Happy Holidays from Madrid

Here's to a 2009 full of promise and happiness!


Holiday lights in the Moncloa neighborhood of Madrid (Photo Source: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/141/325136850_dbfe94259e.jpg)

Mussels in Brussels and Other Things to Do in This Underrated City

(Above: A really cool park called the Place du Petit Sablon. In the upper right hand corner is the back of a statue of two Counts who were executed in the 1500s, in the distance, the church L'Eglise Notre-Dame du Sablon)

Just before Christmas, my friend Meghan and I squeezed in a four day trip to see three cities: Brussels, Bruges and Amsterdam. If we had our choice,we would have gone right for Amsterdam, but the cheap flight gods weren't having it; we had to fly into Brussels. So while we were there, we thought we'd try to make the best of it. And we didn't end up having to try very hard.



You see, Brussels is in Belgium, and as such, is home to a few things I deeply appreciate: chocolate, waffles, beer, mussels and frites. I mean, really, when you have those ingredients to toss around during some free time, how can you go wrong?


(Left: Waffle maker and waffles; Middle: my finished plate of mussels with garlic butter, frites are off camera in this shot; Right: Chunks of chocolate set with a spoon in the middle. You dip these into a hot cup of milk from the same vendor. The chocolate melts as you stir it and, Voila! Hot chocolate. Note also that there are small syringes filled with liquor also set into the chocolate wiht the spoon so you can make yours a high-octane hot chocolate, if you so desire)


A few more surprises were that there is an active royal family in Belgium, it is a treasure-trove of comic strip art, many Belgians speak French, Dutch, and a little English (making them essentially trilingual -- impressive!), and there is some really cool architecture hidden among all the dark, industrial buildings you might envision when you think "Brussels".


(Photos of the Grand Place / Grote Markt and surrounding neighborhood)


(L: Belgians like their comic strips so much that they paint whole sides of buildings with some of the images in that style. R: Here is a close-up of Meghan giving Mr. Comic Strip a hand.)

Brussels is widely known as the Capital of the European Union, is also as the home of a little fountain known as the Manneken Pis (turn down volume for this link). You might recognize it.



(Above: The really teeny Manneken Pis statue, and a few renditions in chocolate, bien sur!)



And when I say little fountain, I really mean it -- it is about the size of a toddler, something that I didn't anticipate.



So, onto more food details:



(L: the terrace at Falstaff, R: The Gaufrette, or waffle, bus)

We had lunch at Falstaff, an art deco brasserie in the center of the city (above), where we feasted on chicken waterzooi, shrimp croquettes .


We snacked on waffles purchased fresh from a converted VW bus kitchen.

We had dinner at Chez Leon on Rue de Bouchers (an extremely touristy restaurant row). We were wary, but but loads of guidebooks and websites recommended their moules frites, so we were compelled and were not disappointed. Great mussels + great frites = a happy girls

We sampled the famous chocolates and pralines* from Leonidas

And our beer sampler: Belle Vue geuze, Cuvee du Troll, Hoegaarden Grand Cru, and straight up Hoegaarden (one of my favorites; it's $8 a bottle at most bars, but in Brussels it is 2 Euros!)

My things-to-do-next-time list:



*Go to Musee Horta (an art nouveau museum, we tried to find it with no luck)


*Visit The Belgian Comic Strip Center (I was skeptical about this being a major attraction until I realized that the Belgians created The Smurfs!)


*Go to Place St. Catherine


*Eat beef carbonnade


*Go to all those Jazz bars!


*Praliné is composed of richly flavored chocolate to which caramelized sugar (hot caramel), well-roasted, finely-ground hazelnuts (or almonds) and vanilla have been added. The praliné flavor is typical in many Belgian chocolates or "pralines."(Source: http://www.aalstpatissier.com/glossary#p)

The Feliz Navidad Bus

My friend Steve was desperately trying to check out the Christmas lights around Madrid this week. He had heard about a bus you could take around the city to see all the holiday decorations that only cost one euro! After a few false starts with other people, I got to be the lucky person to accompany him tonight. As we froze our butts off on top of an open air bus, we saw the following:

I realize that these pictures look as if they were taken from the point of view of a person coming home after a long night filled with Holiday parties (if you know what I mean, *hic*), but it's really just me and my shaking, cold hands and the bumpy ride.

Or I'm a really poor photographer (don't answer that :-).

Supposedly, Madrid has cut down on it's decorations and lights this year because of the economic crisis in the country but, regardless, the unique perspective of seeing Madrid from up high and the company made it a lot of fun. Thanks for the great idea, Steve!

O, Valencia!

Valencia -- home of oranges (above), horchata, paella and the holy grail -- is Spain's third largest city and is located in the Eastern portion of Spain on the Mediterranean Sea. A bunch of us went down to check it out at the beginning of December.

We were greeted by a portion of the city's old wall and gates called the Quart Towers on our way to our hostel in the Barrio del Carmen neighborhood.


(Three different Valencian street signs on the same street)

Valencia was part of an ancient kingdom called the Crown of Aragon, a which also included the city of Barcelona, parts of Greece and Sicily. In this kingdom, the language Catalan was spoken, and still is. Valencia has its own dialect of Catalan called Valenciano. As a casual visitor the extent to which it is spoken among locals wasn't apparent, but I definitely saw the influence in the street signs throughout the old Barrio del Carmen district.

On a map, streets names are shown in Spanish, but when you look up for the street sign, the name on the map often does not match the street sign. In fact, some of the words on these signs are spelled so different from those on the map, that saying the Valenciano name aloud is probably the best way to draw a similarity between the two languages. This didn't make for easy navigation around the city.

Valencia getting it's X-Mas on

Here is an Horchateria -- a place where they serve the lovely tiger-nut based beverage horchata. Having tried it in Madrid and not being that impressed (it's a frothy, slushy milky almost soy-tasting concoction), I passed on this visit. But it made a great backdrop for highlighting common sights in Spain: people out with their dogs and an old couples out for their paseos.

There is an impressive range of architecture in Valencia:

Old School: Church tower of Santa Catalina near Plaza de la Reina

More Old School: Plaza de la Virgen and Valencia Cathedral. This is where the holy grail is supposedly housed. We didn't get a chance to see it, or the famous Goya paintings inside ("The Farewell to Saint Francis of Borja", and "The Condemned"), because there was a religious service going on. On this particular weekend, Spain was celebrating a national holiday (Constitution Day, December 6) and a religious holiday (Day of the Immaculate Conception,December 8).


The New Style: So, fast forward 700 years (give or take) and you can see that Valencian architecture has changed dramatically! These are two of the many modern buildings that dot a portion of an old riverbed that runs through the city. These buildings are part of an educational complex called The City of Arts and Sciences (Ciutat de laes Arts i de les Ciencies ). The one on the right is the main building of the aquarium where we visited. It is one of the largest, if not THE largest, aquariums in Europe and houses over 500 species of aquatic life and has an amazing 30-meter long tunnel through some of the larger aquariums.

Last, but not least, we ate some authentic paella Valenciana, which is a rice dish featuring rabbit and chicken and (who knew?) snails. There are many versions of paella and others at our table got a verdant green vegetarian paella and a lobster paella. Info for foodies: all our paellas had that awesome soccarat at the bottom of the pan as all good ones should! Our restaurant was on the beach overlooking the Mediterranean. Well, it was night, honestly, so we really couldn't see the Mediterranean, so a few of us went down to the water to verify, run our hands through the impossibly cold water and then quickly ran back to the restaurant for dessert.

The Truth About Jamon

Vs.

Serrano Ham is good and Iberian Ham even better, but sometimes, an American girl like me needs a little bacon in her life. Lately, I've really been craving bacon. And Madrid restaurants haven't been providing the goods. Sure, many of them have bacon on the menu, but none of them serve up the perfectly rendered and crisp strips of smoky pork belly I require. It is as if no one has ever told the cooks in Spain that bacon is at its best when it's caramelized and crisp (level of crispness based on diner preference, of course), because what passes for bacon here is slightly warmed, completely uncaramelized and flabby. NO BUENO!

Yesterday, I decided to take matters into my own hands and went to the grocery store to buy some bacon and make it my own damn self. I was in the midst of comparing the tried-and-true Oscar Mayer versus the store brand, Carrefour (some of you may think that this decision is a no-brainer, but I've grown to really like the Carrefour Express grocery stores and was willing to give their bacon a try), but before I could choose, some Madre wandering around the store looking for someone on which to dump her unsolicited advice, decided I needed some help:

Madre: That's not jamon {ham}, you know.

Me: Yes, I know.

Madre: It has a lot of fat. It's not good for you.

Me: Yes, I know.

Madre: You'll pay the price. (Whether she meant the actual price at the register or the price of my health is a bit unclear, but irrelevant to my point.)

Me: Ah! Okay. Thank you.

Now, at this point I just wanted to high-tail it out of the store because the bacon I've been imagining myself eating for weeks was now within grasp. So I left Madre and Carrefour and did just that. Only after I had supped on bacony-laced food items over the remainder of the day did I get to thinking about the incident at the store again. Sure, it bothered me a little that this perfect stranger would approach me and share what was on her mind, but what bothered me even more was the misguided thought behind it:

She thinks jamon is healthy!

I channeled my anger, not at the Madre for being such a busy-body, but to find out if, in fact, ham is healthier than bacon.

I will let the data speak for itself:

1 oz. serving of Serrano Ham / 1.2 oz. serving of Bacon (1-2 slices)

Calories: 80 / 50

Total Fat: 6 g / 4 g

Saturated Fat: 2.5 g / 2 g

Cholesterol: 17 mg / 15 mg

Sodium: 625 mg / 270 mg

Protein: 8 g / 4 g

(Sources: http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-wegmans-serrano-ham-i93062 and http://brands.kraftfoods.com/oscarmayer/main.aspx?s=product&m=product/product_display&Site=1&Product=4470002049> )

So who's paying the price, Grandma!? Excuse me, but I think this girl has some more bacon to fry up.

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P.S. -- Bacon Tasting Analysis: The Carrefour brand of bacon was good flavor-wise and crispness-wise, but a little too thin for me. Next time, I'll go for the Oscar Mayer.

P.S. -- Sorry I haven't posted in a while, people! School projects have dominated lately and I've been swamped with work in preparation for the Christmas Holiday (December 20-January 7, 'round these parts). I hope to make up for my lack of posts in the next few weeks, where I'll tell you all about Valencia, Brussels/Bruges/Amsterdam, Barcelona and a few more hot spots in and around Madrid. Stay tuned!