A Few Things I Learned in Barcelona

I had made some interesting discoveries in Barcelona this month. Culture shock? Far from it. Just interesting observations and nice surprises:  

• No pepper shakers in restaurants. Just about everywhere we ate, salt shakers stood on tabletops, looking lonely without their pepper mates. This probably has something to do with the food being sufficiently seasoned.
• Freshly-squeezed orange juice is ubiquitous. I ordered fresh juice for breakfast, at bakeries and even at the airport.
• Pay per toothpick for tapas. Diners at tapas bars sample different finger foods, or amuse-bouches as David called them, then pay by the amount of toothpicks they are left holding on to at the end of the meal. No wonder you see so many toothpicks carpeting the bar floors.  
• Pa Amb Tomaquet – or tomato-rubbed bread – is simple and delicious. Slice a baguette, slice a tomato, rub the sliced tomato across the baguette, drizzle with olive oil, add salt and pepper.
• There’s a big difference between the castanets that professionals use and the cheapy ones that are marketed as souvenirs.

Brand New Day?

There’s a holiday commercial for the department store ROSS that features a group of seemingly well-dressed people laughing and passing around party platters. It just makes me wonder: have the people who made this commercial ever tried to shop at a ROSS store?

I rented what?

Belgian cross-dresser gets caught up in dangerous police investigation. What? Who put that film on our movie queue?

I read so many summaries of films we receive that don’t ring a bell it’s as if someone else has been managing our Netflix queue.

This is why movie queues need a little comment column next to the titles, so viewers can add notes about their movie choices. My notes would read: recommended by Ayuko; movie trailer looked interesting; review compared it to another film I liked, and so on. This way, when a film arrives in our mailbox months later and that seems completely foreign to me, I can consult my queue to see what prompted me to rent it in the first place.