A few weeks ago when Cynthia and I were getting non-metal knitting needles on Newbury Street for her plane flight (since the Transportation Authority's website still said that baggage screeners could take away your knitting needles if they felt like it), we passed a little restaurant with the words "Tapas" and "Sangria" on the windows, which caused Cynthia to run around in circles with excitement for a while. And so it happened that just a few nights ago I found myself there with both my old roommates ordering about half a dozen little appetizers. Tapas is one of those Spanish words that I will never forget since I learned it in roughly Chapter 2 of my first year of Spanish -- it means small dishes, like snacks or appetizers. The menu at this restaurant was, of course, not in Spanish, and it offered all kinds of things that I never learned how to say in Spanish at any level -- for instance, the rabbit and duck which turned out to be Cynthia's and Maggie's choices. But my dismay at their unusual animal dishes completely faded away when the waiter brought out my patatas bravas, looking just exactly like they always did in the pictures in the Spanish textbooks. I always chose them whenever we had those Spanish class conversations in which we had to order ourselves food, and I always wondered what they tasted like. Now, roughly ten years later, they were sitting in front of me. And they were delicious.

In other news, I called Cynthia later on to tell her that I had found a tapas bar much closer to my apartment that we should go to sometime. Unfortunately she misheard me and thought I said "topless bar". But that is another story entirely.