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.