Las Ramblas 2: Tapas Crawl

I love tapas and I've always been dreaming on doing a tapas crawl in Spain. Now that the occasion presented itself, I wasn't going to say no. We did the crawl. At least tried to. A tapas crawl is when you go from one place to another sampling what their specialty is. However, we could only manage to stop at two restaurants in Barcelona and 3 places in Madrid. On one night, all we could do was order a variety of tapas in one place and just stayed there. I don't know if that would be considered a tapas crawl, but for the sake of this post, it is a tapas crawl.
Specials are posted so it's easy to see if you want anything. This one for instance offers tapas, paella, and drink for E7,95 not bad at all.
Yummmmmmmm!
The very best gambas I have tasted. It's simply grilled shrimps seasoned with salt and pepper and sprinkled with olive oil and sitting on a mound of potato wedges. I have never had very fresh shrimp as these before. I can still taste it.
They have pricey plates like the combination seafood platter, but boy oh boy, it's worth the price. This plate was something like 28 euros.
Common tapas fare: potato in aioli, meatballs, pulpo, and shrimp salad.
The famous paella. While I am a rice eater, I'm more impressed by the paellas I have tasted in the Napa Valley. I want my paella a little drier than this :). It's very good though.
No reason to omit dessert when doing a tapas crawl. Here we each ordered Crema de Catalunya, a custard-like dessert with brulee topping. Very good and tasty. My husband was able to recreate this dessert and we served this over Christmas and last Saturday when we had friends over.
There's beer . It's San Miguel Beer. Now I don't know if this one's Spanish or this is the one from the Philippines. A little thing I noticed in Barcelona is that they never serve you water. If you want water they will bring you bottled water and charge you for it. So we either had beer, wine, or even coffee for dinner.
One restaurant offered sangria in their combination meal.
More beer. Who says no to beer?
The length of Las Ramblas is dotted with outdoor seating like this from restaurants across the road. Burger King is empty, as it should.

Another observation I had is that people eat slowly, taking their sweet time, staying in their seats long after they were finished with their meal, then order coffee or another glass of wine. Everyone is relaxed, even the waiter on a restaurant we went to was busy texting and fiddling with his phone/gadget and in no hurry to attend to customers, and no body was in a hurry to eat anyway.

I thought we offended one restaurant when we were in a hurry to leave immediately the minute we downed our drinks. The waitress asked us if there was something wrong with their food and why are we leaving so soon (we were there nearly an hour and had four tapas, a plate and two drinks). It must have looked strange to them that we didn't stay longer and sipped some coffee. We reasoned out that we needed to sample the neighboring restaurants offerings :)