26 November 2008

Justin and Food and Spanish Regional Pride!

Hello America and the Rest Of The World:

Observation 1: There is a weird regional pride in this country. Everybody wants to seperate. Some jackass (es) apparently walk (s) around and spray paint (s) over road signs with the (Catalan or Basque) spellings of words in a clearly Castillian region. Rio Junto becomes Riu Xunto. Stupid stuff. It makes me want to spray over the whole damn sign and rewrite it in English.

Observation 2: The food. Food report time!

What we eat:
1. Tortillas! Not like in Mexico, these are made with potatoes and eggs and onions and oil and they are the best thing in the world! We eat them everyday- sometimes on bread, sometimes not! Still, Mexican ones are better...

2.) Chorizo! It´s so disgusting and fatty and it stains my hands orange with ¨colorante¨- some wierd coloring agent that looks like artificial cheese powder. Awesome and we also eat this everyday.

3.) Boxes of wine! 69 cents for a liter of wine! Yes please!Also, really cheap, local, extra wine reserves in sketchy looking bottles with no labels. And it´s good! I now am of the opinion that 2 bucks is expensive for a good bottle of locally grown wine.

4.) Lentils in glass jars. Lentils plus tabasco plus ham flavored chips equals mmmmm

5.) I ate blood sausage (tastes like meatloaf) and beef tongue (really, really, really good). Side note - odd to taste something designed to taste you, no? Like making eye contact or smelling someone else´s nose maybe.

6.) Tapas are weird and frantic. Beer plus tapas is about 1 euro and you stand and eat and everyone eats fast and you cant buy just a beer. Its really hard to get drunk when you keep eating greasy tapas. The bars are smoky, really smoky, and people throw all their trash, cigarettes, etc. on the floor. Pretty nasty.

7. Breakfast equals bread and butter and jam or marmelade for the most part at the albergues. Not bad, actually.

OK, enough

It´s cold and theres a lot of snow in this town. I threw a snowball for the first time in years! Aleza was angry cuz I promised not to... Ill probably do it again tomorrow, then she will throw some back at me and Ill slip into a hypothermic coma and she will feel really bad. Or there might be an avalanche. Well, talk to all in a few days if were still alive!

PS: Sorry about the lack of contractions and apostrophes. I keep forgetting where the keys are!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

HI Justin!
Love your food comments! Hope you write down all the different types of tapas that you are tasting so that you can recreate them all when you get back home. Yum. Maybe like a once a month tapas Friday or something. Are they often deep-fried, or baked or seafood, or chorizo, or jamon, or all of the above? Can't wait to have you cook some up for us, tho I don't think we can find any 69 cent/liter wine around here. Love, Dad

CarolineMathieson said...

The region you are in now specialises in a special soup containing chick peas, dark cabbage (or keel) and jamon. Its very tasty and filling in the cold weather. You get it with a chunk of bread.

Have you tried the garlic soup (Sopa De Ajo) where they have a piece of bread floating in the soup with an egg on top of it?

I love Spanish soups!

The restaurant on the other side of the bridge at Hospital De Orbigo specialises in soups and their Sopa De Marisco (Seafood Soup) is fantastic...

Caroline.