Our entrance is barred by a little man with a beret and a moustache:
–You know this isn’t a bar?
–Of course!
–No problem then, I’ll get the landlady.
Later, in conversation with the landlady:
–Aren’t you worried by the EU ban on making your own vermouth?
–If this isn’t a bar then why the fuck would we be making our [...]

The mayor of Agón, Aragón, “sick of extreme nationalism”, on the transfer of water from the Ebro to Barcelona. The underlying point being made by him and others in this, the latest episode in the Iberian Water Wars, is actually fair enough: aware of declining water resources, Barcelona’s “eco-warrior” council planned for unsustainable growth in [...]

Wood ants descending rapidly en masse from a Quercus ilex on Montseny at the onset of a sharp shower:

Having spent several decades standing under trees waiting for the rain to stop, it is my firm belief that small ants do not flee from the rain as do big ones, although their level of activity [...]

When I’m in Barcelona we often go and have a Sunday lunchtime beer on a bar terrace near Park Güell, ethnic Andalusian with scatterings of La Mancha and the Maghreb. The other day there was a new guy, well-dressed, which is uncommon here, and reading El país, which is even less usual. I’ve never heard [...]

Stricken by Barcelona belly, I’ve been trying out this 19th century cholera cure. It’s better with rice, but I’m still surprised more people didn’t die. (Sublimated sulphur is used by modern-day lepers, says the chemist, so that wasn’t a problem.)

Sylvain Gouguenheim’s ‘“Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel” (Editions du Seuil), while not contending there is an ongoing clash of civilizations, makes the case that Islam was impermeable to much of Greek thought, that the Arab world’s initial translations of it to Latin were not so much the work of “Islam” but of Aramaeans and Christian Arabs, [...]

Coverage of the Barcelona water crisis in yesterday’s Vanguardia was a standard victimist litany:

Our consumption per capita is low compared to other cities.
We have reduced consumption per capita significantly
It is like SO unfair that we’re all going to have to roll around in sand to get clean this summer.

I think the comparative stats quoted are [...]

They don’t screw around with it like the brand marketeers do. Fact #6 from a good post by Ryan Opaz helps us understand why a sizeable proportion of new Spanish wine is toxic piss: “Oak aged wines that come in under 10euros/dollars/pounds are 9.9 times out of ten flavored with chips/oak slats/oak tea bags. ‘Aged [...]

They think that patxaran is wine. (Link via JPQ)

A little experiment. Please tell me:

Bar / restaurant / hotel name
Street address, including number
Price (if there are different prices for bar/table/terrace, please specify)
Any other comments

Responses for as many establishments as you want:

Your email:

Bar name:

Bar address:

Café con leche price:

Comments:

We’ve been outed by a couple of publications, so here’s the why/where/when for any readers of this blog who want to come along:
La Hermandad “Pippi Kortkjol” invita a amigos, compañeros, y luchadores de anteriores y actuales jornadas a participar en la Romería Tradicional de La Primera Sueca, que este año se realizará el día sábado [...]

Mona:

(I once met a Tangier man who claimed to own a Barbary ape called Lisa, but let’s not go there, or here either.)
Copywriters have moved on since Darwin was alleged to have said, “It’s the best, science says so and I’m not lying”:

I use the sweet version of Anis del Mono in pastry cooking. Drinking [...]

Re this, some results. The comments in Dutch are grossly libellous, so don’t even try to translate them. I finally managed to get the mitre on my head–Spanish bishops don’t have much between their ears–but the only way the beard would stay on was to jam it over my nose with half of it in [...]

This old bar in Badalona appears to be named after someone who doesn’t have a second surname or a business partner (there’s no room for a second word, so it can’t have been painted out) but who uses the conjunction anyway. I don’t see what’s wrong with being a brazen lover of conjunctions. They are [...]

The name is actually rather interesting. There’s a rule in standard Spanish that says that y is substituted by e before words beginning with i or hi, except when y forms the beginning of an exclamation or question, and except before words beginning with y or hie. However, I’ve never heard of a corresponding rule [...]

The Catalan public authorities have a well-publicised horror of signs using Spanish, but the language police don’t seem to have found this one yet, which, in an exemplary display of bilingualism, has the name in both standard Spanish (Los Cuñados, The Siblings-in-Law) and one of the southern dialects (Los Cuñaos):

I’ve always kind of wondered whether this is kind of tribute to blue jeans/bleu de Gênes, but I’ve never had the courage to ask, mainly because if I’m wrong they’re going to think I’m fucking crazy.

Ooh, wouldn’t one like to be on the committee of geologists and historians advising which villages (French only, of course: what else is the EU about?) get to be added to the list of champagne producers! Although you’ve got to be slightly crazy to drink some of the donkey piss turned out by the French, [...]

Re new figures on the consequences of binge drinking in England: J&A tell that the performance of the British in Andorra since the 80s has been so impressive that the first test performed on all subjects of HM admitted to hospital there is a liver scan.

For a while it sounded like Morse machine being boiled alive, something which probably hasn’t happened for quite a long time, and for sure it’s a terrible thing to be doing anyway. (You may need to turn up the sound. I’m using YouTube and accepting its lack of editing facilities because, like various other [...]

A rebujito is a dry sherry (manzanilla, fino) or occasionally a white wine to which fizz (lemonades, …) has been added, typically in a ratio of 1:2, in order to give you a head-start on the alcohol. This is the lite version of whichever British drink it is that has you knock back a third [...]

Someone must be able to do better than this.

Quiet mountain road, chilly evening. The Guardia Civil do an ID and vehicle document check and then ask us to get out. GC1 takes a couple of paces back, while
GC2: OK, we’re going to do a thorough check of you and the car for estupi … estupe … estupefacientes.
M, also happier with common parlance: Estupi [...]

Spanish wine producers have caught the marketing bug, which usually goes hand in hand with pouring loads of oak chips into the barrel to make you so ill that you don’t notice that the product is basically mediocre. This particular new bodega investment is wasted on me since I can’t remember whose it is, [...]

The pic is by MM, who has heard that this Nuremberg watering hole has nothing to do with Barcelona or even Celona. The Flash on the site is gruesome, so that may be the connection. Next wannahave: a photo of Somerset’s pride, FC Bathelona.
(Update: Ponz@Bloguras says that he prefers McDonald’s to English “tapas”.)

Full points to Mr Antonio Navarro, who wanted nothing more than a peaceful beer in a brothel. (Via Absurd Diari) (I am saving my commas for a more appreciative audience.)

Amando de Miguel says it owes its name to the colour of Capuchin friars’ habits, both concrete and abstract–apparently they were notorious sybarites. I find the colour hypothesis slightly unconvincing, but it’s confirmed here. Evidence of their bizarre taste in this serendipitous find, a description by Nathaniel Parker Willis (Summer cruise in the Mediterranean on [...]

To take a stage version of a mad Ukrainian novel to Edinburgh this summer (budget here). If I had the money, the time and the talent, I’d try to buy myself the part of Junkie.

Arthur Kenyon in Letters from Spain (GBS), in an otherwise standard mid-19th century account of the sherry trade in Jerez (“Zeres”), writes:
A good deal of the wine makes a voyage to India and back before it is mixed in the way I have described and sent to England.
Maybe the guys over Catavino will be able [...]

Bowman Ales have got their feeds working now, so if they just enable comments people will be able to read posts and write wonderful things about them without shifting from their, ahem, WiFi-enabled bench.

Captain Al Cohol (via Papel Continuo; more superheroes) has nothing to do with Al Pernales. I’d hate to think how long it is since I was last ravaged by a bare