Tapas and beer (and Cava)

My first night here my hosts took me out for tapas and beer. Tapas are sort of like Catalan/Spanish sushi; it seems the best way to describe them. They're small servings of food, like appetizers, that you sample, or load up on, depending on how hungry you are. We walked down the pedestrian street in the pic (I think a street next to La Rambla, the larger and main pedestrian mall) to a place where they served the tapas on plates with large toothpick-like skewers. When you've had enough (and want to go to the next bar), you count up the sticks and pay. Kind of like counting up sushi plates in Tokyo.

This is the first place we went to: looks like "Bildao"-something. When you walk around town by yourself you tend to remember places better than when being led along. I wish I'd paid more attention because I'd like to find this "Bildao"-something tonight. Picking out the tapas is easier than ordering food in Spanish :) Tapas are also more varied than sushi. Sushi is very fishy; tapas range from sausages to fish and also to dessert. After this place we went on to another little bar with more tapas but also with Cava. Cava is basically champagne, i.e., sparkling wine. And it's very good. Here the tapas were slightly different. We had fish on a plate and a plate of bread. You pick up the bread and pick out which fish to put on it and scarf that down. Take a sip of Cava, repeat. The nice thing about the whole tapas thing is that you go bar hopping, and while you're drinking in each place, you're also consuming little bites of food. So you don't get too drunk.

The last place we hit was Bubo, where the tapas were mainly desserts. Very sweet, very rich, and very tasty. The pic is of some edible things at the Bubo next door to where we were. The confectionary counterpart of the bar I guess. The little sugary creatures looked cute so I snapped a pic. I betcha they'd be pretty tasty too.