Trade

Sounds dreadful but not at all – wholemeal  croissants topped with sesame seeds from the master baker round the corner. What was dreadful was getting a text to say the Aegean storm is still raging and my sister can’t start her journey.
 
We walked. Past the Sunday-morning football-card traders with their shiny albums laid out on their moped seats and their lists of rarities, past the street cleaners and those out to sun themselves among the parked cars, round St Antoni’s large second-hand book market, by building-scale street art and past more displays of astonishing bread-baking to La Rambla. Where, despite all warnings, we were not pick-pocketed.
 
Like a million and one other tourists we are here partly for the architecture so this evening we went to the insane Palau de la Música, decorated outside with art nouveau mosaics, exuberant ceramic flowers (which made me think the moat poppies were very restrained) and what look like electricity pylon insulators. Like good tourists we went in, not only for the stained glass ceiling, the elaborate tree and horses around the stage and the sculptures of musicians made half from stone and half from flat mosaic, but also for a performance. Of flamenco dancing. I was apprehensive but its fascinatingly varied display smashed the stereotypes. Very little red flouncery but masses of quite astonishing footwork. ‘Beatboxing with the feet,’ I whispered to daughter and she whispered back that she’d been about to say the same to me.