montjuic so asked the hotel for a restaurant recommendation nearby. They recommended a place called La Clara and booked a table for us. I did look it up, but I was in a bit of a rush and on the surface it looked like it had a wide variety. How wrong was I?! I don't think I managed to find a single vegetarian option on the menu - even the gazpacho soup had ham in it! Of course, I could have asked if there were any vegetarian possibilities, but unlike on Tuesday, I was less tired, less tearful etc, generally in a better frame of mind. That may not (and indeed, probably should not) go hand in hand with deciding to eat fish, but as it was the last night of our honeymoon, and I had told myself I "could" eat fish if I wanted to, I decided to make peace with it just once. Plus it meant that Liam got to eat a steak which apparently is his idea of an ideal meal!! (bleugh, I've never eaten steak in my life - the thought of eating bloody meat is too gross, but apparently there's no point eating steak well done!!) Anyway, ramble over, at least last night there were plenty of fish options to choose from so I wasn't stuck with a fish full of bones! I opted for grilled monkfish tail, served with steamed vegetables and one potato...

Yep, you read/saw right, ONE little boiled potato!! I found it so odd, this huge lump of fish and then a tiny amount of veggies. Liam's steak came with no fresh vegetables at all - it would have come with wine sauce and onion confit, but the waitress swapped the onion confit for chips for him. This was tasty though, and the good think about monkfish is it only has one large central bone so I didn't have the same problems as on Tuesday. I can't see myself eating fish anytime again soon though.

After dinner, we headed on to the Magic Fountain. After reading Annie's comment on my first Barcelona post about her unlucky experience...

...you can imagine my dismay when I saw a Harley Davidson show at the entrance to the fountains!! Luckily we decided to continue through the show, and found that the fountains were still open.

Random photo to show off the fact I was wearing a dress!!

We didn't have dessert at dinner, as we'd been planning to eat ice cream later on, however we didn't see any ice cream stands...I can't believe we went the whole holiday without a single ice cream!! The Harley Davidson show did mean lots of cake stands were around though, and I couldn't resist a chocolate covered, custard filled churros...

this more than made up for any earlier churros disappointment, yum!! Tummy happy, we continued on past the rest of the motorbike themed stalls, to the fountains we'd been looking forward to.

Lots of photos taken, the fountains were so spectacular!

Before I show more photos of the main event, let's look at the surroundings. There were so many other fountains aside from the main one!

Little fountains as you walked towards the main one (where the bike show was situated)...

More little fountains on the slope higher up from the main fountain...

(we got to ride up this slope on an escalator - there were loads of them about that you could take instead of the steps, same at Parc Guell!!)

... leading up to an art museum with yet more fountains...

We went all the way up to the top by the museum, there was a great view over the city from up there!

Ok, back to the main fountain. We took so many great photos that I'm finding it hard to choose! I've looked through them all and written down the numbers of my (many) favourites, so this will be a bit of a photo spill, in the order in which they were taken! Imagine the fountain set to dramatic music while you look at these photos - there were 'shows' every half hour from 9.30pm on weekend evenings, but the shows seemed to last almost half an hour so the dramatic lights and music were pretty constant. I'm going to try to upload a (poor quality) video I took on my iPhone to set the atmosphere alongside the better quality photos...let me know if it works! If not you'll just have to imagine the music and atmosphere I'm afraid!

The video...

And the many photos...

It was such an amazing sight! I hope you've enjoyed looking at these photos as much as I've enjoyed re-living them! :)

I'm going to end this post here as I'm no longer able to think coherently - so tired! The trip to the fountains was pretty much the end of our honeymoon anyway - we got a metro back to the hotel, and this morning we had breakfast (I'll post photos once I find my own laptop) and then checked out of the hotel before heading to the airport. And now we are back in the UK, ready to carry on with married, and family, life...and deal with an 18 month old with very bad-looking chicken pox!!