10-16: First Kvetch

It took only one week this time for Plot to start complaining about the food. He and Duck passed by a McDonald's in the square in Toledo this morning, looked at each other and walked in and grabbed two Big Macs. They are already deathly sick of Spanish food.

There is one restaurant in Madrid and one in Toledo. They have hundreds of branches, different names, different decor, different pricing. But they all serve the same food. They're proud of it, probably because it goes great with cigarettes. It's not bad the first two or four or six nights, but this is the city of Goya with the restaurants of an Andy Warhol soup can.

You can have ten restaurants in a row, next door to each other, and they might as well share one kitchen. They have two vegetables in Madrid, mushrooms and beer. Add wilty iceberg lettuce and you have "salad."

There has to be a Chinatown somewhere, but they will probably serve tapas and beer. This is what happens to a country when you kick out the Jews and Arabs and don't have any black people or Latinos.

The photos are of yesterday's lunch, which was tasty, if gloopy: gloopy meat with gloopy fries, a strange plate of bread crumbs sauteed with bread served with a side of bread and you think I'm kidding; mushrooms with gloopy eggs, two great desserts and a jug of wine.

Plottie asks for "salsa brava" at every meal and they bring him a bottle of Tabasco so crusty he can barely unscrew the cap. The Royal Palace is thick with stolen New World gold and silver but they should have hired some Mexicans and Peruvians to work in the kitchen.

Of course, we've only been here a week. At some point, our insides will get used to using beer as ruffage.

And we're going to Barcelona tomorrow, which is closer to France.