Spanish flies
Jul. 5th, 2005 02:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
green_amber.. didn't exist in Valencia, but do seem to exist in Barcelona. Odd that, huh? maybe it was so hot in Valencia the flies just keeled out of the sky and expired..
So I went to Barcelona. Valencia too dull, too hot. Barcelona 26 degrees not 35, vibrant, beautiful. Viva Barca!
Random Barcelona thoughts. Beach culture is what exists in a country where you can quite happily be wearing nothing but a bikini at midnight, and where if it's too hot during the day, you can always fling yourself in the sea. It's a state of Eden. No need to worry about whether you've got your hat, your brolly or the right kind of shoes. From there it's a short hop to, it's too hot to do anything so why worry about anything at all. Which is good for peace of mind but bad for industrialisation. Hence, north south split, globalisation, G8 protests and all things bad. Spain , oddly, seems pretty efficient these days. Food comes far more quickly than in Edinburgh restaurants (possibly because it's usually a matter of salad or grilling the odd fish on the barbie), metro runs on time, frequently and is clean, safe and beautifully climatizo (cf London, New York). The beach is Stepford Wives-clean and devoid of litter, despite the warm gale force wind, and the beach bar/cafe huts, in the fairly out of town beach where I've been loitering, are free of British stag parties and twats, and hence, even at 2am, of lager louts or sexual leering. Por que no como esta in Inglaterra? Barcelona, the city of the multicultural future, where Brazilians , Chileans and Algerians engage you in half-French, half_Spanish, half-English over lunch, where the latest food craze is Spanish tapas re imagined a la japonesa (chorizo and brie wontons, mm), where public modern art pops up in the oddest places and does not, apparently, get stolen or defaced for the hell of it.
There has to be a downside in all this gloriousness , doesn't there, and for me personally, let's be frank, it's the fact that everyone in Barcelona is either young , thin and beautiful (with fantastic legs), or (in the minority) very very fat and old. And no, these aren't metaphorical statements, they're real observations. I think they must take the odd young fat ugly sport that escapes out the birth canal and feed them to the tiberoness in the acquarium (the one here really IS the biggest in Europe, verdad, but I think I'm dolphined out, Steer :-) At the piscina on Montjuic (a pool with a view and a half, I recommend), I think I saw the one fat boy in Spain. I felt such fellow feeling for him I nearly went over and bought him an ice cream, but I'd probably have been stoned. (Mind you, that was the time the Spanish family behind me were re enacting Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in the Catalan version of chav, so maybe I'd have sneaked away with it.) Spain is really not very good for Anglo body image issues. I feel pretty good in Britain, on the whole, and here I feel like some kind of adipose mountain that ought to be towed away, covered in plaster and turned into some kind of grotesque modern art to scare the natives with. Of course the Spanish approach to dieting appears to be to have either a cigarette or a mobile phone to your mouth at all possible moments, which obviously has its own down-sides. I keep wondering about this Mediterranean diet thing; yes, obviously these people are eating a fab diet of fish, salad, olive oil and red wine, but don't they all just then die at 40 of lung cancer? Maybe that too explains the absence of older fatter people. Unplanned obsolesecence ; would I rather have 40 years of looking like these gorgeous creatures or 80 years of looking like me? Sometiems guiltily I think the former.
After which of course I will contrarily tell![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
blue_condition (who alone will care) that I had one of the best meals of my life at one of the posh seafood resturants outside the Palau de Mar at Barceloneta - la Gavina for memory. Foie gras ravioli in a truffle cream sauce, baked au gratin, followed by their own paella de mariscos, creamy, de shelled in advance, fresh and almost but not quite briney. Fantastic. And at el Xalet on Montjuic (with same view as the piscina, for rather more money!) I had lunch of risotto with asparagus and mascarpone - also to die for. Spain grows rice round here - did you know that? I didn't. Tho oddly they also make paella of noodles - fideua . On my last night I ate at the local beach restaurant and had dorada - John Dory - simply baked with tiny pearl onions and slices of sweet potato. Simple, perfect and very gorgeous.
Vale, vale. (The most useful word I have learnt in Spain by far.) Hasta lluego..
So I went to Barcelona. Valencia too dull, too hot. Barcelona 26 degrees not 35, vibrant, beautiful. Viva Barca!
Random Barcelona thoughts. Beach culture is what exists in a country where you can quite happily be wearing nothing but a bikini at midnight, and where if it's too hot during the day, you can always fling yourself in the sea. It's a state of Eden. No need to worry about whether you've got your hat, your brolly or the right kind of shoes. From there it's a short hop to, it's too hot to do anything so why worry about anything at all. Which is good for peace of mind but bad for industrialisation. Hence, north south split, globalisation, G8 protests and all things bad. Spain , oddly, seems pretty efficient these days. Food comes far more quickly than in Edinburgh restaurants (possibly because it's usually a matter of salad or grilling the odd fish on the barbie), metro runs on time, frequently and is clean, safe and beautifully climatizo (cf London, New York). The beach is Stepford Wives-clean and devoid of litter, despite the warm gale force wind, and the beach bar/cafe huts, in the fairly out of town beach where I've been loitering, are free of British stag parties and twats, and hence, even at 2am, of lager louts or sexual leering. Por que no como esta in Inglaterra? Barcelona, the city of the multicultural future, where Brazilians , Chileans and Algerians engage you in half-French, half_Spanish, half-English over lunch, where the latest food craze is Spanish tapas re imagined a la japonesa (chorizo and brie wontons, mm), where public modern art pops up in the oddest places and does not, apparently, get stolen or defaced for the hell of it.
There has to be a downside in all this gloriousness , doesn't there, and for me personally, let's be frank, it's the fact that everyone in Barcelona is either young , thin and beautiful (with fantastic legs), or (in the minority) very very fat and old. And no, these aren't metaphorical statements, they're real observations. I think they must take the odd young fat ugly sport that escapes out the birth canal and feed them to the tiberoness in the acquarium (the one here really IS the biggest in Europe, verdad, but I think I'm dolphined out, Steer :-) At the piscina on Montjuic (a pool with a view and a half, I recommend), I think I saw the one fat boy in Spain. I felt such fellow feeling for him I nearly went over and bought him an ice cream, but I'd probably have been stoned. (Mind you, that was the time the Spanish family behind me were re enacting Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in the Catalan version of chav, so maybe I'd have sneaked away with it.) Spain is really not very good for Anglo body image issues. I feel pretty good in Britain, on the whole, and here I feel like some kind of adipose mountain that ought to be towed away, covered in plaster and turned into some kind of grotesque modern art to scare the natives with. Of course the Spanish approach to dieting appears to be to have either a cigarette or a mobile phone to your mouth at all possible moments, which obviously has its own down-sides. I keep wondering about this Mediterranean diet thing; yes, obviously these people are eating a fab diet of fish, salad, olive oil and red wine, but don't they all just then die at 40 of lung cancer? Maybe that too explains the absence of older fatter people. Unplanned obsolesecence ; would I rather have 40 years of looking like these gorgeous creatures or 80 years of looking like me? Sometiems guiltily I think the former.
After which of course I will contrarily tell
blue_condition (who alone will care) that I had one of the best meals of my life at one of the posh seafood resturants outside the Palau de Mar at Barceloneta - la Gavina for memory. Foie gras ravioli in a truffle cream sauce, baked au gratin, followed by their own paella de mariscos, creamy, de shelled in advance, fresh and almost but not quite briney. Fantastic. And at el Xalet on Montjuic (with same view as the piscina, for rather more money!) I had lunch of risotto with asparagus and mascarpone - also to die for. Spain grows rice round here - did you know that? I didn't. Tho oddly they also make paella of noodles - fideua . On my last night I ate at the local beach restaurant and had dorada - John Dory - simply baked with tiny pearl onions and slices of sweet potato. Simple, perfect and very gorgeous.Vale, vale. (The most useful word I have learnt in Spain by far.) Hasta lluego..
