The eating goes on

A generally uneasy night as the dreaded earache did not diminish in an acceptable fashion – though continued application of the doctor given drops has made some difference and I have been less sulky today.

Although we have had a swim today it has not really been true July weather and Toni only lasted a minute before he had had enough.  I am made of sterner stuff and did a gentle breaststroke so as not to submerge my head and aggravate whatever is going on in my left ear.  Most unsatisfactory.

Far more satisfactory was our journey out on the next stage of the Ruta de Tapa after the usual acrimonious discussion about which of the fifty remaining tapas we should try!

Our first port of call was El Punt de Casa Pac in C/Major, 23 where, the weather being balmy we decided to sit outside on the decking next to the road.  I placed my posterior on one of the metal seats and started a slow but disturbing slide to the ground.  One of the legs of the chair had been placed by my good self expertly just on a weak joint in the shoddy structure on which we were sitting.  Luckily there were posts with ropes at the edge of the area and they allowed me to rescue some degree of dignity from my decline!

The reaction of the bar staff was gratifyingly concerned and it resulted in our being gifted our tapas.  Which, if you think about it, was bloody cheap because if I had been of a litigious frame of mind who knows what money I could have got out of the situation!

The tapa itself was creamed scallops covered by a cod “brandada” with broad beans and a savoury sauce.  It was good, but it sounds better than it tasted.  But, hey! for nothing, who is questioning it!

Spurred on by the freebie we went to a tried and trusted restaurant, Bar Olave Plaza, c/Onze de septembre, 1 cutting our way through swathes of children who, quite unnecessarily walked, ran, jumped and cycled, scooted, meandered, screamed, strolled, played, breathed and generally existed in MY space.  But I think I managed to control my feelings and show nothing of what I felt.

The service in Bar Olave Plaza was efficient and slick.  The tapa was a dish of tallarinas de Castelldefels and they were delicious, but as a competition tapa it lacked structure and was just after all a plate of shells.  Taste excellent, but it aint going to win.  The Cava was excellent.

After minimal persuasion we decided to take in a third tapa in Bar Frankfurt Castelldefels, Av. Constitució 244.  This is somewhere where we have never been before and given its location next to an English Language School it is probably not the sort of place that we will frequent during term time!

The tapa was a kebab of veg and meat on a stick with a side potato salad with a mysterious sauce.  The bald statement of what the tapa was gives no idea of how delicious it actually was.  In my view it is the best that we have had so far, in spite of the fact that the Cava was rather cheap and over-sweet for my taste.

So this ruta is living up to its reputation for surprises and giving us new venues to consider.

Almost time for my drops and the hope of a better night.  I will also sleep easier having spoken to friends back home and consider that they seem to be doing well and are both speaking positively about the future.  I hope I get to see them some time during the summer.

On the OU front there is a limited response with one other person seemingly directly on my wavelength and another offering the possibility of serious difficulties in the next couple of weeks.  Ah the delights of long distance learning!

Tomorrow more academic work and a little light gardening!

A route to eat through!

My earache got steadily worse, or at least it didn’t get any better and spasmodic pain a few times a minute can be amazingly wearing.  So it ended up with Toni and myself visiting the doctor separately today.  Toni to give in a sample for analysis and me to get something for my ear.

When I got to see my doctor he ignored my plaintive bleating about my ear and concentrated instead of getting up to date with my medical situation.  In no time at all I was given a date to have yet more blood taken; an instruction to visit the nurse immediately after I had finished with him, and another appointment made to discuss the results of the analysis.

I did also manage to get a prescription for some ear drops out of him which have had, on their first application absolutely no effect whatsoever.  However, I live in faith and am a great believer in the placebo effect and one or other of those must have some effect.

More importantly than all of the preceding, today is the first day of the new Ruta de tapas (tapa and drink only €3) and, in spite of my not feeling 100% we have done two.  Toni has instructed me to write about each of these “events” so that we can refer back to them in our dotage!

The first was in Restaurant El Mussol, Av. De la Pineda, 24 and was an Owl Burger.  Not that a protected bird was used in its manufacture, but simply that Mussol is the Catalan word for Owl.  

This mini-burger in a sesame seed mini-bun was excellent with a burger that actually tasted as if it had been made of real meat.  It was served with caramelized onion, tomato, lettuce and goat’s cheese with a BBQ sauce.  Fresh, hot and delicious with the sauce not overpowering everything.  We were also told that they do Mex-Tex evenings and, on the strength of this sample, it might well be worth a future visit.

That surely is the worth of this Ruta de Tapa, it should be something delicious enough by itself to get the customer to consider staying for something more substantial.  This is certainly what happened when we had the tapa at El Elephant and I look forward to this happening again during the course of the Ruta which is from today, the 1^st of July to the 15^th of September.

We did not mean to go to the restaurant we ended up in, but our geography was slightly wrong and we didn’t mind making do with what was in front of us.  In a similar way we experienced the luck of incompetence with our second “choice”.

Wherever we meant to go we ended up sitting down outside Dehesa Santa Maria, Av. Santa Maria, 27 in the centre of town.  The tapa when it finally arrived (the single waiter was a little slow) was an elegantly structured edifice all held together with a rather fetching long stick with a red painted circular fiddly bit towards the end.

The base was of flatbread with a squirt of mayo on either end, on top of that was red pepper and on top of that in the centre was a rolled slice of jamón ibérico flanked by two halves of a mini-chorizo.  On top of the jamón was an olive, and resting on that was a gherkin; gherkin, olive, ham and bread being impaled by the stylish stick.

This was a tapa which was impossible to eat in one go!  And when you did manage to get most of it into your mouth it was a somewhat confusing though pleasurable mixture of flavours.

Two excellent tapas to start off our ruta.  Bring on the other 54!

Guests should be warned that they WILL be participating should they chance to visit us!

Good study . Bad football

I can feel smugly satisfied with what I have done today, Sunday, as part of my OU course.  The groups for the Wiki have been decided and work ought to start straight away.  However, getting a variety of characters across Europe to coincide to produce a complex piece of written work is another problem.

Based on my experience on the last course it is necessary to get going at once so I have taken the bull by the horns and produced a few pages of mechanical information which might help production.  At the moment one other person has actually responded reasonably positively to my posts. 

I have tried to find a twist to the general theme to give extra “sophistication” as demanded by the tutor.  The next few days are critical to the success of the enterprise and if people don’t join in then the two of us who have responded so far can take it further.  A bad sign is that there haven’t been more people posting today as there is a boost on weekends usually and that certainly hasn’t happened today.

On the football front Spain has just missed a penalty and they are languishing three goals to nil against Brazil.  They are playing spectacularly badly and all the fight appears to have gone out of them.  Best not to dwell too closely on what is happening, as none of it seems good.  And I have earache.  And Piqué has just been sent off.  Game over.

Tomorrow, or rather today is the first of July and the first of our guests for the summer will be arriving in little over a week.  It will be interesting to see how the conflicting demands of the OU and visitors work out! 

Though I have a sneaking suspicion that sybaritic will win out over academic!

What next!

Rampant corruption in this country has reached a high point with the hustling away to prison of the ex-treasurer of the ruling PP party.  Señor Barcenas is one of the most famous people in Spain at the moment as his face is on the television every single evening of the week.  He has been accused of being the author of some damningly revealing handwritten accounts which show that the members of the government have been paid vast sums of money for various trifling items like suits all paid for by commercial organizations which have benefited enormously from raking in cash from public works awarded by the government.

Barcenas has been found to be couriering eye-watering large sums of black money from Switzerland (!) to Spain in favour of PP – the totally discredited ruling party.  His explanations have been treated with contempt and he has been caught out by a judge in his explanation about millions of euros that happened to be lying around.  The tissue of lies that he told resulted in his being sent straight to prison – but not before he had let it be known that he had made a video which is lodged with a Notario (see previous blogs about the vacuity of these particular money grubbing shits) to be played in the event of his death in prison.

I have to admit that I laughed out loud when I heard this latest piece of melodramatic rubbish.  However, the mere existence of this “bomba atomica” indicates as clearly as if he had stated it that the corruption within PP is widespread from top to bottom and that the powerful in the party can be destroyed by the revelations that he could make.  It can get no more farcical.  Except this is Spain, and anything is possible.

I have to reiterate that had the series of scandals hit the governing party of any northern European country it would have had to resign.  It would have been hounded out of office by newspapers, radio, television and public disgust.  But here, the members of the government, however shockingly inept and mendacious, stay and hope that everything will go away. 

The philosophy is that everyone is doing it so why shouldn’t I, and why are you making a fuss!  It is deeply shocking and, more than that it is positively shaming to have to listen to the blatant lies of our so-called leaders.  They are despicable.

Lunch with Irene, who was dismayed by the news from Cardiff and asked me to convey whatever sentiment I thought most appropriate to the main parties involved.  It is early days, and one can only hope for the best and a positive outcome from a very negative set of circumstances.

The weather has been good.  Ish.  A sort of casual haziness that just stopped it being glorious.  The swim was refreshing.  Which is not good at this time of year!  And it’s supposed to be positively cloudy tomorrow, though I tend to rely on my firm belief in the concept of the microclimate to keep me warm.

On the OU front we have now been given the groups in which we will be working and I can foresee some problems but I am determined to be positive and hope for the best!

Tomorrow I must do some “revision” as I have been looking at the sample examination paper that we have been given and it requires a lot more quite specific information and does not lend itself to the quantity of intellectual “busking” that I was able to do in the last one!

My chosen technique of consolidating the notes that I have made is to use Excel as a way of keeping key terms together with some brief explanation if necessary and then using the important concept to form a “word cloud” which is a useful aide memoire and is a clear indication to me to flag up gaps in specific knowledge.  Well, it worked in the last exam and I intend to use it in this one, but I need to get the notes consolidated before too much of the course has gone to make it far too daunting a task! 

Preparation is all. 

I hope.