Four Days of Drinking Sangria and Eating Tapas

As a last hurrah before heading back home I took a brief trip to Spain this past weekend. This had a nice sense of symmetry for me since my first trip outside of North America was to Spain when I was eleven. A pretty excellent note to end my year in Europe.

I spent a day in Madrid and two and a half days in a small (and gorgeous) town southwest of Madrid called Trujillo. The weather was super hot and sunny the entire time which allowed me to get one last taste of summer with some pool time and lots of hanging out in the shade and drinking cold beer. In fact, the majority of my trip involved drinking or eating, usually both. Basically, I'm obsessed with tapas. I mean, you order a drink (very cheap in Trujillo) and they just give you food. And I'm not just talking crisps or peanuts. I'm talking things like fried cuttlefish, pork in tomato sauce, and mini sandwiches of deliciousness. It's fantastic. Why don't we do this in the States? Seriously, someone get on making this happen.

In addition to the free food, there was much awesomeness to be had in actual meals as well. I'll just rattle off some examples here (non-foodies, feel free to skip ahead): cold melon soup with jamon iberico, churros, lots of grilled octopus, sea urchin, blood sausage on a baguette with caramelized onions, raw oysters, foie gras, chorizo, homemade fried sardines and empanadas, and excessive amounts of jamon iberico. I don't think I went more than one waking hour without eating. Plus there's the oddness of Spanish mealtimes--dinner starts around ten. It's kind of great, but also kind of exhausting. There were children out playing in the square at 1 AM and this is totally normal. I went to a club one night and it was just getting busy when I crawled home at 3:30 in the morning. I could get on board with the whole siesta thing though.

Outside of the whole culinary angle, Spain is a really interesting place. I didn't spend much time in Madrid but I enjoyed the Reina Sofia museum (some Dali, some Picasso, some Goya--no big deal) and I enjoyed wandering and finding cool neighbourhoods--the area near the university has some really cool little shops. When I travel, though, I almost always prefer to see the places that are more off the beaten track, like Trujillo. It's actually a pretty significant place; it has an impressive 10th-century castle and lots of well-preserved old fortresses and it was the birthplace of Pizarro. The town itself is on a hill so there are some amazing views of the surrounding countryside. It's got a great small-town vibe and I wish I spoke Spanish so I could have interacted more with the locals, some of whom were pretty interesting characters--like the bartender who looked a bit like a hobbit and insisted on refilling our drinks when we weren't looking and not charging us.

All in all, it was a highly enjoyable couple of days spent trying to deal with the intense heat beating down by walking very slowly through the town and stopping often for drinks. The in-ground pool overlooking the plains didn't hurt either. A lovely, leisurely end to my time in Europe (before the madness of packing that has consumed this week).