Eating Baby Eels in Madrid

That's right. That's what I did. Only I didn't know it at the time.

We once again spent time with my Romanian mother-in-law in Bucharest. But we planned three nights in Madrid on our way home.

Madrid is known for Tapas. The legend is that workers used to spend their paltry wages on a glass of beer or wine at lunch, since they could only afford one thing. Productivity suffered and the king decreed that restaurants had to give a piece of food with every drink. And so, they began to create little snacks that they put on top of the drink (tapa = top) when they served it. 

We arrived in Madrid ready for anything. Our first night, we found a place serving tapas we did not at all understand. We saw something that looked to be a piece of bread with shredded fish atop it, bathed in some sort of white sauce. 

Let's dig in! We ate it. It was good. We ordered another.

We visited Toledo the following day, and we joyfully ate a shredded fish tapa there as well!

The following day we had booked a tour of "Tapas and Flamenco," in which our guide took us to family owned establishments before a wonderful show.

And the first place we visited, they were offering those "Shredded Fish" tapas. And our guide finally described what we had before us.

Those were not pieces of shredded fish. They were baby eels.

I will admit to you all. I loved them. I ate them again even after I learned they were baby eels. 

I do not, however, think I would have been able to bite into that tapa and greedily eat it, had I known it was a piece of bread with a swarm of baby eels atop it.

And so, ignorance, in this case, was bliss...