Editor's note: To inaugurate our new series, Building Blocks, which explores the fundamental ingredients of the cuisines we cover, we turn to Spain, where anchovies play a large role in the cooking of many regions there. Anchoa, boquerón and bocarte: These names – in Spanish, Basque and Catalan, respectively – all describe the same little fish, the anchovy, and to make matters more confusing, the names also indicate how the fish is prepared, depending on what region you’re in.

If there is a word to describe the Laranjeiras (“Orange Trees”) neighborhood, it is “pleasant.” Agradável. Agreeable. As you walk up its main drag, Laranjeiras Street, you pass by the creamy yellow and white façade of the elegant 19th-century National Institute for the Education of the Deaf on your right. Soon, on your left, you could come across the youth orchestra Camerata Laranjeiras playing free concerts at the General Glicério fair. It’s measurably Rio’s most progressive neighborhood – in the 2012 mayoral election, it was the neighborhood that most favored human rights activists and opposition candidate Marcelo Freixo (48 percent of the neighborhood voted for him in the election against Mayor Eduardo Paes, whereas the city as a whole voted only 28 percent for Freixo). Follow the rising street to its top and you’ll find yourself at the tourist train, ready to go visit the Christ statue.

Cariocas are doubly lucky. They live in a city bursting with natural beauty even in its concrete corners, where wide red and waxy abricó-de-macaco flowers grow in crowded plazas and you’re liable to have an overly ripe and spikey jacá fruit fall on your head as you rush to an appointment. For many, Rio is vacation, beaches, forests and samba clubs – enough to satisfy the craving for a life more exotic.

Foreigners tend to see Rio as stretching from the Christ statue to the beachside neighborhoods, from Copacabana to São Conrado; the rest of the city just provides passage to the Atlantic. That’s a shame. Neighborhoods like Jacarepaguá, Madureira and Bangu have vibrant lives moving at a breathless pace and more intriguing locales than the typical postcard views of the city. Even those of us who have made our homes here can miss these charms. For example, it was only after three and a half years living in Rio that we saw for the first time Madureira’s Baile Charme, a hip hop/electronic music dance party where extraordinarily fashionable attendees do choreographed line dances, and which takes place under a highway overpass about an hour away from the beaches.

As we wrote in part one, specialty coffee has really taken off in Barcelona, after a long period of limited options and mediocre to bad beans and roasts. Here are a few more of our favorites among the new generation of coffee shops: True Artisan Café Elisabet Sereno, a Barcelonan nutritionist, coffee specialist, a founder of the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe (SCAE) and a judge in the World Barista Championship, opened this coffee shop in 2014. It was created as a showroom and also serves an educational role in improving specialty coffee culture in Barcelona and Spain by organizing events, demos and tastings. True Artisan is an official La Marzocco espresso coffee machine distributor showroom, an SCAE-certified training center and a comfortable bar to while away an afternoon diving into Arabica aromas, latte art, cups, gadgets and machines.

Shanghai’s farm country is closer than most residents imagine, especially when surrounded by the city’s seemingly endless forest of skyscrapers. But just beyond the spires is a huge, green oasis: Chongming. Somewhat smaller than Hawaii’s Kauai, this island at the mouth of the Yangtze River grows much of the municipality’s food supply. The government is pushing plans forward to develop the area with “eco-friendly” industries by 2020 but, as usual, has not provided many details on how these goals will be achieved. A stopping point for millions of migratory birds each year, the island (for now) has several wetland zones and ecological parks that are open to visitors, making it a worthwhile jaunt for those wanting to escape Shanghai’s urban jungle.

Some islands, Mykonos and Santorini for example, are known for their temples of gastronomy. Others, like Tinos, Milos, Syros and Sifnos, possess solid reputations for uniformly excellent tavernas. Until recently, Andros, a green anomaly in the treeless, windswept Cycladic chain, had two main attractions for tourists: a world-class modern art museum and a network of well-maintained hiking trails. You could get a decent meal after you’d seen the exhibition in Hora or trekked up to a 1,000-year-old monastery or down a river lined with water mills, but it wouldn’t be something to write home or tweet about.

In Spain, as in the U.S. and elsewhere – even as we hit coffee pod peak – a new multicultural generation of specialty coffee shops are discovering and sharing with their customers the best ways to experience all the special characteristics of truly great coffee. Spain’s cities share the urban Mediterranean tradition of strong short coffee, very much influenced by Italian espresso and served in small cups or glasses, with tons of sugar and perhaps also liquors (orujo or aguardiente, anís, coñac). Much of the time, the quality of this coffee could really hurt your body and soul. It’s made from cheap, low-quality Robusta beans that undergo torrefacto (toasted at 200 degrees C with sugar) – once a technique to keep flavor and increase weight but now widely regarded as a way to hide terrible qualities or to ruin any coffee. At the same time, in the countryside and in small villages, café de puchero, coffee made in a pot and filtered with a cloth, much lighter and more diluted than espresso, was always the brewing method of choice before the rise of the stovetop moka pot.

Oriol’s face lights up whenever a customer selects his favorite pintxo from one of the 49 different trays, beautifully displayed at Euskal Etxea, the bar where he works and the first bar in Barcelona to serve traditional Basque pintxos. One wonders how a small slice of bread topped with a chickpea fritter, jamón serrano and romesco sauce spiked with a toothpick that costs just €1.95 can make someone so happy. We try one and we immediately see why.

We’ve written about mole before, but it’s possible that there aren’t enough words to spill on such a complex dish – probably the most complex in all of Mexican cuisine. Mole has become part of the mainstream culinary scene in Mexico, and many restaurants now sell it every day of the year. However, very few places are mole-only eateries, and even fewer have a mole great enough to have sustained business for decades. One of our favorite eateries, Fonda Mi Lupita, a small fonda in the Centro Histórico that started making mole in 1957, holds that rare distinction.

Dear Culinary Backstreets, I’ve heard about drinks in Mexico called “aguas frescas,” but what exactly are they? Visitors to Mexico are sure to encounter aguas frescas, a popular category of drinks that are ubiquitous at food stands and eateries around the country. These colorful beverages, whose name literally means “fresh waters,” come in a variety of different flavors depending on the main ingredient, but generally all are made by mixing a fruit juice with water and sugar.

Standing behind the counter at his small bici bici shop in Gökalp Mahallesi, a neighborhood in the Zeytinburnu district of Istanbul, Cuma Usta recalls the first time he headed up into the mountains with his uncles in search of wild ice, one of the key ingredients in this Turkish snow cone treat sold from street carts throughout southern Turkey. His uncles had gone up in the winter and cut large slabs of ice from the mountaintop, wrapped it in old blankets and hauled it off with a donkey to a nearby cave. In July, with young Cuma – just being introduced to the ways of bici bici – in tow, they headed back to the cave to collect the ice. It took a couple of hours by car, as he recalled, and the ride back to Adana, vehicle loaded with the frozen bounty, was nice and chilly. Then they’d use that ice to make the summertime street food favorite bici bici (pronounced like the disco-era band of brothers from Australia) and sell it from pushcarts. According to tradition, a bici bici master is, firstly, a harvester of ice.

Several years ago, when the Michelin Guide decided to swoop into Japan and rate its cuisine, restaurateurs were slightly shell-shocked to learn that Japan came away with almost as many highly regarded establishments as France. (And in fact, Tokyo wound up with two more three-star restaurants than Paris.) Then, in 2013, UNESCO put washoku (Japanese cuisine) on its Intangible Cultural Heritage List, alongside such icons as the Argentine tango, Turkish coffee and falconry.

The Praça da Bandeira, an area of Rio that until recent years was mostly known for prostitution and cheap inner-city housing, is rapidly changing. Lying in the shadow of the massive Maracanã Stadium – built for the 1950 World Cup and the planned location of the opening ceremony of the 2016 Summer Olympics – it is alive with new construction and pedestrian traffic, which are changing the tired face of this historical but underappreciated neighborhood. And sitting snugly in the midst of this new buzz is Aconchego Carioca, a restaurant and bar with one of the best beer menus in Rio.

Chat up the older residents of a Rio favela and you’re likely to start hearing romantic stories about Brazil’s northeast: those colorful cajú and mangaba fruit trees, the clear turquoise ocean, the folksy and upbeat forró music, chewy tapioca sandwiches and cakes. Brazilians call that saudades – a longing for something lost, which may or may not exist in the form one dreamily remembers it. These are the pleasant memories many northeastern immigrants hold amidst the urban hustle of crowded Rio de Janeiro, where a working-class Brazilian knows the beach exists but easily lives a hot two-hour bus ride away from it.