Tapas, Mariachi, and Rain...

14 Oct 2011

After a long day at school, getting together with friends made for a fabulous evening! We started the night early--mostly because I get so hungry after school and it's hard to wait until 9 or 10 PM to eat. So we headed to a tapas bar for a "snack."

The tapas bar was kind of quirky. It had funky art on the walls--apparently all done by the same artist even though they were all stylistically very different. There was also a ceramic hand that came out of the wall to hold a light. The tapas bar also had very fresh, delicious tapas. You could practically see them making the tapas in the kitchen so you knew they were going to be good. During a lull, the bartender/waiter sat down with us for a while to chat with us.

That's one of the things I've noticed about Alicante. The people in restaurants/shops are super friendly. Everywhere we go, the waiters/employees take the extra time to talk to you and find out your story. This is just so different from what we're accustomed to in the US--where a waiter's earnings depend on their tip and how fast/efficiently he or she can move people through the restaurant. Here, the tip is included in the bill so waiters make a decent wage.

Around 10 PM, we went to a Mexican place for dinner, and it was quite the experience. The food was pretty decent, but it was actually the atmosphere in the restaurant that made the evening. We were seated in the back of the restaurant--next to a group of people celebrating a birthday.

There was also a mariachi band that went from table to table--playing requests. The weird part was that all the Spaniards seemed to know all the lyrics to all of the songs. I would never have expected or assumed that Spaniards would know the lyrics to songs from Mexico. When it was our turn, we struggled a little to think of a song that we might know--La cucaracha and La bamba being the only songs I think we knew. We decided on La cucaracha, and I think we were all a little surprised by the lyrics--because there is a clean version and a vulgar version. Although frankly-speaking, we didn't really know the lyrics to begin with. The extent of our knowledge of the lyrics was basically: "La cucaracha. La cucaracha. Na na, na na, na."

After we left the restaurant, we discovered that it had rained while we were inside. I was sad to have missed this because it rains so infrequently here. I'm not even sure that it really rains here at all--or at least that's what I've joked. Before leaving the States, I had read that there are on average 20 days of rain in Alicante a year. I call it "stealth rain" because I never see it actually rain, but it's obvious that it has rained because it is wet outside.