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.

Friday, June 11

Life has been boring around here. Ana has been knocking at restaurant doors, while I've been banging my head against this article project. Sooner or later, one of us will break through and do something worth celebrating, and we'll go celebrate, but in the meantime, it's been a rainy week.

That's not to say it's been a bad one, of course. Even gray, our coastal town is beautiful, and we made a great gumbo-esque seafood soup. There's no spice in food here (since everything comes straight either from the farm or the ocean), so we had to use five or six different types of pepper along with garlic and chorizo to get any kick to it all, but it's been a filling three meals, with one more in our refrigerator. (Ana and I have come to two more serious relationship issues, though. She likes to have soups thin enough to sip through a coffee stirrer, while I prefer to be able to eat them with a fork. And she prefers red grapes. I find this horrifying.)

It's another rib night tonight, so I'm warming up my Spanish. I'm fluent, so long as people only ask me how I'm doing.