Travel often leads to bouts of deep reflection.

To hell with American sneeze guards.

That’s what I found myself thinking while enjoying the conviviality of a tapas bar-hopping experience in San Sebastian, Spain this weekend. Admiring the spread of dishes lining the bar – plates piled with frittered fish croquettes, baguette slices topped with razor thing slices of Serrano ham and pudgy chorizo sausages – I couldn’t help but mourn for a moment.

At home, you could never pull this off in the same serendipitous way.

As I stretched my arm amid the offerings to pluck another treasure from the lot – toppling a precariously perched pintxo (the Basque term for ‘tapa’) with my loose shirt sleeve in the process – a vivid image of a buffet line topped with a swinging glass sneeze guard popped into my head.

Those cultural references will find you anywhere, I swear.

I pictured myself back in the States, peering over a spread of tapas through a low glass window as if they were on display in a culinary museum; awkwardly attempting to fill my plate, my mobility limited by the sneeze guard’s motive to keep the bacteria count in the food as close to Purell as possible.

Then I snapped back to Spain.

The San Sebastian tapas bar felt like the most unpretentious yet best catered cocktail party I’d ever attended. My friends and I followed the lead of the locals, who congregated in loose circles with cups of vino tinto in one hand and the thin waxy papers that pass for napkins in the other. When the inspiration struck, we’d slide up to the bar, peruse the pickings, and pluck another fine tapa from its plate prison.

A sneeze guard would have totally rained on the parade.

- by Terry Ward