The Rick Steve’s vs. Lonely Planet Death Match

This trip has finally allowed me to answer the eternal question of which guide book is best. I have always been a Rick Steve’s traveler, and have used his books for every European trip I’ve taken. However, he only covers Europe, so whenever I’ve traveled in Asia or South America I’d used Lonely Planet. I never thought it was as good, but thought maybe that wasn’t a fair judgment since having only used LP to travel in the developing world and only having used RS in Europe I was comparing apples and oranges. There were other things that always made me suspicious of Lonely Planet, most notably the fact that they regularly include coverage of places which Rick Steves doesn’t even include in his book aside from saying “This place is a tourist trap and a headache, don’t go there”. I appreciate these little insights.

However, on this trip, I’m getting to places in Italy that aren’t covered by RS, so have used LP in those locations (Rick Steves only covers enough location for about 5 weeks in a country like Italy, which I’ve already shot over between my two trips). So we now have an apples to apples, Italy guide to Italy guide comparison between Rick Steves and Lonely Planet, and the verdict is in: Lonely Planet sucks balls. Use Rick Steves whenever you can.

Piedmont

I made Turin, Piemonte my home base for the next couple days. I had one primary objective to accomplish while I was here—drink as much Barolo as my wallet and liver could tolerate until I had to leave for Bologna. The stuff is rarely available by the glass or in a tasting in the US, and when it is, it’s invariably at a price that even by the glass will completely destroy your budget. To that end, on my first day here I took a day trip to Alba and Asti. Alba, as in barbera d’Alba, and Asti, as it Asti spumanti, moscato d’asti, and barbera d’Asti (which is entirely different from barbera d’Alba, you brutes!!!!!!). While I’m a big fan of barbera and it’s a regular drink of mine at home, I was planning on concentrating all my euros and available liver points on the blockbuster Barolo and Barbaresco wines of the region, and was hoping to taste as many as I could while there.

Unfortunately, Italians aren’t quite on the tasting bandwagon yet. In both towns, I was unable to find a place where I could get wines in tasting portions. I found a place in Alba that was selling by the glass, but drinking whole glasses at a time you burn through your euros and liver points pretty quickly (not to mention wearing out your palate too fast), and the options there were middling. I asked at the TI, and they said the towns of Barolo and Barbaresco each have a place you can taste their eponymous wines, but these are extremely remote and have completely irregular hours. It sounded like these were a similar setup to the deal I found in Montalcino when I was there back in 2006, and was exactly what I was looking for, but really wasn’t doable at the time. It almost sounds like you’d have to have a car to get there, and by the time I tasted I would be so blasted off my ass that driving would be out of the question, anyways. It was still a good trip, however. I had the best meal yet of the trip at the osteria in Alba I went to for lunch, which included the local tajarin pasta and a killer melon soup with berries that I’m definitely going to recreate when I get home. Best of all, there were pouring a Barolo by the glass which I drank with my veal secondi which knocked my socks off. The veal was unimpressive, but the wine would have made the trip worth it by itself. It was also nice to see the rolling Langhe hills and all the vineyards from the bus going place to place. Asti was also a neat little town.

The next day seeing Torino was on the agenda. Turin is a pretty interesting place. Its heyday came much later that that of most Italian cities, and as such, it feels much more like Vienna, Paris, or Buenos Aires that it does Florence or Rome. There’s lots of art nouveau and other turn of the 20th century style architecture there. This is most clearly evident in all the beaus-arts and art nouveau cafes in the city. So as an obligatory start to the day, I hit one of the quintessential cafes for a cappuccino and a pastry. These people sure know how to do coffee and donuts.

It’s clearly evident when walking around Torino, though, that the former elegance of the city is somewhat faded. Aside from being one of the culinary capitals of Italy (due to its Barolo, Barbaresco, white truffles, and being the home of the international slow food movement), it’s primarily and industrial city. Fiat is based here, and Torino is referred to many as the ‘Detroit of Italy’. The comparison is apt. While is doesn’t have the kind of extreme urban decay that Detroit has experienced the past four decades, the impact of the slow decline of the Italian manufacturing sector is plainly evident. The locals are also very matter-of-fact on this subject (if anything, I’d say there a little overly harsh). While still a very pleasant place, it’s clear that the economy is not what it once was and that the money no longer flows like the fine espressos in all the city’s aging, gilded cafes. Everything I read about Torino compared it to Paris or Vienna in style, but due to the economic factors it reminded me very much of Buenos Aires, both being cities that were booming in the earlier 1900s and with architecture to match, but that are well past their economic primes.

I would be remiss not to mention the important religious artifact in Torino, the shroud of Turin. They’ve got a whole museum dedicated to the thing, which I wasn’t sure if I was interested enough in investing the time in seeing. They did have a copy in the Torino Cathedral that I checked out, and that decided it—I was not going to be spending my time in the shroud museum. There were a bunch of people praying to it, and it took a not insignificant amount of willpower to not be a snotty prick and point out “Um, dude, you know it’s a copy, right?”. Was it even a good copy, or more appropriately was it done to scale? If it was, then Jesus must have been about 20 feet tall because he had a head the size of a pony keg. It was an impossibly clear and crisp image, too, right down to Jesus’ groovy, retro-style porn ‘stache which you could see as clear as if a very talented artist had made a detailed pencil sketch on paper. The impression of the copy left me finding the thing to be only slightly more credible than the images of the Virgin Mary people find in potato chips and are selling on eBay, so I decided no shroud museum for me.

Even better than the Selleck-eque porn ‘stache of the savior was lunch on Tuesday. The dining guide I’m relying on for lots of food-related advice on the trip, “Italy for the Gourmet Traveler", had a recommendation for a very casual osteria in a working class neighborhood far off the tourist path. I show up at the place, and at first was a little confused as some guy who was sitting down eating with his wife asks me “mangiare?” Huh? The guy was the owner, manager, waiter, and host for the place, and was just sitting there chowing away on his lunch. Come to think of it, though, these probably aren’t appropriate terms. The overall experience was much more like going and eating over at somebody’s house that it was to actually eating at a restaurant. Every single person eating in the place was either family or an old family friend that lives in the neighborhood. The food was surprisingly good for as cheap as it was. Because I was apparently the first tourist that had ever set foot in the place, they were pretty interested in me and we spent a good three hours hanging around, eating, drinking, and yapping the afternoon away. By the time I stumbled out of there around 3:30, I think I had had a conversation with half the damn neighborhood. Good times.

Lake Como

After Verona I headed to Lake Como for Alessandro and Christina’s wedding. Lake Como was a very picturesque, relaxed place. It would normally be a little too slow and sleepy for me for a vacation destination, but the main event there was, of course, the wedding. Alessandro and Christina really raised the bar on the wedding. The ceremondy was in an old baroque church in a nearby town, the reception was a block away in a castle high on a hill overlooking the lake, and they had great wine and killer food. Normally, wedding food is at best middling, but some of the best things I’ve eaten while here were included in the spread. Probably my favorite was the lardo, which is a prosciutto-like cured meat made from the part of the pig that is all fat (yes, it literally is cured pig lard). The baked ricotta was also killer. The bride and the groom both looked great, too!

The day after the wedding. I headed into Milan for just one night on my way out of town. Alessandro’s buddy Andrea that I had met at the wedding had invited me out to catch up with him and his friends, which was a great time. I was also very pleased with the fact that we went to only the second bar I’ve ever been to outside of the US that has decent bourbon.

Verona, Padova, Vicenza, Bolzano

Verona was a great choice for my home base for the next 5 nights. Despite all the touristy Romeo and Juliet schlock, it’s a charming little place. Even with all the hokey tourist groups chasing after kitsch from a fictional story written 400 years ago by an Englishman that probably never set foot in the city, it had a vibrant local scene. I think it was a good move to get here a week earlier than I had originally intended to avoid the huge opera festival that is held in the city’s 2000 year Roman arena, as well (made it a lot easier to get into the restaurants I wanted to without having to fight with all the opera geeks flooding the city and packing the 25,000-seat stadium).

From Verona, I took a few day trips to the surrounding area. One day I went to Padua (Padova for the locals) to check things out there. Being a Sunday and given the fact that Padova is a bit off the main tourist trail, the city was almost completely dead. It was a little eerie. You hardly got a whiff, even of the 60,000 students from the local university that are typically overrunning the place. The real issue, though, was that I realized only after heading there that the famous market in Padova isn’t open on Sunday. I still got the see the big sights (Scrovengi Chapel and the Basilica of St. Anthony, but no market. All the restaurants I wanted to go to were also closed! I decided to save that for another day and get to Vicenza to check out the snazzy architecture there before heading back to Verona for the evening.

I was pretty jazzed about seeing the market in Padova, so I headed back the next day. It ended up being a good move, as I was able to make a friend on the train ride there, too. I spent a couple hours checking out the market and chowing down of some of the local produce. There was lots of pretty interesting stuff, but the big winner there was all the horse meat, a regional specialty. Butcher shops has huge chunks of horse steak, massive equine ribs, and lots of this stuff called sfilaccii, a finely shredded, smoke, dried horse meat that you can toss in little salads.

Not feeling like chomping down on uncooked horsemeat at the market, I caught up with my friend for lunch, had an amazing pair of octopus with some kind of tomato and balsamic vinegar sauce and grilled polenta, and also some of the local bigoli noodles with a tomato-based duck sauce. After that, I got a little local tour of the town. The highlight was watching one of that day’s doctoral graduates from the university be humiliated in the fashion traditional to the University of Padova. She had to dress up in a goofy cardboard box costume and read a large poster with her “biography” on it while doing shots and while her friends dumped handfuls of flour and ice water down the neck of her costume. Apparently it is typical for the poster biography to have lurid details regarding past sexual escapades and other private matters in it. All of this is done in front of the graduate’s entire family, who were there for the more formal parts of the graduation process. My friend, also a graduate student at the university, said she had mixed feelings about her impending graduation date.

On the third day in town, I caught the train up to Bolzano. Being a former part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, it feels a lot more Germanic than Italian. For lunch there, I chowed down on a massive, slow-roasted skin-on pork shank with sauerkraut and the local speck-infused dumplings. Go figure that on my trip to Italy so far the single best thing I’ve eaten was essentially German food (although the octopus from Padova was a very close second).

While in the area, I was also able to take a wine-tasting trip to the nearby Valpolicella wine region. Given the fact that many of the winemaking techniques in this area are very unique, if was both informative and tasty (for those not in the know, they actually lay the harvested grapes out to dry for a few months and raisinate them a bit before pressing to make the local amarone and reccioto wines). We also got to see quite a bit of the countryside.

Lake Geneva

The train ride to Lake Geneva was pretty sweet. Lots of good views, particularly when you arrive in the Lake Geneva area. It’s got it all—a huge, perfect blue lake, vineyards all over the countryside (and often even in people’s front yards), castles surrounding the lake, all with a great alpine backdrop. The city I was staying in, Lausanne, was great too. It has a large old center with tons of old buildings, quaint little cobbles lanes, and outdoor cafes. Also, it must be said, that there was a dramatic uptick in the concentration of good-looking women. I think I saw more nice honey-babies in the first ½ hour there than I had in the four full days I’d spent in the other big cities, combined.

Aside from the profusion of honey-babies, there was a dramatic difference in the vibe as soon as you crossed the boundary into Francophone Switzerland from the German speaking side. You could immediately tell that people were much chattier and boisterous. The first train station I was you could see a young couple kissing and flirting on the train platform, something that I don’t think you be too likely to see in Zurich. It was also much more ethnically diverse. Even the architecture was different. On the train, the minute we crossed the linguistic boundary in the countryside, not only did the train conductor start making announcements in French first instead of German, you could also see all the Germanic, half-timbered homes in the countryside replaced by the French, gray-stone style.

The first night in town I took the train into Geneva to meet up with my friend Laure. Being an author, she’s got lots of arty friends, so we started the night hopping through a couple different parties at art galleries. Afterwards, we went out for dinner and headed to a Philipino karaoke bar, of all places. After we closed that out, we hit another club, by which time, of course, I had missed the last train back to Lausanne, so I ended up crashing at her friends place.

Needless to say, I didn’t get a very early start on the next day. By the time I got back to Lausanne, took care of some todos (laundry, workout), and got cleaned up, it was nearly 4:00. No matter, as Lausanne is a pretty small place and it didn’t take too long to see. I polished off the tour of the city with what was definitely the best meal I’ve had on the trip so far. At this very traditional French-Swiss place, I got the ‘calves head’. I really didn’t know what to expect here, but it was apparently a specialty of both the region and the restaurant, and they were also out of horse meat (a common Swiss staple I had yet to try on this tour), so getting it was a no-brainer. I was glad I did. It was essentially just boiled scraps of meat and sinew scraped off of the calves head, served with basic simmered potatoes and a mustardy vinaigrette you pour over the tops. I know it doesn’t sound too appealing, but it was really great. A couple pieces were just pure tendon, fat, and connective tissues, and I didn’t quite finish all of those as they were too rich and gelatinous for my taste, but the parts that had at least 10% meat to them were really great.\

The other big culinary highlight was the market the next day. I had a long train ride with two connections to Verona the next day, and was planning on eating the last of my provisions I brought from the US. As luck would have it, though, when I showed up at the metro stop to catch a ride to the train station, the plaza it was on was filled with the regular Saturday morning market. I was able to pick up a beautiful small loaf of some kind of unidentifiable whole grain bread (it turned out to be walnut), some fraises de bois (the very small, sweet-tart, intensely flavored wild strawberries), and a nice wedge of local Gruyere cheese. I could actually smell the cheese cart well before I saw it. I caught a wiff of that unmistakable funk of ass and rancid feet, so I immediately knew there was good cheese in the near vicinity. What I had was easily one of the best cheeses I’ve tasted in a while. It was a 3-year old Gruyere, so it had been aged more and was much denser and richly flavored than any of the Gruyere I’d had before. It almost reminded me of parmesan, and had a similar crystallization in the cheese and potent flavor. (By the way, if your parmesan doesn’t have crystals in it, you’re eating bullshit. And if you’re, god forbid, eating that abomination that comes in the green can, then you need help.) Along with the small bottle of wine I bought at the train station in order to use up the rest of my change in francs, this made for a pretty satisfying little snack on the train from Lausanne to Italy.

Berner Oberland, pt 2

So I was able to check out Berne and Murten two days ago. The weather forecast for that day was still looking bad and was clearly not a good day for mountain hiking, so I caught an early train from Interlaken and headed to Murten first. It was a cute little medieval town about 90 minutes away. It was quite, but very small. I had the whole town covered in an hour. After that, I backtracked through Berne, the Swiss capital. Berne was definitely the most interesting city I’ve seen in Switzerland yet. It’s an extremely attractive city. It’s maintained a lot of its medieval architecture, is largely traffic-free due to the efficient trams that are buzzing all over the place, and is very compact and walkable. I caught a lunch at an old-school Swiss place about two blocks away from the parliament building. There appeared to be a couple power lunches going on while I was there. I had the typical mix of meats (in this case veal, liver, and kidneys) in a mushroom cream sauce with rosti that appears to be a standard fixture at places serving classic Swiss cuisine. It was good, although not nearly as good as the version I had the night before in Interlaken with pork and morels.

After lunch, I walked around for a couple hours, checking out the town. For a while, the sky had apparently cleared up as I could see the mountains near Interlaken 30 miles away, clear as could be. The mountain was giving me the finger again. Fortunately, it only lasted for about an hour and clouded up again, as I would have been seriously pissed at the Swiss weather service had I wasted a good hiking weather day in the city.

Wednesday was my last shot. I got up in the morning, and saw the sun peeking out and was hopeful. I made my way up the mountain but it was cloudy and raining by the time I got there. That ended up being the pattern for the rest of the day. Sometimes the sun would come out and small parts of the mountain view I was there to see would poke out in small pockets behind the clouds, the rest of the time it was completely clouded over. The side of valley I was hiking on this day had a lift to its highest peak where you supposedly had great views of the three big peaks on the other side of the valley, but I never took it up. While from time to time you had partial visibility in the lower part of the mountain I was on, it seemed that the higher altitudes were completely shrouded. The high-altitude lifts here are actually very expensive (this one would have been about an $80 round trip), so I asked a couple people returning from the peak and they confirmed—you couldn’t see jack up there.

I finished the day by hiking to the small mountain town of Gimmelwald. Most of the towns in the area had long ago gone touristy and been overdeveloped, but Gimmelwald avoided this by apparently pulling some strings to get a bogus avalanche zoning restriction, keeping the big developers out of town. They do see some tourism, having a couple hostels with a couple people selling stuff out of their houses (one was selling fresh alpine milk which I was dying to try, but unfortunately she wasn’t home at the time). It had a pretty amazing setting, with a 400 meter tall sheer cliff on the other side of the valley dominating the view. My guidebook had actually recommended sleeping here, although I’m glad I stayed in Interlaken. While Gimmelwald was a great place to visit, it’s a little too slow, small, and rustic, and had way too many cow pies laying around for me to want to stay there for 4 full nights.

This morning, then, I caught the train out of town. Wouldn’t you know, it turned out to be a perfect hiking day with a nice, sunny, clear sky. I looked at the mountain at the end of the valley as I was walking to the train station, and there it was, giving me the finger again. Unfortunately, my plans aren’t changeable as I’m catching up with my friend Laure in Geneva this evening, and staying any longer would mean that I’d miss out on seeing her (not to mention having to eat my $110 hotel reservation on Lake Geneva). I wasn’t really in the mood for repeating either of the hikes I had taken on the two days I was there, anyways. The hikes were still nice. I got to see all the wildflowers and the fields filled with cows, tingling with the sound of dozens of cowbells, the little alpine towns, and got to see enough partial hints of the scenery that I was able to piece together the whole thing in my mind. In the 4 days though, I never once got the big panorama scene that is really the whole point of coming here. I can’t help feeling a little robbed. I guess that’s how it goes, sometimes. Next time I’m traveling and doing something so dependent on the weather, I guess I can try to build even more flexibility into my schedule.

BTW - photos for this trip are here: https://picasaweb.google.com/tunafishandgrits/SwitzerlandItaly

Berner Oberland, pt 1

So I got into Interlaken two nights ago. This is alps country. The whole point of being here is to get your ass up into the mountains, hike around, and take fancy photos with pretty little meadows of yellow flowers with snow-capped white peaks in the background. In these particular digs, the main event is the three peaks at the end of the long valley which you can see from the town way down below. I had two days planned out. On one day I was going to hit the side of the valley with the big peaks, take some cog-wheeled trains and a couple lifts up the mountain, go for a 90 minute hike on the ridge on one side of the valley approaching the peaks, and from there, catch the train that takes you way up to the peaks of the mountains. They had actually cut a big, 5 km tunnel through the mountain so a train can take you way up into the peak of the mountain at around 1100 feet. It's a pretty slick operation. Particularly when you consider that the built all this crap in the 1800s. These Swiss sure are crafty. They have these special cog-wheel trains that have a 3rd track with teeth in it that a big gear on the train connects to in order to propel it up the mountain. They have to do this because a regular train would never have the traction to get up such a steep incline. In addition to these and array of cable cars and other lifts they also have scattered around, you can get pretty much anywhere on the mountains. Anyways, being able to get to the top of the mountain is really the main event here, so that was planned out for a day (it’s a full day thing, as it takes 2 ½ hours to get there going just one way with no stops for exploring or hiking). I was then going to spend another day exploring the mountains on other side of the valley where there's more great hiking, a bunch of picturesque little towns with tons of cows, some other peaks (albeit ones that aren't quite as high), and supposedly great views of the big boys on the other ridge. In addition, I was going to take a day trip to a nearby city a day while I was here. I'm in the alps three days, so I thought I could do the two days on the mountain, and could hit the city on whichever of the three days I want. That way if the weather was crappy I'd just hit the city on that day, and save the nice weather for the mountain activities.

Of course, this brilliant little plan falls apart if the weather sucks more than one of the three days I'm here. I got in in the afternoon two days ago, explored the lower part of the valley a little bit, and then planned out my time. And the forecast was: rainy on day 1, even more rainy on day 2, not quite so rainy on day 3. Shit. Now I had to roll the dice and see when I want to use my city day. So this morning when I looked out my window and saw the sun trying to peak out and checked the forecast for days 2 and 3 (still very rainy on day 2, still not so rainy day 3), and figured I still needed to save my flex day in the city for day 2 when I’m expecting the worst weather. So I quickly packed up my gear and caught a train up into the mountains. Well, in my case you actually have to catch a couple. I'm staying in Interlaken, which is the big city on the valley floor. (Big as in maybe 3000 permanent residents.) From there, you have to catch a regular train to a much smaller town up between the mountains. From there, you can then start catching your combination of cog wheel trains or lifts to whatever part of the area you're getting to, be it a hiking destination, the resort towns up the mountains, or one of the little alpine herder huts where the people rent out their beds on the side to supplement their income from making selling cheese and milk. So after 30 minutes on a regular train, another 30 on a cog-wheel train, and about 20 minutes on a lift, I'm on my hike. And unfortunately, the weather didn't hold out. As soon as I got to the start of the hike everything got clouded over, and it pretty much stayed that way until I had to leave for the day. The hike was nice, and I only got rained on a bit, but I was deprived of all the great views because everything was covered in mist. Every once in a while I'd see part of the mountains peak out from behind the clouds, but nothing that I could get a decent picture of (hence the complete lack of photos). It was the same deal after I touch the train through the mountain tunnel to actually get up to the peaks. On the southern side it was a little clearer, so I at least got a look at the big glacier there, but you couldn't see squat on the valley side. Major drag. Supposedly, on a clear day you can see all the way to the Vosge Forest in France and the Black in Germany. I stuck around at the top for about 4 hours just in case the weather would clear up eventually, but no dice. I finally had to start heading back down to Interlaken at around 4:00.

To add insult to injury, the sky cleared completely up while I was eating dinner at around 7:30 this evening. I'm actually sitting at the desk in my hotel room writing this right now, looking through my window at the big peaks 5 miles away, and they couldn't be clearer. The mountain is giving me a big middle finger.

We'll see how it goes, though. I was actually rained on the half day that I got here when I was exploring the lower valley, too, so this makes 3 of 4 days that I've been rained on or otherwise screwed over by the weather here on this trip. Not such a big deal in Zurich, but not being able to see anything above 5000 ft really takes away from the experience here. I figure the rain's got to pass at some point, so hopefully I can get a great weather day on Wednesday when I'm back up in the mountains again.

Zurich and Luzern

Got into Zurich late yesterday morning. The flight was good, and with drugs I was able to get a good 6 hours sleep on the flight. Wasn't so lucky with the weather, though. It was clear when I arrived, but by the time I got from the airport to the downtown train station it was raining pretty hard. I checked the forecast on my iPhone and it didn't look like it was going to clear up any time soon, so I bought a cheap umbrella from one of the little stores in the station and headed out.

Wouldn't you know, 10 minutes after I arrive at the hotel (with very wet shoes and luggage), it stopped raining. I checked in, unpacked, got settled and took and nice long shower and refresh, and by the time I was ready to head back out it was just starting to rain again. That seemed to be the pattern the rest of the day. Didn't keep me from seeing the city, though.

Zurich is a pretty swank place. Pretty mellow, though. The Swiss joke that Zürich is 'zu reich' and 'zu ruhig' – that's a play on German words for "too rich" and "too quiet" (so says my guidebook). It's probably not far off the mark, though. It's definitely pretty rich, at least. You'd have to be in order to afford the food and real estate there. The shopping, too. The last half mile of the big shopping street nearest the lake is littered with high end boutiques (Prada, Miu Miu, Dolce & Gabbana, Louis Vuitton, etc.). It probably has more high-end stores than Chicago, which is saying something when you consider that the population of the city is around 370,000, with only a round million in the entire metropolitan area. A bit off the main drag, some stuff in the window of a jewelry store caught my eye, so I checked that out. The necklace I liked was $4K, and that was pretty typical for just about everything in the store. Sorry, mom, you haven't been that good this year. I'm shocked a city that small is able to support that much high-end retail. Either you've got an awful lot of rich people, or an awful lot of people that spend way more money than they should on clothes. Or both.

Zurich is a pretty nice place, though. Not a whole lot in the way of sights, but a very attractive and livable city. I did get a bit out in the styx one night looking for a particular bar and it definitely got seedier; lots of girly bars, Eurotrash, and old dudes walking around with non-Swiss looking women that were apparently hookers. You've always got to sample the local color, you know. I mean sample as in wander and check out, not sample as in…you know.

Today I caught the train to Luzern. While Zurich was pleasant, Luzern definitely has a lot more historic charm. Half the buildings in town look like they were lifted off of a postcard. Just like Zurich, Luzern is situated on a lake where it empties into the mouth of the river. Actually, do you call it a mouth? I know you call the place where a river empties into a lake or ocean is the mouth. Does that mean the place where a lake flows into the river on the other end is, if the metaphor were maintained, ....the bung-hole of the river? It must be because you can't have two mouths on each end of the river. That being the case, why the hell is all the water entering the bung-hole of the river and exiting the mouth. That's gross. It's like the world's most highly-powered enema. Anyways, I'm beginning to figure out that just about every major city is Switzerland is located on a crystal clear, big-ass lake. Good living here, I tell you.

One thing that is not good living, however, is the king's ransom you have to cough up for dinner every night. Basic trattoria or brasserie level cuisine here can often set you back over $40 US for just the entree (no drink, no tip). Last night in Zurich I had some sauteed calves liver with a potato rosti (kind of like a latke). It was quite good, if you're into that sort of thing and like eating cow guts (I do), but this was a very basic, rustic dish made from organ meats, which of course are the cheapest part of the cow. $36. You could probably get something similar in Germany for $10-14 US. It was definitely a good move to bring some food with me on the plane in the spare room I had in my checked suitcase that I'm carrying my suit for the wedding in. Worked out pretty nicely, too. Today, after being gouged $24 for a hearty and satisfying yet grossly overpriced cafeteria lunch (a cafeteria!), I picked up a nice loaf of whole grain sunflower seed bread from a bakery and a couple apples from a corner store the chick at the hotel desk directed me to, and combined that with one of the packs of tuna for a nice little picnic dinner. I would have gotten a bottle of wine, too, as they had some reasonably priced selections at the store, but they were all full bottles and I wasn't in the mood for getting shit-faced by myself (I was also a little annoyed as there were bottles that I’m pretty sure would sell for less than two-thirds the prices in the US). If I can keep finding bakeries that are that good (the bread was awesome), I may just keep doing that every day. At least until I run out of tuna, I will.

Switzerland and Northern Italy

I'm on my way. Coming up to it, I think I was definitely feeling much more blasé about this trip. I messed up my back (again) two months ago, and I think the issues that I was having with it were dampening my enthusiasm for the trip. On several occasions I was seriously considering calling United and cancelling my flight, or since I had already committed to attending Alessandro and Christina's wedding in Italy at least altering it so I wouldn't be away for so long, due to my concern that it wouldn't hold up well with all the packing and unpacking I'll have to be doing on the trip. I got packed up okay, though, and it held up relatively well on the first leg of my flight (I'm currently on waiting for my connecting flight in Toronto's Pearson Airport), so it looks like I'll get by. I realize nobody wants to listen to me bitch and moan about my back, so this will be officially be the last time it will be mentioned on the blog for this trip.

I had a little different packing regime this time. Normally, I just carry a single backpack, sometimes one small enough to slide under the seat on the airplane, but I'm definitely going heavier this time. No way will I stuff one of my nice suits in a backpack for a month, so I've got my usual backpack setup, and a separate hanging garment-bag style suitcase with pretty much only the suit. Well, that, and a bunch of old sunscreen. I normally have to buy it on location because I can't get 3-4 weeks of sunscreen in my little 1 quart baggy of carry-on gels, and as I result, I've had 3-4 half-used bottles of sunscreen, some with labels in completely indecipherable languages, cluttering up my medicine cabinet. I can bring them in a carry on, so I've finally got a good opportunity to use them all up.

The other packing bonus I've got this trip is a bunch of food. I normally bring a little bit on any trip as I despise airport and airplane food. However, my BYOF on this trip is extending into the trip itself. Based on everything I've read, Switzerland is crazy expensive, and I'm in no mood to be dropping $15/day on a basic continental breakfast. So I've packed a bunch of envelopes of tuna, a box of cereal, a big pile of cliff bars, and some protein shakes. That way I'll have more money for drinking.

Should be arriving in Zurich in about 8 hours, and will be hitting Luzern after that. Should get my first real post up in a couple days.

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.