The etiquette of taking your children to the bar.

Last weekend Jose, my friend Megan and I took a short trip to visit the cities Baeza and Úbeda here in the south of Spain, which are about 3 hours away from Sevilla. They are basically sister cities that are famous for being good examples of Spanish Renaissance architecture. We got up early so we could get there in time for a tour in the morning. The first day we saw Úbeda on a walking tour in the freezing cold. It was nice but I ended up liking Baeza much better the following day. Maybe it was the flamboyantly gay tour guide named Juanma, maybe it was just more interesting than the first city or maybe it was that I could actually feel my nose and feet while walking but I kind of fell in love with Baeza and was sad we only had a few hours to spend there. What does this all have to do with the title of my blog you might be asking yourself? Like Lucy, I gots some splainin to do. Part of the reason to travel is to try and experience new foods and our weekend trip was no different. One good thing about Baeza and Úbeda is that like Granada, when you order a beer you get a tapa free. Yum. Let´s just say that we got to try a lot of tapas. In Baeza, just like everywhere else in Spain, to eat tapas you generally go to a bar, not to be confused with a sit down restaurant (although these certainly do exist). Now, bars in Spain generally speaking can be somewhere to go out for copas (mixed drinks like a rum and coke for example) late at night or a place to have a beer and something to eat. They might have a few tables but a lot of times you have to stand or balance on a bar stool. Many change over to be regular bars for drinks at a certain hour. The menu is limited. People in Spain eat later at night than Americans. All of these things I get. What I do not get is when I see parents with their small children and babies at a bar at night. I am not talking the normal meal time which I will say might last until 1100pm (which is late even by Spanish food scheduling). I understand these people need to eat but really, you need to bring little María and her ENORMOUS stroller to the bar and then stay until late? I have seen toddlers scolded by their parents for getting cranky at ¨dinner time¨when in the U.S. those kids would have been in bed for hours. Give me a break. I would like to enjoy my Friday night out without hearing your screaming infant. I will even compromise and give these parents the bars during the day because really they are restaurants but at night, I claim them for myself. So really there is no etiquette for taking your children to the bar. Get a baby sitter.