Spain is an exciting city!

Things that are great:

- It's warm!
- It's a really livable city. Lots of boulevards and walking space for people. I have also never seen so many people in the streets in any city before that I have visited. It seems that people very much enjoy walking with friends and going to large street cafés.
- People are friendly and generally helpful
- Taxi's are really inexpensive compared to Canada
- Lunch is super cheap! (Self made salad, rice with meat and then a drink all for $10!!)
- The city it super clean

Things that aren't so great

- Few tourist places actually have English interpretation. Often they have Spanish, Catalin (local Spanish variant) Italian and German, but rarely English even though staff only speak Spanish and English.
- Tourist things are expensive ($20+ to enter, each)
- Taxis are near to impossible to actually get
- Restaurants have absolutely awful customer service


We went to a number of places today and I especially enjoyed a building which had no flat walls. ie. they were all curvy. This included doors, windows, everything. The builders must have gone absolutely insane building it.

We went to a restaurant and it had some absolutely hilarious translations and scary practices.

We were waiting for a table and watched a waiter place salad on a plate with his hands. Clearly not sanitary. Not so bad until he got the asperagus out of a can and placed those on a plate as well. Needless to say, we didn't order any salad.

On the menu, I first noticed the homely haddock (as in ugly) but it got better!
Another one of their specialities were appearantly roasted kid. Frightening.
Next came the grilled or roasted angler. I guess they weren't a good fisherman.

On the wall we previous notable people who had visited the restaurant. Next to us were Charleston Heston (without a gun amazingly!!) and Robery Di Nero. DIrectly next to me was OJ Simpson sans esposa. :|

Tricky robbers!!

When leaving the hotel before dinner, some American's in front of us in the taxi line (who were more than happy to directly remind everyone that they were first, who were also dressed in hokey teeshirts and hats) had had a nice little incident. One of the women had appearantly been standing on the corner when someone on a motorcycle drove by, slowed down, and grabbed her purse. Lucky for her, only her glasses were in it, but lesson learned for us -- safe guard our things like a hawk!