Weds am.

An interesting item in Monday's Guardian discusses the German position of power in Europe, and wondering about the difference not having a colonial history makes to its cultural impact and presumably its cultural diversity. (It's amazing how much you can glean from one paper if you only have the one.) Anyway it relates to the pride one time colonial powers have in their achievements and identity.

In that context I've been surprised by the continuing strength of local food traditions here.  Somehow the paprika inveigled its way onto the Spanish cuisine along with potatoes (claro),  red peppers of the capsicum variety, chocolate and tomatoes. But of chillies there are none. My point being there are a lot of Spanish restaurants .

Grette  and I went for a long walk tonight tracing down a Mexican restaurant mentioned on a guide site. Passed through a patch of Indian and Chinese places but we were too early - 7:30 pm - and they were all closed so I'm not yet sure who their clientele are or what the food is like. But we then traipsed past a number of classic tapas bars filled with fairly young loud people, found the Mexican cafe and didn't really like the look of it, and so we ended up eating hummus with carrot sticks and listening to Kylie Minogue, The Seekers, and Men at Work among others in a quiet kind of too cool to be hip cafe in the tapas bar area. Hence the photo featuring paprika below.

I think I'll need to keep chasing a bit of South American food here, because that makes an interesting circle  and also investigate if there is any museum or art exhibitions dedicated to say cochineal or more likely chocolate which were a couple of Spain's big American gifts to Europe.


After many hours everyday I now have some transportable blog connectivity. I used some time chasing a chocolate museum - one in Astorga and one in Barcelona, and a cochineal museum of which there appears or be none. Well, we'll see.