Spanish Tapas

I cannot believe we have already been in Spain for a week and it has taken the entire week for us to eat anywhere worth writing about!  Before I catch you up on our Spanish adventures to date, you may recall that I was planning to work off some of those sweets that I have been enjoying with an early morning run in London.  Either my body was really against the idea of exercising or that Jamaican food we ate at Nottingham was not so great.  As we were both sick, I will say the Jamaican was disappointingly the culprit and we therefore spent our last day in London trudging around trying to pass the time until we could check into the next hostel for our 7:30am flight to Madrid.

I am not really sure where to start with Madrid.  We arrived on an incredibly hot day and after getting up at 5am for our flights we were rather exhausted.  Some quick food before joining the locals for a siesta was about all we could manage on a 40 degree afternoon.  After recovering from our lack of sleep we decided to explore a little the next day.  Our first sights of Madrid had already done less than impress us, the city is dirty, busy and not the safest place to roam around.  We did however manage to blend in with the locals yet again and have breakfast at 12 noon (I am still obsessed with goats cheese so I opted for this with caramelised onions and cranberry sauce, it was tasty!) followed by lunch at 3pm outside of Real Madrid Stadium (I cannot tell you what we ate here as the menu was in Spanish so we just picked some random things haha) and dinner at 8:30pm.  Now I feel I should set the scene a little before telling you what was presented to us at dinner.  We decided to head to a bar for some sangria before Spain played in the soccer and before having dinner at another restaurant as the menu was only in Spanish.  So we ordered a jug to share thinking it was a small 1 litre jug which had seemed to be the trend.  The waitress came back with two 2 litre jugs and we attempted to send them back but she just kept saying happy hour, happy hour.  So our glass of Sangria turned into 2 jugs of sangria all for €11 before we decided we should order some food.  The only thing on the menu we could figure out was potatoes, so we gave it a crack.  We were presented with a scallop potato like dish with bacon and cheese however it had 2 raw eggs sitting on top.  If you know me, you know how much I despise eggs and I am sure the look on my face was priceless (so much so that I didn’t even get a photo) when the waitressed pulled out two spoons and began mixing the eggs through the potato on our table.  Luckily it tasted just like scallop potato and the egg was not noticeable, perhaps the sangria helped!  

Time to head to Seville the next day which I was really looking forward to.  4 nights in the one town was pure bliss as moving every second day has started to become exhausting...oh how the unemployed travellers of the world have such problems I know!  We had already decided in advance of arriving at Seville that we were going to try and cook as much as possible and pack lunches as we had a kitchen and a supermarket was across the road from our hostel.  On our first night we made a chicken salad with coleslaw and it was amazing! We used the left over salad to make sandwiches for the next day as we had planned a day trip to Cadiz, which is home to a beautiful beach and is about an hour away by bus.  It was a magnificent day to be at the beach and we spent a good few hours soaking up some sunshine, without getting burnt I might add.  Before catching a 9pm bus back to Seville we decided to have some tapas for dinner and the disappointment was unbelievable.  The food was so horrible we didn’t finish and moved on to another restaurant for round two.  Unfortunately there was nothing to rave about here either and the only thing I bothered to take a photo of was the baked camembert.  It looked delicious but it was not cooked correctly.  The middle had not melted on the inside enough and was almost a curdled like texture.

Today was our first real chance to explore Seville.  There were some magnificent parks near our hostel that we decided it was a perfect opportunity to attempt another run and succeed we did.  I am amazed at how green and well kept the town centre is in comparison to Madrid and also the rest of the countryside.  It is clear that there are no water restrictions in Spain!  The outskirts of the city are very arid and when travelling between cities you could almost confuse yourself with being in Australia as the landscape is unbelievably similar.
After recovering from our run we made some more bread rolls and headed to the town to see some sights.  There are some unbelievable buildings in Seville including the university which is an old tobacco factory (I think if our uni looked like this it would have made attending more enjoyable!), the Cathedral (where we climbed the bell tower to see the view of the city) and the Parliament buildings to name a few.  As the afternoon sun was taking its toll we decided to head to the river to have our lunch.  It was very relaxing and we enjoyed some time sitting and reading a book in the shade of the trees.  We made our way home late afternoon to have some homemade chicken wraps and decided we would try and meet some more backpackers by attending the pub crawl that was put on by the hostel.  It was a lot of fun and we even caught up with some of our old top deckers.

Day 4 in Seville and it was time for a lazy day which first started with left over chicken wraps for lunch.  We decided to do some more exploring and ended up back at the river for some more time on the grass watching the world go by.  Today was Euro cup final day and we had decided to go to the town square to watch with the locals but before doing so we ready for another attempt at tapas.  We finally found somewhere worth writing about! I have been debating trying paella since arriving as being a traditional Spanish dish I wanted to make sure it left a good impression on me as I have been looking forward to this for some time!  This did not disappoint and had the traditional seafood mixed with peas and chicken.  We chose 5 tapas to share, calamari, potato, croquettes, paella and chicken baguette.  Croquettes was our random pick off the menu, something we are trying to do throughout Spain but so far we have not had a win until now.  Croquettes are a small breadcrumbed food with potato, ground meat (I think ours was tuna), herbs, spices etc and then deep fried. These were a tastier than I imagined and we wish we had gotten more than 3 to share. It was time for us to head to the town square and wow is an understatement.  The crowd was insane as we watched in the Metropol Parasol, the largest wooden structure in the world, the floor was vibrating and I would not have been surprised if the building came toppling down!  Thankfully we were with a happy crowd as Spain our now the 2012 Euro Cup champions with a 4-0 win over Italy.

Time to head back to our hostel to prepare for a 12 hour travel day to Pamplona with three connecting buses to catch.  Before we left Seville I decided I was going to take the opportunity to go for one last run in the morning in the beautiful parks.  This meant a 6am start and while my body hated me for doing it was a brilliant idea as I am now in Pamplona and slept a lot of the 12 hour journey where we managed to catch all 3 buses successfully. I must comment on one of the buses though, a supra bus which we assumed was a fast bus.  It turns out this was a luxury bus!  It was as if we were on an aeroplane where we had a seat to ourselves and with a ‘bus attendant’ who served us snacks and drinks during the ride.  It was certainly a nice way to break the trip up.  We are now in Pamplona and after sleeping so much during the day I am more awake then I should be but I am now going to sign off and try and get some shut eye to recharge for the remainder of our jam packed Spanish adventure xx