Now for the excitement

After leaving our bags in the room we wandered the city, eager to actually experince some of Spain.  We wandered the Barrio Santa Cruz which was the old Jewish Quarter of the city.  We looked around and considered our Fleminco options, and finally decided to sit and eat.  A nice outdoor cafe seemed perfect for our first night.  We went with their meal of day, which is a typical spanish cafe offering.  You get a 2 course meal, but you can only choose from a couple of items for each course.  For our first course I chose a spanish ham and cheese platter, and Kim chose speghetti with tomato sauce.  We both chose paella for our second course.  I was eager to try the paella in Spain because I recently made it for us at home.  

The speghetti came out plain, no sauce.  It was weird, just a bowl of noodles.  My ham was good though, but the beers were small.  The paella came out...way over cooked.  It´s almost like they forgot about it in the stove because we seemed to wait forever for it.  The mussels and shrimp were like rubber.  While the rice was good, actually really good, the other meat, I think it was chicken, was horribly dry and looked a bit like beef jerkey.  I have never sent something back to the kitchen...and felt a little bad about doing it, but we did.  And I´m glad we did.  The waiter was nice about things (but didn´t oddly apologize) and they fixed the bill since we didn´t want to go for another round of that kind of food.  

Things actually worked out great.  The first course filled us up enough we weren´t starving and after wandering and doing a bit of shopping the bars started to open up.  We walked up to one of the busier bars that had a long list of tapas hanging on the wall and ordered a beer and 2 tapas.  The food was amazing, the service was stellar, and the experience was unforgetable.  This is the only way to eat.  The bartender wrote our order in chalk on the bar, and kept updating it as we ordered more beers and tapas.  The total bill for both of us (5 beers, 3 tapas) was under 10€. 

Tapas are small dishes, think coffee cup saucer size, with a small portion of food.  Two or three pork ribs, or maybe two short skewers of grilled chicken, or maybe a large spoonfull of olives.   Many places will give you cheaper tapas (i.e. the olives) free with your drink during the evenings.  The idea is that you share them with friends over drinks as you wander the city socializing.  It is the best idea in the world and something the US should adopt immediatly.

We hit the sack at about midnight, again extremly tired and wanting a good nights sleep.  We usually fall asleep to the television, but this was dificult because all of the channels are in Spanish.  I didn´t mind but it didn´t help Kim I don´t think.   Additionally the hotel only gave us one pillow.  It was a long pillow though, stretching all the way across the double bed...weird.