Fish Auction and Shakespeare play

We went for our jog towards the beach area this morning.  It is the nicest spot as it is nice and quiet along the way.  No traffic, just us and the sea.  This morning one of the small fishing boats was fishing near the shore when we jogged by.

Fishing close to shore

Walk, jog, walk, jog, ...this was walk part

After breakfast, I saw in the local paper that a store in town was selling glasses at a very reasonable price.  I went into town and found the store after searching a little bit.  The prices were sure good compared to home.  I made an appointment for Friday morning.  I may cancel it due to the fact that the only have non-thinned glasses.  I will think about it tomorrow.

For our lunch time walk, we went to the beach area and picked up a few things at the supermarket for tomorrow’s breakfast.

Around 4:30, I biked to the port area. Around 5 there was supposed to be a fish auction.  There was not much activity on the wharf except for 1 man mending his fishing net. Kinda reminder me of my neighbor Walter growing up, always had a straw hat on, fixing his net.There were a few people hanging around.  As it got closer to 5 a few fish distributor’s trucks arrived.  I checked with a lady that was near the place where the auction was to be held and she confirmed that it was at 5PM.  At one end of the wharf, a fisherman was loading his boat with nets and small little plastic traps.  I imagine they are used to fish octopus.  It was the fisherman that was by the shore fishing when we had gone for our jog in the morning.  I showed him the picture of the boat on the camera and asked him and his son if they had an email account.  I was going to email the picture but no so luck for them as they don’t have an email account.  

Mending nets

Caught from wharf

The auction started just shortly after 5.  It started by first doing the horse track music theme where they call in the horses to be paraded like at the Kentucky Derby. Boxes of fish, sometimes only 1 large on it, would go by on a belt. The auction is a reverse auction and goes down in price.  From what I could figure, it would start at a few Euros higher that the expected price and go down quickly from there.  The buyers are all seated in one area and have little remotes to do their bidding.  They watch a TV monitor. Whoever bids first wins the box of fish.  A printer spits out a slips that fall in the box, which is then put onto the appropriate buyer’s pallet.  I guess at the end of the auction, you pay for what you won and load up the pallet into your truck.  The process goes very quickly as there were hundreds of boxes to be auctioned off. They had all kinds of stuff for auction (tiny little crabs, small fish to large ones to about 10 pounds of many varieties, squids, eels, and octopus). I stayed until about 5:15, where I quickly biked home because we had dinner reservation for 6.

Auction time

The bidders

Lots of different varieties to bid on

This week, the local theatre group is having a play.  It is a based on Shakespeare play A Midsummer Nights Dream, and was called Bottoms up.  One of the best restaurants in town La Cocina, rated number 2 on Trip Advisor has a pre-theater special.  I must admit, it was probably the best meal we had here so far in Spain.  They started off by bringing us a small glass Wassail, kinda reminded me of glu wine (spelling) from when we did medieval dinners at the Banff Springs Hotel but it was probably made with apple cider & spices and was served warm.  Wendy started her meal with an herb flatbread topped with sautéed mushrooms & onions and cheese.  I had a cheese soufflé.  I chose Chicken Harissa with Catalan Beans.  The beans were in a creamy onion sauce and the chicken was coated with herb (Egyptian style, the waitress/owner told me).  Wendy had Salmon & Cod topped with leeks, spinach & smoked salmon served au gratin.  For dessert Wendy picked Fairy cake which had pop rocks that exploded in her mouth and I had a warm chocolate brownie topped with ice cream and a cherry brandy sauce.  The meal came with a nice bottle of red wine and it cost us about $55 Canadian, tips and all.  2 small pieces of Spanish fudge came along with the bill.  I guess to sweeten the impact. We think the whole family worked there.  Mom and daughter serving, Dad and another daughter and a son in the kitchen Forgot to bring Wendy’s camera, so no pictures. They also do takeout of frozen portions, we may order a couple of these for the week-end.  Bonus, with your first order you get a free bottle of wine.

We asked the owner of the restaurant for directions for where we were going for the play.  She said you better hurry if you want to be there for 8.   We found the place with about 5 minutes to spare.  They even had reserved seating for us.  There was seating for about 80 people. The play was very good and funny.  It was a very good spoof of the original. They had a choir that sang in between acts. These were not professional actors but they did a very good job at it.  The cost was only 7 Euros each (9 Canadian). The intermission came early around 8:30 where I had a glass of wine for 1.5 Euro. The age group was much more balanced than last night at the movie theater. The play finished around 9:15.  We walked home from there and it was a good 45 minutes’ walk.