Zaragoza: Introductions

 We stayed at the Eurostars Zaragoza hotel basically our first week in Spain. Zaragoza is in northeastern Spain, on the main highway between the central capital Madrid and the Barcelona on the eastern coast.

I took a backpacking trip through western Europe after graduating college, and apart from where to stay (which Currie planned for), the first obstacle in a new place is finding food that makes sense and you feel good about eating. I'm lactose intolerant now too, so no pizza for me.

So that first night - as we did our best to keep ourselves awake to get accustomed to our new time zone, and my ears were clogged from the air travel - we urged ourselves out to explore the streets of Zaragoza to find something to eat.

The good news is that Zaragoza is far more pedestrian a city than I'm used to. Wide sidewalks and plentiful crosswalks - which are 99% respected by motorists - make traversing the city on foot quite manageable and often pleasurable. There are also clearly marked bike routes throughout town, up off the street, making the sidewalks even wider. (We saw city bicycle rental stations as well, though more people - mostly teens - were on electric scooters than bicycles.)

So we weaved our way through the neighborhood adjacent the Zaragoza-Delicias train station where our hotel was situated (that being the neighborhood of Delicias), and we scouted out the restaurants. Part of our adaptation to what is to be our new home, coming from living mostly in the suburbs, is getting used to city life itself. So in this case, the restaurants were tight little affairs on the inside, but with many outdoor tables and chairs on  - did I mention the wide sidewalks? - for neighbors or passersby to socialize and enjoy the evening.

By the way, dinner starts in earnest around 9:00pm in Spain (or 21:00), so we were probably a little ahead of the evening rush there, but not by too much. That said, there were many pairs or groups enjoying the evening air - sipping beers, sometimes smoking, and munching on the salted sunflower seeds and shelled peanuts typically provided. And chatting away!

Many of the restaurants are called Bars by the way, which they are, but they also serve coffee in the morning (and throughout the day, particularly after dinner), so don't let the name fool you.

As Currie mentioned, I hadn't eaten much (though there was a ham sandwich at the train station - and ham is a whole other topic, which I've provided a link** for below). The family was largely deferring to me to make the decision as to what to have for dinner. 

We ultimately decided on a bar that had people sitting there (past the empty one with pizza and burgers), and we shared a large plate of shrimp fried rice. (Not very Spanish I know, but we paid in euros, so that has to count for something.) Currie had a beer with lemon, which remains the best beer she's had in Spain to date. (We have to go back and see which brand it was, because there have been other lemon beers not as good. BTW - the beer has a generally lower alcohol content, brewed for sipping a few outside with friends/family). It was good! Fried rice hit the spot.

Then on the way back to the hotel, just before 9:30pm - because that's when the shop closed - we got a few nuts and fruits and snacks for the hotel. August bought a frozen treat for the walk home.

Then we showered and went to bed. Little did we know a 25,000 step day of exploration awaited us.... 

*Not a lot of pictures in this post because we were exhausted.

**Introduction to Spanish Ham, not that I knew this at the time: https://spanishsabores.com/all-about-spanish-ham/