Coma de Comida

AKA Food Coma. For a person as passionate about food as I am, I can't begin to describe how amazing the food is here in Spain. The freshness of the ingredients, the flavors, and the variety are nothing short of phenomenal. For this reason alone I am seriously considering "missing" my plane home in a few weeks.

The locals don't just do Spanish food well, they do everything well. As you walk up and down the streets, you'll find restaurants from Persia, India, China, Mongolia, Italy, France, Thailand, Mexico, etc....all within a square block! (or in colloquial Spanish, a square apple). Not to mention specialty stores, such as the bakery and the butcher shop.

Here is my experience with food so far. Rule number one, serve bread with everything. And I mean everything. For breakfast I eat bread with Nutella, jam, butter, or cream cheese. The other small(ish) meal of the day is dinner, which thus far has consisted of bread, salad, a main dish, and a side dish. Oh, and wine or beer for sure.

Lunch is an experience in and of itself. First, you start with...you guessed it, bread. Then you have your first plate. I'd love to say it is equivalent to an appetizer, but in fact it is much larger. Then you go on to your second plate, which is even larger than the first (all the while consuming alcohol, of course). Next is dessert, followed by coffee. Altogether, this lunch experiences is called something roughly translated to "the food of the day." It is intense. It is to die for. And it costs less than $13 in total.

Here's where lunch gets interesting. Imagine coming to the US and seeing "Sloppy Joe" on the menu, or "PB&J." With no pictures or context, you would be completely lost. It seems that almost all of the platos have distinct names that bear no relation to their ingredients. I've tried asking various waiters to describe what each plate consists of, but to no avail - they speak super fast and talk about ingredients I've never heard of before. Unless it includes something simple like pollo (chicken), or a cognate like frijoles de garbanzo (garbanzo beans), I'm at a complete loss. My solution to this problem has been random selection. I just pick one randomly and see what comes out. This has truly been a culinary adventure, and has worked out stupendously so far. The only drawback to this is a complete inability to describe to anyone what I've been eating, as well as the impossibility of ordering again anything I happen to have liked (worst grammar ever, I know).

In conclusion, life is like la comida del dia, you never know what you're going to get.