Wine and Onion Roots, a classic Catalonian meal

This past weekend we had a CIEE excursion entitled “Caminata and Calçotada.”  Seeing as how I didn’t know what either of these words meant, I initially had no idea what this trip was going to be.  Luckily I did find out before that Saturday that we were going on a hike and would be eating Calçotadas, a very traditional Catalonian food.  They´re basically a type of onion root that you dip in salsa and eat.  But before I get more into that I’m going to give a basic overview of stuff I’ve seen in Barcelona, which I haven’t really done yet.

I inserted a map (I love maps, they’re so much fun) and added pin points for a key places.  Click on the link and you should be able to see all my labels as well as zoom in and out (there’s one pin kinda far away).  Let me know if it doesn't work right.
http://www.bing.com/maps/default.aspx?v=2&cp=41.393228778640406~2.175807597902173&lvl=13&dir=0&sty=r&cid=D3735F57650C2205!125

 

As for some of the things on my map, I have a marker for my house which is on Rocafort; another is the CIEE building that they call “La Casa,” which is where all the staff have their offices and where we take our Spanish classes.  I also marked some of the places we visited two weekends ago on Montjuïc, and the trip we took this past weekend to hike and eat Calçotadas. 

Also, you should check out Plaça de Catalunya and Passeig de Gracia on googlemaps (http://maps.google.com/). Do the street view for the Plaza and walk around there, then go to Passeig de Gracia, (which branches off from the Plaza) and walk along the road looking at all the buildings.  Make sure you see Casa Batlló, and La Pedrera, which you can search in the tool bar if you want to jump straight there. (In case you didn´t already know, you can click and drag the little man on top of the zoom bar and situate him wherever you want to “stand” on the street. It makes life easier)

Here are some of my own photos of Plaça Catalunya:

Esta es la entrada al metro, y el edificio “El Corte Ingles” en el fondo es como un “mall” de Los Estados Unidos aunque El Corte Ingles es toda la misma tienda.---This is the entrance to the metro, and the building “El Corte Ingles” in the background is like a mall from the US although El Corte Ingles is all the same store.

Another really cool plaza that’s a 10 or 15 minute walk from house is Plaça d’Espanya (Yes, I know that´s not how you write it in Spanish; any names that I write which don´t look Spanish are probably in Catalan, which is spoken in Barcelona and the rest of Catalonia).  There’s a really beautiful monument in the middle of the plaza, and in another direction off in the distance you can see the Museu Nacional d’Arte de Catalunya, which we walked in front of two weekends ago when exploring Montjuïc (there are more pictures of the front of it in my last post).

En el centro de la Plaça d’Espanya

El museo en la distancia.

And now for last weekend.  We took a short train ride (it was underground along with the metro, nothing exciting) up to the stop “Tibidabo,” which is a really cool, old theme park that’s on top of the mountains overlooking the city.  I haven’t been there yet but I really want to.  After meeting with the rest of the CIEE group, we started our little hike up the mountain.  It wasn’t terribly rigorous, but it was incredibly scenic.

La vista desde la montaña durante nuestra caminata.

When we got to the top we stopped to enjoy an enormous meal, complete with calçotadas and salsa (definitely not Mexican salsa; it’s a special Catalonian salsa that you dip the calçotadas in), wine, salad, bread with cooked eggplant and peppers, beans, meat, dessert, and coffee/tea afterwards.  Let’s just say that we were there for a while.  By the way, every course we had was brought out on a big plate and shared between four people.  So that was different, and pretty cool.
Now begins the narrative of this amazing meal.  To eat the calçotadas we had to peel off the outer layers of it that were burnt (they cook it first), then dip the bottom into the salsa and eat!  However, because they´re really long roots you have dangle them from above in order to eat them.  They´re really really messy, which is why the waiters pass out bibs beforehand.  I don´t know why, but I didn´t take pictures. Sorry… Oh and the wine! Hahahaha that part was really fun.  They put it in a special vase, I forget what it´s called, and you literally have to pour the wine out of a spout and aim it into your mouth.  (Didn’t get a picture of that either…) Now that was when the bibs really came in handy.  Here´s a picture of the wine:

Luckily it wasn’t regular wine because they mix it with carbonation, so that made drinking it in huge gulps a lot easier.

Then they brought us salad and bread with the eggplant and pepper, which was pretty good.  But next was the meat.  And I mean it was literally a plate stacked with sausages and ribs and chicken legs and anything else you can think of.  Wow.  After that they brought out the dessert, which was a chunk of ice cream (or something cold and creamy) surrounded by baked bread and drizzled with chocolate.  As you can see here…

Yummmmm…

And after we finished that lovely meal we made our way back down to the city.  I quickly went home to shower and grab my backpack before heading out to catch a train to the mountains.  My host mother, Esther, had gone to spend a weekend with two of her sisters (she has a lot; they were a family of 12 kids) in a house that one of them owns, but I had signed up for that CIEE day trip so I had to take a train out there after my excursion ended.  When she told me the house was “in the mountains” I thought she meant the mountains around Barcelona.  But no, I rode for two hours out to the Pyrénées'-Orientales…

Which I shall talk about next time.

Hasta entonces!

Thought of the day, 27/1/11

I’ve decided that since I’m often busy or lazy and don’t sit down to write blog posts very often, I’m going to start making little short ones in between the others.  So here’s one for today:


I went to the market yesterday and bought some yummy chocolates.  There’s a rose, a mushroom (the spotted one) a cup of coffee (the one that looks like an eye), a chocolate covered cherry, and more!  I was super excited but they ended up costing me 11 euros (about $15)!! Oops…

Though sometimes Spain is expensive, it can also be wonderously cheap.  The croissant and café con leche (half milk, half coffee, and smaller than a cup of coffee that they normally sell in the US) cost 1.20 euros together (less than $1.60-ish).  And the enormously monstrous bottle of water, three times as big as a regular bottle of water, cost .90 euros! Crazy!  But on the other hand, you get charged more than that in restaurants for a mini bottle of water, so I guess it balances out…

THE END


Second thought of the day:

Whoever thought of pancake stands was genious!  You can just walk up and buy a warm pancake filled with hidden chunks of suger, doused in chocolate and sprinkled with bananas or nuts... mmmmm

Thank you, Spain.

Begin Week Three

Good morning all!  (Side note: I started this almost 12 hours ago and am finishing it now, which is why the hours don't match with it being morning) I just finished my delicious breakfast of coffee and toast with ham (which here is more like wide slices of thin, flat, non-crunchy bacon; sooo good), and am now hanging out in the living room/kitchen while my host mother is getting ready for work.  I don't have class until pretty late (noon on Mondays and Wednesdays, and 3pm on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays), so last week I ended up sleeping in until 10 or 11 every day, which is too late!  I'm going to try to get up earlier and go do stuff this week, even if just walk around the city, because sleeping 10 hours a day is such a waste of time.

So this past weekend.  Friday I didn't do anything before 3 (oops), then had class 3-6, then went home and sat on facebook until 9:30 (another oops) when I went out to meet my GA group and Lluís for the most enormous meal of my life.  We were going out to get tapas (I don´t remember if I´ve explained tapas yet; put simply they're special spanish snacks similar to appetizers except that usually people order them individually; you can get patatas bravas (potatoes), or salchichas (sausages), or other stuff) so I assumed it was a small meal.  But this was a very fancy tapas place.  We had wine, four rounds of tapas, AND a main dish.  I wasn't feeling incredibly well so by the time we got to the main course I couldn't eat any more.  And by the way, this whole eating huge meals isn't very normal.  Well, I guess sometimes Spaniards will eat a huge meal once a day, but I've gotten the impression that they like to eat a bunch of small meals throughout the day.  Which personally I like better than the American method of stuffing your face 2 or 3 times a day.  By doing it the Spanish way you can constantly be eating without feeling like too much of a fatty.

Wow I'm still on Friday night.  So afterwards our group split: all the Americans went off to some American bar called Dow Jones (oh so clever) while Lluís went out with his friends who had just showed up at the restaurant.  He invited all of us to go with them, but everyone wanted to go out with the CIEE people.  I was the only person who took him up on the offer.  Luckily it wasn´t too awkward since they were all really friendly and Lluís talked to me a lot.  But I will admit that when they were having a group conversation I had no idea what they were saying about 95% of the time.  They speak so fast!  Anyway, we went to a nice bar where one of their friends was having a birthday party, and I hung out there with them until we left around 2 (which is very early for Spaniards, might I add).

The next day, Saturday, I spent the majority of my day at el Parque Montjüic, which is on top a small nearby mountain.  It was beautiful weather to be outside too!  I´d say it was in the low 70´s, upper 60´s perhaps?  Up there we...

...explored a castle...

 ...walked around in the park...

...saw the ´92 Olympic Stadium...

 ...and walked past El Museu Nacional d'Arte de Catalunya (this is the view from the front facing away).

 We also found the most amazing pair of slides in the world.

We would have spent the entire day there but a father with his two girls showed up so we felt awkward and left.  All in all, Saturday was a great day.

Now for Sunday.  First half of the day I didn´t do much (again, the whole sleeping late thing...), although I did meet up with some friends to plan the weekend trips we want to take this semester (it's tricky figuring it out because we have class on Friday, so our weekends are short).  Short summary: Berlin and Prague on our 4-day weekend (I'm going to see the Berlin Philharmonic!!!) and Amsterdam and Brussels on a 3-day weekend.  The other weekends not reserved for studying we hope to go to Granada, Sevilla, Mallorca, maybe Salamanca, maybe somewhere in northern Spain.  We'll be somewhere in Spain the week before Easter for Semana Santa (Holy Week), and back in Barcelona for the Catalonian holiday, El Día de San Jorge.  Hopefully after the program ends I´ll find some time to go to France or visit my friends in Italy (one´s going to see family there, and another will be travelling around with her boyfriend).  My host señora also invited me to go up in the mountains behind Barcelona one weekend with her and Julia (her 4-year old daughter) to visit one of her sisters (my señora is one of twelve siblings!).

The big part of Sunday was the FC Barcelona game!!  Oh my gosh it was amazing.  The stadium was absolutely enormous, it was so cool!  European football is so much better than American football.  I'm adding this to my list of reasons why I'm never coming back home.  And of course Barça smashed Málaga 4-1.  Haha we also happened to sit in front of this huge group of guys who kept randomly yelling cheers, or continuing stadium-wide cheers after everyone else had stopped.  It was really funny.  At one point they started one cheer that went to the tune of the Yellow Submarine and my friend next to me started humming along.  Yet again, it was all in all a very good day.

I promised myself I wouldn't write enormously long posts, but I think that's going to be impossible for me.  Either you get all the details or none of them.  I'm gonna go with all of them because otherwise each post would be about five sentences long, which is boring. So anyway, I hope you all have an awesome day!  Adios!

My classes here

Classes started today!  As weird as it is, I was actually pretty excited for school to start.  I went to one of the University regular enrollment classes and my intensive Spanish class (three hours a day, Monday through Friday, for three weeks), and let me just say that this is going to be an amazing break from all the ochem, biomedical engineering (done with that one forever!), and physics classes.

Okay so here's the deal with my schedule:

When I was signing up for classes before I left UT, I knew I really really wanted to take one of the regular enrollment classes at the University.  However, my study abroad advisor wouldn't sign my paper because I didn´t have a lot of hours of Spanish credit under my belt (I have the absolute minimum that my program, CIEE, would allow).  So I gave it up and chose only HESP classes (specific for exchange students).

However, when I arrived in Barcelona I realized that I still really wanted to try taking a normal class because I knew I'd be missing out if I didn't.  So I talked with the resident director and found out that I did well on the placement exam, so I will now be taking Arte Contemporáneo at La Universitat Pompeu Fabra!  Take that, UT advisor.

By another stroke of luck, my friend, Alyssa, happens to also be in that class.  We went to it together today and it went really well.  I could understand a lot more than I thought I´d be able to (though I´ll admit that sometiems I had no idea what the prof was saying...), and it was very interesting as well.  We pretty much spent the whole time analyzing a couple different paintings, photos, and sculptures on the overhead.  It´s going to be a challenge, but I´m definitely excited.

My intensive Spanish class will also be interesting and challenging, but kind of difficult to get through. From 3 to 6, five times a week...  Not to mention that pretty much everyone in my class has 5 or 6 semesters of experience, while I only have 4.  But the harder I have to work the more I´ll get out of it, so fine by me!

And this concludes my long rant for today.  Hasta luego!

Mi Ciudad Nueva!

Okay first off, I decided that Barcelona is the best city ever, so I'm quitting school after this semester and finding a waitressing job so I can live here forever.

Now that I've put that out there, I guess it goes without saying that BARCELONA IS AMAZING.  Oh and the metro is awesome.  Austin needs one.  The metro is so amazing that I've avoided getting around on foot out of fear of getting lost, and have been totally dependent on underground travelling.

Now for a little about the program I'm in here.  It's called CIEE (no idea what that stands for), and I'm in the liberal arts division.  So far my favorite thing about CIEE has been the "Guardian Angels" they've given us.  The forty of us were divided into groups of seven or eight and assigned a student from La Universitat Pompeu Fabra who has been showing us around the city.  Mine is named Lluís, and he's been a lot of fun to hang out with.  I need to talk to the other GAs more because they all seem really cool too.  Hmm, what else...  I'm living with a Spanish woman and her four year old daughter here, which has been wonderful so far.  Tomorrow es El Dia de los Reyes (which is like Christmas), and the three kings bring all the kids gifts during the night.  So after I got home I snuck into the kitchen and left the little girl, Julia, some candies for the morning.

Okay that's all for now because it's late and I'm going to bed.  Bye!