Day: April 17, 2012

Cadaques catch up

Post by Wynette: I know we are confusing people by jumping back and forth from place to place, out of order from how we visited them.  But, I have a few more pictures I wanted to post from Cadaques even though we are now in Madrid.

I loved these strangely pruned trees (they were all over the place):

We found a restaurant at the Hotel Rocamar named Sa Conca that we ate at twice because the food was so good.  It was a long walk to the restaurant as the hotel was on the far end of town.  This picture was taken on the walk back from the restaurant our last day in Cadaques:

And here is one dish we ate there, both visits.  Fresh peas with ham:

I eat, I sleep, I suffer

Post by Wynette: For the past year, I’ve been studying Spanish and found a great podcast/website that provides listening practice:  notesinspanish.com

It is done by a delightful young couple who live here in Madrid.  Ben is originally from England and Marina is from Madrid. In one of their conversations for listening practice they mention how people in Spain like to complain. (Charlie and I have been trying to write a song about that, maybe fitting in the word “plain” somewhere, but haven’t come up with much yet.)

When we were in Cadaques we found a little bar that served great coffee so we went there several times.  On one visit the woman behind the counter greeted us with a warm hola, took our order for dos cafe con leche, served us our coffee, then carried on her conversation with the only other person in the bar.  She was talking loudly in the small room so I was getting in some good listening practice.  I heard her say “Como, duermo, y … nada mas”.  I think she was saying, “I eat, I sleep, and nothing else.”  Then I heard her say “Yo sufro”, which means, “I suffer”.  Too bad I didn’t get many of the details.  I was thinking she might have been talking with her boss.  I hope she was just complaining and didn’t really live such a terrible life.

 

Food and coffee in Madrid

Post by Wynette: We’ve been in Madrid for 3 days.  Tomorrow we head back for the USA.  We have liked Madrid, more than we expected.  It’s a beautiful city and relatively restful, inexpensive, and easy to navigate for a big city.  Of course, we are tucked into our hotel room by 8 each night and we hear the city really comes alive at 10 or 11.  So, we are missing the main attraction: the night life (called la marcha as I have learned from Ben and Marina).

The first 2 days we were disappointed in the food here.  And, I have to take back what I said about coffee in Spain being consistently good.  We haven’t really liked the Madrid coffee very much.  It must be Catalonia that makes such good coffee.  The coffee at the place below didn’t taste very good but they sure had a cool looking coffee machine.  And all the waiters wore pink shirts:

But this morning we did find a place with good coffee, and yesterday we found a tapas market (really!) (Mercado de San Miguel) that had tapas fenomenal! (Yes, that’s a Spanish word.)  Here is Charlie trying to decide what to have for dinner:

And today we ate in an Asturian restaurant (Asturia is a province in northern Spain, so it’s like a foreign food place in Madrid) named Casa Lastra. Delicious food. Seemed like peasant food.  We had a white bean stew with sausages and ham.  I’ll dream about that one in days to come and try to make one like it but will never come close. Here is the bread and the huge helping of (fenomenal) blue cheese spread that they brought to the table before taking our order.  The only problem is that we were stuffed when we left. No, we didn’t eat all the bread and cheese.  We couldn’t finish the stew either.

I love the description of their restaurant in English on their website. (I’m pretty sure a computer program did that translation for them. Maybe Google Translate?)  I hope we go back to Madrid so we can go back to Casa Lastra several times.  Hmm, maybe we should go to Asturia someday too.