Segovia

I hit Segovia on the last stop on my trip. It’s a picturesque little town just a half hour outside Madrid by the high-speed train. It’s got lots of your standard setup, and old town wall, cathedral, fort, etc. The big attraction in Segovia is its still functional 2000-year-old Roman Aquaduct. It’s about ¾ mile long, and at its highest point is about 40 meters tall, dominating a large plaza in the bottom of town.

As far as I was concerned, though, the real main event in Segovia is the roast suckling pig, called cochinillo. Because of its proximity you can easily do Segovia as a day trip from Madrid, but I planned to actually stay there to make sure I’d have plenty of time to have roast piggy. While expensive, it was pretty damn tasty. They roast the things so that the skin get’s incredibly crisp and brittle, almost getting a consistency akin to a hard-shelled candy. The meat also becomes incredibly tender, reaching the kind of pull-apart tenderness you get with a really good roast chicken that allows you to just pull the chicken apart at the joints. Because of these two factors, the true mark of well-executed cochinillo is that you can cut the pig into serving portions using only the side of a plate. Apparently, if you are an asador and you need a knife to cut your roast suckling pig, then you suck balls. I didn’t think I was going to be able to see this as I was dining by myself and thus couldn’t spend the $150 on a whole pig, but fortunately a table next to me was a group of 4 and pulled the trigger. The waiter comes up with the cochinillo and a regular porcelain dinner plate, finds the natural separation point where the joint is between the hind leg and the body (I’m a little fuzzy on exactly where as I’ve never butchered a whole pig myself), and just forcefully shoves the plate in. The skin makes and incredibly satisfying “CRRAAACK” sound when the plate shatters it, and the flesh just pulls apart when the plate is forced through. They then serve the cochinillo simply with its jus. In addition to the piggy, the other big local delicacy here are the massive white beans from the region which are about the size of silver dollars. Aside from being about the size of my head, they were also pretty tasty.


For such a small city, Segovia was also a pretty happening place. Apparently there’s a university in town, and everybody was out hitting the tapas bars on Thursday night, and I took the opportunity to get completely bombed. This wasn’t really deliberate. I had eaten dinner at a restaurant that served a prix-fixe menu which included drinks. Normally you have to have at least two people to get it, but I guess the let me get it by myself because I’m such a nice guy. (Or more likely because a pair of women sitting next to me also got it and I could piggyback off them.) I guess they couldn’t divide the wine, so with the meal I ended up getting an entire bottle of Ribera del Duero, and entire 375-ml carafe of dessert wine, as well as a large double-shot of a house-made liqueur, all for myself. So let’s just say I was feeling pretty damn social by the time I get done with dinner.

I then went out and got in a conversation with a couple locals at a bar, and of course continued drinking. I actually only got one more drink, but it was one of Spain’s signature quadruple pours of brandy. This is something that has made boozing up quite economical on this trip. When in Rome, do as the Romans do, and in this case it means I drink Spanish brandy when I go out. Some of them are quite good, and the bourbon they have here is trash, anyways. For whatever reason, whenever I order a straight up brandy, I get these monster quadruple pours that fill up half to two thirds of a regular Napoleon glass (not that I’m complaining). Well, apparently not many of the Romans here drink straight booze—the only explanation I can think of as to why I get such gigantic portions is because nobody here takes their liquor neat, so when they get the strange foreigner asking for it they fill the glass to the same level they would for a regular mixed drink. (A wrinkled brow and “Nada más? Sin heilo?” is often what I get from bartenders here, to which I have to confirm that yes, I just want straight brandy without ice.) So I had a pretty interesting time, although it was also interesting watching the room spin when I laid down to go to bed later. I suppose the entire bottle of wine plus the entire half bottle of dessert wine on top of the digestive and my venti sized brandy proved to be a bit ambitious for just one evening.

So that pretty much wraps up the show. I head back to Madrid for one more night before flying out early Saturday morning. As I am wont to do when returning from Europe, I’ll just stay up all night long and sleep on the plane in order to start re-adjusting to the time change. However, I’m sure there won’t be anything worth writing about happening that evening…

Salamanca

I caught the train up to Salamanca on Monday morning. I had to catch it early as I had to take the train way back up to Madrid, take another commuter train to another station, and then get on another relatively long (by Spain’s standards) train to Salamanca. So I spent the majority of the day just traveling, but that allowed me to finally catch up on my blogging (you may have noticed a flurry of new posts in the past couple days). I was glad I got going early as it really allowed me to appreciate the evening in Salamanca. None of the sights there are really A-list items, but it was very enjoyable due to its massive and incredibly lively central square, the Plaza Mayor. I had read that this is one of the best people-watching spots in Europe, and it didn’t disappoint. There were some particularly amusing antics going on as Salamanca is essentially a college town known for having one of the oldest universities in Europe and the annual “frosh week” that occurs at the beginning of each academic year was going on. For those not familiar with this, think of it as a type of light fraternity/sorority hazing that goes on for all the new students at the school. As a result, the square was often filled with groups of young students with painted faces wearing their underwear on the outside of their pants performing flamenco, throwing baby powder at each other, or engaging in other types of wacky bullshit which I’m too old and too American to understand. (I had actually seen a similar thing going on in Granada while I was there, too.)


I didn’t experience anything particularly unique food-wise while I was there. The first night I hit a local place and got the braised pork cheeks, which were good but certainly didn’t wow. I did really like the tapas place I went to the second night, though. This place was a little more modern and fancy with its tapas (although most were again things I had seen at other places). I also really liked the vibe. It had a pretty normal, rustic look to it, buy they were playing thinks like “Shout” and “Surfin’ Bird” on the stereo and was filled up with a relatively young local crowd. I initially screwed up by accidentally re-ordering the same pork cheeks I had the night before. However, I had a couple more tapas, the standout of which was the seared duck with orange marmalade and chocolate. I had actually seen this on the menu at another place on the trip and didn’t have an opportunity to try it as I had other priorities at the moment, so I decided to pull the trigger on it this time (I love duck). It was pretty good, as the chocolate really worked with the gaminess of the duck. I actually think I make a better orange pan-sauce for duck at home, but I may try adding in the chocolate here when I get my next couple duck breasts this fall.

After two nights and a day in Salamanca I headed to Segovia, stopping in Avila on the way. This was a cute little town with a huge medieval wall, but the highlight was a vinoteca I went to for lunch. They had a fantastic selection of wines by the glass including a couple ones with some good bottle-age on them, including a 2003 Reserva Rioja and a 2001 Crianza. It was also one of the places that gives you a free tapa when you order a glass of wine. This is common in Granada, but all the other cities I went to you had to purchase any tapas. There are apparently just some places or cities that still do it the old-school way and give you a free little surprise whenever you order a drink. I’m personally a fan of the old school train of thought.

The wine bar was also very enjoyable as I got into a long conversation with the Mexican girl working it. And this sealed the verdict—I just do not get the Spanish accent all that well. During the trip I was beginning to think my Spanish wasn’t nearly as far along as I had believed before leaving. I very often had difficulty conversing at length with Spaniards, even in pretty straightforward conversations that I would not have expected to have problems with. However, with this girl we just chatted away about where she was born and how she ended up in Spain, the characteristics of some of the wine regions in Spain, my trip, whatever. I guess I got too used to talking to Mexicans and Puerto Ricans back home.

Granada

We finally ended out car journey in Granada. It was a very good decision to go driving in Spain, as it allowed us to get much farther off the regular tourist trail than we would have been able to otherwise. It also allowed us to experience the countryside much more, which was really amazing. The most prominent feature of the countryside south of Madrid is acre after acre of olive groves that are carpeting the entire countryside. At least I think they are olive trees. I’m no botanist and I usually only see them from afar, but I think they are mostly olive trees interspersed with some orange groves (and also vineyards, in you’re in a wine region). You see olive trees here like you see corn in Iowa. It sometimes seems to be covering everything. This was particularly striking in the hillier areas, where you see the scraggly, brown hills covered by a perfectly green set of olive trees lined up in neat little rows, with a large row of tree-covered mountains in the background.

While driving in the country was a joy, driving in the cities just sucked. The street plan for the parts of the cities we were visiting was laid out for donkeys, not for cars. As a result, the historic parts of cities are labyrinths of dead-ends, one-way streets, and tight corners and spaces where you can barely squeeze a compact car through. Since I needed to be doing the navigating Juls did most of the driving (and put on a pretty impressive display of driving skills), but even with two people including a NYC driver that’s an expert with a stick and a obsessive-compulsive planner with a very good sense of direction and Google Maps on his iPhone, driving in the cities was often quite frustrating. Google maps on an iPhone, it must be said, does not work all that well in the historic parts of cities we’ve been visiting. The accuracy of the maps is usually not too bad, but the location positioning service is often unable to identify our location accurately, sometimes pinpointing my location half a mile away from where we actually are. The Google Maps app actually functioned better when I was in India this year, believe it or not. And it certinaly wasn’t much help in getting us into the train station in Granada. We so much difficulty finding the rental car agency where we had to return our car that eventually a cop stopped us and ended up escorting us to the drop point.

One thing that has surprised me on this trip is just how fast it is to get around. The Iberian peninsula isn’t near as big as it looks on a map. This was compounded the fact that Google Maps was again lying to me, both on the routes I pulled up on my computer at home before leaving and on my iPhone. For whatever reason, routes that it said would take 3 hours to complete ended up taking us maybe 90 mins, door to door. This is the primary reason I’ve had so much trouble keeping up with my blog on this trip. I thought I would have a fair amount of down time on some drives, but often by time I navigated our way out of the city and got us on the major highway and spent a little time checking out the scenery on the way to our destination, we’d already be close enough to where I’d have to start navigating us to the parking space at our destination.

I loved Granada. The big sight there, the Alhambra, in my opinion didn’t quite live up to the billing. It had some beautiful decorative work in it, but after spending several weeks in north India earlier this year it seemed like just another fancy Muslim palace to me, albeit with some particularly elaborate ceilings. I was actually more impressed with the Mezquita in Córdoba. It was my favorite city of the trip so far, though. It’s absolutely littered with charming little squares. You can be in a square, take a street out of it, and in another 50 yards you’ve arrived at yet another square. These will often have a small park with a fountain, be lined with tapas bars with outdoor seating and ice cream shops and stores. In addition, the city has a large Moorish quarter, the Albazýn, which is filled with helal butchers, hookah bars, Moroccan restaurants, and kitschy little shops with mid eastern and north African stuff. Most importantly, Granada had the prettiest women of any city we had been to in Spain.

I got some more great food in Granada, as well. To give Juls a break from a plain steak with soggy fries we hit a Moroccan restaurant one day, and the food was quite good, although I was enraged when I discovered that it was a non-alcoholic restaurant (having lamb tagine without of bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape is criminal, as far as I’m concerned). I also grabbed the house specialty from a Galician restaurant the people at our hotel recommended which was killer. It was bacalao (dried salted codfish) with a tomato-based sauce with shrimp, scallops, and clams. I also had a local specialty, fried eggplant with honey, that was quite good. There were two food disappointments while I was in Granada, though. They weren’t disappointing because I didn’t like the food, but were instead disappointing because I never got to try them. One of these was the ajo blanco. This is a cold soup, like gazpacho, which instead of tomatoes and cucumbers is made out of garlic and almonds. This, along with gazpacho and salmorejo (kind of like a thicker, richer gazpacho) are the three signature cold soups of Andalucía. As Granada was my last stop in Andalucía, I absolutely had to have all three of these before I left. I had already had gazpacho and salmorejo several times, but was having a hard time locating the ajo blanco. My last night in Granada, I actually went out in search of it, going from tapas bar to tapas bar asking every single one if they had either it or the tortilla sacaramonte which is a Granadan specialty which I also had to have before leaving (it’s a Spanish-style omelets with pig’s brains and various other meats). I checked out about 25-30 different tapas bars before I finally ran out of steam. Most of the waiters I asking didn’t even know what I was talking about, which wasn’t a good sign.

The one other problem I had in Granada was messing up my back at the gym. I had some free time my second day there and really wanted to get a workout in, and particularly wanted to get a workout for my legs, so stopped by a local place in the early afternoon (I can work out my upper body doing things in my hotel room with the furniture or with the jungle gym at a kid’s playground, and I also worked out on this trip in Madrid using the metal scaffolding constructed when work is done on commercial buildings, but for legs I need real gym equipment). This was a decision I came to regret. For those of you that weren’t aware, I injured my back in college and it’s given me trouble ever since. Normally I can manage it without too much problems, I just have to be very careful with certain activities, including training my legs in the gym. I wasn’t training very strenuously, but the equipment there wasn’t very familiar to me and I nevertheless ended up aggravating my back. It didn’t seem to be too bad, I was able to finish my workout for my upper body that I was also getting in and so far doesn’t seem to be interfering with my travel agenda too much. My only problem at this point is sleep—it doesn’t prevent me from doing anything I need to be doing during the day, but last night it was painful enough just lying in bed that it kept me from getting any significant sleep at all. Hopefully in a few days it will heal up enough so at least I’m able to get a decent night’s rest, but otherwise shouldn’t interfere with the rest of vacation. Quite frankly, I’m much more concerned this point at the impact it will have on my ability to train in the gym and the salsa studio once I get home.

If you're also checking out the snaps, note that I've needed to start a new photo album since Google Photos limites you to only 1000 in each. You can see the continued set of photos here. Note this album may disappear later if I'm able to trim the fat and consolidate all the snaps into one album.

The Coast

The day after seeing the hill towns, we moved on to the coast. We made an afternoon stop in Jerez on the way to the coast from Arcos. For those of you that aren’t wine geeks, Jerez is where sherry comes from. While I’m a huge wine drinker, sherry is a category I don’t indulge in very much, so I figured it would be a good way to educate myself on this very different style of wine. The uniqueness of the process by which it’s made and the widely varying styles in which it’s available makes sherry a pretty complex subject, so I was looking forward to educating myself a little more. We ended up going on two sherry tours (we had planned on only doing one so we could also see the Analusian Horse riding performance that is the other big draw in Jerez, bur unfortunately the horsies were sold out). The tours were targeted at the average tourist and were thus a little more high-level than a hard-core wine geek like myself would have preferred, but I still ended up learning some things and met some pretty cool people that were also taking the tour with us. My response to the tastings we had were somewhat mixed—a couple of the wines were something I enjoyed, but several of the sherries we had didn’t turn my crank at all. When I get home and try to duplicate some of the cooking I’ve had here I’ll maybe try some other producers which I may like more, but overall I’m still not sure if dry sherry is my thing. I specify dry sherry there as the sweet Pedro Ximinez sherry dessert wines are definitely my thing, and have been since long before this trip. The PX sherries are something Juls has some to appreciate on this trip, and she’s been drinking them like they’re going out of style.

While we’re on the subject of wine, I must say that the ubiquity of high quality wine at bargain-basement prices here has been one of the highlights of the trip. The average cost of a bottle of wine we’d get at a restaurant has been around $18-20, and even though we are getting two bottles every day (one lunch, one dinner), almost every single one of them has been quite good. I can’t remember the last time I got a bottle in a restaurant in the US for under $40 which I enjoyed. Some of the inexpensive wines here we’ve gotten in the $15-$25 range have been fantastic, and are things I would have been pleased with had I spent $60 on the exact same bottle at a restaurant at home.

After the sherry tasting, we continued to Cádiz to start our drive along the coast. We didn’t stop there, but just drove through to check out the town and the huge port in the bay. After that, we made a beeline to Vejer de la Frontera, a small hilltop town with very strong Moorish roots in the Andalusian hills near the coast. This town was a delight as there wasn’t much tourism, and was a very local scene. All the whitewashed homes, the winding lanes which were more staircases than roads, and the heavy Moorish influence gave it Greek-island type feel, and it was very relaxing and a nice evening stop. I also had a really nice meal there, a seared duck breast with a red wine and sherry vinegar sauce and a wine-poached pear. I also didn’t get any fries (although there was no starch component at all on my plate, hhhhhmmmn), and while Juls got a big pile of fries with here steak, these were at least the best fries she had yet had.

The next day, we got back into the car and headed back along the coast, stopping briefly in Gibraltar and Marbella. Gibraltar was interesting as it is actually British Territory, not a city, and being part of the British Empire has a very Anglican feel to it, right down to the boxy red telephone booths. We actually had to go through customs to get in and out, although I don’t think the border guards sweated the details. All they did was look at our passports, and when we re-entered Spain the immigration agent only looked at my passport as I flashed it open from 5 feet away. Juls apparently never even got hers out of her bag. Whatever.

We actually didn’t go up to the top of the rock. If was a very cold, rainy, and foggy day, and you could barely see across the bay, let alone across the straight to Africa. We just ended up tooling around the town in a public bus to get a feel for the place. By far the most interesting part, though, was simply entering and exiting the country. Because the country is so small (just 2.5 sq miles, 1/3 of which is dominated by its namesake rock), there’s hardly any place to put a runway. The one and only place with sufficient space for an airplane runway is running parallel right along the border. Actually, that wasn’t even sufficient as they had to extend it out into the bay with reclaimed land. Due to this, you actually have to walk across the airstrip whenever you enter or leave the country. It’s got stop lights and signals like you’ve have a railroad crossing to keep you from crossing the runway then a plane is about to take off or lang. Pretty wacky.

After Gibraltar, we continued on along the Costa del Sol to Marbella and then headed inland to our final stop, Granada. The coast here was very beautiful, but I can see why our guidebook didn’t recommend staying along this part of the coast. It’s very developed, and appears to be more a set of resort-y beach towns littered with condos and timeshares for retired Europeans that want a tiny sliver of beach and lots of sun than they are places of historic or cultural interest.

Analucía’s Hill towns

While Sevilla was a charming city, we actually got out of there one day earlier that we had originally planned. This was largely because we had already ticked off all the must-see stuff, but also partially because we weren’t too happy with the hotel we were in (it was a nice place, but nowhere near nice enough to justify what we were paying there). So we split early, giving us some more time to explore the pueblos blancos, the small Andalusian hill towns. If your Spanish is dreadful, they’re called pueblos blancos because, yes, they’re all white (and because they are pueblos). They’re also all located in the Sierray Nevada mountains, usually capping hilltops, and are filled with tight, narrow, winding cobblestone lanes. Arcos de la Frontera was the one we stayed in for two nights. We didn’t have a hotel reserved ahead of time, and when we arrived the only one we could get was in the attic at some place and had a sloped ceiling which at its high point in the room was around 7 feet tall, and dropped down to about 5 ½ on the opposite side of the room. My neck definitely got a little stiff in the two days I was there, but it was a bargain and the view was amazing as the hotel was right on the edge of the cliff the town sat on and we had windows on that side overlooking the whole valley below, filled with orange groves, a river, and the local shepherd tending to his flock.

We used Arcos as a home base to drive around the area and hit a couple other pueblos blancos the day after we arrived. We ended up cruising through the mountains, checking out Grazalema, Zahara, and Ronda on the way. The scenery in the mountains was amazing, and the towns were all really cute. Grazalema had a lively town square with a bunch of old guys hanging around on benches and chatting up the pigeons, Zahara had some tasty chow and was incredibly picturesque sitting in a valley floor under its obligatory Moorish castle on the hill overlooking the town center, and Ronda had an amazing cliff-side setting with a massive river gorge running right through the middle of town. Ronda was also interesting as it’s home to the oldest bull ring in the country and had an interesting bullfighting museum there.

I’ve continued to score really great food as the trip has progressed. I say ‘I’, because I think Juls is in hell. Being kosher and a picky eater that doesn’t (for some inexplicable reason) like uncooked tomatoes and anchovies, there just isn’t a lot here that she can eat. The food suits me just fine, though. If I did have one complaint, however, it is that it’s not very diverse. If you go to a restaurant that isn’t deliberately trying to make another culture’s food, such as an Italian or Chinese place, you tend to see the same things over and over again. You definitely see regional variation, but within any single region you could probably pick any two mid-range Spanish restaurants and they will likely have 75% or more of the exact same items on their menus. And of the items which aren’t duplicated there’s probably yet another restaurant not too far away that’s got it. It’s also rare at the mid-range places to encounter items I haven’t seen before at other places. It must be said, though, that this is quite common in many of the countries I’ve traveled to in Europe outside of the food meccas of France and Italy. American food culture has some serious problems with it, but one thing we have that is unparalleled relative to any place I’ve traveled to is the incredible diversity of options available to us. And this isn’t only due to the high availability of ethnic food in the US, either. Even if you limited yourself only to places serving new American cuisine, at home you’ve got a diversity of options and a creativity in inexpensive food that I’ve never seen anywhere else.

The most egregious example of the lack of diversity in the food in Spain is the ubiquity of French fries as the side dish here. 95% of the time, whenever you order something which needs a side dish, it’s going to come out with an obligatory pile of fries. And for all the skill they’ve got for other items, it appears that most Spanish cooks couldn’t turn out a decent plate of fries with a crisp exterior if their life depended on it. I haven’t gotten nearly as much of them as Juls as I’m often getting things like tapas or paella which doesn’t get a side dish, but between the two of us I think we’ve thrown away enough, limp, soggy, greasy, and under-seasoned French fries on this trip to feed and entire African village for a month. This is one of the reasons I liked Zahara so much. I ordered the house specialty at the restaurant we popped into, the slow-roasted leg of lamb. When they brought the plate out, I was extremely pleased to see that instead of a pile of oily fries, I got some heavily herbed roasted potatoes. Both Juls and I sat there staring at the plate for a few seconds, a bit stunned that the de rigueur pile of wet frites was nowhere to be seen. “Wow, just look at that, potatoes”, I said. This place was obviously very avant-garde. Roast potatoes as a side with roasted/sautéed/grilled meat? Who would have ever thunk it. Both the potatoes and the lamb were absolutely phenomenal, by the way.

While Spanish food could get out of the box a little bit more, where Spain completely kicks our ass is in quality of ingredients. (Well, they also kick our ass in that people here eat actual real food, rather than the phony processed garbage that people eat at home, and that they eat out with friends and family instead of in front of the TV, and that a quarter of their population isn’t morbidly obese, but I digress.) A tomato here actually tastes like a tomato, compared to the typical tomato which you get in an American grocery store which tastes like, well actually, I don’t think they taste like much of anything at all. I picked up a plum as a snack from the market a couple days ago, and it was absolutely exploding with flavor. Many of the grapes you get here leave your fingers all sticky and gooey when you eat them they are so flavorful and intensely sweet. With a more educated consumer, farmers markets, and supermarket chains like Whole Foods that place more emphasis on quality ingredients we are starting to roll back all the damage that was done by half a century of inadvertently breeding all the flavor out of our and food and we’re thus starting to close that gap, but we’ve still got a long way to go. I can pick up any piece of produce here in a local market and it will usually taste better than something I pick up at a specialty store or farmer’s market and do so at a price ever less than that for the tasteless crap that most people in the States are buying every day.

Sevilla

Sevilla was a great stop on the trip. The cathedral there is pretty wild, and in my opinion is more impressive than Notre Dame. However, the big draw in Sevilla is Flamenco. During our two nights there we checked out a professional performance, which was pretty amazing. However, even more interesting was the small local place we went to on our first evening. It was a Sunday around midnight, and we went searching in a particular neighborhood for a Flamenco bar. Things were pretty dead, and I was beginning to worry that the search would be a bust. However, after looking around for a while, we finally stumble on this tiny place with a live flamenco band and a bunch of locals just having a good time. From the looks of the goofy hat and camera some middle-aged guy was wearing, it appeared to be his birthday celebration and everyone was dancing and having a great time. Needless to say, it wasn’t up to the standard of skill that we saw in the professional performance, but it was fun to watch and amusing to note the universality of some white men being completely hopeless regarding dancing, be the dancing flamenco or otherwise.

One thing I’m coming to appreciate much more as I spend my time here is the profusion of the Muslim influence in Spanish culture. I always knew it was there, but I had no idea of the full extent to which so much of Spanish culture can be directly attributed to the Moorish influence, particularly here in the south. Be it in all the Muslim elements in Spanish architecture, the reflection of the Muslim call to prayer in the wail of the Flamenco singers, or even peoples’ appearance (which becomes notably more dark and exotic the farther south you travel), you can see it absolutely everywhere.

La Mancha and Córdoba

In Toledo, we picked up the car and headed to Córdoba. On the way, we drove through La Mancha, the flat, barren, arid plains in central Spain where Don Quixote was set. It was filled with olive and orange trees and had those funky little picturesque white Spanish windmills on many of the hill tops. We stopped in one town particularly known for this and spend about an hour taking photos. I took a lot of snaps here in particular because I always attempt to get one or two iconic photos from every trip I take that I can hang from my walls, and figured this would be about as good a chance at one as I’ll get in Spain. Unfortunately they were doing work on the castle in the background, so when I get home I’m going to need to PhotoShop out the crane in the background and the people on the street.


We also tried to go wine tasting as La Mancha is a significant wine producing area, but that didn’t really pan out as we couldn’t find any place that was open when we were driving through and could accommodate us without a pre-arranged appointment. Instead, we just took a scenic driving route through the wine country which allowed us to check out the vineyards.

We ended up in Córdoba that evening. We had to stay at a hostel in a dorm room because the Davis cup semi-finals were in town there that weekend and hotel prices had gone through the roof. This ended up being fortuitous, though, as we were able to do our laundry in the hostel and were sharing a room with just one other person, a charming French girl who was in Spain teaching English.

The big deal in Córdoba is the Mezquita, the huge mosque-cum-church that dominates the center of town. You would probably recognize if from the red-and-white striped arches that litter the massive room. It’s also neat to see the juxtaposition of two different buildings of worship. The mosque complex is enormous, and when the Christians booted the Moors from Córdoba they built their huge church right into the middle of the building, incorporating it right into the mosque. So you can be standing in a huge room with Muslim-style architecture everywhere, and then you walk twenty yards to the side and you’re then standing in what is unmistakably a Christian cathedral. And this is all done is a way so that the Cathedral is incorporated right into the structure of the mosque. Very cool.

No Whiners!

Some of you may have noticed that I'm about 5 days behind on my blog, and am creating posts and back-dating them. You have a problem with that? Well you can suck it! I'm on vacation, damn it! However, for those of you that actually give a shit (I'm not sure if this includes anyone other than my mom), I promise to get caught up soon.

Toledo

After Madrid, we caught the train to Toledo. This was an incredibly charming city, as it was formerly the capital of the Spanish crown and was filled with ancient fortifications, churches, and all the usual fun crap you find in medieval Europe. The old city walls and cathedral were a particular joy to check out. At least they were when not getting lost. Because the street plan for Toledo is about 800 years old (not sure about that, but I need to get this blog out and am too lazy to check my facts right now), it’s a confusing warren of streets that are very easy to get lost in. We arrived in the evening, and of course I dragged us out to a particular restaurant I had pre-picked so we could experience the best food Toledo has to offer, and got a little lost on the way back to the hotel. Well, maybe saying ‘a little lost’ would be an egregious understatement, but we ended up getting to experience about half the cities medieval charm at 1:00 AM without another tourist around, so it was a bit of an adventure.

Toledo has some very regional cooking. Partridge and venison are very big there, and I had them a couple time. Although they were all quite good, there was nothing particularly unique about their preparation. I think the dish of the stop ended up being the beef cheeks I had the first night we went out, prior to our 1.5 hour scavenger hunt for our hotel. They appeared to be pretty straight-forward, just a standard braise in beef stock with aromatics and maybe a little wine or vinegar, but were very well executed and incredibly tender. Despite the fact that braising is my cooking forte, I’ve never worked with beef cheeks myself, and definitely need to get around to trying them this winter at home.

Dessert-wise, the big thing there is mazapán, or marzipan as we’d say in English. Tasty, but as far as I could tell no different from the sugary almond-based dessert you get anywhere else. Of course, it didn’t prevent me from devouring half a box.

The last notable thing about the food there wasn’t related to preparation, but instead to nomenclature. In this part of Spain (possibly others, but I’m not sure), beans are referred to as ‘Judias’, or translated literally from Spanish as ‘Jews’. So you will commonly go into a restaurant and order something in Spanish which literally translates to “braised partridge with Jews”. Hhhhhmmmnn.

Madrid

Madrid, not unexpectedly, had a very different feel than Barcelona. Because Barca has the beach, Madrid has a much more metropolitan and less touristy feel. Also, the weather was much more pleasant. In Barcelona, I was generally sweating my balls off walking from place to place. Madrid, while even warmer (it was in the 90s most days), is a much drier climate, so while still definitely hot in the sun, it was pretty pleasant to walk around, so long as you were in the shade and not baking in the Iberian sun.

One thing that was pretty nice about Madrid was the fact that the historical center is pretty compact. Almost everywhere we went was within reasonable walking distance. The metro there is also first-class, so it was very easy to get around. The only problem we had with transportation there was me almost losing my fancy sunglasses. One evening, a train was just shutting its doors, so I sprinted for about ten yards and jumped to catch the doors before they close. Unfortunately, I had my sunglasses hooked into my pocket by just one arm, and when I ran to the train they came flying out of my pocket, slid across the floor, and dropped into the crevice between the train and the platform onto the tracks below. This was no bueno, as they were my favorite sunglasses, were a rather expensive set of frames, and are a critical part of my travel wardrobe. Because I pack extremely light (everything I need for 22 days in one 9x14x22 bag, including my large and bulky work laptop, with room to spare), a lot of the clothing I have is pretty basic and gets dressed up by accessorizing with a nice pair of sunglasses, a nice watch, and a good pair of shoes. Thus losing my good sunglasses means I just lost a critical piece of my wardrobe for the next 2 ½ weeks. (Come to think of it, having the right accessories--glasses, belt, watch, etc.-- is what separates the schlubs from the men with style back at home while not traveling, as well, but I digress). Luckily when the train passed I was able to see my sunglasses sitting in a small crack tucked up between the train tracks and the wall, so I was able to jump down onto the tracks, fish them out, and get back up before the next train arrived without electrocuting myself in the process. The only problem was I ended up with a coating of repulsive subway floor grime on my hands from when I boosted myself back up on the platform. In retrospect, this might not have been the swiftest move. Aside from the concern of zapping myself on the tracks, I suppose I would have had a very big problem had I misjudged the height of the platform and was not able to jump back up after fishing my glasses out. The trains here are much more modern and efficient than the ones in Chicago and New York, and they come by very frequently, every 2-3 minutes or so, and when they do they do it with a vengeance, zipping right into the station at high speed, stopping on a dime, and zipping right out. Because I was in the very middle of the platform, had I not been able to jump out before the next train came I may have had a little bigger problem than losing my sunglasses.

Aside from possibly getting squished by the metro, there wasn’t too much drama in Madrid. We did do a lot of partying, though. We went out salsa dancing the second night in town, and went to this Cuban place that was a lot of fun. I couldn’t fully whip out my skills, as they danced Cuban/swing-step-style which really isn’t my thing, but people were very friendly and very interested in us as they could immediately peg us as foreigners. We also met some very interesting people there, including a couple German girls and a VERY friendly Russian-Peruvian girl that I was dancing with. We didn’t get back to the hotel that morning until about 5:30 AM, so it was definitely a good time.

The next night we met up with Selene and Helena, the two German girls we went out with the night before, and went out for Tapas, a drink at a very flash rooftop lounge downtown, and then out to a different place for more salsa dancing. Once again, we ended up rolling into our hotel at aroud 5:00 in the morning.

The most interesting things about Madrid, aside from all the salsa dancing with friendly Russian-Peruvian girls, were the Prado, the royal palace, and a bull bar we went to. The Prado had the best collection of paintings I’ve ever seen. The royal palace was also pretty neat, although being fairly well traveled and having already been to Versailles, Schonbrunn, a half dozen palaces for the local kings in Germany, etc., it seemed somewhat like the same royal getup. The bull bar was a kitschy little place with tons of paraphernalia from the local pastime. You can think of it has a hard-core sports bar exclusively for bull-fighting. It had about a half dozen bull’s heads from fights, and was covered with photos and other bric-a-brac from fights, mostly focusing around where bullfighters got gored during the contest. If you hunt in the photos you can find photos of a fighter that had a bull’s horn shoved into his neck under his chin, with the tip of the horn protruding out his mouth. They have the photos of this proudly displayed with the suit the bullfighter was wearing on this fateful day. Seeing Picasso’s Guernica in the modern art museum was also a bit of a charge. I’m not a huge art guy, so usually what I’m saying to myself when touring a world-class museum is “OK, this is all fine and good, but where the fuck are we eating dinner tonight?”. But Guernica is definitely one of Europe’s must-see sights and seeing the massive painting in person was a real treat.

Speaking of which, I got some interesting food in Madrid. I tried callos, which is a stew made out of tripe and blood sausage. It was good, but didn’t completely turn my crank. I also tried another local specialty, Cocido Madrileño, which was a stew made out of garbanzo beans, pork, and beef, which was cooked in an earthenware pot. You first eat the broth like a soup with noodles, and then monge on the stewed meat. However, by far and away the big culinary standout in Madrid was the Galician restaurant we went to after hitting the Prado one day. The octopus with potatoes and pimienton I got was out of this world. I spent about 15 minutes talking to the restaurant owner at the end of the meal asking how he prepares it so I can replicate it at home. I have made octopus a few times, and can do it competently, but the result I get is nothing like this. I think I’ve got the trade secrets now, though.

After the meal with the octopus, Juls and I got into a lengthy discussion about how everywhere we go in Spain, the restaurant owners are always giving us free shit. It seems like at over 1/3 of the places we go, they are bringing us out free dessert, and giving us free glasses of wine, extra aperitifs, whatever. Our best guess is that it’s the combined factors of her speaking perfect Spanish, my speaking crappy Spanish, me showing obvious interest in all the particulars of the food they make and also particularly always ordering regional specialties wherever we go. It seems like many of the people here are very proud of their regional and local dishes, and if you show a particular interest, you’ll be their best friend in not time. The guy from the Galician place with the crazy-good octopus was probably the best example. After we finished lunch he hung around and talked to us about Galicia for about 20 minutes and brought us a couple monster pours (we were completely trashed) of the local coffee liquor they make in-house.

Barcelona!

Got into Barcelona relatively on time on Friday. I ended up taking an earlier flight for my first segment of my trip because rain was forecast both in Chicago and at Newark where my first connection was, both my connections were tight, and it would have been a disaster if I missed my second segment to Lisbon due to delay in arriving at Newark. Luckily, I got through without a hitch. The one downside is that I didn’t sleep a wink on my long segment from Newark to Lisbon and was already pretty tired before I even left Chicago from not sleeping well and having had very busy week before I left. Not that it mattered that much. It was my first night in Spain on a Friday night and I wasn’t even going to allow myself to be tired.

It was a good thing, too. I ended up catching up with some people that night for drinks that I met via an online social network I belong to. The plan was to just meet up for drinks, grab some dinner, and head back home and make up for my huge sleep deficit. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. After dinner, two of the three girls I was out with invited me to head out to a club with them, and since I’m working on overcoming my overly sensible, stick-in-the-mud tendencies, I said to hell with it and went out and partied. My travel buddy for the first 2/3rds of this trip, Juls, didn’t come with as she was even more run-down that day when I was. I got a slightly quizzical look at 3:30 AM when I rolled back into the hotel room (after I had originally told her I’d be home at 11:00), but she didn’t seem perturbed.

The next night was the same. I was planning on catching up with my friend Montserrat that had just moved to Spain this summer. Between a couple friends that Montse brought and the three girls from Friday and a few more friends of theirs which we had all invited along, we had quite a quorum. Montse took us to a fantastic tapas bar and then out to a club for another night of partying. I was having a great time, but was beginning to think I would be so sleep-deprived the next day that I’d hardly be able to see straight.

No matter. I functioned surprisingly well on Sunday. The particularly strong Spanish coffee Juls was drinking all day that I kept stealing sips from certainly helped. However, I was certain that if I didn’t get a full night’s sleep that evening that I’d keel over and die by EOD Monday. Alas, I didn’t get a decent night’s sleep on Sunday, either. Juls and I had plans to meet our other local friend Sonia out for drinks that evening, which we were both saying was going to be just drinks, a light dinner, and then home at around 11:00. This was particularly important, as we were catching a train to Madrid on Monday and had a very full day planned and couldn’t sleep in. But of course we were drinking and dining on Spanish time. So 11:00 turned into midnight, which turned into 1:00,…, and next thing we know it’s 3:15 before we’re getting to bed. Ironically, it even took me a while to fall asleep, presumably because I was worried about my impending death the next day from an entire week of sleep deprivation.

However, I managed surprisingly well on Monday. Although I’m not counting my chickens just yet as the day isn’t over--I’m writing this while on the bullet train to Madrid, and it’s entirely likely that by the time I arrive in Madrid and check into the hotel that I’ll be a walking zombie (in this case, the shuffling, slack-jawed, drooling king, not the sprinting, foaming-at-the-mouth, 24 Hours Later kind). This is pretty surprising as I’m not normally a person that functions very well without an adequate amount of sleep, but I suppose the mere fact of being on vacation has me particularly energized. I am eagerly looking forward to an evening where I have nothing planned and can get to bed at a decent time, though.

Believe it or not, I actually did do some things in Barcelona other than drink and socialize. The city’s extremely pleasant and enjoyable, and there are tons of things to see. The big highlights are all the modernista architecture, particularly the Antoni Gaudí stuff, and the local Catalan seafood. Well, some people may say it’s the beach, but I say f#@k the beach, bring me the shellfish. But hey, that’s me. My particular favs were all the tapas from the bar Montse brought us to on Sunday, the fideua pasta at the restaurant Sonia brought us to on Sunday, and the arroz negro I had the afternoon before leaving. For those not familiar with it, fideua is basically a seafood paella dish, but instead of making it with saffron-flavored rice, it’s made with toasted vermicelli noodles. This is something I had always known about but never actually tried, and was specifically looking for on this trip. It didn’t disappoint. It was, naturally, made with the fresh local seafood, and had a rich, nutty flavor from the heavy toasting of the noodles.

As good as the fideua was, though, it paled in comparison to the arroz negro. It’s called, literally, “black rice”, because it’s made with the ink of cuttlefish, squid, or octopus, which gives the entire dish a dark, dark black color. It kind of looks like something that you put in the oven and forgot, burning it all to a cinder. This is a Spanish variant of a dish you can get all over the Mediterranean. It’s a common thing to get in risotto form in Italy, and I had this dish about wherever I could find it (also in risotto form) when I was in Croatia a few years ago. It’s a particular favorite of mine. I love me some cuttlefish/squid ink. Here it’s a bit different, as they make it like…you guessed it…a paella, where they substitute the cuttlefish ink for the saffron. Of course, they also add the meat from whatever cephalopod they got the ink from, and in my case also some other seafood like clams and some shrimp. The ink gives it a strong, briny, seafoody flavor which is very unique. Mmmmmmm!

I was actually a little freaked out on Monday as this is a regional specialty which I wasn’t able to get the first couple days and won’t be made (or not made as well) at other places we’re going to on this trip, and hence I absolutely must have gotten in Barcelona. I think Juls was a little confused as to why I had arranged the entire last day here around being able to get a big plate of what looked like a plate of rice with strange seafood which somebody had burnt to a crisp with a blow-torch, but I think she was pleased in that once I got it I was finally able to shut up. She’s definitely being a good sport. Being kosher, Barcelona isn’t a particularly good food destination for her as just about everything is made with crazy seafood or pork (more on the pork later). But I guess that leaves more squid ink and Serrano ham for me.

As for the architecture, well, you can check out the photos here. All the Gaudí stuff speaks for itself. The aesthetic kind of reminds me of Dr. Seuss. In particular, the Sagrada Familia was really amazing. It’s hard to believe that this church is still several decades away from being completed. I guess I’ll have to come back and see it when it’s done.