Running away from the hippy bar

November 4, 2009

We chose an Italian restaurant for our last meal, El Fuente, located in the back streets near the Ayuntamiento. It was a non-smoking restaurant - thank you, thank you! And thank you most of all to a super-friendly waiter as he allowed me to use the restaurant's private wireless internet connection.

It went some way towards offsetting the bitter truth, again: the food was mediocre. Pizza generally disappoints anyway, in my experience - all full of sizzle and sinful promise, but as soon as it cools it's just a fatty gunk. We ordered tuna fish. Interestingly, the waiter serves the fish, asks you to look at how well it is cooked and expects you to send it back until it's cooked to your satisfaction. So you get raw, then dry. Salt and pepper and olive oil as table condiments are a rarity, especially black pepper. But again, the people here are so chatty, so naturally friendly, I'll forgive them crap food. Well, not entirely. And why do they switch the coffee machines off so early everywhere? I thought the locals would be supping coffee until late o'clock.

The waiter gives us a recommendation for a cafe with a bit of a Moroccan atmosphere. Interesting decor, lots of added Arab feel, old photos of cities across the water, cushions with tassels and a bit shabby to boot. God knows how it looks when the lights are turned on. Oh, and, what else do you expect in a Moroccan-style cafe - it has a dart board!



A hippy/rasta chap (who turns out to be German going native in the wrong country) showed us a selection of herbal teas in an old wooden box. What we saw was just teabags - the same basic supermarket-type ones, so why the pretentious palaver? Any anyway, we thought we could at least expect a pot of tea served in an ancient Moroccan pot.



Then came the delay - no tea appeared, and twenty minutes later we walked out. Just enough time for us to be choked by the cigarette smoke. I caused a fuss, sat outside on a wet seat and did some exaggerated coughing. This smoking thing is primitive now - Spain, it's time to put the things of your childhood behind you. We slunk sheepishly back through the narrow streets, fearing the waiter would be searching high and low for the customers who did a runner before he had a chance to make his ceremony out of serving us a tea-bag in a cup. Stopping off at the trusty cafe a few doors down from the hotel I was quietly enraged when an Englishman started to smoke a strong roll-up. He was seated in a corner with two young kids at his side who were stuck amidst his poisonous funk. Shouldn't that be a crime - forcing cigarette smoke down kids' lungs?

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