Bilbao - from a food perspective!

One of the things I love about visiting other places, or spending time with people from other places, it the joy people get from sharing their foods. This may be their favourite foods, or things that remind them of home (if they are travelling or away from their home country, like I am at the moment), or typical or famous foods of a region.

While in Bilbao I had the chance to try one of the local foods, something you can´t get anywhere else, even within Spain, as I was told. Bollo de mantequilla, which my host bought me to have for breakfast on Sunday morning. Not necessarily a normal breakfast for either of us, but wow! It was great!  It is a slightly sweet bun with a firm but not crusty shell and a very soft interior. It had a very sweet filling, a creamy buttery substance but definitely not the kind of cream or butter that I am used to! 

 

Yet another first for me in my time here in Spain, eating out Saturday evening for supper. I had a lot of fun reading the menu, trying to choose something different from the sorts of things I´d normally buy in a pub in Australia, and wanting something warm. I did get a hamburger, but both the name and the method of cooking the egg in it were different for me. Hamburguesa a caballo (caballo is Spanish for ´horse´) with eggs in the plancha style of cooking. Some kind of grilled egg, I think. Anyway, the hamburger was great but HUGE! I barely managed to finish eating the whole thing!

Our last meal in Bilbao was with the family of one of my fellow students. 

This is the table before the meal, with pre-meal nibbles. We could have spent hours relaxing and enjoying the food the family kept bringing out for us, but we had a train to catch. We left with very full stomachs, having eaten two courses as well as the pre-meal nibbles, and the others had a bit of yoghurt and fruit, while I accepted an apple for the train ride. I did eat that apple, too, a few hours later, and it was delicious as well!

These were the sort of food experiences that make you feel very willing to return to a place, to try more of what they have to offer!