One week in Vegetarian Madrid
I just got back from a week in Madrid. I didn’t read anything about it before leaving (didn’t even buy a guidebook) and thus wasn’t sure what to expect. I certainly didn’t expect the huge metropolis that I found. Madrid reminded me a lot of New York City–tall buildings, lots of people and traffic, great metro system, millions of shops and restaurants…. The main differences seemed to be that Madrilenos eat dinner at 10:30 at night, and speak Spanish. I think Madrid would be a fun city to live in, but it was a bit overwhelming as a tourist destination, at least for a tourist as unprepared as I was.
Before leaving for Spain, I had read a bit about the cuisine. I mostly found webpages complaining about how veggie unfriendly the country is. I even found one page that claimed that Spain was voted the second worst country for vegetarians to travel in, after Mexico. Supposedly meat and/or fish are in everything. I don’t know if Madrid is different than the rest of the country, but I found the veggie-options to be better than I expected. I was lucky enough to travel mostly with Spanish speakers, which definitely helped. I never ended up being served anything that had any meat or fish in it (at least to my knowledge). Read the rest of this entry »
The captious vegetarian 