On Wednesday night we called in at the Failde cafe for a beer. They served us a bowl of olives, a plate with two pieces of tortilla, two mini tuna salad sandwiches and two pinchos of salami and cheese on bread, and another plate with two hot beef sandwiches. Later, as we were still messing about using their internet connection, we ordered another beer, just the one between us. This arrived with a ham and cheese toastie. The whole lot cost us €5.70. You might get one glass of indifferent white wine in an English pub for that. 
Do they look at us and think we need feeding up? Is there an ulterior motive? Do they hope that we will tell all our friends to go there and spend lots of money? I don't think it's the first one because I see others getting the same sort of treatment. Also, last night we stopped off in another cafe where we are not so well known and they also served us a fairly generous plate of mixed tapas. Their beer was slightly more expensive. Or perhaps that should be less cheap. Certainly it was still within the almost giving it away range of prices.
The Failde cafe is a bit special in its generosity but really it's just one extreme of the tapas game here. Some places just give you a bowl of crisps or a bowl of that measly nut and seed mix that has some kind of extremely hard nuts in that are impossible to eat. Most fall somewhere in the middle. The Failde, however, is to held up as a shining example of how to do it properly. And it is understandably very popular. We have seen other cafes around here close, reopen under new management and with a new name and then close once more. But the Failde is regularly full and on match nights is positively crowded with football fans. So their generosity clearly works
The question still remains: how do they manage to do this and still make a profit? I assume they do make a profit. Maybe not. After all, drinks are not expensive here. Maybe they are happy just to break even. I suspect that most of the staff are family members, reducing wage bills to a minimum. At the Nuevo Derby, another of our favourite haunts, we know that the staff seem to have their meals provided, probably as part of their wages. Bar staff everywhere are notoriously underpaid. And yet, in all of the places that we frequent on a regular basis, the staff are friendly, pleasant and helpful, seemingly always pleased to see us when we pop up again after a long absence back in the UK. Either that or they are very good actors and know their customer service very well. However, I say again, bar staff are notoriously poorly paid. Keep tipping them!
Last night we went to a concert at what used to be called the Centro Cultural Novo Caixa Galicia. Now it seems to be called //Afundación Obra Social ABanca. As banks pass from hand to hand their names change and so I assume do the various places associated with them. Whether that is the name of the venue or the name of the organisation remains a mystery but the venue remains the same and is as elegant as ever. The concert was excellent.
When we went into town yesterday evening, we were uncertain whether we would actually get into the concert. We had had a little problem with the tickets. As is our wont, we booked tickets on line, at the last minute. We did this in the Failde on Wednesday evening, in between consuming free tapas and drinking beer. Not, I hasten to add, an enormous amount of beer. Had that been the case it might have explained what happened with our booking but I don't think that three cañas between two of us counts as an enormous amount of beer. We found the website and made our booking in the usual way, planning to print our tickets when we got back to the flat. And then Phil realised that he, who is usually scrupulously careful in checking stuff like that, had managed to get one digit wrong in his email address. So the email containing the pdf file with the tickets has gone off into the ether somewhere. All for one number!!!
We did, however, have a booking reference number and a printout of our order, indicating the seats we selected. So we set off for the challengingly named concert venue early, planning to explain the situation, taking that proof with us together with the card we used to pay for the seats and Phil's passport to prove that he is bonafide. This is Spain after all. And it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that we might come across an immovable bureaucrat, who would refuse to let us in unless we bought more tickets. As it was, the chap in the ticket booth was friendly and helpful, if a little amused. He simply printed out duplicate tickets. And there was no-one else trying to sit in the same seats.
Of course, all of this could have been avoided if it were possible to buy the tickets from a booking office in town when one is out and about. During one of our forays into the city centre this week, we would happily have popped into the booking office and purchased tickets. However, even though there is a booking office it is only open half an hour before the concert begins. The Bridgewater Hall in Manchester has a manned ticket office, perhaps not all day long but certainly for a good part of the day. People can wander into the foyer, pick up brochures about performances there and at other concert halls in the area, buy CDs and, oddly enough, jewellery from stalls around the foyer and have a drink at the bar. The Corn Exchange, a more central venue, operates a similar system. In fact I often meet friends there for lunch. It's good for marketing and creates a few jobs.
Mind you that may be why tickets for concerts are more costly in Manchester than in Vigo.
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