Barcelona Restaurants...

Little plazas in Gracia

In the afternoon I received a text message inviting me to a book launch. I had no idea who the author was or what type of book it was. Having no plans for the evening, I accepted the invite and looked forward to attending. I met my mother and my brother at the Fontana metro stop - which is where we agreed to meet earlier. Fontana station is the metro stop in the Gracia area of Barcelona. Gracia is quite an elegant, old part of Barcelona, with a Bohemian feel to it. There is a maze of little side streets running off the main thoroughfare. Each of the side streets is very different from the other, and is home to its own unique collection of shops, bars restaurants and pubs. The sidewalks are teeming with people, making their way to pubs, bars or restaurants. The whole area comes alive at night. Various languages and accents from all corners of the globe permeate the air. The restaurants boast cuisine from all over the world. For an early dinner, we decided upon an Egyptian restaurant which even sells pizza! This restaurant advertised a "two for one" special on its pizzas so we were hooked. After being seated and looking at the menu, we discovered that there were conditions to these special offers. We had to order several entrees which were above certain prices before the "two for one" pizza special was applicable... Much time was wasted trying to navigate the terms and conditions to be able to get the second pizza!! Far too technical for my liking. After all that navigation, the entrees and the pizzas were excellent. After dinner we made our way - taking several wrong turns in the maze of side streets - to the bookshop. The bookshop is called Hibernian and. It is a bookshop which sells secondhand books in English. I am sure it is successful as there are many English speakers living in Barcelona. The smell of paperback books pervaded the air inside the shop. The atmosphere inside the shop was congenial - with groups of people engaged in friendly chatter. The book which was being launched was called "5". It is a collection of poems and short stories by five authors of different cultural backgrounds and different languages. The five co-authors are from different parts of the world. The book's poems and short stories are written in different languages. An interesting evening was spent chatting to the authors, in the balmy ambience of an English secondhand bookshop in the Spanish city of Barcelona.

Shops in side streets of Gracia

A passage in Gracia