All Tapa'd Out

We spent a little over two weeks in Madrid, Barcelona and Amsterdam. We were in Spain for about 10 days which was huge fun. Madrid is gorgeous and very different from Barcelona which has its own charms. The wine is great and the tapas, well the tapas…Initially embraced with enthusiasm, after 10 days of it we went screaming off to Amsterdam in search of vegetables as we faced impending scurvy (our first meal in Amsterdam was in a vegetarian restaurant). No matter what you call it, bar food is still bar food.

We were in Madrid for the Annual Meeting, but once that was over we moved from the big hotel scene to some smaller and way more fun places to stay. In Barcelona we scored a two bedroom apartment (yay, my own dressing room!) in Born, an old part of town, where we did the local neighbourhood thing. Wine store on that side, chocolate store on the other and bars and restaurants everywhere. Plus, I got to indulge in my favourite pastime - spying in people's windows. In these dense streets you really get a sense of urban European life on top of each other –night voices up the air shaft, party people on the streets late late late. In Spain everything is late. If you go to a restaurant for dinner at 9:00 you are likely the first people there, and when we were leaving for the airport on our last morning there, at 6:30 a.m. on a Sunday, there were lots of people on the streets just leaving the clubs. I kept asking Spaniards I met when they sleep but never really got an answer. Perhaps they don’t.

The street theatre in both cities was lots of fun. You hear lots of music from street musicians and the mime human statues are very inventive. When you put money in their bowls they shift position. But the best thing is always sitting on a sidewalk café with a glass of vino (and a tapa) and watching the street life.






This was not my first trip to Spain although my first to Madrid and Barcelona. A gazillion years ago I spent two weeks in the Costa del Sol in the south with two girlfriends, sisters. We visited Torremolinos (which was exactly like the Monty Python travel agent sketch), Marbella (which is beautiful and where Omar Sharif played backgammon in the Marbella Club) and Soto Grande (where a friend’s mother kindly lent us her upscale condo, which was completely lost on three girls out to have a good time. After two days of reading the phone book, we left.)

We headed to a town called Nerja. Actually we were heading to Barcelona but we never did make it. We never made it past Nerja, as we were, shall we say, waylaid by its charms. One (of many) incident sticks in my mind and I have told this story many times.

On the beach in Nerja was a bar called Ayo’s Beach Bar. Ayo was a wild looking kind of guy with long flowing hair, married to a statuesque blonde from Sweden or somewhere. On his beach he used to make paella over a wood fire in the biggest paella pan I’ve ever seen. This particular day I decided to try some for lunch. It was great, but a little while after eating it I didn’t feel so great and felt the need to lie down on the beach for a siesta.

Now, in defence of Ayo’s paella, I must explain the kind of lives we were living. We cut a swathe through the south of Spain on one phrase alone – vino blanco seco frio por favor. My gal pals had a dozen or so years on me yet I couldn’t keep up with them. I’d wake up around 10:30 in the morning in time to see them returning from the market, bright eyed and bushy tailed, unpacking food and more bottles of wine and about ready for their first drink of the day. So perhaps it was the paella on that particular day, or perhaps it was the aftermath of the prior night’s shenanigans.

Anyway, the girls decided to rent a paddle boat for an hour as I settled on to my blanket for some shut eye. Off they went. Meanwhile, Paco, the beach boy, put his blanket down on the sand beside mine and lay down for his siesta. I use the term “beach boy” a little loosely. Paco was about 75, a slight, wizened man whose job, as far as I could tell, was to put chairs out on the beach for the beach goers.

So there I was, sleeping with Paco, on the beach on the Mediterranean in the south of Spain. I slept, soundly. When I woke up I had a sense that I had been asleep for quite some time, several hours perhaps, although I didn’t wear a watch. Paco was long gone. No sign of the girls. I sat up on the sand and peered up and down the beach, then out in the sea. No sign of them or their paddle boat. Nothing for me to do but wait. Another hour passed by, and I was starting to get really concerned when I spotted them out on the water in the paddle boat. I watched as they took the boat back to where they got it and walked toward me along the beach. Well walked, sort of. One of the sisters had her arm across the shoulder of the other sister who was propping her up. Together they wove their bikinied bodies in my direction. I watched their progress, astonished. How could two gals go out in a paddle boat in the middle of the Mediterranean and return drunker than when they left?

Well…there were these fisherman…

Apparently they had run out of cigarettes (we all smoked back then) and had paddled over to a fishing boat to bum a smoke (no doubt scaring all the fish away), then as the pack was being handed to them they dropped it into the sea, and then ended up sharing the fishermen’s bottles of vino tinto. Much later on, back on dry land with me, when they sobered up they shook their heads at their foolishness, but hey, foolish was the name of the game back then.

Memories of that early trip were much on my mind as we traveled in the more northern part of the country this month. Laugh out loud memories. Yesterday, the strangest thing happened. I was catching the last part of a TV show on Discovery Travel and Living about the south of Spain. At the very end of the show, they were listing the five best things about it. I nearly fell off my chair as Ayo’s Paella on the Beach was listed as #4. Thirty years later, he’s still there??!! This world keeps getting smaller and smaller.