It's a very simple thing, but I think our most exciting gustatory discovery while in Spain was a traditional (Galician) pepper dish, Pimientos de Padrón, and I'm willing to go to great lengths to find the right pepper in order to reproduce the dish at home.

This picture shows us on the terrace outside the Mayflower restaurant in Getaria finishing a magnificent, elegant but extraordinarily-minimal appetizer of house-cured anchovies, in a terrific local olive oil combined with chopped garlic, just after the peppers were brought to the table and before the wood-grilled monkfish entrée (cola de rape a la plancha) had arrived directly from the fires burning ten feet behind Barry's chair.

The wine in that beautiful thin [cider] tumbler was an excellent Txakoli from the Basque country.

like a bad penny

I cannot hide it any longer: We arrived back from Spain Wednesday afternoon. Our luggage, having decided to extend the holiday for another day, arrived at our door 24 hours later, sadder but a little wiser. Next time there will be no dawn check-ins at a remote airport for a connection to a Transatlantic flight.

I have tons of images from our trip to Spain which I'd like to put up on this site. I'm going to keep putting more up until I get distracted by the next new thing.

Unfortunately I really am very easily diverted. Witness my delight in one of today's biggest news stories and my failure to resist looking back almost four years to three of the entries on this site which dealt with Paul Wolfowitz - in one of his earlier incarnations. Too bad he's never gotten fired for his real failures and crimes: total personal incompetence and state murder on an international scale.

If you can still stand to read about the man, see this, my September 21, 2003 post and both this and this post each filed two days later, concerning Wolfowitz's appearance at The New School.

[yucky image, but perhaps also an homage to Deborah Kass, from trueblueliberal]

Barry and I went to Atocha early this afternoon, to see what the station looked like, but also to see the memorial to the March 11, 2004 Madrid train bombings which killed 191 people and injured some 1800.

Especially considering the circumstances of its origin, it is, as Barry said, the least chauvinistic monument imaginable. Texts composed of hundreds of expressions of grief sent in the days after the attack from all over the world are printed on a clear colourless membrane that is inflated by air pressure, rising balloon-like inside a cylinder. That structure is composed of glass blocks and sits on a platform or terrace overhead. The light in the empty blue room below comes from this source alone. At night the cylinder is illuminated by lamps within its base and can be seen throughout the station neighborhood.

Francisco de Zurbarán Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose 1633

We're flying to Spain tomorrow for two weeks: Madrid, a motor trip north, ending in Barcelona, from which we fly back on the 16th.

I was in Barcelona in 1961. I was almost arrested for wearing Bermuda shorts while riding around on my bike. I went back to Spain (Madrid, Toledo, Segovia, Salamanca) in 1980. the Caudillo was dead, and it felt like one big party; I can't believe I haven't been been back in the meantime.

Barry just did a post covering some territory we're going to have to miss, several benefits and some theatre.

I have no idea whether I'll have a chance to blog while away. Okay, maybe some pictures if we have good internet connections.

[image from gatochy]