$tay ¢old

Well, not actually Day 1, it’s Day 2, but yesterday was made up of flights from New York to Madrid to Barcelona, no sleep (reminder: must take sleepy drugs next time), having to kill two hours before the hotel room was ready, passing out for four hours, dinner, and going back to bed.

So, here I am in Barcelona for the first time, hanging out for a few days before heading to the UK for a wedding. It’s my first year in quite some time where I’m not in Austin at SXSW and I really don’t feel like I’m missing anything compared to this amazing city.

Today started with a walk up La Rambla, the famous boulevard that’s home to a host of “living statue” street performers, flower and bird vendors and the incredible Mercat de la Boqueria. It’s a place I’ll return to every day that I’m here, as I wish that we had such an incredible space in New York. Fishmongers scale, clean and fillet each customer’s choices with surgical precision, while meat and poultry vendors fill rows upon rows of stalls with literally every single piece of the animals that they butcher. Far from upsetting or gross, it makes me feel sad that supermarkets have shielded us from really knowing or being able to visualize where our food comes from. Rather than neatly packaged on styrofoam trays and sealed with cellophane, these fresh cuts are often only a few steps removed from the live animal. Pigskin cut from the head lays in cases, snout intact, slits where the eyes were, as if it were a sort of mask. Poultry is plucked but otherwise left whole, the legs tucked under and the head curved into the breast, as though the bird were simply sleeping naked. The fruit is stunning, egg vendors stock everything from an astonishing variety of everyday brown and white chicken eggs to enormous teal emu eggs. I can’t get enough of this place, feeling like I’d really make an effort to be an adventurous home chef and eater if I had these kinds of ingredients at hand.

Pics after the jump, and another update coming soon…