Santiago - Another Day of Sun

Santiago de la Compostela
Tuesday March 17, 2015

Coffee and Tea

Breakfast Tapas

After another great night sleep in our hotel - we got up and went out for a long walk.  We're both trying to keep up as much activity as we can since Cathy's had her surgery and I'm still trying to get in shape.  With the amount of wine and food we're drinking and eating, it's best to keep moving.  So we went on our route as the hotel suggested; though the main square and down to the park and around and up the hills and back towards the hotel.  We found a great little coffee shop that had breakfast for just a few euros - coffee with hot milk, a croissant, and fresh squeezed orange juice.   The orange juice is delicious and we were having it about every other day.  One thing that is weird is that they serve their orange juice with sugar.  If we had consumed each sugar pack that they had given to us with our coffee and our orange juice our teeth would fall out from decay.  The barrista remembered us and dropped a couple of churros (freshly fried pastry) on our plates for us to take too.  He tried to get us to try the hot chocolate, but we figured that would be at another time.  Little did we know it would be about an hour and half later when we went by the marketplace and it was buzzing with action.

A Smiling Piggy

Marketplace

The marketplace had come to life with the multitude of fish that you could not imagine.  The reputation for their seafood in this area of Spain is well deserved.  Fish that looked straight from a horror movie and ready to exact revenge were laid out across beds of ice and lettuce.  Joining them on their revenge would be the pigs, rabbits, and various fowl that had come to the show.  It was a vegetarian's nightmare, or a gourmet's dream.  Around the outer part were rogue vendors with clothes and vegetables without booths.  We moved to the side to watch the action at Bar Radio, where we were convinced to try some churros and chocolate.

Thick & Hot Chocolate

We haven't had them since a previous trip in 2011.  Imagine the chocolate is the consistency of pudding and it is very hot.  It is constantly moving in the Chocolate Machine to keep it from forming a pudding skin on it.  This is
served in a cup to be drank, eaten, dipped, or however you want to finish it with the churros.  The chocolate is the flavor of those chocolate lava cakes - deep and rich and full of flavor.  I'd place it between a sweet milk chocolate and a dark chocolate bar.  The churros are flash fried like doughnuts at a fair, but like crinkle cut fries, they have edges that crisp up and turn golden brown.  You can get the churros with sugar, or plain, or even dipped in flavors.

Our Favorite Tapa

We continued to do post cards and update the blog information and take notes on our trip.  We discussed how good the tapas, or pinxtos in Gallego, were for us at the O'Bispo tapa bar.  It was so clean and well lighted that it made us want to go back.  Even more so, we wanted to split one of those cheese sticks with crushed almonds and blackberry sauce one more time.  So we did.  We started there and spoke with the guy who recommended the pinxtos to try.  He moved us up on a couple of wines and for just like 50 cents more than the 2.50 - all the way to 3 euros.  We left there and went down just a couple of doors to a fun looking place that had been filled with people earlier nights.  We had a split a burger and a mixed ceasar salad.  The salad was swimming with anchovies and was full of flavor.  The burger was made from veal, so it had a different texture that what we expected.  We both were so full from the food we couldn't even think of anything else.  Well, except we did have a bottle of Rias Baixes wine called EB6.  Really pleasant and stood up to both the meat and the strong fish.

While walking around, we met a woman who was running a wine store and asked her for advice to visit a winery in the area.  She recommended without hesitation the original maker of Albariño at Bodegas del Palacio Fefiñanes in Combados.  So we sent off an e-mail and this evening we received a response that the could meet us for a tour the next day at 4:00 PM.  So we went to bed after downloading directions to Combados from Santiago - which was only a just an hour away.