Drinks in Spain

One evening in Spain I ordered a glass of orange juice to go with my dinner. ("Tiene, um, jugo de naranja...?") What arrived was essentially a glass of liquidized orange. It was pulpy, there were seeds in my drink, and it tasted exactly like an orange, nothing added it. On the side of the saucer was a large packet of sugar and a long spoon. Which, of course, I didn't use.

However, that sugar packet provoked me to look around at the other cafe drinks being served, and all of them came with giganto sugar packets as well. I'm not talking about the square-ish shaped ones that hold more sugar than they look, these are the cylindrical ones about four inches long that probably hold enough sugar to sweeten a third-world developing nation.

Most people used their sugar packets, even in the cafes con leche that I found to be sweet to begin with. I take my coffee as black as I can manage, and the orange juice was naturally sweet, so I never used mine. I think it struck the servers as odd.