Tapas Tour

One of my favorite things that we did in Barcelona was our tapas tour. Ian, the guide was a lot of fun and explained everything very well. 

Tapas in Spain is a type of food that is shared by people when they go out for drinks. It's not exactly a meal because it's usually a small plate of food that is shared standing up and most people get one or two plates at each bar instead of sitting down and eating a lot of food in one place. 

The first place we went to served octopus as its speciality. 

I wasn't sure how I'd feel about eating octopus, but as it turns out it was excellent! Since calamari is rubbery, I expected something similar, but this octopus had a lovely texture between meat and fish. In the picture below, the octopus is on the plate on the right.  We also ate green peppers cooked in oil and sprinkled with rough ground salt. 

At the next stop, we were served sausages, cheese and crackers along with cider. The cheese was strong, almost like blue cheese. 

Since the cider from this region of Spain is not bubbly, the tradition is to pour it over your head into a glass and then to drink it very quickly before the bubbles depart. We were shown how to do this and quickly learned that this was not a good tour to wear nice clothes on...

At the last stop we ate sausages, beans, peppers and bread rubbed with tomatoes and garlic mayonnaise.  The highlight of this stop was learning how to drink wine out of a porron wine pitcher.  This was apparently developed in the past when people wanted to share the wine easily without sharing germs. Again, no nice clothing at this stop. 

I became quite a pro at the end. Ask Andrea and she'll vouch for me. :) 

Finally, here's our tour guide Ian showing us how to do it.