After departing Brasserie Flo after being completely ignored (see review in post preceding this one), we headed to Barkeno Cocina Mediterranea, a restaurant we had previously walked past on the way to our hotel, and one the front desk at our hotel had recommended as well.

What a difference Barkeno was from Flo. The service was very good - the only mild negative was that I had to pour my own wine and water most of the time, but that truly is mild considering how great our waiter was in all other respects.

We had an excellent meal, starting with appetizers including mussels in cream and wine sauce, tuna tartar with avocado, and whole fried small fish and baby squid. We were also treated to home-made chips (potato, sweet potato, and eggplant) and nicely marinated olives. We also had an order of Catalan Bread - lightly toasted bread onto which olive oil and tomato has been rubbed. Catalan Bread is a staple in most of the restaurants we’ve been in here, and quite fresh and tasty when done right.

For our main courses we enjoyed monkfish medallions, grilled pork with mashed sweet potatoes, and duck margrate, all of which were also excellent.

We accompanied our meal with a bottle of 2006 Ermita D’Espiells from Juve y Camps, made from a blend of Macabeu, Xarello and Parellada grapes - a wonderful recommendation from our waiter, and reasonably priced as well.

Our “postres” (the local word for desserts) featured a trio of chocolate textures, Parmesan ice cream (sounds odd, but was quite tasty), a cheese cake, and strawberries in muscat. Again, all very nicely plated and very tasty. We were also given small (thimble-sized) cups of white chocolate filled with dark chocolate mousse and hazelnuts (filberts) as a small treat to end our meal. I also discovered that Grand Marnier comes in a yellow label (versus the usual red), indicating a lemon flavor instead of Grand Marnier’s usual orange base, although my personal preference still runs to Grand Marnier Cuvée du Centenaire or Cuvée Speciale Cent Cinquantenaire when opportunity arises.

Our meal for the four of us was about 175 Euros, plus I gave our waiter a 20 Euro tip for the service he provided. Expensive, but definitely the best meal we’ve had in Barcelona so far.

I give Barkeno an 8.5 out 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

After lunch yesterday we parted ways with Martin and his father Arend, followed it with Gelato at a local gelataria, and went for our afternoon Aquarium excursion after some shopping. We tried to drag things out so we could make it to dinner at 8:30pm instead of facing restaurants closed for dinner prior to that time, but despite our best efforts, we found ourselves tired and hungry, strolling back towards our hotel around 8pm.

Along the way we encountered, on Jonqueres near the Urquinaona intersection, a restaurant that was open, and looked nice and quiet - Brasserie Flo. The outer vestibule teased us with a display of delicious shellfish, and the interior was formal and refined. We were promptly seated at a table for four, given menus featuring a limited but tasty looking set of items - ranging from duck foie gras to lobster and sole.

Alas, looking at the menu was as close as we actually got to the food, since we could not get even a modicum of service during the 20+ minutes we sat at our table. No offer of water, refreshments, bread, or any attempt to communicate with us, never mind taking our order. The one point at which I managed to get one of the wait staff to look at me, she responding by saying that someone would be right with us. Ten minutes later someone had yet to materialize. As by now it was 8:30pm and other dining options were now available in Barcelona, we ended up leaving the restaurant in disgust. And interestingly, not a single member of the restaurant’s staff deigned to even ask us why were were leaving. Brasserie Flo gets a big fat raspberry and a 0.0 out of a possible 10.0 on The Richter Scale. Only go here if you are a masochist who thrives on being ignored and enjoys not eating or drinking anything in a restaurant. For the rest, keep in mind that life is too short and restaurant alternatives too many to need to experience treatment like this.

Yesterday, after touring the Parc Guell and passing up a visit to the Miro museum (see previous posts), we ended up in Las Ramblas, a busy, touristy section of Barcelona about a 15-20 minute walk from our hotel. We picked a Tapas-oriented place at random and ended up at El Choquito Restaurante, a busy restaurant with mostly tourists as customers, although we did see some locals at the Tapas bar on the way in. Service was brusque - just a slight bit above the sort of service one would get at Dick’s Last Resort back in the U.S. - a chain which prides itself on rude servers.

Fortunately, the food was a bit better than the service, but nothing great - mediocre and expensive would be a better description. We had a blend of tapas and entrees, none of which really stood out, although the patatas bravas were pretty good.

Bas particularly enjoyed his Chicken paella, although I was a bit put out by the lack of saffron flavor and the use of frozen vegetables. However, it’s been pointed out to me that each region in Spain has its own version of paella, with different flavors - but whether that was the reason for the flavor of the paella here or not, I don’t know.

The only thing that was distinctively good was the Cava-based Sangria - Cava is Spanish sparkling wine - and normally Sangria is made with red wine, but it was close to US$35 for one liter of Sangria with Cava.

There’s no question in my mind that El Choquito was a tourist trap. Cost for lunch was about 160 Euros (about US$250) for the six of us - pricey for what we got. I give El Choquito Restaurante a 5.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

For dinner on our first night in Barcelona we were wandering about after having toured the Sagrada Familia, and then walked a number of miles to the Arc de Triomphe (a bit smaller than the one in Paris), which led to a long line of market stands. We then walked into the La Ribera area near the Barri Gotic. We were still early - it was only just about 8:30pm, and ended up picking the first decent looking restaurant we came upon which had already opened - the restaurant Iggy.

Iggy specialized in Italian cuisine, and had a pretty diverse menu. Our charming waitress was actually Italian herself, from the island of Sardinia. We had an excellent bottle of Priorat (a red wine which comes from a particular region of Spain) and an excellent meal. Appetizers we enjoyed included Steak Tartar, steamed shellfish, stacked Caprese salad, and goat cheese ravioli. For our main courses we had roast lamb shoulder, a tender Ossobuco, pumpkin gnocchi (the only mild disappointment as the gnocchi were not fresh and tender), ox tail, and Turkish snuff tail (a type of fish). Dessert consisted of a chocolate fondant, apple tartlets, and ice cream, along with a sweet Spanish sherry with overtones of raisins. Final bill was around 240 Euros (approximately US$380), plus a 20 Euro tip (tipping is not that common in Spain, with a tip typically consisting of rounding up the bill to the next round number) for the nice service we received. Iggy gets an 8.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

As some of you may know, the three older Richters are foodies. Bas is slowly getting more adventurous too, and for an 11 year old boy, does well (his favorite foods include mussels, snails, and steak tartar), but he doesn’t hold a candle to the rest of us.

As foodies, we try to explore the local cuisines of areas we visit, and here in Barcelona, there are three overlapping cuisines we were are working to sample and experience: Catalan, Mediterranean, and Spanish. That’s in conjunction with some excellent Spanish wines, of course, as well as with another wine-based concoction: Sangria.

As mentioned in my previous post, dining times here in Spain are a bit unusual from an American perspective. Most local restaurants are open for lunch until about 4pm, and then re-open around 8:30-9pm (some as late as 10pm) for dinner. Back home we usually have lunch between Noon and 1pm, and dinner starting betweek 6 and 7pm). I’m hoping jet-lag makes the whole adjustment to later dining times easier.

So far we have dined at four restaurants, with a failed attempt to dine at yet one more.

Our two lunch experiences have both been at places which offer a popular form of Spanish dining, namely something called “Tapas“, with the restaurants serving Tapas frequently referred to as Tapas Bars. Spoken quickly this sounds like “Topless Bars”, a misunderstanding which is a source of frequent amusement to us.

Tapas Bars in the U.S. are bars (as in alcohol bars) which serve Tapas, while here in Barcelone, they are bars more along the line of Sushi Bars - you can set at the “bar” and select from a variety of Tapas shown under glass at said bar.

So what are Tapas? Well, the term refers to small plates of a particular food item - it might be a cold food, like marinated octopus or ham on small slices of bread, or hot food like skewers of meat or patatas bravas (chunks of potato with a spicy sauce).

The plates either comes as individual items for one person or as a slightly larger small plate featuring multiple portions of the ordered item, ideal for sharing with others at your table. Our experience with Tapas in the U.S. so far had been with the latter approach - you typically get enough for sharing with one or two other people, and make a meal of ordering a half dozen different Tapas items which are all shared.

Our first restaurant was Txapela (pronounced “Chapella”), a couple blocks from our hotel, right near the busy intersection of Passeig de Gracia and Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes. While the weather was still a bit brisk, it was a beautiful afternoon, so we sat outside at the cafe portion of the restaurant. Our waitress did not speak English, and our Catalan and Spanish were minimal, but thanks to a pictographic menu of Tapas, we were able to order our Tapas-based meal without too many complications. The tapas at Txapela were the first single portion size tapas we had ever experienced. We ended up ordering two or three of each of the kinds we wanted to sample (about ten different kinds overall), and enjoyed them all. We accompanied the meal with a couple of pitchers of sangria, a blend of wine, fruit, fruit juices, and as we discovered in this case, a heavy dose of sugar too. While the food was good, service, while friendly, was a bit spotty. For the six of us, the bill came to around 120 Euros (about US$190). Based on what we’ve been seeing of prices here, that’s not unreasonable, and certainly eating outdoors was a pleasure (albeit a bit cold for those of us with thin blood) as we could do all sorts of people watching. Txapela gets a 7.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

Day 42 of our Pacific Journey - Diving With Sharks

Friday, November 30, 2007

Getting Our Days Straight

So I finally got around to counting days on the calendar and my previous entry below marked as Day 40, should have really been Day 38 (or technically Day 37 due to the fact we crossed the International Date Line, but I’m not going to deal with that issue). That makes this day I am chronicling about next - November 30th, our 42nd day of travel and excitement.

I need to mention I would have had this posted in a more timely fashion except for the fact that our somewhat pricey but decent Internet connection at the Outrigger On The Lagoon in Fiji went dead on the 30^th at 11am, and as of when we left for the airport at 6pm on December 4th, had still not come back to life. So here we are almost a week late, again. Sigh.

Back to our story…

A Diving (for Sharks) We Go…

Linda and I awoke around 5:45am this morning, and at 6:20am, Luci, a nice Fijian woman, showed up to take charge of our young ones. Neither Bas nor Krystyana were inclined to join Linda and I on our great adventure today, and in retrospect, it’s probably a good thing too, as the challenges of our journey would have exceeded their physical limits.

Our great adventure was going on a pair of shark feeding dives in the Beqa Lagoon.

Beqa is a small island atoll located due south of the Pacific Harbor area. The atoll forms a natural lagoon which is reportedly a great place for diving.

Another detour here - when people, especially non-divers, hear that someone is going shark diving, they get all sorts of images, typically ones derived from having read or seen Peter Benchley’s epic, Jaws. Those images involve menacing and calculating sharks looking to sneak up on hapless divers, ready to bite them in half, with blood and carnage everywhere. The reality is that dives where sharks are regular fed by trained feeders are quite safe, and for divers the biggest rush is how cool all the sharks are, and not “I hope I don’t get eaten”. And Peter Benchley himself realized this too, well after the hysteria and fear his works had induced. In the years before his death in 2006 he attempted to fix some of the damage Jaws did to the perception of sharks by working to protect them.

Back to our adventure. To get to where our dive was to occur, we had to drive more or less west for well over an hour to a place called Pacific Harbor, and hook up with Aqua-Trek, a dive shop which does a two-tank (two dives, one scuba tank per dive, hence two tank) dive trip south to the Beqa Lagoon three times a week - Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays.

We arrived at Aqua-Trek around 8am in our AVIS rental car, checked in, set up our gear on board the Aqua Sport dive boat, and watched (and smelled) days old fish parts and chum being loaded on board. Just before 9am, we and our seven other dive companions were off to the Bistro dive site. One couple was from Vancouver and traveling about the world for a while. Another was a younger couple from San Francisco on a six month world tour. There were two Japanese guys, vaguely reminiscent of Hiro and Ando from the series Heroes, and a young Australian guy who was in Suva on business and managed to work the dive into his schedule.

It was a very short boat ride, perhaps 15-20 minutes, and we found two other dive boats already there - apparently Friday was the day that the Aqua-Trek dive shop ran the shark dive for two resorts located in the Beqa Lagoon as well, so that put us at around 30 divers for the dive, plus a half dozen or so divemasters and handlers.

Entering The Watery Depths

After a briefing where it was explained that we’d be watching the first feeding at a depth of around 30 meters, we all made our way into the water. The current was ripping, and I lost track of Linda for a while as I struggled to get down to the target area - I finally saw her behind me, swimming for all she was worth trying to make headway into the current. We helped each other over a ridge and finally made it to the feeding area, breathing hard. Good thing they gave us generous fills on our tanks (for our fellow divers, tanks were filled to around 3400 psi).

We joined other divers along a rope that had been set up to mark off the viewing area, and watched as ever-increasing numbers of fish of many species mobbed the diver who was dispensing the yummy fish parts. Among the fish we saw were a variety of fusiliers, giant trevally, rainbow runners, butterfly fish, smaller jacks, groupers, and more. And then Linda started hitting me to get my attention - a tiger shark had appeared to our right and was regally swimming through the parting hordes of smaller fish to scope things out. The tiger shark was a female as evidenced by the lack of claspers, a clasper being a shark penis - and most male sharks have two of those, incidentally. She was also around 12 feet long. A big lady indeed! This was a major rush for us, as tiger sharks are rarely seen by people, especially in non-threatening situations. Their name stems from the white tiger-marking-like patterns on their backs.

It should be noted that tiger sharks are the second most dangerous shark (to man) in the world, but mostly to surfers, not divers. And this tiger shark had been acclimated to divers and being fed (and even touched), so we were not in any real danger at any time. However, just in case, a number of the dive guides had aluminum prods (looked a bit like walking canes) which were used to keep sharks away from the paying divers. They must have been doing a good job because we don’t think any divers were lost on our dives.

At one point during the feeding a male nurse shark got in the way of the tiger shark and was almost bitten in half for his insolence.

The tiger shark stayed with us for the entire dive, getting as close as a couple of feet away - I was glad I had my camera system equipped with a wide angle lens - both to capture the full shark even at that distance, as well as a barrier between myself and the shark, just in case this was the one time the tiger shark decided the nearby blond diver might make a good snack.

This was our second tiger shark view on this Pacific journey of ours - but the first was behind glass, however, at the Maui Ocean Center a few weeks ago (more on that at some later point). Much better and cooler to see it in real life right in front of us. There’s also no question that the tiger shark was the queen of these here waters. Where she swam, most other fish rapidly made way for her (except for the stupid nurse shark, and he certainly did not get in the tiger shark’s way again).

As the food ran out, and we were getting close to having to do a decompression dive, we were ushered to head up to the boat. The tiger shark was still prowling about as well, making our handlers a bit jumpy. However, ascending was not quite that simple for me. As I tried to get up from my kneeling position, I found that one of my fins had gotten lodged in under a rock and I could not extract the fin - I was effectively stuck at 80 feet under water. Linda tried to help, but it required the assistance of one of the dive guides to finally dislodge it (and it ended up breaking the rock too). Mind you, I wasn’t too nervous, as I knew I could always take the fin off and either leave it there, or at least have better leverage to get it out without my foot in the fin, but it was nice having the additional assistance. We finally managed to ascend to do our safety stop and then got back on board the boat for a decent surface interval.

The Second Dive - Amusingly, Most Divers Unaware Of Sharks

The weather had gotten a bit sunnier, so we tried to warm up before the next dive. For this one we were going to a shallower feeding ground at only around 15 meters deep. The current was much weaker, fortunately, but even so, this time we used the descent line to get down instead of free swimming. We found the line of divers too crowded to get situated comfortably, and I had to bonk a small moray eel on the nose a few times with my camera strobes to have him give up his perch near where I was trying to kneel. Linda ended up sitting on a rock behind me. However the feeding this time was rather boring - lots of smaller fish, and no sharks, so I left the line of divers with the intention of taking some pictures of other fish in the area.

As I managed to free myself from the other divers and started looking around, I realized that there were a fair number of sharks cruising around behind all the divers, right near me. Linda and I signaled our amusement to each other about how all the divers were focused on watching small fish, and meanwhile the big ones with big teeth were mere meters behind their backs. We ended up seeing up close (within a few feet) a sicklefin lemon shark with her entourage of bright yellow juvenile golden trevally - acting as a type of pilot fish, as well as a silvertip shark. Further off in the distance we also saw whitetip, blacktip, and bull sharks. Quite the shark menagerie, and most of the divers had no clue until the very end as they ascended in a chaotic jumble and saw sharks all around.

As we surfaced from our second dive and got comfortable on the boat, we all had a chance to share our favorite shark tales.

Once we arrived back on shore, we got cleaned up, ordered a DVD of our dive (which featured about 15 minutes of footage from our dive and another 15 minutes of filler about the dive shop and the sharks and other fish we had seen), and then set out in search of lunch.

Lunch, Low Tourism, and Traditional Song & Dance

We found that at the Oasis Restaurant at Arts Village, also in Pacific Harbor. Art Village was supposed to be a recreated old-style Fijian village with additional shops offering local handicraft, but we found it rather quiet and deserted. Another victim of the bad PR created by last year’s coup. Occupancy at the hotels in the area was also way down, just as in the Coral Coast area where we were staying.

The food at the Oasis was excellent, and reasonably priced. I had a local fish soup with some hot sauce they made for me, and Linda had a Thai salad with mango and tamarind dressing. We followed that up with spicy ginger noodles, and a ginger pork dish. Everything had incredibly fresh and crisp, not overcooked, vegetables. It was more food than we could finish, so we skipped desert. And one of the highlights of the meal was our dining companion, a calico cat which belonged to one of the staff. The cat was very friendly and reminded us of our pet family members left back at home.

After the late lunch we checked out some of the shops at Arts Village, found nothing truly worthwhile, and then made our way back to the Outrigger, arriving sometime after 4pm. Luci had taken good care of the kids, and both were in good moods, as was Luci.

After some quiet time, and room service for Bas, we had dinner at the Ivi restaurant with Krystyana while Bas went to the kids’ club. It should be noted that both Bas and I wore a sulu for our evening activities. A sulu is a type of wrap worn by Fijian men. Very comfortable, and it even has pockets. We also wore matching Hawaiian shirts we had picked up at Hilo Hattie’s in Hawaii. Here on Fiji they call them Bula shirts, incidentally.

We hooked up with Bas during the performance of the Meke - a traditional native song and dance ritual. After the Meke we were invited up to dance. I joined in in the hopes of getting Bas to participate, but he weaseled out on me.

We had a fine time, and closed the evening with the nightcap left in our room - one of the benefits of the type of bure (hut) we’re staying in here at the Outrigger. We also get a glass of champagne each with canapés earlier in the evening each night - another nice benefit we have been enjoying regularly.

More photos from this day, including lots of shark shots can be found here.
Thus ends Day 42 of our Pacific Journey.