Sunday was quite a day. For a while, we couldn’t have been more Catalan. Then, we couldn’t have been more American. First, we went with our new friends, Rosy and Clemens, to something called a calçotada. This is simply a lunch at which one eats a lot of calçots, which are sort of like scallions that have been attacked by Bunnicula. Remember Bunnicula? Actually, the onions go through what sounds like a rather tedious process of being planted, dug up, hidden in a shed in the dark, replanted, and covered in dirt. They don’t turn green. All this just to get in the New York Times magazine. Imagine.

So we drove outside of the city a few kilometers with some other people, friends of Rosy and Clemens, and parked ourselves at a little restaurant with smoke pouring out of it. The calçots are grilled over open flames, then wrapped in newspaper to steam themselves. Now, normally, we’re “restaurant fluent.” This means that we can ask what things are and at least look like we know what the waiter is saying in response. We can make sure our coffee is made by machine and not from a little packet of instant. We can even get a draft beer instead of one in a bottle.

But this sort of thing, kind of like I would imagine eating your first lobster or s’more might, presented an interesting challenge. Not only would we have to be vigilant about menu-reading and question asking (“It comes with ceps. What are those? Are those brains? Wait, no. They’re mushrooms, right? Ah, forget it.), but all within a sort of cultural tradition. We have long referred to this as the “Maple Syrup on your Hamburger Problem,” in which the juxtaposition of both syrup and ketchup on diner tables is invoked in Vietnamese restaurants as we try to determine the proper uses of the many sauces provided, all of which ostensibly have specific uses, but which are simply sampled at random by white folks like us.

Luckily, as we tried to look busy with the menus, someone ordered a lot of calçots. They come with these things:

• red sauce
  
• big empty plates, sort of like for a lobster
  
• bibs, also sort of like for a lobster
  
• one plastic glove per person, sort of like for sports physicals in high school
  

We put on our bibs. We put on our gloves. We sat still and watched. Finally, after learning enough, we picked up one onion each in our bare hands. Using the gloves, we stripped off the charred layers. While the glove did manage to keep one hand clean, it was in no way effective against the painful, searing heat emanating from the steaming onions. Leah was very talented at this activity, nonetheless. I was a mess. Eventually, after being peeled, the onions are dipped in red sauce and then sort of dropped into one’s mouth from above, like so. Then you throw out the leftover burnt part. The whole thing was fun, even though onions aren’t really a food as much as they are a flavor. It is the rare dinner invitation, I believe, that includes the sentence, “We’re having onions!” After a lot of onions, you definitely are done, but you’re not full.

Luckily, more food was ordered. Leah and I split something called cabrito, which is a baby goat. I honestly don’t know what has happened over here that makes us think of ordering baby goat, but that’s what we did. It was fine when eaten with sauce. Cabrito now goes on the list of

Things We Have Bought Here, In Spain, But Never At Home

1. pork
   
2. chairs
   
3. a washing machine
   
4. a heater
   
5. dressers
   
6. chicken that still had feet, head
   
7. and now, of course, goat
   

Following that, we had coffee and dessert and took a short walk. And then we went home and prepared for…the Superbowl, just like you people.

Or not like you people at all. See, we worked to enjoy Superbowl Sunday this year. Yep, we were the Official Promoters for our local pub, which has some kind of hookup to show the NFL via satellite. We wandered around the city, looking for overfed college boys in baseball hats, and handed them flyers. We also dragged along our friend Albert, who had to have the rules explained to him by our other friend Phillipe, who really speaks French but is good enough with the Spanish to help out. The whole thing really sounds much more elegant when it involves le quarteur-back.

We also organized our very first illegal betting pool, that thing where you sell 100 squares and then draw numbers and whoever matches the last digits of the final score wins. Try explaining that in Spanish. Somehow, we sold all hundred squares and, when announcing the winners to a contest no one playing understood, were only on the verge of a full-on fight one time. Oddly, it was not when that very same Albert won the first prize. He decided that the Superbowl was pretty fun, after all.

The only other slightly dodgy moment came when I took some pictures. A guy who looked sort of like a cross between Elton John and A Flock of Seagulls, decked out in an acidwash denim tuxedo, said, “You could get shot in this town for less.”

That, as any Barcelona resident will proudly tell you, is completely untrue. There were probably more guns on the Raiders’ team bus than there are in the hands of regular Josés in Barcelona.

I said that I didn’t think that I was going to get shot, but thank you.

He said, “Well, someone might cut you up, then.” As he said this, he made a show of flipping around what I was expected to believe was a butterfly knife. It was, in fact, one of those fancy wine openers that waiters use. Though I am a slow, weak, and easily frightened person, I refuse to be worried by people who “do” their hair and still wear acidwash. Still, I am polite, which is a good fourth to add to “slow, weak, and easily frightened.” I promised not to take his picture. Then he said, “I’m only kidding. Hell, I’m Canadian.” Brotz, if either you or your forehead are reading this, I would appreciate an explanation.

The game itself was as boring here as it was there, but we got to stay up until 4:30 in the morning to enjoy it. Plus, I got to say (I have no excuses for this behavior other than that I was desperately wanting to sell all those betting squares), “So, are you ready for some football?” into a microphone and receive wild cheering in response (I’ll be honest: It was fun.), and we got to hear people swear at Rich Gannon in Finnish, Danish, French, Spanish, Catalan, and English. And I am now alone among the people I know who have uttered the sentence: “You need to talk to my wife; she’s the one running the betting pool.” And we were not close to ordering brains all night. It was a pretty good Sunday.