We've been back from Barcelona for about a week. I've noticed that, insofar as I need to go to work almost every day whenever I hang around the United States, Barcelona may be a better option. But Leah, who remains on vacation, is up in the air.

Since deplaning, we've returned to battling the garden gopher (he's winning), had some people over for dinner, given away a bunch of Spanish candy, and returned to my writing group.

Have I mentioned the writing group? Sometimes it's worth mentioning, if only for its dysfunctionality. While I was in Spain, for example, a flurry of emails circulated regarding the fact that some people felt that "we might not be committed enough - or maybe I'm just not talented enough to get you guys to give me feedback." Ugh. Yes, writing group is often substituted for therapy, but does it have to be so blatant?

One of the first weeks I was involved, we all read a story by Patty, a forty-something mousy blonde woman. She introduced herself - new to the group, as I was - as a laid-off "PR professional." Funny, since the story we had read for that meeting concerned a heroine taking the form of a forty-something laid-off PR professional. In the tale, this PR professional takes on some temp work and winds up going to a surreal office that holds only temp workers doing entirely unrelated tasks. They tend to meet in the kitchen. It is there that the PR professional meets a hunky thirtyish laid-off temping something else, and he tries in vain to win her affections. Alas, she is too het up with her internal monologues to notice and he drifts off with a skinny young intern. O, cruel world.

Like all of the stories everyone brings to writing group, it needed work. No problem there. It was when the first suggestion came - always the same: "I'm not sure I believe that character X would really do Y after Z just happened." - that the fun began.

"No," said Patty.

"No what?"

"No, I'm not ready."

"Not ready...for what?"

"To have this...to have my life, my existence, critiqued."

"Well....uh...we were just, you know, the story..."

"Do you know," she finally said, eyes moist, "how few forty-something unhappy people there are as protagonists in modern fiction?"

I thought about buying her the Philip Roth Reader and a collection of Toni Morrison, so she could enjoy some good old-fashioned middle aged angst, but instead I kept quiet. Luckily, the next thing she submitted was a humorous essay about forks, and that kept the conversation a little further from home.

It was with this history in mind that I shuddered when a new member opened the conversation about his "play that isn't meant to be acted - just read," a lighthearted tale about a theater troupe at a state college that puts on a production in which gay cartoon characters - Tinky Winky, Vanity Smurf - read aloud from the book of Isaiah. I won't tell you exactly how a cucumber was used as a prop, but it was. "It's a real look at homosexuality and Catholicism, especially as it relates to the priest scandal. I'm very interested in that because I'm gay and Catholic."

Ah, fantastic.

I didn't mention that I didn't buy the piety of the protagonist.

Ok, we´re back from Madrid.  There has been a lot of eating since we last sent news.  To be honest, we even did some sightseeing, though not without some trials and a clear message from above that such things are not to be undertaken lightly.  As we walked from our friend Philippe´s office (where we dropped off the backpack) in a fancy neighborhood through the Retiro, a beautiful park in the center of the city, we saw a column of smoke rising from the direction of the only things we had really come to see:  El Prado and the Reina Sofia Museum. 






The Prado is full of many of the works of Goya, El Greco, and Velasquez, and even since we returned from a year in Spain without even considering seeing, it has been something of an embarassment to my family.  The Reina Sofia has more modern art, Picasso´s famous Guernica, and, at this moment, a Roy Leichtenstein exhibit. 
 
But back to the smoke.  It is hard to gain enough perspective on a column of smoke to determine from where it is emanating, so we continued our walk towards the museums.  Coincidentally, the museums are located essentially across the street from the Atocha Station that was bombed by Al Qaeda in March.  We were undeterred by both that fact and the two loud explosions we soon heard.  In fact, the most daunting thing was the dust and heat.
 
Arriving at the street with all the museums, we were greeted by crowds of people looking up.




The fire was directly between the two museums, and no one seemed scared.   Clearly this was not another terrorist attack. After asking around and later reading the paper, we determined it was an electrical fire which led to an explosion in the 40000-gallon tank of vegetable oil used to cool the electrical transformers that helped provide power to the neighborhood.  Quite a show.
 
Anyhow, we finally got into the museum when it was un-evacuated, around 6, and stayed until 9, when we were starving.  Philippe led us on a forced march through the streets to a nice place with a terrace and a few other bars.  At one point, we passed what looked like a pile of shards of glass.  But it was moving.  Cockroaches.  This is why one should not wear flip-flops in the city.
 
The next day, we tackled the Prado for a few hours, got lost once, and flew back to Barcelona.  That night, we went out with Jose, Melissa, and Melissa´s parents to a Catalan steakhouse.  We ate ourselves stupid for about 3 hours and went to bed.
 
Saturday began at 3 in the afternoon, when everyone woke up.  Something in the meat, perhaps.  We killed time until dinner (read:  we wandered around and ate) and then went out for more tapas.  This time they were nouveau tapas: a Catalan riff on tuna sashimi, black noodles with squid ink and vegetables, cod raviolis, duck and mache fajitas, and a bunch of other tiny plates. 
 
We got up early on Sunday and made it out to our friends Katie and Albert´s house by 1.  This is a feat, since they live an hour outside of Barcelona.  But it is easy to convince oneself to go, since they have a beautiful house with a pool.  Sadly, a nest of angry wasps was making camp somewhere near the pool and Jose, Leah and I all got stung.  Leah even got stung twice.  Albert attacked the remaining wasps with a hose and seemed to drive them off, though poison was dispatched to take care of the toughest ones.  The day´s highlight came when one-year old Leo, the son of our friends Catrine and Marc, attacked Katie´s very pregnant midsection.  Surely you can figure out why.

Outside of Jose and Melissa´s, we saw a small car.
Small for Europe, even. Guess the name.



Yes, Microcar. Micro indeed.

So, back to dinner. We followed up Alkimia with a visit to the famous Cal Pep, where we had a lot of fried baby things: baby shrimp, baby minnows, (unfried) clams. We also had the best tortilla ever and huge shrimp from a town called Palamos, which I guess is sort of the Ipswich of the fresh shrimp world. There was more foam served for dessert.

The next night Leah and I made dinner, which required a trip to the market. We did not buy the wild boar here.



We did buy enormous salmon steaks that no one could finish. Intent on avoiding sightseeing as long as possible, we delayed our exploration of the neighborhood of Gracia by going out to brunch this morning at the Bar Pinotxo in La Boqueria.



More baby squid, but this time sauteed. Leah had cava and croquettes made of spinach, pine nuts, and raisins. A good start.

In Gracia, we did not see this building:


, the famous Pedrera, but that´s because we´ve already been there. Instead, we wandered around and looked at houses designed by Berenguer, Gaudi´s assistant and the man behind most of the buildings in Gracia. Who knew?

He did not design this place, but you can´t say it doesn´t look cool anyhow.



Next, news from Madrid (we´ll be there for the next two days).

We got to Barcelona after the typical groggy bounce through London, all messed up from too little sleep, too many bad movies, and breakfast at dinnertime. We knew our luck was good when there was a Toyota Prius promotion at the airport and we got a free ride to José and Melissa´s in exchange for filling out a survey. Having seen all the sights we needed to last year, we immediately began to eat.

To thank them for letting us move into their tiny apartment, we took José and Melissa to Alkimia, a restaurant we read about in Food and Wine. It made Melissa throw her arm in the air with glee on the Metro when we told her about it.




The review we had read on egullet.com (never trust Food and Wine on its own) said that there were 10 courses for 40 Euros, and so we began counting right away.

1. Small dishes of olives. Nondescript, but free.
2. An apertif of pan con tomate (bread with tomato) in the form of a shot of liquor. We received a shot glass full of tomato juice with some very crunchy bread bits in it, covered with a slice of salami. Though I do not like wet bread, this was delicious.
3. Parmesan flan. Delightfully cheesy.
4. A salad of fried baby artichokes with ham raised on a diet of acorns. We need to raise more things on a diet of acorns in the US. It would be good for everyone. Also, fried baby things can´t be beat.
5. A tuna taco-ish thing with cherries, bacon, and goo of pesto. Perfectly cooked tuna. Cherries surprisingly good with pesto.
6. Now we´re getting into the good stuff. Monkfish with almond cream is never, ever bad. This was made even better by an accompanying tempura-ed zucchini flower and romesco sauce. Romesco is a Catalan sauce made from nyores, a kind of pepper you will never find in the States. Michael Moore should make a movie about the suspicious lack of Romesco at home.
7. Foie, nicely seared, with blanched pears, all bobbing in a broth of cocoa. Of course - chocolate and liver! But it seems an idea whose time has truly come. Of all the things not to try at home...but it worked.
8. On to dessert. First, chocolate...sauce? Syrup? Ganache? Is there an official definition of ganache? Anyhow, it came with spicy ice cream and apricot slush. The Spanish word for apricot is albaricoque. There was a lot of talk about this word.
9. A sort of panna cotta of goat´s milk with pine nuts and berry sorbet. There are no known instances of people not enjoying berry sorbets.
10. Assorted free things: chocolate lollipops, ganache in a cylilnder of burnt sugar, not-very-good but still free raspberry jellies in coconut, and fabulous foam of mandarine orange. The foam reminded us that Ferran Adria had trained the chef at Alkimia, although you can´t go out for a hot dog in Barcelona without being served some foam of something.

Ten courses. Forty Euros. Fantastic.

Next, we would begin hanging out with Melissa´s parents, who have begun to move here.




They are very nice people and bought us some slush on a pleasant Sunday. We also met up with our friend Angela and her sisters for a night of tapas. It has been amazing how quickly we got back into the rhythm of sleeping until noon and going out - even to dinner - until 3. Let´s hope I can stagger in to work by 9 when we get home.

Coming soon: A night at the famous Cal Pep.

Last night we went to see Fahrenheit 9/11, and at the end it says, "Do something." Now, all those shots of maimed children and our low-functioning president do make one want to follow someone or other off a figurative cliff in the name of being anti-maimed children, and so we walked out into the West Newton night ready to "do." We decided to gather up our leftover Euros and go spend them someplace else. Even if the US did take Euros, we'd take our business elsewhere.

Sometimes in the car I listen to awful, awful right-wing radio. It's kind of entertaining. It's meant to be entertaining. When Air American comes to Boston, I'll listen to that, but I've listened to Air America, and it isn't as entertaining as being appalled. Michael Moore has mastered the art of appalling you while having you agree with him, although I could only imagine the skyrocketing blood pressure the movie would induce among a few of my more poorly informed friends (How poorly informed? Well, people, they don't even read this.)

The thought I left with, since everyone is offering their Michael Moore opinions currently, is that you would have to be a complete dupe to have been in the military and still vote for George Bush. The allegations in the movie that W tried to cut active duty pay, cut aid to military families, and cut veterans benefits while the fighting was going on is not news broken by Michael Moore, and it isn't as nuanced a problem as the Bush family's dealings with the Saudis over the decades - if you want to make money in oil, can you really not get into bed just a little bit with bad guys? It's a throwaway jab, one reported months ago in the New York Times and other places. Even if he didn't cut the pay, it isn't exactly like enlisted men get rich even when we fund the military way too much.

So what is it that makes people say it's ok to shortchange them in numerous ways and still send them off to die in a war that, at this point, no one really still thinks is a good idea? Lack of options? Family history of voting GOP and joining up out of high school? Desire to be a part of something? Damned if I know. What I do know is this: In one scene, some poor PA has the thankless task of smoothing Paul Wolfowitz' hair, by hand, after Wolfowitz has slobbered on his comb and tried to get his funky bangs into place on his own. No one gets paid enough to touch the almost-certainly caustic spit of Paul Wolfowitz.

Here you see Leah speaking Spanish. We had enough English over the big July 4th weekend, and so we ran right home and called Melissa and Jose. We've decided to go visit them again, and in this photo you can see Jose giving Leah instructions on how to access the ancient walled city of Barcelona.

Last night, to prepare for not being with Americans, we had people over. Also, this gathering was intended to celebrate Kevin's new job. After a successful stint as a waiter, he decided that he missed health insurance and became a lawyer again. But in Albany. Which is hours from here. So he's moving. Which cuts the number of people I have to watch football with to one. Maybe two.

Here's a test of the photo blog. Gen' s wedding. Leah has gotten us organized in the cabinet department, and I was supposed to put Gen's pictures in an album right after her wedding. That was in October. Leah 1, Dan 0, Gen 0.