Spanish beer is served up in a huge variety of shapes and sizes, but nothing beats the good old fashioned tubo pictured above… Though the tapas in the picture usually provoke a collective groan from my friends and I – there’s just something too pink about this particular brand of embutido (I’ll even take bog-standard olives over this stuff!)

At the other end of the tapas scale you have this, Tortilla Paisana, the mother of all omelettes!

OK, so the tapas in the first picture are free, and you always have to pay for tortilla this magnificent, but Tortilla Paisana is worth a every centimo. Look at it! It’s a meal in itself! What distinguishes the Tortilla Paisana from your average slab of potato and eggs? Apart from it’s size, it usually includes other delectable ingredients such as chorizo, red peppers, even peas!

Commonly found in Asturian bars and restaurants, where food is always large!

One of the most useful phrases I learned in my first year in Spain was:

¿Donde esta la marcha? – Where is the nightlife?

As my friend Alistair and I traveled from city to city in search of fun and photographic subjects for possible exhibitions (full story here, plug plug!), we never bothered looking in a guidebook to work out how to find the best of the city’s entertainment at night. We just asked the locals…

¿Donde esta la marcha? would elicit a string of information from passers-by about which bar-filled lane to head to from, say, 9.30 pm until midnight, where everyone went for copas after that, and which disco was best from 2 a.m. onwards. Plus we got chatting to the people we asked, which lead to other adventures along the way…

What’s the most useful phrase you use in Spain?

Useful Link: What to take out when you hit the nightlife in Madrid!