Midway through our trip, we rolled through a town called Puigcerdà (pooh-chair-DAH) in the Pyrenees in northern Spain. For dinner, we tried Restaurante Asiàtico – yup, Chinese food. Why? 2 reasons – it’s fun to see how the cuisine compares in different countries and we needed a brief respite from tapas. Fear not – the menu still had items with fun titles like “crispy noodles with three deliciousness”, but the real kicker came at the end of the meal.
The server brought 2 bottles of booze and 4 shot glasses to our table. I didn’t see this happening at the other tables, so I thought she may have been trying to make up for the fact that right when we sat down she dropped the encyclopedic menu on my water glass, scattering shards of glass everywhere. Thinking back on it now, however, it seems she may have been having a chuckle at the expense of some turisticos, because while one bottle was plum wine, the other was this:
Not one dead lizard, but two
These lizards were wide-eyed, scaly and decomposed, but for the sake of this blog, I forced myself to take a sip. It could have been the power of suggestion, but it tasted faintly of how formaldehyde smells. The worst part was that it didn’t taste nearly strong enough. I was expecting a full-on throat-burner, but no such luck. It should also be noted that the 2 shot glasses she gave to the ladies at the table had pictures of men at the bottom and when full of liquid, these men became naked.
A Thirsty Spirit 