Always Learning: Language, Bread and Candy

The other night we went out to dinner at a restaurant not far from the hotel. We were hoping to have a quick dinner and go to sleep at a decent time (11pm). This is hoping for a lot as we have found that you need to plan triple the time in Spain for anything we go out and do. It is a wonderful aspect of the culture but does not always work for every situation. Anyway, we got to the Restaurant and sat down, the waitress politely asks if we would like an English Menu and we say "no, aprendamos Espanol" which means we are learning Spanish and then of course we continued on with "menu en Espanol por favor" ( I am sure you can figure that one out). The menus arrive and we start to read them.... but nothing seems to be clicking. We can usually figure things out but this was just impossible. We keep asking each other questions like "What do you think "amb" is? Lamb? Wow if that that is true they only serve Lamb. Maybe it means "and", that seems to fit..." After about 10 minutes of this we figure out the menu was in Catalan which is a version of Spanish only spoken in this region. We then asked our waitress "humbly" for the English menu and decide we had better just try to tackle Spanish before learning Catalan.

After ordering they bring a bread tray by list off our choices of bread, we choose and lo and behold along with our choice comes this piece of candy. My first reaction is "Wow that is cool! Candy with my bread!" I pick it up squish the candy (it gives a little) Jonathan does the same and we both put it aside and dive into the bread. We talk about how interesting it is to get candy this early in the meal and what an interesting aspect of the culture. Both really trying to understand what kind of candy it is while never opening the wrapper. I think it is a soft "fig" candy, Jonathan thinks it is something else. So we finish dinner and are getting ready to leave when Jonathan decides to eat his candy......he gently opens the wrapper and is about to pop the contents into his mouth when he realizes it's not candy it is a tiny baby salami! Ah, now it all makes sense.... salami / bread ...... bread and salami....we get it. Oh the lessons we continue to learn......