We were lucky enough to have an apartment literally across the street from a huge Wednesday farmer's market. Our landlady had given us a heads up yesterday, so I was ready for action this morning. I LOVE going to local farmer's markets, it's one of my favorite things to do when traveling. Such a fun way to try new foods, and see local goods. We were out the door at a totally reasonable 10 a.m. (which I was impressed with), and strolled the row after row of fruits and veggies. 5 euros got me a huge bag of peaches, and a huge bag of strawberries. It was nice, not too busy, and everything was absolutely beautiful. I grabbed a 6 euro blanket at the flea market attached to the fruits/veggies market and like that we had a nice big beach blanket.
It was cool and cloudy for the first half of the day, and a mild 70 degrees, but manage to heat up as the day went on. We strolled to the beach, and everyone radiated out to different take out restaurants to get what they wanted to eat. Gia had a pork sandwich, and didn't seem to notice the sign which called it a "piglet sandwich", or if she did, she was fine eating piglet. The actual pig on display, roasted snout at all, definitely gave me pause.
We sat on the beach, argued over who would sit where on our big blanket that in reality was only big if you were a family of 3 not 6. The ocean is beautiful, and the beaches are still mellow and not over crowded because it's early in the season. We strolled around, split into groups for a bit and eventually all met back at the apartment. Everything we do seems to take a long time. Where you might stroll thru this town with one other person in a matter of an hour or two, it takes us four because someone is always darting off into one store or another, we stop for water, we stop to listen to street musicians, we stop for coffee, Ava and Lucia stop to take selfies, then someone is hungry so we stop at the bakery, then everyone declares they are starving to death for a "real" meal (I can't stress enough how dire they make it sound...you'd think they had been trapped for days without food or water). A food frenzy basically.
Late in the afternoon John and I went on our two mile run which felt really hard for some reason, but we shaved off 15 seconds. It might almost qualify as a jog now. I feel like I read somewhere that they can determine your "health age" by the speed of your one mile run. That's not good for us. We strategized the whole time on where we'd live part of the year when we retire (to escape rain and cold.) Madrid could be added to the list of possibilities. I kind of agree, simply because it's a really cool bigger city, so you could "live" there easily, without feeling like you were stuck in a tourist zone all the time. I love Seville, but it might be hard to live there for 4 months (John's issue with Oregon is strictly the 4 months between 1/15-4/15.)
We fed the kids a random assortment of dinner foods after dashing to the store, and then John and I went out to a vegetarian restaurant. This was done entirely for me, because John would rather go to a restaurant with ALL meat and nothing else. They had wine though so he promised he would be ok. I've noticed a lot of the vegetarian or vegan restaurants seem to have a buffet sort of approach. This restaurant had a cold salad bar with maybe 8 or 9 different types of salads, veggies, potatoes etc., and then you also picked two hot vegetarian dishes from an assortment of maybe 8. John didn't even touch the cold salads so he paid a lot for two small dishes of polenta and two chickpea balls with sauce (since the whole thing was a flat rate.) I can't feel too bad, I'm almost always the one putting my dietary preferences aside for the benefit of other people's food happiness. Every once in awhile it can be my turn right? At least in this town it seems that everyone eats earlier, and no one is coming out to dinner at 10:30 or 11:00 p.m. just starting their night. Definitely more mellow here.
It was a nice, quiet, and pretty day, It was good to slow the speed down, especially since Ava seemed better, but still a little touch and go at times. Ava tends to go down hard but she bounces back pretty quick.
Signed, ME {lv}
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