Sushi

Tonight I went out for sushi with Joanna to Barri Gotic. A couple days ago I read a letter to the editor about how bad the neighborhood is - drug addicts lying in all the gutters, drunks vomiting, etc, so I felt really safe walking around with Joanna in the middle of the night overhearing conversations about which of someone's friends has money.

We got to the sushi restaurant and it was totally full, reservation only. It's tiny and one of the only sushi restaurants in the city. We managed to get a barstool and they let me stand while Joanna sat. After a little while, the couple sitting next to us asked the waitress for the check (in English). She didn't understand them and asked me to translate. I like to think of this as step one of her warming up to us (up until then she had seemed very unpleased with our standing/sitting formation).

She then proceeded to take forever to get our order in, after we stole a stool from the couple. (Note: when she took our order, she just handed me a piece of paper and had me write down what I wanted since she didn't have time for us. She didn't make anyone else in the bar do this. This was pre-translating help time.)

We spent an hour or so waiting for sushi, a food that is usually immediately available, which is especially great because Joanna stayed home sick today and all she had eaten was a croissant. When they did bring food out, they would only bring out things that I had ordered, which Joanna didn't want to eat since she didn't want to risk getting sicker by eating fish (she stuck to veggie/soup based dishes).

By the end of the meal, we weren't too full, and we had been in the restaurant for what felt like years. We were about to leave, when the waitress told us the two guys sitting at the table closest to us had sent over some sake. Turns out it was the guy that Joanna had kept staring at because she was fascinated by how gay he was and I kept accidentally staring at when looking longingly toward where the food comes from. He was a little too old for us, but wasn't bad looking. His friend, on the other hand, was not looking too good. I'm pretty sure he was shorter than me, and his hair was going pretty fast.

They tried to convince us to come out to a bar with them (the bar was supposedly "chulo," but when older people drop words that mean cool it freaks me out a little). We ended up leaving and not going to the bar. For the record, this is the first time in Barcelona anyone has bought us drinks AND asked us out.

Also, I took a picture of a guy playing violin in the metro on the way back!