"I See an Eyeball."

We ordered fried fish, imagining chunks of something freshly caught in a crispy batter but getting instead a pile that looked like french fries. “What is this?” Lauren asked, and all of us tentatively put a fry to our lips. It was disappointing to feel the crunch of skin and bone against my teeth, but I was starving and made the best of it, squeezing lemon all over the plate to curb the heaviness of the oil.

“I can see an eyeball,” Lauren said, examining a brown sliver and putting it down again. The next dish came, a platter of calimari, similarly fried, but its familiarity made it more appealing and we ate it all. Next came a small plate of chicken wings with sauce straight from a bottle, but the final dish was a Moroccan style kabab, big hunks of some sort of meat with golden cubes of potato, the dish of the night. I drank a glass of tart white wine and most of Gary’s beer, which was decidedly bitter and a nice contrast. Lauren had a lemon Fanta in a glass bottle, that ubiquitous choice of the Spanish speaking world, and took advantage of the playground where unsupervised children played despite the fact that it was ten o'clock at night. Beautiful.