Spanish Food Refusals

Last year three Canadian friends came to visit me in Spain. By Day 2, one of them complained, “Can we PLEASE eat something that's NOT ham? Or bread? Or fried? Like, how about a salad?”

I honestly had no idea where to get that. I'm now used to the limited choices in Spanish bars. It makes it easy to order quickly when the waiter / waitress comes swooping in to ask what we want. I think Spanish people hold the world's record for knowing right away what to order.

Although I love the food here, there are some food-related things I still haven't been able to do:

Follow Spain's eating schedule. Here's a typical schedule my friends follow:

Breakfast at 8:00 = coffee and a cookie or two

12:00 = fruit

Lunch at 15:00 = lunch cooked by Mom

18:00 = coffee

Dinner at 22:00 = a small plate of something

I tried to follow these hours and the same amount of food during my first year in Spain...and almost fainted.  I now eat whenever I feel like it. The kids at my elementary school are lucky I eat my way.  If not, I'd eat one of them.  There'd be “missing person” posters all over their village.

Drink coffee at any hour of the afternoon and night.  My friends can have coffee at 19:00 and sleep just fine.  If you see me do that, it's a sure sign I'm about to go to a rave or something.  My cutoff?  12:00.

Polish off every single drink.  I get booed sometimes for leaving my glass half-full when leaving the pub.  What my friends don't understand is that I have to draw a very fine line between “drink only half of the last glass and quietly hide the rest”, and “finish the drink like a polite Canadian, go home, and paint the walls with my vomit."

A penúltimo disaster