During my time in Madrid, I had great testing grounds for my then-new digital camera. One night, a few of my colleagues and I ventured out into the city for a tapas crawl.
Tapas has a long history in Spain, with various tales of its origins. Some credit Spanish liquor laws that required a little bit of food to be served alongside alcoholic drinks. Others claim the small plates were placed on top of drinks to make it easier for servers to carry without spilling or to keep flies from sampling the local brew. Somehow the mystique of the tradition's origins adds to its allure.
Essentially, every tapas bar will have its own menu, but will tend to specialize in one or two particular dishes. We started our journey around 8:30 in the evening, still early by Madrid standards, and made our way through the downtown streets in search of Serrano ham, blood sausages, shrimp, and just about any other local delicacies that we could find.
Along the way, we met up with another colleague also out for the evening; he joined our group, which we realized was perhaps that most eclectic and international blend of cultures and languages we'd each been a part of: representing the US, Spain, Canada, New Zealand, Argentina, the Dominican Republic; speaking a few varieties of English, Spanish, Russian, and Japanese; we ended our evening with an invitation-only after-hours gathering in our final watering hole.
Earlier in the evening, we'd sampled the house sausage, house wine, and house bread at our third locale of the night. The composition of the shot captures the simplicity of the meal, but the visual as a whole evokes a flood of memories that perfectly captures that entire experience:
Tapas has a long history in Spain, with various tales of its origins. Some credit Spanish liquor laws that required a little bit of food to be served alongside alcoholic drinks. Others claim the small plates were placed on top of drinks to make it easier for servers to carry without spilling or to keep flies from sampling the local brew. Somehow the mystique of the tradition's origins adds to its allure.
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| 4am in a Madrid taxi |
Earlier in the evening, we'd sampled the house sausage, house wine, and house bread at our third locale of the night. The composition of the shot captures the simplicity of the meal, but the visual as a whole evokes a flood of memories that perfectly captures that entire experience:
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