Part III: The Beautiful South

Even though it probably seems like all we did was eat on this trip, we really had another objective in going south for our vacation. After the chilly palaces and educational museums of France, we wanted a few days on the beach. Hey, most people spend two weeks lying in the sun for their honeymoon. Everything doesn’t have to be an adventure.

Our first morning in Almería, we asked directions to the beach at the hotel’s front desk, and got instructions to drive to a place called Cabo de Gata. This area, which is a nature preserve, was also featured in the guidebook, and numerous people had told us to go there. Sounded like a safe bet. “Oh, one thing,” said Leah to the clerk, as we were on our way out. “Is there a parade tonight?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Every night during Semana Santa. Come back by five or you’ll have to wait until eleven or so.” The idea that we had almost sentenced ourselves to another few hours in the car behind the Grand Wizards and hooded Knights made us shiver. We picked our way out of town, spending nearly half an hour to go two blocks on the main drag, which had been reduced to one lane with rows of parade-watching seats, then got on the highway. Signs to Cabo de Gata led through fields of plastic-covered tomatoes, boarded-up towns awaiting the summer tourists, and beaches that looked to windy to even walk on. We were a little nervous, especially when the signs that read, “Welcome to Cabo de Gata” we framed by a backdrop of broken farm equipment, discarded plastic sheeting, and migrant farm worker housing.

Passing the picturesque desalinization plant (where there had been rumored to be flamingos) and a garbage-strewn beach, we were beginning to think that maybe something was going on in Barcelona that the Fodor’s people and travel agent hadn’t wanted us to see. Why would anyone recommend that we come to this place. About the only thing from the guide that seemed accurate was that the landscape was “lunar,” though we hadn’t expected the moon to be so, well, ugly. We decided to just keep driving.

After heading off the highway to a smaller road, we wound up on some kind of mountain pass with beautiful views. We relaxed a little. Until, that is, we saw a sign with two arrows, one red and one black, pointing in opposite directions. This is the “you have (or maybe you don’t) the right of way,” sign, only necessary when a very small and dangerous two-way road is going down to one lane. While I was taking pictures of the views of the Mediterranean, Leah was craning her neck to try and see around blind curves, hundreds off feet up in the air.

Every now and then, we would come around a turn to encounter another nervous-looking Opel going the other direction. Someone would pull off the road into a small patch of dirt, either against the cliff or perched over the water, and the other would pass. When we emerged on the other side of the mountain, the landscape had changed. Rocks jutted in every direction, and the plastic sheets were gone. There was no beach to be seen, only coves surrounded by jagged cliffs. Cars seemed to be parked in every small area off the road. We chose one and walked towards the edge of the cliff, through a field of yucca.

Approaching the edge, we could see a small strip of sand with about five people on it. This was our beach. We watched people try different routes to find their way down. Some gave up, as arriving at the beach involved climbing down some steep hills. Eventually, we made it to the sand, and though the water was too cold for swimming, the hills protected the beach enough to make it broiling hot. And parking and beach access were free, free, and free. Almería was looking like the most romantic place in the entire world.

Part II: This Is Where They Were Hiding the Free Luna de Miel Stuff

Even though there was a TV in the room, we decided that eating was important. We were wary of trusting our map-reading skills any more that day, so we went to the bar attached to the hotel. There was a long list of tapas, without any prices, and some expensive entrées. We ordered drinks and about eight of the tapas, along with one entrée, and got sort of a funny look from the waiter. The food was good and plentiful, and after a couple of glasses of vino, we were done with dinner.

Next, we began to steel ourselves for the argument over the bill. We were certain that the unpriced items would have come back to bite us, and that we would go to bed feeling like illiterates once again. These things have become important, things like being able to order exactly how we want, or to protest when we’ve been cheated. Now that we have the language skills to manage these situations, albeit with a lot of effort, messing them up hurts doubly: it means that not only are we suckers, but that we can’t speak as well as we think we can. In some ways, these things were easier when we knew we couldn’t talk. In many others, though, this is one of our biggest victories: we can talk our way into things that other people might not want us to do. And when the bill came, for more food than we could finish and a bunch of drinks, we were indeed shocked speechless. It read, “4 vino, 4 cerveza, 13 Euros.”

The next night, it began to happen again. We ordered things that we were sure would cost money: calamari, shrimp, bacalao, anchovies and fired almonds and pieces of manchego cheese with Jamón Serrano. It didn’t matter. With every drink – and the drinks were pretty small and cheap – one could order something off the tapas list for free. People seemed to be heading to one bar for, say, the grilled calamari, then to another for the bacalao with tomato, then to the one specializing in octopus roasted with paprika.
Back at the hotel bar, which seemed to serve better food than many of the others in town, we ordered the bacalao. They were out of it. We tried just about everything else, in an attempt to console ourselves. It couldn’t fill the void. We headed to dinner, where we had an interesting experience with what passes for a martini in Spain (a glass of warm vermouth, a splash of gin, and a wedge of lemon), then went to bed.

The next day, after lounging on the beach for a few hours, we returned to the hotel bar. Still no bacalao. But the waiter was beginning to recognize us. He chatted with us about where we were from, complementing our Spanish and lamenting the fact that so few of the English-speaking tourists that come to Almería to hit the beaches try to use any Spanish outside of “la cuenta, por favor.” Even though the Andalusian accent is a little tough for us to decipher – as in, people tend to leave off the endings of all words. Remember that in Spanish, the endings are where all the actual information is – we followed him and must have said the right thing. A few minutes later, he emerged from the kitchen with a grin, then presented us a plate on the house: the bacalao had materialized. Who needs France?

The Honeymoon Continues: Southern Spain Edition

Part I: Getting There, During Semana Santa, is Nearly 5/8 of the Fun

Almería is far. Seven or eight hours far. And no train runs from here to there in any sort of straight line. In fact, we even found one on the schedule that took 23 hours to make the trip. After that, we headed back to Avis. There, we overheard a very tall blond man – the Avis attendant – speaking perfect, unaccented English to the customer in front of us. Obviously German. The Germans are the most impressive language-learners we have ever encountered, we thought. A German man lives across the hall from us, speaks very good English, and in two years here has learned both Spanish and Catalan. Interesting facts all, but not relevant: this guy was from Tenafly. We were upgraded to a bigger Opel.

After about a seven hour drive, which included some wasted hours searching for a lunch place recommended in the guidebook, we rolled into Almería. The outskirts of the town, off the highway, included some dicey slums which featured houses without any doors, just curtains. But we picked our way to the center and were a block from our hotel when a policewoman stopped us by sliding a metal barricade into the road. The streets had been blocked off in Valencia, too, but we snuck by them by showing the cops our hotel reservation. When we tried that here, the policewoman shrugged her shoulders and said, “There’s a parade.” Undeterred, we drove off to find another route to the hotel. We found more police, with more barricades. We showed off the hotel reservation again. Again: “There’s a parade.” “How long will it last?” “Don’t know. Ten, twenty minutes?”

We kept driving. We asked more policemen. Eventually one thought of a way to get to the hotel without negotiating the parade route. We had already been driving on streets narrow enough to make going around corners an experience that required a bit of Semana Santa faith, but now we were really in the old city. Our map collection consisted of a Michelin highway map, a hotel reservation map that included street names written in a size completely out of proportion to the map itself so that it was impossible to tell which gray line each name referred to, and a map given to us by a cop. This map had the opposite problem: the street names were so small that they were impossible to read.

We guessed and drove and found ourselves directly behind the parade. It consisted of a large float, carried by at least twenty people walking underneath it, with life-sized figures of the Crucifixion. This was accompanied by other floats with what looked like kings and queens on them, and marching bands. And marching to the band music were people in robes – some white, some blue, some red or green – with matching pointy hoods. I’m guessing that Spain’s Semana Santa marchers had the costumes first, but if I had a uniform that got adopted, even by accident, by the Klan, I’d cut my losses and find a new one.

Finally, the marchers dispersed and we were able to follow signs to our hotel. We checked in and were given exactly the last thing we wanted: a tiny map, directing us to the parking garage. Leah, who was ready to get out from the behind the wheel after the two-hour sojourn within Almería’s city limits, turned and looked me in the eyes, then said, “Please, please get us there.”

We passed something that said “parking,” on the correct street, but there was something about it that was a teeny bit different than the name on the card. Maybe it said “parking garaje” and the card only said, “parking.” Maybe the words were in a different order. It’s all the same: we passed it and I immediately decided that 1) that was, in fact, our garage, and 2) a quick left would get us back there. Then a right. And then we were looking at the grill of a police car. Little kids and old women were laughing at us and waving their hands in the international signal for, “You absolutely cannot drive here.”

I said, “You should probably back out.” The moments that followed, in which Leah backed a relatively large car out of a dead end in the middle of a crowd of paradegoers, were not the most romantic of our honeymoon. Even eating the sneaker-flavored andouille in St-Remy was better. Leah did not answer me with words, which was probably good, and she performed the backing-out admirably. On our second time around, I found the parking garage. The honeymoon was saved.

Part II tomorrow

It's Semana Santa. Everyone is on vacation, and we're going to the beach in Almeria for a week. Maybe you can find it on a map. We'll post stories when we return. Enjoy your Easter, Passover, or Rite-of-Spring-Pagan-Ritual.

Cooking Lesson 1: Calamari a la Calamari

Every Monday, when Gloria comes up to our apartment for her English class, I’m in the kitchen cooking dinner. Ever the showman, she usually manages to keep herself focused on the class for about 45 minutes before she begins talking more and more loudly. I try not to respond, not wanting Leah’s class to degenerate any further into chaos – Gloria’s kids often come to class with her, and no matter how far and wide Leah searches for a bland topic of conversation, there’s something to bicker about. If there’s nothing worth fighting over in the topic itself, they fight over whose grammar is better.

But if she’s alone, she can’t resist eventually poking her head into the kitchen to comment on whatever is being cooked. I’ve never seen anything I would call approval register when she looks at a roasting chicken or pot of spaghetti sauce, although once she was intrigued by lasagna. Here, that’s foreign food. Finally, one Monday when she could endure no more of what I called cooking, she snapped: I was enrolled in cooking classes.

Free of charge (it would be easier for us to steal her money than pay her), and focused on Catalan delights, the classes would be held each Saturday afternoon. We would split the cost of the ingredients, which only she would be allowed to purchase. I would follow her instructions precisely and she would stand off to the side, coaching. We settled on fried calamari as the first dish and made a plan for to meet at two on the following weekend.

Leah and I arrived in her apartment to find the following: three barking dogs, an enormous bag of spinach, two heads of lettuce, some mushrooms, four apples, and a sink full of whole squid. Gloria apologized for not having enough time to make us a salad, some spinach, and baked apples. We had, it was becoming obvious, been snookered: this was not a cooking class, but a lunch date.

She threw two white aprons our way and then shoved us out of the way to begin cleaning the squid. “You can clean them,” she said. “If you want.” We decided to step in, since we were supposed to be learning. I picked up a squid, whose smell still lingers on my hands as I write this, many handwashes later, and began to follow her lead. You clean squid like so:

1. Rip head from body.
2. Find plastic-y bone, remove.
3. Look for parts that are more gross than rubbery, remove.
4. Cut head in half with enormous scissors, shove eyes into trash.
5. Explode squid eyeball all over your apron, feel pang of embarrassment.
6. Shove plastic-y squid nose (beak?) out of head. Receive short lecture about how the nose is delicious.
7. Peel skin from flesh. Become frustrated. Keep picking at skin, which is maybe 1/3 of a millimeter thick. Find it impossible to remove from your fingers.
8. Notice that Gloria has already cleaned six squid while you were doing this.
9. Let Leah try; resolve to ask the fish guy to clean your squid for you if you try this at home.

Next, she gave us some enormous scissors to hack the squid into little rings. After heating some oil in a cazuela, which is a big clay dish that can go on the stove or in the oven, we threw in the squid. While it fried, Gloria said, “Now, grate an onion.” Then, she peeled an onion and quickly grated it into a sort of onion paste, which she added to the frying squid. After letting it cook for about fifteen minutes, she added some tomato sauce.

Now the squid was red, and it was clear that we would not be getting nice crunchy rings of fried calamari. It was looking more like squid stew. She grabbed some parsley that had been sitting on the counter and chopped it up. It too went in to the cazuela, without the hassle of being washed. All I could think of was the factoid in Fast Food Nation about here there is more e.coli in sinks on and on counters than in toilets. “American sinks,” I repeated over and over in my head. “American counters.” I did not make eye contact with Leah.

Next, we offered to set the table. Of course, since we had offered to do a task, Gloria said, “No, absolutely not.” She crushed up some garlic in a mortar and pestle and threw that in the cazuela. Next, she beat an egg in the mortar with the remaining scraps of garlic, poured in an unknown quantity of olive oil, and handed the thing to Leah: “Stir.” Leah stirred. This would be an allioli, a very Catalan sauce that goes on all sorts of things. Would be, that is, if Leah stirred properly. She wasn’t stirring properly. Gloria took the mortar and stirred, then poured the whole mess in with the still-frying squid. She stirred the whole mess to keep the egg from cooking like it did this summer when Leah and I tried to make French Vanilla ice cream and wound up with Shirred Egg Ripple.

Gloria decided that the calamari was done and transferred most of it to another, smaller cazuela. She threw some spinach out of the way and set it on the counter. We now had about ¾ of the squid, leaving the remaining ¼ for her and her daughter for what is, traditionally, the biggest meal of the day. Her eye caught on another pan, one that had been sitting out of the way on the far end of the counter. She opened it to find garbanzos, spinach, and boiled eggs, sautéed with garlic. “And this,” she said, scraping as much as would fit in with the squid. She was rambling about how sorry she was that there was no dessert, but that a bunch of Finns had arrived early. Finns everywhere. So many Finns. “Ok,” she said. “Go.”

Go?

“Yes, you go. I am very sorry, but there is no time to have lunch together. We will have lunch together…April 20. It is my Saint’s day.” Everyone in Spain celebrates something like the equivalent of two birthdays: one when you were born, and one on the day that honors the saint with whom you share your name. April 20 is the Domingo de Gloria, the Ascension. That might be Easter, which would be fitting, since you remember what happened on Christmas.

The recipe over, we were shepherded onto the elevator with our calamari and beans. The next day, we got a glimpse of what had happened to the rest of the groceries. I was coming back from running – it was Sunday morning – when I ran into Gloria walking down our street. “Come,” she said. “I have something for you.” I hoped it was water, since it was about 80 degrees here on Sunday.

It was, in fact, a flan-like pudding, roasted artichokes, baked apples, spinach quiche, and stuffed mushrooms. All of these foods are good; none are quite what you’re looking for when you finish running on a hot day. I tried to resist, but it was useless. Gloria made up three plates and handed them to me, shuttled me back to the elevator, hit the button for the 6th floor, and closed the doors. Never mind that, laden with all the dishes, I would be unable to re-open the doors when I arrived there. After standing at our floor for a few minutes, I managed to set one dish on the floor and turn the handle that opens the elevator door.

Leah was, needless to say, surprised to see that I had returned from my run with Sunday lunch. “She shouldn’t be giving us all this food,” she said. “I want to pay for it.” Not likely to work. There is a theory here that many of the Catalan people are actually descended from Jews who changed religion because of all that “inquisitiveness.” We have heard – and we have no idea whether this information is reliable or not – that anyone whose last name is something like a place name or a common verb is from a family that grabbed the name out of a yarmulke to save their hides.

We’d believe it. Once my grandmother said to me, after I had turned down an orange by saying that I wasn’t hungry, “You don’t have to be hungry to eat an orange.” The same idea was invoked on Sunday, but with Spinach quiche, which is a tougher sell to the not-hungry. Go re-read the scenes in the kitchen in Newark in Goodbye, Columbus and you’ll get an idea what chance I stood of getting out of Gloria’s without baked apples. And forget trying to leave the building - regardless of the weather – without a jacket. If the next lesson is about how to make croissants into matzoh brei, then really we’ll know we’re on to something.

Would you drive for three hours to see people burn things? Do you even need to ask if we would? Even after the “can’t miss” all-night parade in Sitges, we decided that we could not ignore the hype surrounding Las Fallas. Las Fallas is a festival held in Valencia every year to celebrate something religious. From the looks of the city, you could have convinced us that we were honoring the patron saint of Traffic and British Tourists, whoever that is. St. Faneuil Hall?

A Falla, we think, is a big statue that could be made out of papier-mache. If not, it’s at least made out of something flammable. The city of Valencia splits into teams somehow, then spends all year building their statues. They look like huge trombones, or court jesters, or political figures. Then they spend that week with all the Fat Tuesdays and Holy Wednesdays looking at them and crowning Fallas Queens and dealing with tourists. Then, to make everyone go home, they set them on fire.

We were all set to take the train, except for knowing which station it was leaving from and having tickets, when our friend Philippe realized he had vacation days. Since his girlfriend, Arancha, is sort of between two jobs, that meant they were free and would drive with us. After a small mix-up involving the translation of “en frente de” (To us: “right in front”; to Spanish-speakers: “across the street from.” This can cause more problems that you would think if the street in question is big enough.) we picked up Leah from work and hit the road.

Three hours to the city of Valencia from Barcelona, then one more driving real slow through all the blocked-off streets to get to the hotel later, we were officially at Las Fallas. We pretty much killed time until midnight, when the burning started, then packed it in. I suppose there is a reason why, despite having grown up 20 miles away, I’ve never been to Times Square on New Year’s Eve. We are hoping to make our next excursion a beach vacation.

In the spirit of fun-without-crowds, we decided to host a dinner party. Even though we only have four plates and four chairs, we invited eleven people. Three of them cancelled the day of the dinner, which helped a little insofar as it reminded us that we needed some chairs. As usual, Gloria came up big in the giving-us-things department – namely, a bigger table, a box of wine glasses, a tablecloth, and a bunch of folding chairs.

Then we swiped a salmon recipe from Bobby Flay, the idea for making dumplings from Josh, and we were all set. There was also turkey scallopine, since some people just won’t eat fish. If we do say so ourselves, the food was good enough to provoke a small crime wave, at least among the roasted potatoes that went with the salmon. And Leah added a killer dessert.

The real key, though, as we see it, is that we had a lot of people around who speak Spanish. We are a little self-conscious that if we only invite, say, one couple over, we could be subjecting them to an experience not unlike babysitting for a five-year old. Not exactly constant responsibility, but they need to be considerate about using too many big words, and they don’t always know what we’re talking about. Everyone has always been very nice about our linguistic klutziness, but we are currently trying to embrace the principle that listening is more than half of the conversation. This means we keep quiet more, like so:

Guest: You know, once when I was about twelve, I fell off my bike into a well.

Old us: Yes? Well, that’s fun, because when I am twelve, uh, was twelve, I am…no, no, pardon me. You are. You were. I was. I had a bicycle? Bicycle. Yes. I have a bicycle. I have had a bicycle. I had bicycle. What’s “well”?

Guest: What are you talking about?

See, now we’re in trouble, because we’re going to need to explain something. With all the waiting, people get bored. You need a whole bunch of tenses just to tell a simple story with a few details, especially if there’s going to be “If I hadn’t….then I might have…” type things in there. The new us focuses on getting people to say more and letting them make all the points they want.

Guest: You know, once when I was about twelve, I fell off my bike into a well.

New us: Oh! Tell us about it! Did you have wounds?

Guest: [Long story about bike and well, interrupted only by sporadic vocabulary questions.]

Not only are we learning new words and practicing our comprehension, but we’re polite, too! Maybe we’ll let you get a word in edgewise when we get home. Anyhow, with 6 people fluent in Spanish, all we had to do was keep the snacks coming and stay tuned in to the conversation. We could chip in a little something about how to make dumplings (“Con aciete muy, muy caliente. Y como se dice ‘water chestnuts’? Ten cuidado con tu ropa.”) now and then and take it all in in a more relaxing manner. Just like that, we had transformed conversation from a sort of exam into a fun activity. And with only a little violence. Who knew?