Sufficiently photogenic is the Catalan capital that I find myself – almost a week on since our return to the UK – still identifying images that I feel inclined to post to this forum. I promise that this will be the last batch!
To mark our transit from Sitges to Barcelona on Wednesday last the Kickass Canada Girl organised something of a culinary coup – in the form of a gastronomic walking tour of the older parts of the city. This was arranged through the good offices of a concern called Spanish Trails – which the Girl had discovered through her latest ‘fave’ InterWebNet service – Chowhound.
The Spanish Trails wine and food tours include one by the appellation ‘Tasting Barcelona’ – which is described on their website thus:
“The focus of Tasting Barcelona is always great food and wine but with the important added opportunity for our guests to explore and experience the best of Barcelona’s sites of interest as well as get a taste of the side street local flavor. Tasting Barcelona is a food and wine tour by nature, but is in turn an exciting and interactive way to experience Barcelona. We can comfortably host small group tours and private tours in a fun, personalized manner away from the crowds and with an amazing and plentiful diversity of wine and Catalan and Spanish tapas and gourmet dishes.”
We were met by our entirely splendid host – Danny (a native New Yorker, ex chef and seven year resident of Barcelona) – in the Placa de Catalunya at 6:30 of the evening and availed ourselves of his enthusiastic tutelage for the next five hours. You will be unsurprised to hear that we learned a great deal – had a lot of fun – discovered previously unexplored quarters of the city – met some fascinating people – and genuinely wondered whence five hours had vanished…
Danny was excellent – knowledgeable, enthusiastic, personable… youthful! – and he did (and had!) a great job! He also took the trouble to follow up the day after our tour by emailing the Girl and I further recommendations and suggestions – which really was above and beyond. To Danny – many thanks!
Now, I’m not going to give details of the bars and cafes that we visited – you’ll just have to sign up for one of the tours yourselves – but I am going to pass on Danny’s descriptions of what we ate and drank. Just remember – envy is a sin! (Yes, I know – so is gluttony!)
- First port of call:
Wine: Sumarroca, from Penedes (blend of Muscat, Gewürztraminer and Xarelo)
Food: Montadito de cuarto quesos & Montadito de Solomillo
- Second base:
Wine: Nekeas, from Navarra (100% Grenache)
Food: Patatas Bravas, Spicy Olives, Fried Artichoke chips, tortilla de patata, Croquettas de Pollo
- Third stop:
Wine: Vermut de la casa (all the rage in Spain at the moment!)
- Fourth:
Wine: Porron of red table wine
- Fifth:
Wine: Petit Bernat (blend of Merlot, Cabernet Franc. and Picapoll Negre from DO Pla de Bages)
Food: Pan con Tomate, Iberico meat plate, cheese plate
- Final call:
Wine: Llopart Cava from D.O. Cava (blend of Macebeo, Xarl.lo & Parellada)
Yum!
Naturally (for those that know us!) – this was not the end of our epicurean adventure – though for the remainder of our visit this veered from the sublime to the… even more sublime!
At Danny’s recommendation we broke our fast sitting at the counter of the Kiosko Universal in the Boqueria – that amazing market off Las Ramblas which reminds me just ever so slightly of the Granville Island Market in Vancouver.
A freshly conjured plate of huevos y patatas or huevos y setas – the latter from a mound of fresh wild mushrooms on the counter – and a small glass of cold beer… what better way to start the day – especially after the night before?!
And what better way to continue it than a visit to one of the world’s top cocktail bars – Javier de las Muelas’ – “Dry Martini Bar” – in L’Eixample district. Their specialty is – you may already have guessed – the Dry Martini! I was impressed that they not only stocked my favourite artisan gin – Sipsmith – but that the MD of Sipsmith’s had himself been a guest at the bar the week before.
Less good news – from the financial perspective – was that since my last visit a decade and more ago Javier de las Muelas has opened a restaurant – Speakeasy – adjacent to the bar. It would have been discourteous not to have had lunch there, and we are nothing if not polite! Very, very good it was too…
There is – of course – always a price to pay, and we must now haste our way back to the gym!
Bah!
Tags: Barcelona, Food & Drink, Holiday
Those readers who are ‘au fait’ with the glorious city of Barcelona will doubtless – at some point or another – have visited Gaudi’s yet to be completed masterpiece – the Sagrada Familia. Regardless of one’s spiritual persuasion (or indeed one’s lack of such) it is surely impossible not to discern in this extraordinary endeavour substantiation that man can indeed on occasion rise above his baser nature to create something which touches upon the numinous.
With its foundation stone laid in 1882 and the project handed to Gaudi a year later, this expiatory church was little more than 15% complete at the point of the architect’s death in 1926. Funded entirely by donations and hampered by the Spanish Civil War – during which the workshops containing many of Gaudi’s plans and models for the cathedral were destroyed by fire – it is estimated that the halfway point in construction was only acheived as recently as 2010. Modern building techniques and an influx of funding following the Barcelona Olympics have – however – enbled the setting of a hopeful target completion date of 2028.
It is simply not possible to walk around this singular monument without wanting to take photographs of it. It is equally impossible (for me at least!) to do the edifice justice. The exterior is probably well know by all. These shots are of the interior:
…and just a couple of the exterior:
Tags: Barcelona, Fuji x10, Photo, Sagrada Familia
The building that houses the Institute of the Arts, Barcelona (which is actually a short journey down the coast in Sitges) was in a former life an Audi design centre.
It shows…
The rule of thumb regarding survival of the first three bitter months of the year is to ensure that the Christmas/New Year spirit lasts as long as possible, before hunkering down and digging in for the long haul through to spring – pausing only to offer a grateful prayer of thanks that – as winter months go – irksome February is at least numerically challenged!
And then – all of a sudden – everything changes!
These are amongst the happenings that occur over a relatively short interval:
- March finally limps to a close and we find ourselves on the threshold of the spring.
- In the UK the clocks go forward to British Summer Time, thus ensuring that – for the first time in the year – my journeys both to and from work are accomplished in daylight.
- The spring term at the School comes to an end and we are suddenly two thirds of the way through the academic year.
- The sun puts in a proper appearance and nature starts to awake. Those bright munchy greens presage my favourite time of the year.
- Those of us who own ‘fairweather’ convertibles (unlike the Kickass Canada Girl!) uncover our transports of delight, charge up our batteries and venture forth to blow away the cobwebs.
Following last year’s ridiculously early Easter, this year’s is nearly as late as it can be. Before that feast is upon us The Girl and I are heading to Barcelona (leaving – in fact – on the morrow) accompanying the A level Theatre Studies boys on their field trip to the Institute of the Arts in Sitges.
The Fuji x10 and the School’s iTablet will – naturally – be accompanying us.
Expect pictures!
I watched last night on the BBC a deeply affecting documentary film by Helen Langridge entitled ‘Moving Half the Mountain’. At the centre of the film was the story of the building of what became commonly known as the ‘Death Railway’ in Burma during the Second World War.
Those of us who grew up with Alec Guinness in David Lean’s epic “Bridge on the River Kwai” (based on the eponymous French novel by Pierre Boulle) will be broadly familiar with the subject, should this be only because – having been absorbed by the film – we engaged in further research to establish the real truth behind this regrettable chapter in the history of mans’ inhumanity.
It is not – however – the narrative itself that imbues this impressive new documentary with its power to move. That comes – as it so often does – from the testament of those directly involved – from the thoughts and memories of the British and Japanese soldiers that survive still – and who agreed to be interviewed for the film.
The British had been caught up in the cataclysmic events that lead to the disastrous fall of Singapore in February 1942 and were subsequently marched up the Malaysian peninsula and into Burma, where they were ill-used by the Japanese as slave labour to build a railway linking Burma and Thailand. Forced to work in appalling conditions it is believed that a total of some 100,000 men – including more than 6,000 British servicemen – perished in pursuance of this objective.
Of those that survived the ordeal many have never spoken in depth about their experiences – even to their loved ones. That these men have chosen to do so now is a result of most of them being in their 90s, some having even achieved their centenaries. It would be a further tragedy were their testaments to be lost without being heard.
Affecting though they may be – however – their stories are not the most telling element of the film. What really moves is the demeanour of the survivors themselves. Almost to a man they demonstrate a degree of forgiveness, of acknowledgement, of coming to terms with their experience – that is humbling in the extreme. These men had come face to face with the very worst of which mankind is capable, and their survival – and subsequently fulfilled lives – leave us a lesson the we would do well to heed.
In the light of some of the more unpleasantly revisionist thinking that seems to be prevalent in this centenary year of the outbreak of the Great War, I would strongly recommend the viewing of this excellent film to any tempted to make glib judgements as to the expediency of warfare.
Tags: History, Loss, Modern life
“Own only what you can carry with you”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Readers with long memories (and, of course, all who know me personally) will be aware that I carry at all times what is usually described – with more than a whiff of condescension – as a ‘manbag’. The much loved specimen of the genus that is currently my constant (inanimate) companion was purchased in Paris (pretentious – moi?) back in the summer of 2007. Though it has since required the repair that was the subject of this previous post, it really has done very well given the rigours to which it has been subjected.
As detailed in that aforementioned post this invaluable receptacle contains just about everything that I could possibly need to carry with me on a day to day basis – thus ensuring that I avoid the usual bulging pockets, broken gadgets (from having sat carelessly upon something delicate) or indeed that frenzied last minute search for keys, phones, credit cards etc – that seems to accompany some others’ less – um – organised egress into the world of a morning.
I say that the bag holds everything. Actually – that turns out no longer to be true…
Life changes. Things become more complex. I now find myself routinely toting around things that I would not previously have carried. I am sure that I could simplify things – strip them back – but at the moment, given the amount of traveling that I do daily, I would rather feel confident that I have all that I require to hand at all times.
I have for a long time now carried with me everywhere a spiral bound A4 notebook (for Canadians and other North Americans this equates roughly to Letter size). This is an essential for nurturing the creative impulse – for the harnessing of that lightening bolt of inspiration wherever and whenever it might strike (the spiral bound nature of the pad enables one to tear off and dispose of the evidence should one’s notion prove not to have been quite so inspirational after all!).
As of two years ago now I also have with me at all times the trusty Fuji x10, without which I would not be. Taking my first tentative steps into the world of photography has been a literally eye-opening experience – helping me to see this wonderful world in a whole new light.
Age dictates that I must now travel encumbered by a selection of optical devices. If I wear my contact lenses I must needs have with me reading glasses for computer work and for reading, and sunglasses should the weather be fine. If I leave the lenses at home I must carry glasses – reactive or lightweight (or both!) – to enable me to drive safely.
Finally I now also find myself carrying around an iThing of the ‘Pad’ variety. Yes – I know! I have not previously restrained myself from expressing staunchly my views on the evil-empire that is Apple (they are not actually any more evil than the other corporate IT behemoths, of course, merely richer!). The fact is that the School is meandering uncertainly in the direction of adopting a one-to-one tablet policy, and as head honcho in the world of things digital I feel it incumbent upon me to try to keep pace with the bright young things.
All these additional burdens seem now to accompany me everywhere – and I have thus felt it necessary to add to my impedimentiary armoury the new item to which I refered in this recent post – a rather splendid leather messenger bag (which is – in fact – actually a reporter bag – being in orientation portrait rather than landscape).
Either way – should this trend continue I will eventually find myself – like the terrestrial pulmonate gastropod mollusc – carrying my entire estate on my back whenever I venture forth!
Tags: Luggage, Modern life
“The whole digital enchilada – interactive, cable, broadband, 500-channel…”
Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age
One for the nostalgia buffs! I bet that you never thought you’d find yourself face to face with that particular rubric again…
The ever-procacious Urban Dictionary curls its lip at the moniker thus:
“Laughably outdated term for the Internet. Mostly used during the 90s by yuppies who made their own awful-looking web pages.”
…and again:
“A cheesy, ebullient, woefully outdated term from the 90’s, which means ‘Internet’. Coined when all the people were massively wowed by the sheer awesomeness of the Intertubes. Nowadays in disuse unless you use it for comedy.”
Yup – comedy! That’s the effect I was going for… How am I doin’? How ’bout now? etc, etc…
‘Holy moly!’ – you’re thinking – ‘what in the name of Al Gore is he doing raking up this sort of muck in 2014?’
Well – back in the day when it was the Information Superhighway I ordered an upgrade for our broadband connection (yes – the very same that was dead as a dodo for six weeks over Christmas!) to an all-new super-fast fibre (or fiber, as our trans-Atlantic cousins would have it) broadband circuit! And – guess what? It finally came!!!
Ok – I exaggerate the timescale slightly – for effect, you know! But by the time that we actually got to order the thing last October we had already been a target for generic flyers from the mephitic British Telecom – advertising their new fibre service – for at least a couple of years… long before it was actually available anywhere in the surrounding neighbourhood.
When our ISP eventually informed us that fibre was finally available at our local exchange I was, naturally, on the phone immediately – placing an order. The niceties observed, a date was fixed for an engineer to pay us a visit to do the necessary. Splendid!
Except – you’ll be unsurprised to hear – that it didn’t happen. It turned out that though the fibre service had been installed at the exchange it had not actually got as far as the cabinet in the street outside our domicile.
A new date for installation was set… and missed! Then another… and another…
At one point our ISP cruelly raised hopes that something was about to happen by sending us our new high-speed router. When – however – I called excitedly to check, they admitted that they had made a mistake. Bah!
In the end it was five increasingly resigned months before finally – and quite suddenly – an appointment was made and not broken… and we found ourselves on the end of an InterWebNet pipe that is actually fat enough to carry the traffic that the Kickass Canada Girl requires. For now – anyway…
This does all make me realise that we need to start checking now regarding the broadband situation on the Saanich peninsular. Having experienced a whiff of bandwidth freedom I can’t see The Girl settling in future for anything less…
Tags: Broadband, Internet, Modern life
Bob: I can’t do that. It’s too big!
Dr. Leo: Baby steps Bob. Baby steps.
From the movie: “What about Bob?”
Written by Tom Shulman
Directed by Frank Oz
The illation of this post from January of this year – wherein I pondered the next steps in our glacially slow progress towards a new life in British Columbia – was that all depended on our being able to sell our property in Buckinghamshire… which objective would – in consequence – be our main focus over the coming months. The first landmark along this route was to be the date in March on which the tenants currently occupying our apartment could be given notice to quit – after which we could move to bring the property once again to market.
On Wednesday this week such notice was duly served.
We are currently in discussion with several local estate agents with a view to establishing a fair and reasonable price for the property – subsequent to which we will stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, take a deep breath and return to the affray! Fingers – and much else – firmly crossed…
Now – because selling a property in the UK is such a big, grown-up, scary prospect we have decided – instead of taking the risk of biting off more than we can reasonably chew – to sell the apartment bit by bit!
Well – no… of course we haven’t really – though just at the moment that might appear to be the case!
I’m being cryptic! I will stop at once…
We are in the final stages of selling a brick built bin store that is located behind the main house. There are four such stores – assigned to four of the seven apartments into which the original residence was divided – in a row abutting the rear wall of the estate. The roofs of these stores had – of late – fallen into such a state of disrepair that urgent remedial works were required. Naturally the Kickass Canada Girl and I were reluctant to invest further monies into a feature of the property that adds little or no financial value to the apartment as a whole, so a deal was done with one of our neighbours. She will pay the costs of the roof repairs in return for the transfer into her name of the store itself. She can use the space – we can do without the expense!
It would – of course – be really good if the rest of the sale were to proceed as expeditiously and smoothly as this. Let us be optimistic and assume that this will indeed be so.
Tags: England, Money, Real estate
Each year there is one early weekend – one glorious (if brief!) window – the effect of which is to renew afresh our faith in the continuing cycle of the seasons. However hard the winter may have been (and in terms of storm and deluge this one has been tough indeed) we can once again see the light at the end of the tunnel. We are alerted by the cry of the distant harbinger… “Spring is coming”!!
This was such a weekend…
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