Adios, Barça!

No thanks to those silly things called “borders” and “nation-states” (ugh), I’ll have to leave Spain and the rest of the European Union in a few weeks. Take note fellow European Union- travelers: you only get three months in the entire European Union, not three months per country. I’ve found out the hard way, and I guess I won’t be tending organic Greek sheep anytime soon. Well, at least I have come to really love Spain, especially Barcelona.

I wouldn’t recommend coming here for the food, however. Apparently, Spanish food is all the rave in many parts of the world. DC’s once-Chinese Chinatown now boasts a really expensive tapas bar. If you are at all hip, you should know what “patatas bravas” are... and how much they resemble thick-cut french-fries with some hot sauce and mayonnaise. Where the hell is the good food here?! It must be somewhere outside of Catalunya, because the potato omelette and the "pa amb tomàquet" (basically bread wetted down with tomato and drowned in olive oil) hasn’t been exactly a gastronomical feast. Catalans proudly boast that the pa amb tomàquet is a native dish. Wow. If you want independence, you should at least have good food, like curry or even hamburgers. Well, I guess they have good hams.

However, I went to a calçotada (pronounced “cal-su-tah-dah”; see pictures!) this past weekend. This is a very curious Catalan tradition where everyone gathers around a table, usually outdoors, and eats grilled green onions, called calçots (pronounced "cal-sots"; I felt bad telling everyone that they were really just eating onions - one’s sarcasm can only go so far) with this amazing sauce (made of hazelnuts, almonds, tomatoes, nyora - a Spanish red pepper, and other ingredients... here’s a nice recipe). It actually was delicious! And of course, they grill up some meat, and lots of wine to go around. By 4 o’clock, I was the drunken Takeru Kobayashi of calçots. I would come back to Barcelona just to eat calçots. By the way, calçotades (that “e” there is for catalan plurals) only happen around this time of the year, then people get bored of them.



(This is one picture of a guy eating calçots. You should really appreciate the picture not for the way he aptly demonstrates his ability to eat calçots but rather for his impressive Spanish mullet.)

Also, I must say that I have really come to love the Catalán language. I was talking to the mom of my friend (who hosted the calçotada) in Catalán with a few “hijuepuchas” and “malparidos” peppered in there. Once you get to actually study the language, you realize that it is more than a truncated Spanish... it has a lot more complexities and it is rather pretty. I like it! If anyone wants a Catalan language learning CD, just let me know.

Other than that, I have been just enjoying the beach, the people, my bike, books. I recently visited the national cemetery here and visited Durruti’s grave, which was just a grave. He’s not even buried there. I wonder if he liked calçots. Viva la anarquia!

So in a few weeks, I will be leaving Barça (sniff, sniff) and heading down south through Morocco and off to Egypt. If anyone has any friends out there who might give me a place to stay, I would like to be their friend, too... hehehe.

Un petó per a tothom!