The Big Five

This past weekend, Matty, Sean and I took a train from Paris to Brussels, Belgium.  We had five goals for our weekend in Belgium, much like those who are on safaris in Africa: to drink Belgium beer and to eat moules, frites, chocolate and waffles, not necessarily in that order.  We accomplished our goals quite nicely.

In short version, our weekend could be summed up as beer, beer, moules, frites, beer, beer, beer,  waffles, beer, chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, beer, frites, and waffles.  (That’s leaving out the absinthe and Grec in which Matt and Sean decided to partake after I went back to the hotel to go to bed after we had been drinking for 10 hours straight).  Before we left, during my negotiations with Sean in the middle of Target about which over the counter medications that were necessities, we debated the finer points over whether Pepto Bismal was different than Immodium.  In the end, only Immodium made the cut, but on the train ride back from Paris, I recalled the main difference between the two.  Pepto Bismal lists “overindulgence in food and drink” as one of the conditions it treats.  Sean kept asking me what was wrong on the train, and I moaned, Overindulgence in food and drink…Overindulgence in food and drink…

In the somewhat longer version, our weekend to Brussels was a lot of fun, but we all concluded that one weekend in the city was enough.  (Although Matt repeatedly mentioned, usually at a café sampling various Belgium beers and lambics, each in their own uniquely shaped glass, This would never get old.  I could do this all of the time!)  When asked about his experience visiting Brussels before we left, our friend Brad, who opted not to go with us, only said, Brussels is…interesting.  You’ll see.

If Paris is refined, uptight, and classy, Brussels is coarse, bawdy, and quirky.  The language in Brussels is somewhat of a hodgepodge, with French spoken mostly, with some English, Flemish and Dutch thrown in.  The French influence tricks one into thinking the city is like Paris, but you quickly learn that it is not.  For one, the café culture is ubiquitous, but completely different than Paris.  I saw no one sipping mineral water or espresso in Brussels.  Instead, everyone was drinking some form of beer.  People were seated around café tables, instead of lining up in the stadium style seating like they do in Paris.  I didn’t realize how immaculate Paris’s streets and landscaping are until viewing the graffiti and litter present in Brussels.  Many stores were closed in Brussels, and the empty streets felt like downtown Pittsburgh on a weekend.  While Paris allegedly has a lot of immigrants, one rarely sees them, but some of the neighborhoods we walked through in Brussels felt like we were in the Middle East, with children climbing on a mock camel and women in traditional garb.  The most obvious example of the differences between Brussels and Paris is Brussels’ main tourist attraction: the Manneken Pis, a statute of a little boy peeing.  Manneken Pis also has companion statutes elsewhere in the city: one of a girl squatting and one of a dog lifting his leg.  Nice.

Even if Brussels is a little on the raunchy side, raunchy can be kind of fun. For one thing, there’s the beer.  We visited Delerium Cafe, a place Matt dubbed “The Disneyland of Beer.”  The bar had rows of copper taps, with endless amounts of Belgium beer to try.  After all, one grows weary of drinking wine all of the time in Paris.

As for Manneken Pis, his “Friends of Manneken Pis” take him very seriously, and we were lucky enough to witness the changing of his outfit, a regularly scheduled ceremonious event.

When we passed by the statute again later in the day, people in brightly colored costumes danced and sang, while the woman who changed his outfit earlier stood in the fountain, holding up shot glasses to the “pee” stream.  The “pee” was now some sort of alcohol instead of water, which lucky recipients in the crowd received.  Meanwhile, a man with a serious mustache pushed around a cart with a replica of the pissing boy leering down at the crowd.  To clear the street of people, he lurched the cart forward, sending “pee” through the air towards unsuspecting bystanders.

Brussels wasn’t all raunch and debauchery.  The Grand Place, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is a site to behold with its Gothic architecture surrounding you on all sides.  We had lunch consisting of fancy salads and pasta on a street filled with cute little cafes, interspersed with art galleries.

Brussels also has, of course, some of the world’s finest chocolatiers.  The chocolatiers turn chocolate making into a fine art, like the creation of wine or cheese.  I think it was the chocolates that blew our budget for the day, but tasting some of the world’s finest chocolates was worth it.  Since I don’t discriminate in my chocolate (Sarris or Hershey, I won’t turn either down), I was curious to try the Belgium variety, most of which are handmade.

We visited what according to my research are the top three chocolatiers – Pierre Marcolini, Neuhaus, and Wittamer.  I also visited the mass-produced Leonidas for good measure, where I got three filled chocolates for the price that I paid for one at Neuhaus.

In Wittamer, the woman behind the counter waived her hand towards bars of solid chocolate, saying, Here is the dark chocolate. She continued, wrinkling her nose, And here is the milk chocolate, for the Americans.  I laughed to myself, and promptly purchased my favorite – the milk chocolate of course – along with some filled pieces of dark chocolate.  I certainly would never turn down any dark chocolate offered to me, but none of the dark chocolate I’ve had in the United States could compare to the flavor and creaminess of the milk chocolate.  Further taste testing revealed that I could change my milk chocolate eating ways pretty easily if I lived in Belgium, particularly if I directed my chocolate eating towards Pierre Marcolini.

We were told in Pierre Marcolini that Pierre himself hand selects all of the beans.  The labels list the origin of the beans, specifying whether the chocolate was made from blended beans or from pure origin.  While many of the other chocolatiers focused upon creating different types of filled chocolates, Marcolini mostly featured solid bars of chocolate, with no nuts, creams, or jellies to interfere with the tasting experience.  Hands down, the three solid chocolate bars I got from Marcolini were leagues above any other chocolate I’ve had in my life, and better than the other chocolates I purchased that day.

Since you can take the girl out of America, but you can’t take America out of the girl, my favorite was Java Lait, a chocolate featuring beans solely from Indonesia that contained 50% cocoa, cane sugar, soy lecithin, and Tahitian vanilla pods.  My second favorite was the limited edition dark chocolate I purchased, with beans from Oriente and Cuba, containing a minimum of 78% cocoa.  Its ingredients are cocoa mass, sugar, cocoa butter, soy lecithin, and natural vanilla.  Following closely behind was the Chocolat Au Lait, which contains 35% cocoa, “a lightly caramelized milk powder with a subtle taste of honey”, cane sugar, soy lecithin, and Tahitian vanilla pods.   Note the complete absence of high fructose corn syrup, and other names you can never pronounce.

All of the chocolate was fantastic, but Pierre Marcolini was the clear winner (and naturally, the most expensive, at 80 grams of chocolate priced between approximately 9-13 US dollars).  Behind Marcolini was Neuhaus, and Wittamer, the chocolatier with the snide comments about Americans’ chocolate palette, trailed behind.  Leonidas, the mass produced chocolates, were definitely good as well, although I didn’t purchase enough to rank them with the others.

We also stumbled upon a lambic tasting tour that featured pairings of regional, natural cheeses.  We planned to tour Cantillon which is the only brewery tour offered in Brussels.  They have been brewing lambics there, in the same way, since 1900.

We paid for our tour, and were told we would get two free samples at the end.  Walking through the brewery, we noticed people drinking and eating.  As we stood there, trying to figure out what was going on, a guy behind one of the stations laughed, and said, Guess you are wondering why everyone has little glasses and you don’t, huh? Why, yes, that is exactly what we were wondering.

After paying some more money, we were allowed to join the tasting, which turned out to be one of the best parts of the weekend.  Matt’s brother-in-law Dennis dabbles in beer and wine making, and is an expert in the different types of beer and wine.  He told us we had to try to lambics while we were in Belgium, because they are only produced there due to the prevalence of a certain type of wild yeast and bacteria.  And try lambic we did.  At the tasting, we got to try 16 different types, from a young lambic, to an old lambic, to a young gueze (a blend of different Lambics), to an old gueze, to a kriek (with sour cherries), to framboise (with raspberries), to a pale-ale type Lambic, to a vigneronne (with Muscat grapes), to Zwanze (with elderberry flowers) to Faro (with brown sugar candy).   We’re told by Dennis that most of these lambics are not available in the United States, and to the extent that they are available, they would cost about $120 a case.

All of the lambics had a somewhat sour taste that was strangely delicious.  The cheeses ranged from creamy and delicious, to extremely pungent, but you couldn’t deny that each cheese was perfectly paired with its lambic companion.

My favorite was the Lou Pepe Framboise (very different and less sweet than the more mass produced Lindemanns Framboise; it is made by blending lambics from the same brewing season with a high level of raspberries and inducing secondary fermentation by using a limited amount of liqueur; paired with Delice des Bois cheese, which is a triple cream cheese stuffed with stewed forest berries).  Matt’s favorite was the Cuvee Saint-Lamvinus (a rare and unique beer produced using Merlot grapes soaked in Lambic aged 2-3 years in barrels from the Bordeaux region of France; bottled without any blending and carbonation induced by adding liqueur; paired with sausage with Boletus mushroom) and Sean liked the Cuvee St-Gilloise (a beer produced using cold-hopped Lambic aged 2 years, which brings out flavour and gives it a more bitter aroma and palate; paired with Trappe d’ Echourgnac, which is a cheese made from cow’s milk produced in the tradition of Cistercian monks and matured with walnut liqueur).

Needless to say, whether it was the 16 lambics, or the high alcohol content of the Belgium beers, but we had a grand time in Brussels.

I have a new love…

…and her name is Burrata.  No, it is not a pastry.  (Shocking, I know).  It is an Italian cheese.

No, we’re not in Italy, but one of the wonders of Paris is the accessibility of all things fabulous from elsewhere in the world.

Burrata is creamy, salty, and tangy, all at once.  It was delivered fresh from Campania, Italy to the Italian food co-op in Paris’s 5th arrondissement today.  It was worth the hour long walk to the  co-op and the blatant ridicule and laughs the man behind the counter and those in line shared at my expense during my awkward efforts to order.  Yes, it was that good.

My Paris Diet (i.e., Brad promised me I can eat as many pastries as I want and not get fat).

My cousin Karen, who traveled to Paris in December, sent me an email and mentioned that she was excited to see Paris through my eyes. As she probably could have predicted, my view of Paris is directed towards the patisseries, boulangeries, and creperies. (Specializing in pastries, bread, and crepes, respectively). Did you know that in France, a patisserie is a legally controlled title that may only be used by bakeries that employ a licensed maître pâtissier (master pastry chef)? I didn’t either, until I learned this fact on Wikipedia. Wikipedia teaches me a lot these days.

I don’t really pay attention to the names, other than to notice that in Spain I liked anything that ended in -eria and in France I like anything that ends in -erie. I mostly follow the delightful smells. Seriously, there is nothing more aromatic and calming that the smell of French baguette wafting down the street. It is rare that one of our meals these days do not chiefly consist of baguettes. Not so great on carbs, but nice on the wallet. Fortunately, we’ve happily been adding vegetables to our baguette-based meals, because we have found that all of the vegetables taste fresher and have more flavor than most of the veggies at home.

I have been eating Nutella crepes, madeline cookies, palmiers, macaroons, lemon tarts, and chocolate eclairs with abandon. On our first night in Paris, Brad, a friend of Sean’s who works for Sean’s former employer, and who is here in Paris working for about a month, mentioned that when he first came to Paris, he promptly dropped a ton of weight because of all of the walking that he did. He assured me that he had been sampling everything Paris had to offer, and that he dropped the weight despite the Parisian treats.

While I am sure that I would have promptly commenced eating crepes and such regardless, this was the go-ahead I needed to eat them guilt-free. Luckily, we have been walking a ton. Paris is very flat, making it easy to traverse from one area of town to the other. I am not sure that I am losing any weight, but I can fairly say that I have not yet gained any weight, so the Parisian diet must be working on some level. I mean, the treats are so delicious here, and I am eating so many of them, that I don’t even find the need to make sure that each treat is chocolate filled or covered.

I promise that I will write about more than just food, but the way I see it, food is the best way to experience the cultural differences between countries and even regions. Sean is a slightly alarmed in my increase in sweets in particular, but I seem him enjoying quite a few baguettes, paprika-flavored pringles, and comte cheese himself. Besides, I am taking advantage of sweets now in Europe, where they are abundant. You never know when I’ll suddenly find myself cut off.

Land of Peen-chos.

Deciding it was time to head out of Barcelona and make headway towards Paris, where we would be visiting our friend Matt, we planned our next destination: San Sebastian, Spain.

From San Sebastian

From San Sebastian

San Sebastian, or Donostia as it is called in Basque, is a town on the ocean in northeastern Spain, close to the border of France. It is in the heart of Basque country, which is a region spanning northern Spain and southern France, where the Basque ethnic group lives. In San Sebastian, people spoke noticeably less English than in Barcelona, with the added of challenge of frequently speaking Basque, a language with a lot of x’s and t’s, in addition to Spanish. San Sebastian is a cute little getaway where the pace was a little slower than Barcelona. It is nestled between the ocean and the mountains, with tons of shops, flowers, and quaint old architecture in between. The people in San Sebastian seemed to be very dedicated to their siesta time, even though shops and restaurants did not open early or stay open particularly late.

From San Sebastian

The 6 hour bus ride from Barcelona to San Sebastian was pretty uneventful, save for the loud Spanish lite FM blasting from the speakers (Spanish songs frequently interspersed with Lady Gaga and Owl City’s song Fireflies) and me trying to retrieve my tres-dropped Ipod while accidentally pouring half of my water bottle on Sean’s pants as Sean and the Spanish man next to him stared in horror. (No worries, the quick dry fabric works as advertised!) We arrived in the heart of siesta time, without a reservation or a map. We eventually ran across Pension Santa Clara, one of the accommodations advertised in Lonely Planet Spain ( www.pensionsantaclara.com ). Although I was suspicious of its simple rooms, thinking it did not seem to raise the bar in our lodging as much as I would have liked, it didn’t smell like fumar (smoke) like another pension we tried (hate that fumar!), it was in the heart of the Old Vieja (Old Town), it was only 38 euros per night, and our backpacks seem to triple in weight after carrying them around town. It turns out that we loved the Pension Santa Clara. The linens were great (nice and clean and white!), the internet was super fast, and the shower in the en suite bano was full of pressure and hot. We even got to watch some TV (some gameshows in Spanish and lots of the Teledeportes channel).

From San Sebastian

All over San Sebastian, you will be surrounded by bars and restaurants with pinxtos (pronounced peen-chos) sitting on their counters. Similar to tapas, and essentially little appetizers that can be eaten as a snack or combined to make a meal, it was fun to try all of the different combinations.

From San Sebastian

One has to wonder how fresh all of these pintxos are, because save for our favorite pintxos restaurant (Casa Senra on San Francisco street in Gros), we never saw the pinxtos being replaced. No matter. The little sandwiches and seafood or jamon (ham) topped pieces of bread were so cute, it was easy to ignore the fact that seafood was sitting out unrefrigerated or that everyone’s fumar constantly wafted over the pinxtos. Plus, because there were a million different places right in walking distance, it made bar hopping very conducive. Although we stuck to the Old Vieja section the first night, we frequently found ourselves wandering about a mile down the road past the surfer’s beach to the Gros district, which is noticeably less touristy.

In San Sebastian, we quickly fell into the routine of eating pastries from the pasteleria around the corner, drinking fresh squeezed orange juice for breakfast or lunch, eating pinxtos for essentially all meals, taking walks or running by the beach, and browsing the shops. On our last day, we decided to “summit” Mount Igueldo, a small mountain overlooking the beach on one side and the town on the other, with a fort and a statute of Jesus on top. Even the cloudy, overcast day couldn’t hide the beauty and sereneness of the sight of the ocean through the trees on the mountain. The water alternates between azul and aquamarine. It has been about five years since we have visited a beach. It had been way too long, I decided.

Apparently we drink wine by the bottle now.

Barcelona – from the moment we stepped off the plane, it was obvious we were not in the United States anymore.  I have a feeling we may not be able to truly appreciate Barcelona for what makes it unique because we are still in wonder at the, well, Europeaness of it all.  I wonder if many of the things that endlessly intrigue, amuse and/or confuddle us now will eventually become routine, pedestrian.  For example: the wooden elevator that escorts us to our residencio.  The large door to our building that has a smaller door subset within.  The scooters speeding around all over the city.  The tiny cars, including two Smart cars so small they can fit into one combined space.  The sounds of people chattering about in Catalon or Spanish.  The sounds of ambulancias that I previously had only heard in the movies or in films from my international terrorism class.  The products in the grocery stores, which look so familiar, yet in a foreign language.  Coke Lite, instead of Diet Coke.  Ordering some variation of coffee, and never knowing whether it will be an espresso shot or something a tad larger (but no where near tall, vente or grande).  Speculating what might be on the menu, until the waiter takes pity on you and brings you the English version of the menu (and you learn what you speculated was dead wrong).  Forgetting that 5 euros really isn’t 5 bucks.  Endless streets filled with quaint buildings, with flower and laundry filled terraces.   A store where you can get Chanel cosmetics on the first floor, and plain groceries on the second.  The negative one floor.  Bottles of wine cheaper than one glass of wine at home.  Lack of prominent street signs on the street itself, instead being hidden – in small print – on the buildings.   People gathered around the television in bars for futbol.  Prevelance of smokers, including up to date cigarette machines (unfortunately).  While we do have the curious constant sensation that we are in Europe, things are still very familiar.  It is probably because Barcelona is a cosmopolitan, large city, and because you can actually get the menu in English if you want.

From Barcelona

We love walking through the curving, winding streets and alleyways, and gazing at the unique architecture.

From Barcelona

However, without a doubt, our favorite thing about Barcelona so far is the food.  (Perhaps we should have made this a food blog, and then our obsession with food would be acceptable).  We have received wonderful restaurant recommendations from the owner of the hostel where we are staying.  The portions are noticeably smaller here, which is good because it all is so delicious.  The portion size combined with walking should keep us in check.  We hope.

We read that Spanish food is very simple, and puts the focus upon quality ingredients.  We would agree with that.  Every day for breakfast for the last three days, I have had freshly squeezed orange juice. One of our favorite lunches has been the lunch we had today at the market, simple sandwiches consisting of jamon serrano and manchengo cheese.  (Okay, it was one of our favorites until a pigeon decided to poop on Sean’s sandwich, and we had to split mine instead).

From Barcelona

Our dinners have been fantastic, each one better than the other.  We’ve been dining the way the Spanish do, never eating before 9 or 10 p.m.  So far we’ve had various tapas; ensaldas with creamy gorganzola cheese; two different dishes with sweet apples, one duck and one chicken; grilled tuna with olive oil and tomatoes; chocolate mousse with mascapone cream and crunchy tidbits; and always, a bottle or carafe of wine.

We already have had a change in our itinerary.  We plan to stay in Barcelona through Monday, and are heading to San Sebastian, Spain, by bus.  We’ll stay there for a few days, then we’ll be heading to Paris for about a week (squee!) to stay with our friend Matty, who is graciously letting us crash on the couch in his company-funded apartment while he is there for work.  More to come about Barcelona in future posts.