Spain

Only a few days into our trip and fresh from our stay in a decent pension in Santiago it happened to be our 10 year anniversary!! Being on a quickly organised 4 month holiday on our way back home we didn't have too much time to organise anything too extravagant, so Rishi researched the best Paradors (Historic building hotels) for the area of Spain that we would be in, and it happened to be in a beautiful walled Roman town, Lugo
The accommodation was exactly our style, not to over the top, and was only opened this year

The room was great with a huge surprise of having a 42" plasma on the wall!

All the staff were super friendly and our stay was exactly what we wanted
The town was reasonably large for a walled Roman town and the walls are still almost entirely intact, but unfortunately most of the houses inside the walls haven fallen into disrepair and many have been knocked down, the area of our Hotel was the most intact and there were quite a few beautiful old buildings being renovated

Most of the most impressive old buildings had been converted into museums in the early 20th century by wealthy locals, this museum was a real highlight with a broad collection of local antiquities and even modern artwork.

Rishi was delighted to find and unusual self serve pop corn machine in the old town!

We stayed one night in luxury in our Parador, so to really enjoy ourselves we found the best restaurant in town and had a great meal
Rishi had the Merlurza(Hake) which is a great local fish in Spain

And I had the Lubina (Sea Bass) which I was warned when I ordered was done in a special style consisting of a very! creamy sauce (very indulgent!)

The meals were great, but the dessert was the real highlight, unfortunately no photos as I was too shocked to get the camera in time. But Rishi had a Delicious speciality of a crepe like thing stuffed with some sort of house made triple cream which is then warmed up again, very creamy.
But I had the flaming Leche Frita which is basically fried milk, but this speciality was then flamed with brandy, the waiter was quite excited about it and set up his little tray and brandy in front of us (with the rest of the restaurant also watching) he then poured the flaming brandy over and spooned it around to flame it right up and kept pouring more, and then got a bit too cocky and spilt the flaming branding down his arm! luckily it burns at a low heat! but he ran of to what I assumed would be to rinse his arm off but came back in about 1 second with a cloth to wipe up what he had spilt, but after a smile I was sure that he was ok and I was safe to eat my dessert!
It was a memorable evening!

Its kind of ironic, but we are starting our journey home from the end of the pilgrammage route (el camino) through Spain, Santiago de Compostela.

We were both pretty excited to be heading back to Spain, a country we have visited many times during our trips (mostly at my insistance I must admit). As soon as we got off the plane I was grinning at the prospect of getting to practice my Spanish on a daily basis. The fact that it was a beautiful, clear, sunshiny day helped a lot too! Santiago is a beautiful city. We quickly managed to find a great little pension run by a very friendly lady and settled in for some sight seeing and eating!

this is the view from our window:

Being in Santiago our first stop was the famous cathedral, which really is very beautiful

Our other major task for our stop was to sample the seafood! Galicia (North-west corner of Spain) is famous for its seafood, and in particular the octopus. We found plenty of pulperias around town, it was just a matter of finding the best one!

To start the night off right we had to have our first caña (beer) which in Galicia is acompanied by huge amounts of FREE tapas

which can lead to people going a little crazy..... the beer is really cheap

We eventually made it to this great pulperia:

which had excellent pulpo!

and after several tapa stops we found these great street buskers with heaps of people dancing right infront of the cathedral!

I think we started the trip off pretty well, though our heads and bodies complained a little about it the next day :-) Thanks Santiago for a fun two night stay! On with the pilgrammage!