Perhaps too literal a translation

I had my first hambrguesa in Spain today. It came with a beef patty, a slice of deli ham and a slice of cheese. It was as if the word hamburger was broken down into its parts of ham+ burger and reassembled; perhaps thousands of years in the future the words were rediscovered and scientists decided to regrow the mighty beast from the DNA of its word origin.

Still, as I am sure we will come to find out with wooly mammoth steaks, the ham + burger was pretty tasty.

And so it goes...

After three days in Madrid I have had my fill of jamon.

I seem to attract the people who want to either drunkenly ramble to me in Spanish on the street, or even better, the young lads who want to express their distaste of tourists. It all comes from traveling around like a herd of cattle on any school-sponsored excursion. I might as well wear blackface to a klan meeting.

The young citizens of Madrid have a style that I find very appealing. People wear jeans and dark sweaters with almost militaristic button up jackets. It's like the old Warsaw style of the late 70's, but updated. Minimalist and functional, yet sleek and well put together.

The metro here is needlessly clean. Not that I don't appreciate it, but Madrid seems to be somewhat of a utopia in that there are city employees who have the job of "cleaner" and who do nothing but clean up the city. I imagine this happened sometime after curing cancer and solving all other problems in Madrid.

An international school is the safest feeling place here, with everyone having English in common. I had good conversations with German and Chinese women today.

I find that my musical taste is taking me back to previous European trips; Fireside, U2, Kent, Radiohead, etc. There's a new dimension of my soundtrack that I can't fully explain, but Paul Simon and Seals and Crofts have been inspiring in me great emotional responses. I may elaborate on Paul Simon later, as I feel that this connection is worth exploring.

Last night we went out to a bar called "Dubliners", an "Irish" pub. The staff spoke English and they didn't serve Guinness. It was neither Spanish nor Irish, and 100% bullshit, apparent from all of the American students around the age of 19 getting trashed and dancing uproariously with each other when the Offspring comes on the sound system. Bourdain probably felt a quick pain in his chest and his right arm went numb for a second out of solidarity.

The grocery store is like heaven. I have never seen such a seafood counter, and the meat department had whole, skinned rabbits. I want to cook a meal here more than anything else.

Hot Dogs in Madrid

OK, I realize that eating a street vended hot dog for your first taste of Madrid may not seem like the best thing to do, but you sir, yes you, just try and stand in front of a place with a sign that says "Perritos Calientes" and NOT buy one. Not to mention, they take soft, uncut hot dog buns, stick them on a toaster pole and toast the inside of a hot dog sized hole, then they dip your dog in ketchup and slide it into said toasty hole.

Now that this little treat is out of the way, I am doing to go stand in the middle of SOL, close my eyes, turns around till dizzy, walk straight, and eat jamon at whichever jamon bar I run into.

music of choice for metro ride: U2 - "War"

This is why I don't eat out in Los Angeles

You'd think that a town with as much going on as LA has, that it would be a mecca for fantastic food. The truth is, it may be, but I can't get past the sense of entitlement that conflicts with the ability to do the job that food servers have in Los Angeles to find out. Last night, I find a great looking diner (although one whose entire identity is built around being run by hipsters) and a good looking menu. My friends order food but my eye is drawn to the milkshake.

Let me pause here, because this is important. There are two ways to make a chocolate milkshake. One of them is traditional and how the milkshake was born, and the other is the incorrect, Baskin Robbins way to make a milkshake. The correct way to make a chocolate shake is to use vanilla ice cream, chocolate syrup and whole milk. The incorrect way is the same but with chocolate ice cream. I assume that the idea is that it makes it more "chocolate" tasting. It doesn't, since chocolate ice cream tastes nothing like chocolate, it just makes it taste weird.

I have found, that if I assume a place will make my shake correctly is usually the instance in which I wind up with a shake made with chocolate ice cream, so I have learned to specify that I would like a chocolate shake made with vanilla ice cream.

So hipster waitress comes over, funny shaved half head thingy hairdo and multi-colored yoga workout gear on. When she gets to me I say "chocolate shake made with vanilla ice cream" to which she sticks out her tongue, and makes an "ugh" noise as if I have either said I hate Jews or asked her to reconstruct the Great Wal of China using toothpicks. I notice her after she leaves, causally ignoring all customers and hanging out in the back of the joint, only to go talk to her group of friends at a booth at length about her band.

Our food comes in a bit, and afterwards my shake, in all of its glory, made with chocolate ice cream. Amanda notices just by the look and says "that's made with chocolate isn't it", to which I reply "yup" without even having to taste it. Could have chalked this up to a mistake, although an embarrassing one on behalf of the restaurants ability to properly take and execute their customer's order correctly, except for when our "waitress" came back 10 minutes later, look at me with a little squinty gleam in her eye and asked me in a slightly sarcastic, slightly triumphant tone "how's that milkshake?" before walking off.

Albeit five dollars, I'm your customer, and this is my money I am handing over. I didn't ask for anything crazy, and instead of being treated with respect, I was mocked and purposefully given something I didn't want. This is the part where I threaten everyone to stay off my lawn, but had this been an authentic diner, operated by people who work in food service because they are emotionally fulfilled by making their patrons fulfilled, (then they would have made the shakes right in the first place and I never would have had to specify) servers with this kind of attitude would be thrown out on their ass. Look, I know you worked hard to make you outfit look like you dug it out of the trash, and I am sure that working in the diner in Echo Park where they play indie rock all day long does wonders for furthering your band's career, but it does a huge dis-service to anyone looking to get a satisfactory eating experience.

My opinion on work in the food service industry has changed completely since I was a teenager, and I now see it as one of the most important, and if done in the right environment, rewarding careers that one can have. I am currently considering quiting a great job to go serve BBQ to people. This place has the potential to be one of the greatest places to work and to eat, a truly unique atmosphere, but if you let your snarky irony get in the way of SERVING your customers, well then, fuck you. This goes for pretty much every place I have eaten in LA. I should not have to impress you to get good food service, I should only need to be hungry and have cash in my pocket.

The Countdown...

I leave for Europe in less than a week. I haven't done the research that my tummy demands of me to know where to go for the best (bacon) food. Since the entire nature of my trip is that of flying blind, I feel that to research too much would dishonor the spirit of the journey. I'm ready for you Madrid.

I learned how I DON'T like to travel

For my Spring Break this year, I made the silly decision to take a free school trip up to the bay area to look at college campuses. Three days on a bus, 4 campuses, too many fast food meals and 50 other people who were mostly at least 10 years younger than me later, I have realized that I cannot be herded around like this, no matter what the purpose may be. I had to explain to an 18 year old why the Transformers movie was a worthless piece of garbage (please stay tuned for that post on discriminating taste that will come at some time in the future), and I was told that I was "mean" for asking a young woman to get out of the seat next to me and return to hers which she had previously plopped herself into to have asinine conversations with a girl sitting in the next row.

What I did get out of the experience was the purchase of a new tobacco pipe. I already have the pipe that my grandfather used, but I thought it would be nice to have one that I was the only person to ever smoke out of it. Now I can experience the continuation, and the implementation of tradition. I bought tobacco and grabbed some matches, and one of the only calming moments of this trip came that night as I stepped out of the hotel out into the cold night air of San Francisco and lit my pipe for the first time. a lifetime of fantasies of being an English gentleman, sitting in a private library next to the fire smoking a pipe were immediately realized, and I was completely satisfied with my purchase.

This beautiful illusion was soon shattered though by being forced to eat a meal on the SFSU campus. Blech.

It doesn't always work

While I encourage anyone to take cooking "by the horns" as it may, meaning to just sort of jump into it blind and cook "by feel", there are times when I would have been better off following some sort of instructions.

Recently I really wanted some shrimp that gave me a taste of garlic, lemon and lime. Something fresh and light tasting. I bought some shrimp and chopped up a few cloves of garlic, then threw them into a container with the freshly squeezed juice of 3 limes, 1 lemon and 1/2 an orange. I let this all chill together while I made some rice and then I heated up some olive oil and threw the shrimp into it once warmed to the proper temperature (that is a lie, I don't know how hot the oil was).

What happened? Some of the juice from the marinade went into the pan too and immediately lowered the cooking temperature, giving me not a searing on the shrimp, but a kind of boiling instead. When I went to eat them, the texture was all wrong and the taste was very strong of nondescript citrus flavors. I only ate one of them.

Now, at this point I take back that I still wouldn't stand behind my method of ignorant cooking, because through this experience I learned a couple of things NOT to do while cooking shrimp. This I believe, will be highly valuable in the future.