Kazan — summer 2012

Last night's dinner... although technically it was slightly after midnight.

I had purchased a 5-day “Barcelona Card” for my stay, which gives me unlimited access to the major public transport services and also free entrance to dozens of museums and nearly two hundred discounts. Among the free entrance coupons was one to Le Museu de xocolata. I had to go. Here is the entrance.

Once inside my coupon was exchanged for a ticket, and the ticket was a dark chocolate bar (73%) with an ennumerated wrapper.

The museum itself is an odd little place. There are mock-ups of various bits of chocolate history making, some video and audio, and a hallway of famous Catalonian chocolatiers, a microhistory of the industrialization of chocolate making, and many devices that are used in the production of chocolate. And then there was something I entirely did not expect: multiple cases of chocolate art. By which I mean statues and dioramas made of regular chocolate and white chocolate and painted chocolate. There was a diorama of Don Quixote having fallen on the ground after tilting at the windmill, with Sancho Panza looking on in laughter, which was about 2½ feet tall. There were chocolate cartoon characters, includi Tom & Jerry, Asteryx and his huge side-kick. There was a chocolate Sagrada Familia. There was a chocolate Pietà (übertacky, offensive). They were all quite amazingly produced.

The museum empties into a chocolate shop, where I decided to have their hot chocolate.

This was the thickest hot chocolate I've ever had. See the video; I'd say it was a bit thicker than the standard Hershey' Chocolate Syrup.

The original drink of hot chocolate had chiles and spices in it and was not at all sweet. Some day I'd like to find a place that has such a thing. That would be interesting!

One of the things that first strikes me about Barcelona is the trees. Streets often are lined with them, and the ones that seem the most common are the planteros (sycamores), with their spiky seed pods. They give a green-gold shade to the pedestrians below. But I'm particularly struck by the the number of trees in bloom right now. Everywhere you turn you see the brilliant yellow flowers of the tipuanas, a South American tree that grows well here; the flowers are the brilliant yellows of Arizona's palo verde trees.

Then there is a tree with beautiful purple flowers, whose name has eluded me so far.

From some vantage points the city seems like an indistiguished urban mass.

In the midst of it, though, you see odd building rise up unexpectedly, like the Barcelona Water Department Building that penetrates the sky like... um... a corn cob. Yes, that's it. A corn cob.

The Ciutat Vella (Old City) has narrow streets like most old European cities.

But then there is the area called L'Eixample, which was shaped by a 19th century urban planner. The gist of it is this:

The Eixample is characterized by long straight streets, a strict grid pattern crossed by wide avenues, and square blocks with chamfered corners (named illes in Catalan, manzanas in Spanish). This was a visionary, pioneering design by Ildefons Cerdà, who considered traffic and transport along with sunlight and ventilation in coming up with his characteristic octagonal blocks, where the streets broaden at every intersection making for greater visibility, better ventilation and (today) some short-stay parking space. (Wikipedia)

Essentially from above it should look like this.

So when you look through Barcelona and see a long street, stretching forever, garlanded by trees, that's part of the Eixample.

Here are some shots where you see how the corners shape the experience of the whole.

The combination of old city, Eixample and modern city give Barcelona a type of fascinating grace that is unique in my experience of Europe. When thinking of next year's vacation time, I've seriously considered going to Scotland, Iceland or Greece, but having now been here, I will seriously coming back here instead. After all, it would be great fun to work on my Catalan.

I wanted to head back to the market today for a couple of reasons. First, there are some packed lunch stands there that are always full of people, but alas, when I arrived, I was still full of veal from last night and breakfast from this morning, so no lunch.

The market is amazing. Let me give you just a few shots. First off, the juice venders make an amazingly colorful presentation. Mostly they sell fruit juices for a euro a cup. I got myself and honeydew melon and mint juice. Very tasty.

Many of the stalls sell fruit salads, really just chunks of fruit cut up and neatly packaged. Again, beautiful presentation.

Spain is known for its pork products, and their are butchers everywhere.

But my main goal was to find a couple gifts. There are two women who I gave perfume to last year. Don't want to do that again. The gifts went off well, but giving perfume is always a risky business. Plus you don't want to be boring in your gift giving. So I had settled on some of Barcelona's chocolates. Barcelona is an incredible chocolate city; I can't imagine it's outdone anywhere except perhaps for Austria or Switzerland. Anyway, there is a confectioner at the market that caught my eye. I wanted to get one of their ½ kilo truffles, basically rectangles of layered chocolate, but then I worried that I wouldn't successfully transport them. Too much heat or getting crushed in my backpack amid boxes of iPads and computers... Tricky. So I asked the saleswoman which ones would travel well. She pointed out three types of turrones. A turrón is a nougat, which in this context means an almond paste. I chose turrones that additionally had some hazel nuts and hazel praline intertwined with them.

I'm hoping that makes them happy. After all, it's not every day an American brings a Russian a Spanish confection, right?

And last but not least, I want to show you the t-shirt I bought. I actually bought it in the old city on the way back from the chocolate museum, but I'm too lazy to make an independent entry. It's a mosaic lizard, not really like the one at the entry to Park Güell, but I liked it nonetheless.

Here I am in Spain. I've spoken Spanish for over thirty years, so why the hell do they speak to me in English once I get two or three sentences out of my mouth? I mean, I have studied thirteen languages. Why don't they try my first in German or French or Spanish or even Finnish. (Only Finns speak Finnish, so really that one is not reasonable.) I mean, the first words out of my mouth in Barcelona were Catalan. At least the woman checking me in at the hotel had the decency to do most of the presentation in Spanish.

The situation has irritated me so much, that I've started asking around. The other night I asked the waiter how he knew to give me a menu in English. He paused and said, “We have menus in Spanish, Catalan and English, so when we see the blond hair, we give you English.” They do the same thing with Germans and Swedes and Finns because those nationalities have all studied English, and you simply can't produce menus in all the languages. Hmph. I really want to be offended, but I can't because that makes perfect sense. In the Frankfurt airport cafes, the Asian waitresses all speak in German or English, but when they encounter a Frenchman or a Hungarian, they go for English. Damn. English really is the most significant international language. That kind of pisses me off. So often you hear Americans say something like, “You can get by in English when you travel. You don't have to study the local language.” And they are so very often right. Alas, it leaves us in the position of making so many assumptions about people that you probably won't figure out are wrong if you don't have to deal with people in their own homes and their own languages.

For instance... last summer there was an issue in one home stay where the guys thought they weren't getting breakfast. One commented to me, “We don’t want anything complicated. Just cereal and milk would be fine.” He had no idea how assinine that comment was. Of course the host family wasn't giving them milk. Milk is for children, and they wouldn't insult a grown-up guest who has trained to be a warrior in the army by giving him milk. It's not manly. (I've actually heard Russian men say that men should only consume fermented milk products, not sweet milk.) And of course they didn't buy them breakfast cereal because (a) no one in Russia eats breakfast cereal so it just wouldn't cross their minds, and (b) breakfast cereal is prohibitively expensive in the stores that sell it, so a low-paid host family is not going to spoil their potential profits by buying such a wasteful item. The host family had in the fridge cheese, sausage and eggs, and they had bread and tea on the shelf. That's what a normal Russian eats for breakfast. Milk and cereal? Stupid Americans!

I picked the brain of another Spanish waiter. First I wanted to know whether he preferred to be addressed as tú or usted. To my surprise, he prefers tú, although he will address his customer as usted. My acquaintance Dale says that in Germany the distinction is also being lost. Everyone under 30 addresses everybody else under 30 as du. Next I wanted to know whether he could tell from my accent where I was from. He couldn't. Then I asked where he would think I was from judging by my clothes, and for that he said America. Okay. That all makes sense to me now.

Speaking of words... now, don't ask me how I got into this conversation, but I came across the Spanish word vicioso, which sounds like ‘vicious,’ but the context didn't support it. Turns out it means something like ‘sex-crazed.’ No, I was not the subject of the conversation. I also came across the word morboso, which looks like ‘morbid,’ but again the context didn't support it. One waiter gave me an explanation, but it didn't make sense to me. So I did some internet research and at last found someone who said, “It's an adjective that describes someone who undresses you with his eyes.” That actually does fit the context. And no, again, the conversation was not about me. Still, what an interesting word to have in one's language.

As long as worldwide travel is relatively easy, I predict that English will continue to be the dominant world language. No, Chinese won't surpass it. The English writing system, though ridiculous, is nowhere nearly as ridiculous as the Chinese system.