The South Americans love to give you food and it's always so, so good. Yeah, from a ton of countries, Peru, Ecuador, you'll have some, you have some good South American food. My favorites, probably ceviche from Peru or Ecuador, papalobancaina de Peru, arroz con pollo from Ecuador. Yeah, just a lot of good South American food. Spanish food is good, but it just doesn't compare to the South American food that you're going to have.
Paella is really good. It's this like Spanish rice and they have like different vegetables and also like seafood and like Other like meats like chicken and beef and stuff. It's really good
My favorite Spanish foods are tortilla de patata, which is an omelette type thing with potatoes and eggs, and then of course paella, I love paella, and just bocadillos in general. They have loads of sandwiches, normally with ham and cheese, really good ham in Spain, but also tortilla, bocadillos de tortilla, which is really good, sandwiches with omelette on them.
I learned to really enjoy a lot of the simple foods that you could buy there. I ate a lot of lentils and chicken and I just loved that. I still eat lentils all the time to this day and it's super cheap and I really like it. You season them up and put some sauce in there. So that's something I loved. I also loved a little barra de pan, a little long skinny loaf, kind of like what we call a French baguette. They eat those with every meal in Spain just about and you buy it fresh that day. Sometimes per meal you go out and you buy it. It's like one euro. So it's pretty cheap and the bread is really good. I loved it. I ate the bread all the time. That's one of my favorite foods too.
You get foreigners from all over South America, Asia, Africa. So I try dishes from a lot of different places. My favorite dish is actually a Peruvian dish called ceviche. They make it two different ways. Well, there's different versions, but the Peruvian version is my favorite. It's actually a seafood. You take fish. It's like a white fish. And they cure it with lemon. And they kind of like half cook it, so it's not fully cooked. But it's like lots of lemon, and they put spices in it. And there's another dish that they eat called papalawangaina, which is like hard potatoes, baked potatoes. And they put lettuce in there, and they have this sauce that's just amazing. Peruvian food, I would say, is probably the best food I tried in Spain, as well as Bolivian food is very good. And obviously Spanish food is very traditional.
One of my favorite things that I got to try was the oranges from Valencia when they're fresh. Valencia is just a region, just a little south of Barcelona in Spain, where they grow tons and tons of oranges. And when they're fresh, they are so good there. So if you're there during that season, I would highly recommend trying one.
From Spain, there's food called, there's a dish called paella, so it's kind of like, it's like yellow rice and then it's like seafood. So there's like mussels in it, prawns, just like other shells. Sometimes there's fish, sometimes they make chicken ones. Paella is super good. The candy in Spain is super good. There's these little red candies that are covered in sugar. They're super, they're super good. Other foods I liked, so there's so many different cultures, like I said, that live in Spain. So like arepas from Venezuela, there's like the Colombians, just like their rice is just so good. Basically just all the food is so good.
There's so many good foods in Spain. Some of them have an acquired taste. One that I really like is called fabada, which is from Asturias. And it's got faves. It's kind of like a chili. Faves are beans. It's also got chorizo and blood sausage. And it may not sound great, but it's really good the way they prepare it. As well as cachopo, which is also from Asturias. And that is, it's like a fried steak in layers with cheese and ham. It's super good. And those are, those are some really good foods. There's also jamon serrano, which is like cured meat. And they just kind of set it outside. Not outside, but they set it on, um, they hang it and cure the meat. And it's really good.
There are these things and I only ever bought them at the grocery store called Lidl. My favorite grocery store was called Mercadona but at Lidl, and I'm sure they're at Mercadona, I just don't know why I never bought them there, but there's there are these little things they're like these little mini breads and they're called pan de leche and they're amazing. They are so good and I like crave them all the time. I've been home for like x amount of years and I still like want pan de leche. So that was like my very favorite thing and also there's these little like shops on like the corner of everywhere and they're called Chino's which, yeah, and they like sell what they call chuches which is just like little candies and I love the little watermelon candy and they were like kind of like Sour Patch Kids but like in the watermelon flavor and I just thought those were the bees knees and those were probably my two favorite foods in Spain.