Posts Tagged ‘beach’

A Tale of Two Beaches

The Baltic stretches out to the horizon placid and pink from the reflection of the early morning sky. There is only a bank of cloud to the west, still heavy and purplish with night, but the eastern sun is quickly burning the sky above the ocean blue and white. I stand at the water’s edge; my bare skin prickles against the chill. I breathe in deeply and walk into the water.

The ice of it sucks my breath away, and today it’s all me propelling my body forwards and under. Gone are the greenish, churning waves of the last few days that slapped up against my belly and chest and made short work of getting in. But also gone is the wall of seagrass torn from the ocean floor and hurled against my legs and into every seam of my swimsuit. The water today is clear. I can see all the way to the neat, rippled rows of sand beneath my feet.

Finally, I’m up to my neck. The horizon is nothing but a scar. At my feet, mitosis; an underwater tumbleweed splits apart, and one half of it is a crab, its back the color of salad leaves left to wilt in the fridge. It scuttles in half circles around my feet and warily, carefully, we dance.

Ten minutes. That’s how long we stay in the water. It’s one minute for every degree Celsius that your body can take before it begins to cool too far, and the water here is fifteen degrees. So ten minutes is safe. Still, my wet skin prickles with goosebumps as it meets the salt-soaked air. The water is only at knee height when a reddish bloom catches my eye. Pulsing furiously and too fast for comfort, a jellyfish red as washed-out bricks shows us his tangled underbelly. » Continue reading this post...

On the Beaches of Barcelona

Raw oysters (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

The best part of Vilassar de Mar was the blue. In the mornings, we woke to the bright glare of the ocean pinching sunlight from the sky and pitching it in through our window. The early hours were cool and dry, lulled by the soft crash of waves and shattered by the Renfe searing down the tracks with a load of commuters headed for the city center. In Barcelona, the merchants in La Boqueria would already be unrolling the shutters from their stands to reveal hanging hocks of jamón and stacked fruit, and the bleary-eyed tourists would be marching down Las Ramblas with bulky black Canons strapped to their chests. But in Vilassar de Mar, there was only ocean, a multi-hued blue dotted with sailboats and solitary paddle boarders cutting the surf.

Balcony, Villasar de Mar (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

What we couldn’t figure out in Vilassar de Mar was when things were open. On the day that we arrived, just after lunchtime, the little town was shuttered. We wandered uphill from the shore, the only direction to wander, and passed cafés and shops, all closed. Even the grocery store participated in the afternoon siesta hours, only opening again late in the evening. We were still hesitant of ourselves, the only tourists on the deserted streets, slow in our Spanish, when what we should really have been speaking was Catalan.

Fresh mussels (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Choosing somewhere to eat is hard when you’re so fresh to a new place, when you want so badly to make the best decision, but are too hungry to decide. At least there weren’t that many options. Halfway up the hill, we found a small bakery that was still open. One lazy couple sat beneath a yellow umbrella, slowly picking at fish bones. The tables were covered in clean white cloths and inside the windows, glazed pastries billowed beneath the glass. » Continue reading this post...