Thousands
of tourists from Euro-land and the UK Pound Sterling-land flood the
shops and restaurants in Barcelona en masse in August. The US dollar
is pitifully weak compared to the very nicely valued Euro and even more
lucrative UK Pound Sterling. The bulk of tourists here earn salaries
in either Euros or Pounds and seem to have an endless amount of
discretionary money to spend by the shopping, dining and drinking
behavioral observations we make day and night. The economic laws of
supply and demand, and the sheer emphasis on "demand" here at this time
of the year mean that restaurants have more customers than they could
ever supply with goods and service. That imbalance, coupled with the
fact that gratuity is automatically included in the bill, lends itself
to shoddy, sub-par and often arrogant service. It's not just sub-par,
we've found restaurant staff outright rude.
After
having traveled all night from Egypt, arriving at 6:00 a.m., and not
being able to check into our apartment until 10:00, we look to find a
café to hang out at for a cup of coffee, and a seat to rest our weary
bodies. We sit at a very prominent restaurant on Las Ramblas and the
waiter guy refuses to acknowledge us. So I go up to ask him, in
Spanish, if we could see a menu. He tells me there are no menus. So
Darrin asks if we can get some coffee in English. The man, visibly
annoyed to have to serve us retorts, "This is a restaurant, if you
don't tell me what language you speak I do not know if you're French,
German, Italian, Portuguese, and I will not serve you." So I say to
him in Spanish, "I just spoke with you in spanish, so I am speaking
your language, and would expect you could respond with service, in your
native language." We pick up our heavy bags and move on down the road
to another restaurant, where we go in, get our $15 croissant and two
cafe con leche, and sit out on the street side café to wait for our
room to open up.
Another
wonderful experience, at 11:50 p.m., we finally sit down at a
street-side café, after waiting 30 minutes for a table to free up,
small enough to warrant them seating the three of us. We decide to
order two paellas to share along with two one-litre huge glasses of
sangria for the tree of us. Actually, quite a big volume of food and
drink for us at this late hour. The waiter takes our order and comes
back five minutes later to say that unless we order three large
servings of everything - sangria and paella, he will not serve or seat
us. So we up and leave. It's a similar experience walking into
several other places. Some we can't even get to acknowledge our desire
to be seated, despite going right up to them in person to ask. They
rudely ignore the fact that we're even there - don't even look at us,
and push us over as they walk by. We finally settle upon a
"cerveceria" or beer and tapas joint on the placa below our apartment.
It takes us awhile to finally get the grumpy waiter man's attention to
serve us, but he eventually does, and the sangrias, tapas, and of
course beer for Darrin, were just what we needed to take the edge off
the service.
