Spain Day 4: Jerez

We wake up and get some breakfast at the hotel, which consists of mostly ham, because we have forgotten the lessons of the previous day very quickly in the presence of more ham. After eating our delicious future regrets, we review the plans for the day:

1. Walk around Jerez
2. Look at stuff

Feeling sufficiently overloaded with an itinerary, we set off to try to fit in all of our activities.

Teapots, guns, and other essentials.

Authentic Spanish art.

As we wander, we remember that we actually do have one more thing to add to the itinerary. Anyone who knows me knows that the last time I traveled to Spain, I was cheated out of a churro, mostly because I will tell anyone who will listen, like a vegan at a barbecue, THIS IS CENTRAL TO EVERY INTERACTION THAT YOU UNDERSTAND THIS ABOUT ME.

Anyway, the story goes thus: We came to Jerez, and there was a marvelous kiosk in the center of the town that had an old man making fresh churros. The smell of freshly crisped dough evoked a happiness reserved only for Golden Retrievers at tennis ball factories. My eyes filled with tears, my heart swelled, but the line was long, and I considered if I would have enough time to get a churro before we had to leave, and as I considered, I was pulled aside to enter the mercado, and when I returned to the churro kiosk, my mind made up to brave the line and eat all the churros, the magical kiosk was shuttered and closed. Then it wavered like a mirage and flew into the sky, never to be seen again, and perhaps having never existed at all.

That last part didn’t really happen. It is just always present in my CONSTANT NIGHTMARES ABOUT NEVER GETTING A CHURRO.

Much of our trip was planned to retrieve this churro and stop the night terrors that have plagued me ever since, because my life is hard and the trials I face are many. We wander up the streets, not bothering to consult maps but walking based on the pull of my heart only, and eventually, we come upon a sight I thought I would never see again:

Like a heavenly boob.

Right where I left it, in the center of town, is the churro stand with the old man flipping churros. In a rare case of reality exceeding expectations, in my dreams there was only one churro stand and one churro man. In reality, there are TWO churro stands and two churro men, standing together, timeless in their pursuit of greatness, flipping churros like hardened warriors who fend off enemies back to back, only instead of fending off enemies they are delighting them, and instead of using swords they are sticking people in the face with fried dough sticks. 

I bask in the beauty of what I have come upon, but it is early, and Dan and I decide to satisfy Requirement #2 in our Very Important Plan and look around the square a bit before settling into our churro heaven. We walk around and look at things, and they are all very nice things, and then our bellies are ready to receive greatness, so we return to the churro kiosk to enjoy what is most certainly the best thing that will ever happen to me including the births of any children that I ever have, whom I will most definitely remind at every turn that they are great and all, but one time I had a churro in Spain so clean your damn room.

We make the left turn to get back to the square, and I am basically sliding towards the kiosk on a river of drool and I see its magical boob in the distance and then my eyes adjust to the sunlight and 

It.

Is.

CLOSED.

Dan quickly reminds me that we have two more weeks in Jerez, to prevent me from falling to my knees and trying to tear up the cobblestones and throw them at the very-shuttered churro stand, because we have fallen victim to the same thing that happened last time, which is that store horarios are pretty loose in Jerez, and when things are open and when they are closed is really dependent on how people are feeling that day, it seems to us, which I maintain is much better for the satisfaction of life of the shop owners, but much less better for the satisfaction of life for people who want churros 24/7.

To cheer me up, Dan buys me a rose from the flower market next to the churro stand, and he is so sweet that I shovel all my feelings back down into the dark pits I keep them in (the one labeled Desire for Desserts is the biggest pit) and we decide to go get something else to eat.

“I shall name his Squishy and he shall be my Squishy.”

Everywhere in Jerez are signs denoting ‘Hay Caracoles!’ and they have a friendly drawing of a snail next to them, and the snail always looks so happy we decide we should definitely eat his face off, because the lack of churros has made me a heartless beast who needs to consume the happiness of small animals. The only issue is that we have absolutely zero ideas how to eat these, so for the first few minutes we fumble around like dumb otters trying to crack shells on other otter bellies because I know these open somehow but how? HOW?!

Luckily, an old Spanish man comes along and sits at the table next to us, and rescues me from my stupidity by ordering some caracoles and picking them up and rapidly sucking the little suckers right out of their shells. He is halfway through his cup while we have barely removed two caracoles from their little tiny houses that are also the scenes of their own little tiny murders (the resale values are just through the floor). We realize there is a Better Way, and take to aggressively sucking the snails out with a gusto reserved for any activity that isn’t sucking snails out of their shells.

Horrific image of a snail village genocide.

We return home, full of entire civilizations of smaller lifeforms and also some sherry, and take full advantage of the siesta culture. I long suspected that I was a person made for siestas, and this first day in Jerez confirms it: I am the queen of naps and also naps are essential to a well-rounded adult life. We wake up ready to attack the evening, and exit our hotel once more, heading for the plaza where most of the restaurants are clustered. We follow this person, cuz she seems to know where she is going.

Always trust a lady who gets 20 men to carry her places.

We wander by some restaurants that have lots of people sitting outside, and then decide to try the restaurant with no people sitting outside, Tala Bar, because what do people know anyway?

So much room for activities.

The answer is a lot, because this place is fine, which puts it seventy stars ahead of anything that we get home. Because we deem the food just fine, we decide to move on to another tapas place, to have more tapas, because the beauty of tapas is that you can have tapas, and then have other tapas, and then more tapas, until you are drunk on tapas and also wine and also you are dying but you assume it’s from the walking and not from the mass amounts of tapas.

Our death walking takes us to a restaurante, where we quickly realize that at restaurants you order food, and not tapas, but we are American and very fancy so we order an appetizer to split and give them an expired coupon and talk about how much better our country is than everyone else’s. The server stares at us when we order a single appetizer and two drinks, and asks, “Algo mas?” We say no gracias and he continues to stare at us, then walks away. After a moment, another server comes up and confirms, “Algo mas?” And we say no gracias again and he stares at us again and walks away, and we smile happily for communicating perfectly in Spanish and letting these folks know we are tourists who are determined to eat every croqueta in the city, no matter the strange situations that allow for it.

After our wonderful journey of tapas, we figure we should get one more thing to round out the evening, and by now we have drank quite a few glasses of wine, and reading signs has gone out the window, so we enter another tapas bar and order a small plate of delicious tapas.

Figure 1: Not tapas.

Because we are hoping to invent a new way to seal our insides with meat, we order more ham tapas, only to find that we have inadvertently entered some sort of steak house where the small plates we are used to are actually the entire side of a pig. We decide that as we live by ham, we shall die by ham. It is a fitting death for people who can’t read or understand the country of Spain.

Lessons Learned in Spain:

     4. Don’t eat all the ham
     5. Read the names of places because they might be steak houses
     6. EAT THE CHURROS WHEN YOU HAVE THE CHANCE

Bonus gif of me asking Dan to take a picture of me next to a statue and being very good at posing for it: