“I just finished my small lunch,” Ricardo said.

I knew what he meant. He had just finished his almeurzo. If you look up the English translation, it will say, “lunch.” But in Valencia, Spain (where Ricardo lives), it is definitely not lunch.

Almuerzo consists of a small sandwich accompanied by a glass of wine or a beer. Usually followed by coffee.

Americans would say, “Yes, that’s a small lunch.”

Except that Valencianos have almuerzo between 10:30 and 11:30 a.m.

Followed by lunch sometime after 2pm.

Would this then be his pre-lunch? I wondered.

“I’m trying to think of a better way to describe almuerzo in English,” I said. “Because if you say, ‘small lunch,’ that implies that your next meal will be dinner. But your next meal is going to be lunch.”

“It’s not brunch,” Ricardo said.

“Right,” I said, impressed that he knew the word “brunch.” Ricardo and I are language exchange partners. We chat every week. And in our two-and-a-half years of friendship, we’ve never lacked for conversation topics.

Neither of us come prepared with anything in particular to talk about. There’s no need. Sometimes, the first thing one of us says leads us down a rabbit hole.

Ricardo and I finally settled on “mid-morning snack.” As, in Spain, “morning” lasts until you eat lunch.

“What did you have?” I asked.

“A sandwich with ham.”

“So a bocadillo,” I said, which means “sandwich” in Spanish. Or so I thought.

“No, we wouldn’t call it a bocadillo. A bocadillo is with long bread. This is a shorter bread.”

“Oh! So would you say you had a pincho then?”

“Yes!” Ricardo said, ever the enthusiastic teacher.

By definition, a pincho is a small slice of bread topped with anything from calamari to ham to (if I’m lucky) goat cheese and jam. A toothpick holds it all together.

But that’s not what Ricardo had.

For reasons I still don’t quite understand, if you walk into a bar and ask for a “pincho de jamón” they will bring you what Ricardo had: a 4″ long piece of bread with a couple slices of ham in the middle.

Michael and I often see piles of these sandwiches on the counters when we go for mid-morning coffee. I like the ones that hold a thin slice of breaded chicken. After an odd stare when I called it a bocadillo, I asked what the correct word was. “We’d say a pincho de pollo,” the waitress told us.

So . . . in conclusion: Almuerzo looks like a small lunch to us Americans but it is, in fact, a mid-morning snack consisting of a drink and a sandwich, but you call the sandwich a pincho even though it’s not exactly a pincho. Got that?

“And at the end, we have a coffee,” Ricardo continued. I recalled that there are certain types of coffee you only have at certain times of day in this country. As I only ever drink cafe con leche, I asked, “Is there a specific time of day to drink cafe con leche?”

“No, we have that any time.” Phew. No rabbit hole to descend into there.

“Some people have a carajillo after their almeurzo,” Ricardo said. And . . .we descended into our next rabbit hole. “Do you know what that is?”

Yes, indeed I do. A couple years ago I went out to paint yellow arrows along the Camino route outside Valencia with a group of Valencianos. When we finished our walk, we sat down to what I now know was an almuerzo. After the sandwiches, we ordered coffees. The guy next to me asked if I’d ever had a carajillo and encouraged me to try one. I took a sip. Whiskey is definitely not my thing. Not even if you top if with coffee.

I told Ricardo about my one experience with a carajillo and how I’d since learned that there are a variety of liquors with which it can be made: rum, brandy, amaretto. Ricardo shared that when he was a kid, carajillo was a way construction workers stayed warm when working outdoors. I’d heard this before.

“So they’d have one after their almuerzo,” I confirmed.

“That was their second one.”

“Their second one?!”

“They’d have one at the start of the day, one at almuerzo, one after lunch, and another at the end of the workday.”

I’d heard that there’d been an attempt to clamp down on drinking liquor during a construction work day due to the somewhat dangerous work some of these men were doing. But I have yet to find evidence of this. Ricardo wasn’t sure of the current day-drinking procedures of construction workers, either.

I told Ricardo about the first time Michael and I saw Valencianos having almuerzo–our surprise at people drinking alcohol at 10:30 in the morning.

“This is how the bars are able to stay open,” he told me. Morning coffee and breakfast, almuerzo, lunch, a drink and a pincho after work, friends meeting for an aperitivo in the evening.

“Yet I rarely see anyone drunk,” I said.

“Just the young people, late at night,” Ricardo told me.

“Speaking of young people, how are your daughters?” I asked. And just like that, we headed down another rabbit hole.