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Saturday, January 16, 2010

Voyage of Discovery


No sooner had my passenger (a confirmed pedestrian) said, “You are sometimes lucky in this area” than I knew that we were doomed to that particular form of driving limbo where you creep along at a snail’s space past unending lines of parked cars like some form of perverted automotive car crawler looking for a quick fix from a shapely chassis.

Ten cars and two corners later I had resigned myself to an unconvincing curbing of my impatience and had settled for a slow tour for unlikely car-free space in the centre of Barcelona.

When a parking space is magically vacated just when you need it an overcrowded part of Barcelona you know that you are in for a good day.

Sometimes a simple walk along a few city streets can be an exploration and a revelation. I was lucky enough to wander through part of the old area of Barcelona in the company of a colleague who used to live in one of the streets who dropped little morsels of information into our peregrination which were a constant delight.

She also knew which of the stores and restaurants we passed to recommend to me as worthy of further attention when I had the time to explore.

A herb shop; a deep narrow store with an astonishing range of dried fruit and nuts; a coffee shop with an aroma you could almost touch; a tea shop with rows of numbered blue ceramic jars containing a bewildering range of teas; the first Basque tapas bar in Barcelona; a Cava bar which served wonderful anchovies; a wine bar near Santa Maria del Mar with a delicious cheese tapa and, the reason for our going into Barcelona, a remarkable wine shop.

This was to get the raw materials for the next wine tasting. The choice of wine is my responsibility this time, so I decided to have the theme of Catalan wines. One of my books has a page on the different wine regions of Catalonia and I thought it might be fun to have one bottle to taste from each of the regions.

We have ended up with 7 bottles of red and two of white with an extra bottle of special red. As the finest one is to be tasted last (in emulation of the story in the bible) it will be interesting to see if anyone notices!

The shop we went to, Vilaviniteca (
http://www.vilaviniteca.es/) is a remarkable looking place where two floors of walls are lined with interesting looking bottles with stairs giving access to a mezzanine so that the bottle you need can be brought to your attention. We were served by a most accommodating gentleman who guided (and I use that word in its very strongest sense!) our choice. We have ended up with a very interesting series of bottles not one of which have I ever seen before. It is going to be a taste discovery!

Having got our major purchases out of the way relatively quickly we re-visited the wine shop and asked if they could recommend a place for lunch.

We were directed to the Big Fish which turned out to serve Japanese food. The sushi we had was astonishingly well presented and I was particularly impressed with the raw salmon scraps twisted together into a most convincing rose shape nestling on a bed of white ‘straws’.

The food was light and excellent but what really impressed us was the wine. Which wasn’t Japanese. The wine was ‘Libalis’ – yet another wine of which I hadn’t heard and it was cold and delicious. The wine was blended from various grapes Moscatel de grano menudo (Apianae) 90%, Viura 5%, Malvasía 5%. It was a perfect summer wine, which was also perfect, as it happened, in January. We are now on the lookout for this bottle to start storing it and cooling it for the months of the holiday!

The fascination with Ronaldo continues with news programmes, sports programmes and every other type of programme vying with one another to find an excuse to show the latest pictures of this very expensive young footballer in his underpants. The Spanish television stations have no shame and dwell longingly on Ronaldo’s crotch. The ‘photographs’ have obviously been heavily Paint Shopped and the final results, especially one picture of him laying on his side, make him look like a gay fantasy from the pen of Tom of Finland! It reminds me of a New Yorker cartoon showing two dogs having a conversation about a highly clipped poodle walking past, “He must be very sure of his masculinity!”

I have now had my new Sony e-reader for a few weeks and, while I do like the touch screen capabilities of it I have to conclude, regretfully, that it is a much weaker product that its non-touch screen ancestor.

The cost of the touch screen is that the screen is much more reflective and the brightness of the page is much diminished. Reading in anything but good, bright light is not the same as reading a page of a book. I will continue using it and see what my reactions are after a month or so.

Meanwhile the examination system has probably thrown up yet another set of papers for me to mark, but I made sure that I saw no one before I left for the weekend.

Sufficient unto Monday is the evil thereof.

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