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!