Annie D. Asked, “What’s the one thing you like here that you don’t like at home?” That’s hard for me because home is somewhere I like more than anywhere else. It took some thinking.
As I started in on my second package of salami in a sitting the answer dawned on me. Food!
Roció took me out looking for food one night in Pamplona. The menu was all in Basque-Spanish. Roció did all the talking. When our feast arrived everything looked disgusting.
Blood sausage in a bowl. Rocío thought I needed some meat on my bones so that was what I got. Octopus wedges was the first choice of our friend Esterr. Roció received a steaming plate of black goo.
After gulping down as much blood sausage as I could stomach I became desperate to try anything else. “Want to try my squid?” Asked Roció.
“HUH?”
“Oh don’t be a child.”
Roció passed me the plate of black goo.
“Why’s it black?”
“That’s the squid ink that they cook it in.”
Yuck. I bit in.
“I’m pretty sure I can taste its brain.”
“Oh shush it’s good.”
The squid tasted like what a fish’s butt must taste like. I informed the girls that I would not be trying any more squid.
“Come on let’s go out to the bar!” said Roció after finishing off the last off the squid.
“But I’m in my pajamas!”
The girls were already walking out the door.
A Spanish gay bar at 11:00 in your pajamas is only a good situation if you’re a certain type of person. The naked man on the wall with a telephone chord wrapped around his junk could have just been modern art. The holographic penises hanging from the ceiling were the dead giveaway. Loudly dressed Pamplona locals jostled up against us and Roció and I grinned at each other as I asked her what on earth we were doing there.
The answer to Annie’s question is this: everything here can be a little adventure, even the food. At home my Friday night pizza rarely leads to a night on the town in a medieval city. Roció is hosting me in Madrid in June and our first adventure together began over a plate of black goo.