Bar Los Baskos on Ramelleres, Barcelona:

The interior is a curious clash of old CNT/anarchist graphics with neo-fascist skinhead children. I’m not particularly fond of the one or the other, but I quite like the bar. I suppose, not being Spanish, that I could buy it and turn it into a Hayek shrine. Not sure how [...]

“I think the sherry trade could learn a lot from their cousins in Portugal. But of course that’s only if the sherry trade sees any benefit in visitors to their bodegas. I often wonder if they really do.” It’s the old Spanish paradox of shops whose owners seem prepared to go to quite extraordinary lengths [...]

B forgot one in the freezer. I quite like the redesign. Opening it was mildly implosive, nothing like as interesting as a butane canister explosion.

Re John Chappell’s smack toddler, here’s Thomas COW from Bangor, County Down, Northern Ireland singing “Bottle take effect” by Jim Reeves:

There’s a photo out there somewhere of my father helping me drink Guinness out of a bottle, aged 3. I think we’ll be able to pull statute of limitations on that one.
(Via Clinton McClung [...]

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):