Spanish Kimchi Special

This past weekend I was fortunate enough to take a trip to Madrid to visit my beloved friend Jean, who’s been spending the month of January studying there. I like Madrid very much. Actually, what I told Lucia when I got back on Sunday night was that I’m a little bit in love with it. The city is beautiful, and feels like a big metropolis full of different people and ideas and places to go. After living in a small, ancient walled-city like Bologna – which is a different kind of beautiful – Madrid’s tree-lined avenues (room for FOUR cars in a row!!) were mind-boggling. Plus, there’s a metro. And it comes all the time, and goes everywhere we needed to go. Can you tell that I had culture shock?


Though Madrid is in the same time zone, it doesn't feel that way. It gets light later in the morning, and stays light until almost 7 pm. This is in sync with the city’s nocturnal schedule. Everyone really does live at night. And Spanish people even seemed to look different from Italians. I’m sure there’s some sort of ethnic history on this, but I may have just been dazzled by my visit to a new place. I was most especially dazzled (and sort of shocked) by the amount of fur coats. This may not be a Spanish thing, but whoa. Once we counted 15 fur coated-ladies on one block. That’s a whole lot of small animals.


Also, we saw a painting, called Un Mundo (along with Guernica and lots of other amazing art, here), which I loved.


It looks much better in person, because it’s huge. Also there was a sculpture of a paper horse being but in half by a miniature bicycle, and I wish I remembered who created it.


I was hoping to write a blog entry that only skimmed over the issue of food. However, that isn’t going to happen this time. Food is cultural! I can’t help it. Luckily, Jean and I have always spent most of our time together snacking on something, so she was a very good tour guide in this respect. We most certainly ate paella, chorizo, Spanish omelette/tortilla sandwiches, and chocolate con churros - also chocolate-covered churros, which are very different. (I would advise you to stay away from anything that’s been deep fried, dipped in chocolate, and left to sit in a glass case for a little while. Strange things happen inside the chocolate shell.) There was also plenty of ham and olive oil. And good juice! Spain makes lots of good juice.



But . . . I think that one of the most exciting meals I had in Spain was actually not Spanish at all.


As some of this blog’s readers may know, Korean food is my favorite favorite kind of food. It’s light and spicy and full of good things (in my opinion) like tofu, garlic, and hot peppers. My last meal before coming to Italy was Korean. And I thought I wouldn’t have it again until I returned to the States – especially after realizing that nobody whom I’ve met in Bologna even knows what Korean food is. But no! There is Korean food in Madrid! Apparently it can be found in more than one restaurant – but I only went to one. That’s okay, though. One was enough. Just thinking about this makes me happy. The food was super yummy. (If you care, I had kimchi and soondobu chigae.) Plus, I think that happiness helps the digestive system. Because I ate an entire 4 euro platter of kimchi and didn’t even feel remotely . . . bloated. And if you know what goes into kimchi, you’ll know that that’s pretty much a miracle.


I swear, next time I’ll write about something super cultural.

Back in the Fold

A long delay in blogging! I’m back in Bologna, with not much changed except the weather. The days are a little longer, but I’ve glimpsed the sun once in the past seven days. Below is a photo of the fog in Milan on the morning of my arrival. On the plane from the US, everyone was literally silent as the pilot began to land; we couldn’t even see the wings of the plane. However, everything proceeded safely, and after my Milan-Bologna flight was cancelled I enjoyed the bizarre logic of Alitalia (which hired a bus to take the place of the plane – only one bus, despite the fact that it had about half the seats of the aircraft and maybe one quarter of the luggage space).

By the way, Italian bus drivers are really skillful. I’ve been riding buses for weeks now and almost every day I gape out the window as the bus misses a person, car, or scooter by inches. No accidents, though. At first I thought the drivers were just lucky, but they must know the dimensions of their buses down to the centimeter.

My return to Bologna has been uneventful. I have given out primarily peanut butter related gifts (crunchy, smooth, Reese’s pieces, peanut butter cups). Peanut butter is an interesting thing to give Italians, many of whom seem to have very particular opinions about flavor and food. For example, breakfast should be sweet pastries or bread with jam, almost always, and eggs are not a breakfast food (American breakfast is the thing I miss most when I’m here). If your plate holds more than one food, eat every thing separately in turn and don’t take bites of each alternately. Once eating my salad and pasta simultaneously at lunch, I was told that I ate like a Japanese or German person (??). If other people think you don’t eat enough or, at least, enough of the “correct” things, you’ll be told. Repeatedly. Not drinking coffee, of course, is seen as appalling and literally impossible – so is drinking coffee with milk after the morning is over. So is tea without lemon. You cannot touch food while giving it to someone else, with some appetizer exceptions, and produce must be extremely clean. I have seen people go to amazing pains to make sure that they don’t touch food with their hands. At the coffee shop near Coop Italia, the baristas wash the lemon before cutting it, and then they wash the slice of lemon again before putting it into my tea (if only I liked tea with lemon). I have yet to see a single person put an un-peeled piece of fruit in his or her mouth. My coworkers are amazing fruit peelers. Of course, these are generalizations that I’m making after spending time with a teeny-tiny fraction of the Italian populace, and may be completely unfounded, but still - I can’t imagine what they think of my manners. I really can’t resist eating different foods together, either.

Anyway, because of peanut butter’s taste, it is regarded with curiosity by those of my coworkers who haven’t tried it before. Vittorio took a peanut butter cup home with him, he told me, and prepared to eat it in the car during his drive (there’s a ton of traffic in the city at night). He was ready for something sweet, and, he says, almost spit it out when he realized that it was “so salty”. In fact, it was saltier than it was sweet, and barely a candy at all. This exchange is probably one of the most strangely surprising ones that I’ve had here. I can understand having cultural misunderstandings over so many things – politics, social class, appearance, racism, immigration, you name it. But I have never in my life thought of peanut butter as a salty food. It’s sweet! In my opinion, peanut butter itself, non-peanut-butter-cupped, is practically a candy. And it makes sense that taste buds would be cultural. What surprises me even more is my own surprise – the fact that the taste of peanut butter is so ingrained into my brain that I can’t even taste it objectively.

Actually – in regards to the above paragraph about Italians and food preferences – I can say for certain that although these particularities can be extremely baffling to an outsider, they aren’t shared by everyone. Case in point: an exchange I overheard between a Coop Italia manager (Franco) and his secretary (Chiara) on Wednesday.
Franco: Do we have any candy?
Chiara: Yes. [She gets a bag of hard candy for him and gives him a piece.]
Franco: [After a moment.] Ugh! What’s wrong with this?
Chiara: What do you mean?
Franco: It’s sweet! It’s sugary!
Chiara: [After staring open-mouthed.] I’m sorry, have you ever had candy before? Isn’t sugar the whole point?
Franco: This is terrible! It’s sugary! [This was repeated several times.]
Chiara: I don’t know what to tell you! That’s what candy’s like.
Franco: Don’t we have any good candy? I hate this!
Chiara gives up at this point and goes back to work. Franco finishes the candy.

And, on second thought, Reese’s pieces are starting to taste pretty salty.