El Mercado de San Miguel, a very popular weekend marketplace in Madrid… quality food and beverages, a beautiful iron building, excellent seafood tapas!

Right next to La Casa de Bacalao is the bar where we usually get our beers. Their specialty seems to be huge prawns.

Afterwards we went to catch the Chinese New Year celebrations in Plaza de España, which included awful hip-hop dancing and the token white man singing songs in Chinese. Still, it was probably the first time I’ve seen so many Chinese people at once in the center of Madrid.

To continue the festivities we went to a Chinese restaurant in Bilbao that specialized in noodles. The guy at the bar puts on a show of making the noodles.

This is probably the most I’ve ever done for Chinese New Year, not including all those years when they made us sing and dance for the annual show in grade school. When you’re abroad, the things that make you different and that have defined you on the sidelines back at home suddenly leap into the foreground. You point at things and say, “That’s how my family does it…that’s what we eat, how we celebrate” and the Spanish marvel and gobble up the fresh egg tarts.