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.