Fumbled Toast

In my experience the tourist areas are where you find the tourists and service providers who treat tourists like crap.  Not all of them do but a lot more than in the non-tourist areas.  I can't really fault them all that much - they're dealing with people in a big hurry to have a good time who aren't being all that polite or understanding.  I bet it's easy to say: "I'm never going to see that person ever again and he's kind of a jerk, anyhow."

We had a very nice experience with a taxi driver that I hailed in an obscure square far from the tourist area.  He estimated a price and that's what the price was.  Every few blocks he'd tell us how close we were getting - he wanted to reassure us that the price was going to be about what he said.  I gave him a nice tip.  We also hailed a taxi right in the middle of the tourist area and this guy was rude and unhelpful.  He charged us a lot more than the nice guy did to go a shorter distance.  I gave him roughly no tip.  I got out my tip calculator and multiplied 12 euros by 0.00% and gave him the full amount indicated.

We've mostly eaten on side streets and quiet squares.  The food has been good and reasonably priced.  Today we ate on the world-famous La Rambla.  It is quite the spectacle and we knew we would pay more to have a table with comfy chairs right in the middle of the chaos.  We ordered two meals and two drinks, declining the offer of bread.  The waiter brought the bread anyway, dropping one piece on the ground, and charged us $5 for some of the food we did not order.   He did not replace the fumbled toast.  Our two small bottles of water cost us about as much as a two bedroom apartment in downtown Berlin.

It was still fun but we're not going back.