Exploring Barcelona: Shopping in Catalan Spain with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Exploring Barcelona:  Shopping in Catalan Spain with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Walking along the Ramblas in Barcelona, I passed the Gran Teatre de Licieu where the Catalan opera called Zarzuela is performed. 

Attending the opera was expensive for us even the kiddy matinées, but fortunately they did have children’s cultural programming on television in Europe, so Florence could see musical programs like Peter and the Wolf, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and the Nutrcracker on television.

A little further down from Rambla Sant Josep, I heard meows, cackling birds, cooings, and gurgles of aquariums along the Rambla del Estudios as vendors to buy a pet.

Along this Rambla, I found a neat bookstore and a cheap one at that; it was the Catalan regional government’s bookstore.  I bought a book about Catalan wine and food in Castellano, which everyone outside of Spain refers to as Spanish.

Opposite the bookstore is the Catalan Cathedral of good food, the Boquería Market.  The place was so crowded that I could hardly squeeze Florence through in her stroller.

I knew I was a nuisance from all the vendors calling me, “mamasita.”  That innuendo is called a “piropo” in Spain.

I wanted to rent an apartment near the Boquería, so I could try my hand with the local ingredients.  After awhile, it became impossible to maneuver Florence through the crowd, so I reluctantly left the market.

The place I visited next was the Plaça Catalunya.  The stores there were nicer in this area.  Supposedly, there were Roman tombs there, but all I could see was traffic.

It started raining, so I decided to do some shopping at El Corte Ingles, the big department store in town.

There were no doors leading into the store.  There was just a large opening with sawdust on the floor and security guards posted on either side of the opening. 

When the Spanish people congregate in public they tend to speak loudly and the department store is no exception

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting the Spanish Enclave of Lluvia inside the French Pyrenees with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting the Spanish Enclave of Lluvia inside the French Pyrenees with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

After our siesta and lunch, we visited a Spanish enclave in France called Lluvia.  Various wars and treaties left bits and pieces of Spain in France like Lluvia.

I noticed that people in the Cerdagne region of France called themselves Catalan and not French or Spanish.  The shop owners in Lluvia spoke French, Spanish, and English.  They had no problem serving my mother-in-law in French.

I wanted to be trilingual like these people one day and could see that you could make money as a salesman, who could speak several languages selling quality products that were not as expensive as cars.

We returned home and ate another dinner of trout with sliced almonds.  The fatigue of walking in the heat for 6 weeks with no air conditioning in blazing hot countries was catching up with me.  The US has a lot of air conditioning.  (Even at this time, I thought you could park under solar panels that would pay for air conditioning.)

We ate another dinner of trout with sliced almonds.  The fatigue of the last few weeks was catching up with me.  I drank some slightly, sweet wine to go with the trout and almonds and went to bed happy.

The rest and my strong legs served me well on our mountain hike the following day.  We had a picnic lunch by the Val du Galbe.  We sat in the shade by a small stream and looked at the mountains.

We ate ham and butter sandwiches with apples.  I thought some good old American southern fried chicken would have been a nice meal after this hike.

From the Val du Galbe, we drove to Formiguères to visit a church built in the 5^th century AD in the “Roman-Byzantine” style. 

This Roman-Byzantine style at this church described a square church rather than a rectangular one.  Greek churches are usually square with a dome on top.  I also noticed that the priests in the sculptures held mass with their backs to the congregation.  The tour guide spoke French like a Spaniard, so I could understand what he was saying.

After our tour, we ate an omelet with fried potatoes.  I was making an inventory of simple French meals to put together in half an hour during our vacation.

We hiked up another mountain peak on our honeymoon vacation to the Vally d’Eyne.  I liked ham and butter sandwiches on half a baguette, so I knew I had a reward for my hike coming.

We found some trees and took naps in the shade after our hike and listened to a mountain stream tinkling nearby.

After our siesta in the sun, we went to the Spanish border town of Puigcerda.  Laurent and I wanted to visit Barcelona and needed a train schedule.  My father-in-law pointed out the buildings in town that had been damaged during the Spanish Civil War when we drove into town.

I was surprised that the buildings still stood without being repaired.  They made me feel incredibly close to George Orwell’s book Homage to Catalonia, which I read in college.

Laurent’s parents go to mass on Saturdays, so we headed out to Font Romeu for mass.  The Catalans sing whenever they can.  All the mass responses were sung instead of spoken.  Two nuns played the guitar.  My “mass French” had improved, so I could follow what was happening.

We ate grilled lamb outside that night.  My brother-in-law put up a screen and showed slides of “the royal wedding” in Joué-les-Tours, various photos of Versailles where my brother-in-law was in perfume school, and glimpses of a trip Laurent and I took to Lyons (France) to visit his aunt and uncle.

When we looked at the slides of Versailles, I said, “I’ll tell my American friends that my in-laws live there,” I said.  We sat around giggling eating popcorn with sugar on it like the French serve it.

A few days later, we celebrated the name days of one of Laurent’s family friends on August 15^th – the Assumption of the Virgin.  In Catholic countries, you have a party on the day that honors the saint you are named after with a nice lunch for your friends and family.

We went to a Catalan restaurant in a hotel for the celebration.  We ate cantaloupe with air-dried mountain ham called Serrano as a starter.

To this day, I still love the melt-in-your-mouth creamy white, fat on Serrano ham.  We ate roast lamb with small, green kidney-shaped beans called flageolets.

For dessert, we ate crema catalana with a caramelized crust on top and a slice of orange in the bottom.  This dessert is a tropical crème brulée.

I liked this simple Catalan meal from the mountain regions of Cerdanya and Rosillón as they were written in the Catalan language.  These meals reminded me of reading and marveling at the restaurant reviews of Jay Jacobs as a kid in Gourmet magazine, which read like Margaret Mead’s anthropology books.

After lunch, we went to Saillagouse to see Catalan dances.  Little boys dressed in black hoisted themselves to the top of human pyramids while girls clad in red danced around them.

I thought activities like this happened only for tourists, but I could see parents and grandparents taking pictures of grandchildren, too.  I was the only tourist in town and was having fun.

I asked to participate in the candlelight procession for Saint Mary at Font Romeu.  There is a man-made hill there that is constructed to look like a Calvary with crosses on it.

The procession started there and meandered through the countryside to the church.  The candles the church gave us fit inside holders that gave out enough light, so we could sing the words of Ave Maria in Latin.

The Latin words filled the air.  We all crammed into the church to hear the homily at the end of our procession.  Despite the words, I felt as if I had participated in a pre-Christian rite.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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