Spanish Food Post #2: Paella

Let's talk food. In this post I will be talking about paella, a classic Spanish dish. It includes rice, some kind of vegetable (in the one I tried peppers), and a meat (beef, pork, fish, shrimp...). I had paella for the first time in Spain, and I loved it. They make it in a giant circular pan, that looks like a frying pan but is huge. At my host family's house they made it over the grill. The rice layer was maybe only 3-4 grains thick, and on top were designs with the pepper and the meat. It was very salty, but in a way that makes it addicting and I really could not stop eating it. In this case, the meat was ribs, and it was all very delicious. One of the top foods you should try in Spain!

Snorkeling in Spain

I do not have any of my own pictures for this, because I did not have an underwater camera. But I will describe and also give some pictures of what I saw from the internet. I do have a picture of the boat I was on though.

I went snorkeling and I was very very excited because here in Wisconsin there is no chance of that happening and actually seeing cool fish or coral in our lakes. I put on my tube and my goggles and hopped in. Now something I must say. The water is incredibly salty, like one of those salted pretzels you can buy covered with salt times two. It starts to (at least felt like) it eroded my tongue. I had been swimming for a little bit, and my eyes were already stinging. I thought though that the goggles and snorkel would protect me from the salt. I was wrong, and snorkeling turned out to be much more difficult than it looked. The goggles I had, kept on leaking and getting water into my eye, and since there were waves taller than the little snorkel and I couldn't get my snorkel to stay above a 45 degree angle, a lot of water came in. So about every thirty seconds I was coughing up salty water that hurt my tongue and made it hard to keep a steady pace of swimming.

While this was happening, we were swimming to some coral. We swam for a good 15 minutes, except once we got there, my host family said you couldn't touch the bottom because of sea urchins and octopuses in the weeds. That sounded cool to see, but I was tired, so I found a little rock and kind of stood on it with a couple of toes. Once I got a break, I was able to here be able to fix and empty my goggles everytime I needed to, so I got to see some really cool and colorful fish. Here are some pictures:

http://exoticsfish.blogspot.com/2013/02/spanish-hogfish.html

http://saltwater.tropicalfishandaquariums.com/Wrasses/SpanishHogfishPhoto.asp

I am sorry the fish pictures are brief, but I can't remember which other ones I think I saw, there was a pretty green one, and also a lot of big blue ones, by big I mean largest was a foot, they ranged from a few inches (10cm) to a foot, (30cm).

As a tip: practice snorkeling before you do it, you'll be able to avoid salty water in your lungs and bloodshot eyes. (If only I had known...)