Shan and Travis just left this morning, and it was absolutely wonderful having them here. It was probably the second or third time that I've seen them since graduating from TAMS, but its kind of amazing how easy it is to be comfortable with people that you knew ages ago. And they brought us coffee, still whole, and a grinder, pretty close to enough to last us until we get back to New York.
They also inspired us to plan for our first apartment when we get back to New York. They bought a house and have redone most of it themselves (ripping out the bathroom completely, redoing the hard wood floor, painting, etc.) I haven't actually seen the apartment that we've signed a lease for, and Matthew has only seen it a party, not really in terms of "do we want to live here?" so it will be interesting once we get back and figure out what we've signed up for. In the meantime, we've been drawing out possible layouts and talking about furniture.
I went to Bilbao with Shan and Travis on Saturday. Matthew stayed home to "work." The outside of the Guggenheim is even cooler in person than it is in pictures, because changing position by a few feet can give you a totally different angles on the building. The inside however was less interesting for me; I'm just not a modern art girl.
After the Guggenheim, we went to old town Bilbao for lunch. After wandering the small roads, we found a place with a menu of the day that looked pretty good. While we waited for a table, there was a woman in a tight and tiny red dress making eyes at Travis. She kept trying to catch our attention and talk to us. After like 10 minutes, it finally clicked on me, and I turned to Travis and asked if she was a prostitute. We did the best we could to ignore her, but we were very confused how she thought she might pick up a guy that was standing with two women. Would we just not notice that he had gone off with someone else? Crazy lady.
After lunch, we stumbled on an shop selling "artisanal ice creams," and the flavors were too delightfully weird to pass up. They had cinnamon and roses, lavender, "kalimotxo" (Spanish/Basque for red wine and Coke), and Rioja red wine. Shan tried a mojito sorbet, and Travis and I settled on a local cheese with quince and walnuts flavor. It was really tasty, but towards the end it got a little exhausting. I kind of wish that I had tried the Kalimotxo.
Monday, July 26, 2010
San Sebastian Again
We did go drink (eat?) the ham coffee last night, in a lightning strike on the tapas bar I mentioned last time. Unfortunately the last bus to Hondarribia leaves San Sebastian at around 10, so we didn't have much time to soak up the atmosphere.
We had spent most of the afternoon lounging on the beach after a long and decadent lunch. Shan and Travis sunned themselves, while Ana and I engaged in some serious sand-castle architecture. We completed keep, cathedral, moat, drawbridge, and two ring walls before it was time to go bob on the waves. I'm surprisingly proud of this, perhaps because I keep seeing kids with crenellated buckets that made everything easy. Our extra fifteen or so years of experience meant we could build without cheating, drawing plans in the sand and then building up and decorating with seashells and sea weeds.
There was more, but since then I've mostly been drawing sand castles in my notebook. If graduate school doesn't work out, I may become a sand micro-architect.
We had spent most of the afternoon lounging on the beach after a long and decadent lunch. Shan and Travis sunned themselves, while Ana and I engaged in some serious sand-castle architecture. We completed keep, cathedral, moat, drawbridge, and two ring walls before it was time to go bob on the waves. I'm surprisingly proud of this, perhaps because I keep seeing kids with crenellated buckets that made everything easy. Our extra fifteen or so years of experience meant we could build without cheating, drawing plans in the sand and then building up and decorating with seashells and sea weeds.
There was more, but since then I've mostly been drawing sand castles in my notebook. If graduate school doesn't work out, I may become a sand micro-architect.
Tastes!
[Sorry for the delay! Our Internet supply got cut off, so we've been typing without anywhere to post from!]
It's hard to write about having my family here, just because the pleasures of that sort of visit are as much from the familiarity as they are from the touring you do together. I'm exhausted from our adventures, but what I needed most was just to sit around and talk with Mom, Dad, Joyce, and Grandaddy.
And eat. Ana estimates 100 courses over the ten days; I think I tried more than 300 dishes. It's hard to tell, because it was too many for us to take notes about. We did sit down and make a list of the best things we had, but even then some of the places were fuzzy: how do you remember which was the best of three txangurro patés?
It's an interesting question, how to retain culinary memories. In some ways, forgetting is a blessing, because I can have what I think is the best meal of my life over and over again, but it feels like an enormous waste, too. I suppose I'm just a child of the age of mechanical reproduction: I am used to the idea that a movie, painting, recording, or poem will always be almost instantly accessible, with even a theatrical performance potentially downloadable. Food, on the other hand, goes fast. I'm jealous even of food writers' abilities to get something of what they ate down on paper.
I'm hoping Ana will write sometime about what it is that she learns from a trip like this, more focused on taste than technique, but now is not the time. Tonight there's an inexplicable DJ djing around the block from our house, playing a mixture of instrumental band music, a medley of showtunes from Grease, Mexican pop songs, and a healthy dose of Shakira. (Spanish set lists tend not to pay much attention to the flow between songs.) But it's a good backdrop, as Ana shows Shan and Travis a tapas-cookbook/graphics-novel that we bought at a funky tapas place in San Sebastian. Both cookbook and tapas place are bizarre and wonderful: I'm hoping it has the recipe for the ham-flavored coffee with sweetbread cookies we had when we went.
Even if not, Shan and Travis brought us two pounds of coffee and a grinder, so I'm now looking forward to our morning Joe again. It's a silly thing to be fussy about, but I would swear I can taste the difference. They only learned after buying the coffee that customs officers are particularly suspicious of coffee because drug cartels use it to mask the scent from the dogs, but they seem to have made it through all right. Today we wandered the city, pointed out Napoleon's cannonball holes and the castle, and then took a little tapas tour.
Tomorrow it's San Sebastian, more tapas, and the beach. And Saturday, the gang is headed to Bilbao, while I stay home with my article and do a little penance from the hard work I've done relaxing over the last two weeks.
It's hard to write about having my family here, just because the pleasures of that sort of visit are as much from the familiarity as they are from the touring you do together. I'm exhausted from our adventures, but what I needed most was just to sit around and talk with Mom, Dad, Joyce, and Grandaddy.
And eat. Ana estimates 100 courses over the ten days; I think I tried more than 300 dishes. It's hard to tell, because it was too many for us to take notes about. We did sit down and make a list of the best things we had, but even then some of the places were fuzzy: how do you remember which was the best of three txangurro patés?
It's an interesting question, how to retain culinary memories. In some ways, forgetting is a blessing, because I can have what I think is the best meal of my life over and over again, but it feels like an enormous waste, too. I suppose I'm just a child of the age of mechanical reproduction: I am used to the idea that a movie, painting, recording, or poem will always be almost instantly accessible, with even a theatrical performance potentially downloadable. Food, on the other hand, goes fast. I'm jealous even of food writers' abilities to get something of what they ate down on paper.
I'm hoping Ana will write sometime about what it is that she learns from a trip like this, more focused on taste than technique, but now is not the time. Tonight there's an inexplicable DJ djing around the block from our house, playing a mixture of instrumental band music, a medley of showtunes from Grease, Mexican pop songs, and a healthy dose of Shakira. (Spanish set lists tend not to pay much attention to the flow between songs.) But it's a good backdrop, as Ana shows Shan and Travis a tapas-cookbook/graphics-novel that we bought at a funky tapas place in San Sebastian. Both cookbook and tapas place are bizarre and wonderful: I'm hoping it has the recipe for the ham-flavored coffee with sweetbread cookies we had when we went.
Even if not, Shan and Travis brought us two pounds of coffee and a grinder, so I'm now looking forward to our morning Joe again. It's a silly thing to be fussy about, but I would swear I can taste the difference. They only learned after buying the coffee that customs officers are particularly suspicious of coffee because drug cartels use it to mask the scent from the dogs, but they seem to have made it through all right. Today we wandered the city, pointed out Napoleon's cannonball holes and the castle, and then took a little tapas tour.
Tomorrow it's San Sebastian, more tapas, and the beach. And Saturday, the gang is headed to Bilbao, while I stay home with my article and do a little penance from the hard work I've done relaxing over the last two weeks.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Why... Hello There Strangers.
To both of our regular readers, I apologize for our lack of posting over the past few weeks. I won't make any excuses, we really have been quite busy. Matthew left for Bilbao earlier this morning to see his family off to the airport, and I will be joining them later today after the cooking class I have later this afternoon (my birthday gift from M).
We've absolutely loved having Matthew's parents, grandfather and aunt here for a visit. We've seen some beautiful sites, ate amazing food, and drank deliscious wine. We went to San Sebastian, Pamplona (post San Fermin), and Haro for a wine tour. We lingered over most of our meals for two hours or more, probably trying 100 dishes all together over the course of 10 days (6 people, at least 4 different courses a meal, and often doing tapas with lots more little courses really adds up). In Haro we walked through the hand-built caverns of a 132 year old winery, and tasted 20 year old white wine (and Matthew's dad bought a bottle of wine that is 8 years older than I am). In Pamplona, we traced the path that the bulls run through in about 2 minutes from their corrals (or most of the way there, there was a Bollywood movie being filmed the first 50 meters or so), but at a much more leisurely pace. We also laid on the beach in two different countries (we liked the french beach better), ate lots of ice cream, took lots of pictures (none on my camera though).
We've absolutely loved having Matthew's parents, grandfather and aunt here for a visit. We've seen some beautiful sites, ate amazing food, and drank deliscious wine. We went to San Sebastian, Pamplona (post San Fermin), and Haro for a wine tour. We lingered over most of our meals for two hours or more, probably trying 100 dishes all together over the course of 10 days (6 people, at least 4 different courses a meal, and often doing tapas with lots more little courses really adds up). In Haro we walked through the hand-built caverns of a 132 year old winery, and tasted 20 year old white wine (and Matthew's dad bought a bottle of wine that is 8 years older than I am). In Pamplona, we traced the path that the bulls run through in about 2 minutes from their corrals (or most of the way there, there was a Bollywood movie being filmed the first 50 meters or so), but at a much more leisurely pace. We also laid on the beach in two different countries (we liked the french beach better), ate lots of ice cream, took lots of pictures (none on my camera though).
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Leaving Galicia
I've been hogging the computer recently, because it's crunch time on this article. If I don't finish it before visiting season starts, I'll never get around to it. And so, my procrastination has started in earnest, and in breaks between games of Computer Chess and cups of coffee I've been littering the house with marked up copies of this darn thing. (I'm not sure if I mentioned that on the spur of the moment--horse metaphor!--I made us buy a printer in Puebla. I haven't owned a working printer in seven years, but we just carted one across Spain.)
Before heading off, we paid our respects to Saint James at the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. The line seemed strangely long, but everywhere we went in Galicia, we had seen pilgrims headed toward the church, so we didn't make too much of it. The Cathedral of St. James in Santiago is the third-most important pilgrimage site in Christendom, and since the twelfth-century it has received all the faithful who thought Rome or Jerusalem were a bit too far a hike.
it wasn't until we got inside that we realized that we had spent an hour or so waiting to embrace St. James himself, or at least the statue of him. And the ladies in front of us had brought a priest with them, so we got to hear a Spanish prayer before his bones. We sidled out and found an entrance that required less kneeling and saint-hugging.
After saying goodbye to our friends in Puebla, we made the Galician pilgrimage we had been looking forward to, heading to the capital, A Coruña (or La Coruña, or, in 16th-century England, The Groyne), to eat with John Barlow, who wrote the definitive guide to Galician food. Besides John, A Coruña has two claims to fame:a working Roman lighthouse and repelling a raid by Sir Francis Drake around the turn of the seventeenth century. Best I can tell, they're equally proud of the two: I was irked that everywhere I looked there was a monument to this early modern skirmish. No mention of the Spanish armada, incidentally. Somehow that seems less important on this side of the ocean.
John showed us around and took us to some number of the best local places. Ana should really write about this night; I was trying to go drink for drink with a British food-writer. I do remember hearing a jazz trombone solo in a smoky club full of musicians.
There is more to write, but I don't want to relive the next day's hangover or the twelve-hour train ride of the day after that.
Happy belated fourth of July to everyone over there. Ana and I celebrated in the traditional manner: with two glasses of cava in a Basque pub.
Before heading off, we paid our respects to Saint James at the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. The line seemed strangely long, but everywhere we went in Galicia, we had seen pilgrims headed toward the church, so we didn't make too much of it. The Cathedral of St. James in Santiago is the third-most important pilgrimage site in Christendom, and since the twelfth-century it has received all the faithful who thought Rome or Jerusalem were a bit too far a hike.
it wasn't until we got inside that we realized that we had spent an hour or so waiting to embrace St. James himself, or at least the statue of him. And the ladies in front of us had brought a priest with them, so we got to hear a Spanish prayer before his bones. We sidled out and found an entrance that required less kneeling and saint-hugging.
After saying goodbye to our friends in Puebla, we made the Galician pilgrimage we had been looking forward to, heading to the capital, A Coruña (or La Coruña, or, in 16th-century England, The Groyne), to eat with John Barlow, who wrote the definitive guide to Galician food. Besides John, A Coruña has two claims to fame:a working Roman lighthouse and repelling a raid by Sir Francis Drake around the turn of the seventeenth century. Best I can tell, they're equally proud of the two: I was irked that everywhere I looked there was a monument to this early modern skirmish. No mention of the Spanish armada, incidentally. Somehow that seems less important on this side of the ocean.
John showed us around and took us to some number of the best local places. Ana should really write about this night; I was trying to go drink for drink with a British food-writer. I do remember hearing a jazz trombone solo in a smoky club full of musicians.
There is more to write, but I don't want to relive the next day's hangover or the twelve-hour train ride of the day after that.
Happy belated fourth of July to everyone over there. Ana and I celebrated in the traditional manner: with two glasses of cava in a Basque pub.
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