The Flavors of Madrid
When in Spain, the Tapas are a MUST. After traveling with my boyfriend’s family around Italy, we made our way to Spain to explore Madrid and Barcelona. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but we got Eurail passes and got a pack of 15 travel days for the first two months and a pack of 10 for the last two months of our study abroad, and that covered us perfectly. For the most part, we didn’t have issues with our passes, because for most public transportation and trains you can just show up and walk on once you activate your pass for the day. The Eurail passes determine “travel days” to be the 24 hour period of the calendar day, and it ends up costing about $28 per day, which is a phenomenal deal for the trains that can cost over 100 euros for a single train. Some of the trains need reservations, though, and that makes the process more difficult. We used a day of travel to get from Madrid to Barcelona, and had to get seat reservations (which cost around $10) the day of only to find that they were sold out for a couple of the early trains we wanted to take. This had never happened, but I guess you need to make reservations in advance when it's busier. This actually happened in Barcelona as well. After we arrived, we thought we’d avoid our mistake and purchase the reservation at the train station a couple of days before we were supposed to leave. Much to our surprise, they were sold out for the rest of the weekend! We had no way to get home to St. Gallen for classes on Monday! We ended up having to buy a flight back, which luckily hadn’t sold out and was very cheap since they were trying to sell more tickets, but I write this as a word of caution to anyone using the Eurail pass - definitely make your reservations more than a couple of hours in advance if you can.
Anyway, back to Tapas. In Madrid, the Tapas can be found everywhere. It was hard to decide where to go. Eater.com is a great source to find amazing restaurants in cities around the world. We have fun wandering and finding good restaurants naturally, but sometimes when you have a limited amount of meals in a city (and a limited amount of money to try places), food recommendations come in handy. We went to a couple of yummy restaurants around town while we were there. Our favorite was Tinto y Tapas in the center of Madrid near the Parque de El Retiro. We ordered a couple of items, including a couple of empanadas, toast, and croquetas.
The empanadas in Spain are IMPECABLE. They’re not the same as empanadas from South America and are made almost like mini calzones with yummy goodness stuffed inside a buttery, flakey, bread casing. The “toast” that they serve there is phenomenal as well. They put various toppings on their toast to make it almost like a mini pizza but not taste anything like pizza, for example the one pictured had this tomato sauce and goat cheese with a balsamic drizzle. The croquetas were also a hit at all the places we tried them. We stuck to cheese renditions and ham and cheese combos and were satisfied with both. The pure cheese are great for a gourmet mozzarella stick vibe. Out of all of the tapas though, I definitely will be dreaming about the empanadas when I’m back in the states.
Bis zum nächsten mal!
Kara