LARD HAT

Yes, folks, summer is on its way. The eternal debate, however, still rages. Which is better? Summer or winter? While both seasons have their advantages and disadvantages, I tend to prefer summer.

Here are 6 things I’m excited about:

1. Gazpacho, sherry and carpaccio. As much as I love red wine and cocido, I’m also happy when summer rolls around and it’s time for delicious cold seasonal foods. Drinking sherry in various specialty bars is also a plus. Also, the super-abundance of tomatoes and eggplants is great for making sauces and pastas.

2. Synthesizing Vitamin D naturally. Vitamin D makes everything seem awesome. In summer you can get a huge vitamin buzz in about 15 minutes.

3. Daylight past 10 PM. God bless European latitudes. It stays light until 10 or 10:30 most of the summer, and you can do all kinds of things.

4. Finding out who’s pro-bullfighting and who’s anti-bullfighting. In late Spring, bullfighting season starts, and suddenly all the closet animal rights activists get all worked up about bullfighting. The ironic part is that virtually none of them are vegetarians. They just somehow have the idea that being anally electrocuted in a slaughterhouse is much more dignified for bulls. I like to know who these people are, so I can take the rest of their opinions less seriously. Hypocrites.

5. Brutally hideous fashion. When Spanish people are mostly covered up, they look respectable for the most part. But give them a chance to walk around half-dressed in the heat and they’ll bring out clothes that are shocking and horrible even to my provincial sensibilities. It’s like a circus, and you can sit all day and just watch the freaks go by.

6. Laughing at everyone who starts whining about the heat. You’ve never felt real heat till you’ve spent, oh, let’s say 20 summers in Phoenix, Arizona. Go do that and then let’s talk about how hot it is in Madrid.

Here are the things I’m not really looking forward to about summer:

1. Watching my income decrease by 80% as all my students decide they’d rather be synthesizing Vitamin D than coming to English class. Pretty much self-explanatory why this sucks.

2. Sweating like a pig at night. Sleep, and all other bed-related activities become sticky, sweaty events whether you’re alone or in company. I’m pretty sure pigs actually refer to this as “Sweating like a fat German-American in an environment he’s not genetically designed for.”

3. Listening to Europeans complain about how “air conditioning makes them sick.” This is apparently an old-wives’ tale that Europeans take really seriously. Europeans consider air conditioning to be more dangerous than mosquitoes in a malaria zone. They’ll be like, “Oh my God! Cold Air! Get it away from me!”

In the end, summer wins my vote.

Coming soon: Which is better? Madrid or Barcelona?

I came to Spanish food a little bit late. My first surprise on arriving in Madrid was that no, they don’t eat Mexican food here. I was 21 and suffering from the All-American ailment of total ignorance of everything outside your dismal suburb, and really didn’t know any better. 

In addition, I was a vegetarian at the time. While vegetarianism is an interesting experience, I wouldn’t really recommend it at this point: either way, it was totally impractical for me to integrate into Spanish culture if I wasn’t eating animals. So after a couple of years, I gave up on vegetarianism. Sorry, animals.

Anyway, a lot of Spanish food is not exactly politically correct by American standards, and I have the feeling that many tourists come here and don’t have any idea what things are, so they end up in McDonalds. Bad idea.

Anyway, without further ado, here are my top 25 Spanish foods (in no particular order):

1. Pulpo a la Gallega: That’s Galician-style octopus. Yep, the tentacles. It’s purple on the outside, white on the inside, an delicious all over. In Galicia (in the north of Spain), they serve it with cloudy home-made white wine, sometimes in little ceramic bowls like in the photo.

2. Tortilla de patatas: Otherwise known as Spanish omelette, this one is pretty simple (most Spanish food is pretty simple, actually.) It’s potato and eggs. Sometimes onion. Sometimes a little bit runny on the inside. Great.

3. Paella: I’m not actually a huge fan of paella, but it seems to be pretty popular. Rice and various kinds of seafood (mussels, prawns, squid) are the usual ingredients. The yellow colour comes from saffron.

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