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.

Sunday, June 20, or Sincere and deep appreciation for the smoking ban in New York Bars

In case anyone was worried, I managed to get myself out of my rut just by talking about it, and am now doing much better.

The second best place in town put a sign in their window that they are looking for help in the kitchen. I didn't get a yes come work with us on Friday when I went to talk to the owner, but I'm going to try again tomorrow. I need to convince them that it won't hurt them or bother them for me to work there for the next week before we leave on Tuesday, since they are really looking for someone to help through the busy season of July and August. Part of the reason that they are looking for help is that one of their daughters who works in the kitchen and as a waitress is looking to move to New York, so she was really excited to talk to me, but it might have hurt me a little bit in the eyes of her father.

So, an update on our antics from this weekend.

Friday night was once again rib night except that they didn't have ribs, instead they had grilled sardines. They were just sprinkled with a generous amount of salt and thrown on the grill whole, they hadn't been cleaned at all, and they were delicious. I probably ate 6 sardines.

Saturday we did an all day cookout with our hosts in a public picnic area right by the beach. In case you were wondering, the rumors are true, Spaniards drink their wine with Coca Cola (that is, when they drink wine instead of beer). The trick is to do one part wine with 2 or 3 parts coke. It basically makes it like a lambrusco, very sweet and bubbly. They were drinking cases of house made wine bought from the illegal wine restaurants that we went to last weekend (then the wine was cut with club soda instead of coke). Young red wines apparently need something to make them drinkable. For food we had pork ribs, beef ribs, chicken and empanadas (there were zero vegetables). I'm convinced that the meat here really is just tastier than the meat in the US, everything was so fatty and tender and amazing. And for our evening meal (it was a 2 meal cookout), one of the guys put on his wet suit and went diving for razor clams. He probably brought up 4 pounds of razor clams and they went directly on the grill, and then were doused in lemon juice. There are few things as tasty as seafood that fresh, it was mind-blowing. Matthew and I went swimming in the freezing cold water, and then took a nap on the beach. All in all, it was a pretty amazing day. But we were just getting started....

We were dropped off at home at about 10:45, and told that we would be picked up at midnight again, we were going clubbing. So we showered and dressed nicely (we figured better over than underdressed). Of course we were overdressed, but oh well. At midnight on the dot we got picked up, and we headed over to the bar that has the friday night ribs. I was surprised, but thought maybe that it just turned itself into a club on Saturday nights. Oh no, I was wrong, that was just our meeting place. The rest of our group didn't arrive until 12:30, and then everyone had a round of drinks. We didn't head out until shortly after 1, and we were headed for Boiro. Apparently, last night was the biggest clubbing night of the year because exams ended this week for university students. We went to 4 different clubs. Matthew and I had an over/under bet that we would be home by 4:10. We have rarely been so wrong on over/under bets. We were still at bar #3 at 4:10. The sun was coming up when we finally made it home at 5:34. And we were the first car in our group of 3 cars to head home. At 3 of the places, I felt like I had trouble breathing and my eyes were burning because there was so much tobacco smoke (laced with a smidgeon of marijuana smoke) in the air. Other than saying it was a shit show of a night, I don't really think I can adequately describe it. Oh and we heard Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" 4 times over the course of the night. Today, Matthew and I slept until 1:30, went out to eat, and then came back home and took a 2 hour siesta, and we still don't feel totally recovered. And we reeked of smoke, it felt so gross. (Sorry that this paragraph rambles, it was a rambling kind of night).

But the Brazil vs. Ivory coast game is starting downstairs, which means it is time for me to sign off and go watch a soccer game.

Tuesday, June 16

I've been trying not to complain on this blog, because it seems like such a monumental missing-of-the-point. There's no point in traveling just to grumble about what's better at home. And, really, it doesn't take much to make Ana and I happy: just a cup of coffee in the morning and a well-cooked piece of meat at night.

Which leads us to the problem. Ana and I are coffee snobs. I hope we're not obnoxious about it, but we're certainly persnickety. Ana likes to point out that for awhile we had seven coffee makers between us. We're down to five now, but I'm scheming to replace the missing two. We only buy fresh-roasted beans; when we're in New York we grind them ourselves; and we try to buy from local roasters so we know what we're getting. That kind of snob.

Galicia is not that kind of place. We're in a town of 10,000, so we wouldn't dream of finding a local roaster, but even the supermarket only sells what amounts to two kinds: a one-euro box--the one before last was labeled in Spanish, Portuguese, and Greek--and a three-euro bag. There's not even an equivalent to Starbucks, Illy, or Nespresso available. The cafés here all have high-end commercial espresso machines with attached grinders, and grind your coffee to order before they brew, but they use bottom-shelf supermarket beans.

We know because we asked.

We've been sort of on a mission to find good coffee before the month is up. We asked at the cafés; we asked at the mercado; we even double-checked at the supermarket. Then we asked the real estate agent; we asked her son and daughter; and we're considering hiking over to the tourist office and asking there, too. Everyone here, it turns out, uses the same low-end, stale, prepacked coffee.

So yesterday, when we took a five-hour journey across Galicia in order to go to a cool restaurant in Pontevedra for lunch (two buses each way, one cab, and a 2 mile walk), we were thrilled to get a reasonably good café con leché. It was bracing rather than caustic, with a pretty good head of crema on it and just enough milk to keep your teeth on. So, aided by a bottle of local red, I got up the courage to ask Ana to ask the silent, black-clad waitress if she would, por favor, ask where Chef buys his coffee beans.

We were just getting up the nerve to ask if we could buy some from them, when the waitress came back and proudly showed us the box of pre-packed Nespresso pods.

We're considering emailing a Galician food writer and asking him.

Wednesday, June 9

Its been raining pretty consistently since Monday, which has its ups and its downs. I've read a book and half, and Matthew has started working again on a regular basis, but it makes me really reluctant to go outside at all.

I've gone to a handful of restaurants around town to ask about working part time, and so far I haven't gotten any yeses, which isn't fun, but I need to keep trying. Part of the problem is that there are relatively few actual restaurants in town, its mostly bars that also serve food, so the dedicated kitchen space is even tinier than would be expected. In a lot of these places there really is only room for one or two people at the most (and if there is room for two, they already have a second person). There is one nice restaurant, and it was the second place I asked, but they have a new hire fresh out of culinary school, so again no.

But lets talk about food! We have been trying to split our meals between home and out to ensure that our money lasts, so there aren't quite as many notes to talk about as there might otherwise be.

The most interesting part for me has been that with every single beverage that you purchase, some small amount of food is also given to you. Every cup of coffee, every bottled water, every seventy-five cent glass of wine comes with an appropriate snack. None of it impressive food, none of it comes from the kitchen, but the economics of giving food away with every drink boggle my mind. Not that I'm complaining, part of me will always be a college student who loves free food. We've had bread slices with thinly sliced ham on top (with wine), canned sardines in olive oil with a slice of bread (wine, and they were pretty tasty), chorizo slices with bread (wine), muffins (coffee), chocolate (coffee), and olives (beer and water). The weird time was when I had water and Matthew had coffee, so we got one muffin and a small plate of olives. These same places then charge for a basket of bread when you order other food. The ribs that Matthew mentioned a few posts ago also theoretically work like this, but because they are coming off a grill hot, they don't actually go one for one with a drink. Plates of stacked high with ribs just get put on a table with a round of drinks. Or sometimes between rounds.

For our first meal in Puebla we basically walked into the first restaurant we could find, which happened to have the most beautiful view in town from the second story terrace. We had the traditional pulpo a la feira (fair style octopus) and padron peppers (tiny local green peppers sauteed in olive oil and a substantial amount of salt) and a total flop of a dish called jamon al adobo. We ordered three dishes expecting it to be tapas style fare. Tapas sized fare, I should say, after all, we are in Spain. The prices were in Euros about what tapas cost in dollars in the US (I know thats complicated, but thats how I'm thinking about things money wise), so 4-8 Euros a plate. When the waiter asked us if we would mind pulling over another table, to make sure all of the food would fit on the table, we were a little taken aback (we were at a table for 2). Sure enough, the portions were enormous. Matthew and I are big eaters and we were only able to make it through half of each of the plates. The octopus was a little rubbery, but actually very tasty, the peppers would have been better with beer than with wine, they were that salty. The ham was dry and basically covered in ketchup. The only redeeming part about it (in my opinion) was the french fries that came with it. They were hand cut and they were crispy most of the way through, with just a little bit of softness on the inside. I think Matthew disagrees with me, but I was very impressed.

After that meal, we were totally baffled by what we should expect. Are things that you order full size? How can you tell ahead of time without sounding like a tourist (or an idiot)? Our confusion was promptly cleared up by the realization that the snack comes with every drink is the "tapa," otherwise you are just ordering entrees and appetizers. Our hosts thought we were silly, and we had to explain that back home there were restaurants that serve food tapa style which just meant tiny and expensive plates that you have to have 10 of to have a full meal. Then they were like, oh silly americans.

Ok, I had much larger ambitions for this post on food, but it has already taken me longer than expected, so it is time for me to move on. Surprise, surprise, I will have to do another post about food while we are Spain.