{adventures abroad} spain: day two - la rambla to the port

apparently, we needed lots of slumber, because we slept till 11 a.m. on day two of our anniversary-moon (oops!).
once we got up and running, we walked down towards placa catalunya for a breakfast (brunch?) of coffee and pastries. i don't know a word of catalan, but my high school castillian spanish was coming back to me pretty easily by now.
we wandered down to la rambla, a completely different scene during the day than it is at night. all along the street, vendors sell souvenirs, flowers, and apartment-sized pets {birds, bunnies, ferrets, etc}.

a little farther down, we came to the mercat de sant josep de la boqueria, an open-air market with endless aisles of booths where you could buy just about any type of food you could ever imagine - we paid a euro for a cup of fresh blended fruit juice (strawberry and some other fruit we'd never heard of). it was delicious, of course.

we continued down the road, past our friend christopher columbus, to the port. we crossed the rambla del mar  to get to the maremagnum mall. lunch was fish and chips (and cava and cerveza) out on the boardwalk, where we could sit in the sun and watch the boats out in the harbor for a little while. after we did a little shopping in the mall, we went to the aquarium, because we can never resist an aquarium.

after leaving the aquarium, we indulged in a little chocolate waffle action and then headed back up the rambla towards placa catalunya. on the way, i stopped to take a drink from the fontana de canaletes - the legend says that if you drink from this fountain, you will fall in love with barcelona and will one day return {i think it worked...}.

after all of the day's adventures, we had zero energy. we stopped at a tapas place close to our hotel and ordered some yummies to go. we spent a quiet evening in the hotel room - a delicious tapas dinner in bed, accompanied by some delightful bbc programming - and then we drifted off to dreamland...