29 August 26
Two Barcelona Favorites
I found Barcelona overwhelming, which is probably related to the fact I haven’t lived in a place with more than 190,000 people for over 36 years, but we did visit some interesting spots. My two favorites were the Catalan bookstore and the orxateria.
We went to Ona Llibres the evening of Friday August 14th. This is probably the largest Catalan-only bookstore extant. Pica fearlessly conversed with the shopkeeper in the Catalan that she’s picked up and we came away with four publications shown at left from the store: a novel by Barcelona author Montserrat Roig, a Catalan textbook, a translation of Terry Pratchett’s Equal Rites into Catalan (there have been about a half-dozen Pratchett books translated into Catalan), and a 1:300,000 scale map of Catalunya.
The second place was the orxateria. An orxata is a sweet chilled beverage from Valencia and Catalunya that is etymologically related to the horchata from Mexico, but they are made from different bases. The latter is made from rice, cinnamon, and sugar, but the former is made from ground tiger nuts. Bottled orxatas are widely available across Catalunya but I wanted to try an orxata that was made from scratch. Prior to our trip, I had watched a video on the YouTube channel betevé that was entitled Orxateria Verdú, el secret de l’orxata artesana a Barcelona so I tracked the place down. The drink was well worth savoring..
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