Torben had morning and lunch meetings at the university, so we were deprived of his company until later in the day. It was our last night in town, but we weren't sure we would see him again. I had taken to finding breakfast closer to home, and this morning I walked straight into the Raval and found a reasonable-looking bakery a block or two in -- which is to say, the croissants and bread were no worse than anywhere else. Given more time in town, I would have sought out artisanal bakeries, but it is possible that there just weren't any.
After breakfast, we walked up Passeig de Gracia as far as Diagonal, turned right, and quickly found the Museu de la Musica, in a Modernista mansion designed by Puig i Cadafalch. The building was stunning, but the museum was not as high-tech as the one in Paris, in which we donned infrared headsets to listen to the instruments we were looking at. We took the elevator to the top floor and worked our way down; each floor had three or four relatively small rooms (this was clearly once residential space) with instruments displayed in cabinets. There were a couple of parties of noisy schoolchildren, a museum guide carting around a sound apparatus intended to give them something more than static visuals, and a few stations at which questions were to be asked about instruments by a teacher. At one of these stations, there was a violin, but the bridge had been knocked out and the strings loosened. I quickly fixed it, but as I replaced it one of the guides saw me and the kids, and asked us not to touch. I attempted to establish our bonafides by running the kids through a quick quiz on the parts of the violin, but she appeared unconvinced.
We had to keep out of the way of the school parties, but our kids had a good time identifying instruments and marvelling at the variations and historical development of the instruments. Still, it wasn't long before we were back on the ground floor. We had a few places left on our Articket, and while they weren't essential, we thought we might as well look at them.
We had seen the Tapies Foundation from the outside before, with the huge distinctive tubular steel sculpture on the roof. The inside was surprisingly pleasant: while we quickly got the idea of his style, there was enough variety to keep all of us looking. We spent some time in the theatre watching a BBC documentary on Tapies. Moving on, we went to the CCCB (Centre de Cultura Contemporania Barcelona), a huge exhibition space just to the north of MACBA. We had a choice of exhibitions, and chose one that purported to describe the founding myths of cities. There was quite a lot of wall text, but it was in Catala and Spanish so we could ignore it, and concentrate on the displays of antiquities from Greece, Rome, the Middle East, and their Mediterranean colonies. Unfortunately, the displays were in small cases masked and set back from the wall, so we had to lift each child up to see each item. I suppose it was some exercise to work off all the food and wine we'd been having.
We rectified the deficit at least partially by having lunch at Silenus, a cool space just south of the museum clearly aimed at art types. The menu was inventive: amanida d'estiu (summer salad) turned out to be boiled sliced potatoes layered in an architectural style with bits of tomato, red pepper, olives, and cucumber. N had a great cold melon soup, and I had pastis de something (the handwritten menu was hard to read) con oratxe something, which turned out to be a light orange-coloured egg terrine. For mains the kids had arros alt empordana, a rice dish with mushrooms, and N and I had peix fresc amb salsa de piquillos -- unfortunately, the fresh fish was rather bony. A good deal, but we probably would have preferred something more substantial.
For dessert, we walked through the Raval to Horchateria Sirvent again. This time, we all tried their homemade ice creams, and got a litre of orxata to go (it came in a cute plastic bottle emblazoned with the logo of the shop). Back to the hotel: N packed and I assisted, and we nibbled some more on the contents of the fridge. We had a call from Dimitrios, who agreed to meet us at 6:30 with Maria and his sister in tow, and mentioned that he had seen Torben at the university. Torben himself checked in a short while later and added himself to the plans. Arju and I went out and walked through the massive underground space below Placa Catalunya looking for the right entrance and route to take in order to get to the airport the following morning. It was a good thing we did so, as we found out that the train system I had though we could take was the wrong one, and the entrance we had to use was at the northeast corner of the Placa, past at least two other entrances that looked more promising.
We took the kids for a last trip through La Boqueria, since they had spent hardly any time there. Then back to the hotel and a short wait until the others started arriving. We all strolled quite leisurely through the medieval backstreets to the west and south of the Catedral, emerging at last onto the narrow Carrer Merce, which used to be the street one in from the waterfront, and was famous for its tapas bars. Our destination was Bar Celta La Pulperia, a Galician bar specializing in octopus. It was early, and as expected the bar was almost empty. There was a long line of stools down a bar topped with large containers of seafood of various types, and a small seating area in back, where we headed. Torben looked dubious, but faced with three additional adults (including Maria, who was already raving about the place and inquiring how I knew so much -- I had, alas, to give credit to the guidebooks) he went along with things, and had no complaints later. We ordered a number of dishes -- the ones I remember are pulpo a la gallega, of course, pescadito, bunuelos de bacalao, patatas bravas, but there were many others -- and a bottle of white Ribiero wine, which came with a number of traditional shallow white porcelain cups out of which we drank. The total bill came to about 9400 ptas, which neatly used up most of my remaining Spanish currency, leaving enough for train tickets and emergencies in the few hours remaining.
We strolled back to the hotel, again through backstreets, stopping to let the kids use up their film (and to allow Maria and Dimitrios's sister to take pictures of the kids) where we relaxed in the room. I was going to pack up all the remaining supplies for Dimitrios and Maria, but people got hungry again, so we dove into them: I made pa amb tomaquet, marvelling as I did so why this Catalan invention had not become a standard appetizer all over the world, and we polished off the last of the wine and sherry with bits of meat, cheese, and fish. It was, to my mind, the quintessential European experience: eating, drinking, and laughing with a cosmopolitan group of people, with almost as many cultures represented as individuals present.
So I will stop here, because the journey home the next day went off without a hitch, except that our luggage did not arrive in Toronto, our car in the long-term parking lot had two flat tires, and the tow-truck driver informed us that the highway home was closed due to a diesel fuel spill. Forget that. Go back to the image of friends gathered in a cozy living room, toasting a marvellous Mediterranean city.