So February is almost over, and we're wiped. We're working our asses off on Così fan tutte, which the Kons has decided to stage, like, right now, so we're cramming every day, trying to get the next scene memorized in time for staging. At the same time, we're preparing for a recital next Saturday, with a couple of dress rehearsals this week and next week leading up to it, where we have lots to sing as well (and lots to memorize). Insanity. We have about enough energy every evening to stare at our computers mindlessly until we realize it's late and we need to be asleep 30 minutes ago. And that, my friends, is what the end of February '08 looks like from out here.
We saw lots o' operas the week we got back: Aida, Così fan tutte and Cavalleria Rusticana/Pagliacci. Aida gets a high draw score, since the women were good, and the tenor was *so bad* that he unfortunately doesn't allow Aida placing in the win category. Così fan tutte was excellent, with an excellent cast, an excellent conductor (Muti), no cuts, and an adequate staging. Really really great (and long!). Cavalleria was not so good, and Pagliacci was good, so I guess we'll give one point into the win category and one low-draw. So, that's 2 wins and 2 draws for the Wiener Staatsoper: 10-4-4.
I gonna get me a Tom Bihn backpack. I'm actually excited about buying a backpack. Nerd. On an unrelated note, you know when you wake up and your eyebrow or eyeball is spasming for no reason and it's really weird? You ever get that in the muscles of your lower lip? I used to be able to say me neither; it's been a weird day.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
The Last Few Weeks of February
People who look at this site
In creepy big-brother fashion, here's Google's site tracking info:
In the last month, of the people viewing the blog for more than a minute,
6 were from Pennsylvania, 2 were from New Jersey, 2 from California, 2 from Vienna (not me!), 2 from Granada, Spain, 1 from Serbia (?) and 1 from Denmark (?).
So, in case you were curious, I'M LOOKING AT YOU RIGHT NOW THROUGH YOUR COMPUTER SCREEN
Also, California, you're way behind. Time to get cracking.
Béchamel
I have just figured out how to make a mushroom sauce out of a Béchamel base. This is a special day indeed. I have sought long and hard for this sauce, and at 6:00pm, February the 28th, I now know that if you want an awesome, awesome mushroom sort of sauce, you do everything I used to do (Saute mushrooms in butter or olive oil, with onions and garlic and salt and pepper and stuff), and then,
In a separate pan, you make the magical béchamel base, which is a couple of tablespoons of butter, cooked till frothy, and then a couple of tablespoons of flour, cooked till golden, and then a couple of cups of milk and/or chicken stock, added slowly, then boiled for a while (during which you add the yummy mushroom goodness and maybe a bay leaf if you want it to taste a little more like gravy) until thickened and reduced.
Awesome
In the olden days of yore, I tried to make this sauce with chicken broth and lots and lots of cheese, which never came out right. But those olden days are behind me, and a new age begins today.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Espain: The End! Feb 10-11: Girona, lessons learned
On Feb 10th we got up at 5:30am to leave in time for our plane. After assorted busses and planes, we got to our Bed & Breakfast, Bells Oficis, run by Javier, a super-nice spaniard who speaks more English than he thinks he does.
Bells Oficis is a lower-end sort of hostal, in that the rooms share a bathroom and there's no heating, but Javi's made a really comfortable, pretty place with a good breakfast and smiles all around (and a good price :) ).
We left our bags there, and went into Girona, which is a *very* pretty, medieval town, where you can walk through pathways of archways that support the buildings above you. We made a poor lunch decision (yum! cold tapas!), went to the extensive Jewish museum, where Gabe ran out of energy entirely, went to the hotel, passed out, went out again for dinner to a great seafood place, La Riba, and then went back to bed and read books and such.
The next day was spent barely making our bus, then barely making our plane, then waiting a long time for the bus to Vienna, and then getting home. A great success.
So! Lessons learned:
-Whatever people say, Spain has great food (people mostly say that Spain has good food, but some people go and come back complaining). That doesn't mean there aren't crappy places, but as long as you're going on recommendations, you can find pretty consistently good food. Also, the bread is fantastic. I dont know why, but even mini-market bread products and processed grossness at bus stations are full of delicious, crispy, chewy, awesome bread.
-Spanish Busses are cheap and get you all over the country, but there is noone except for someone *working for the bus company* that actually knows the schedule accurately. We found inaccurate schedules from the bus company websites, from tourist offices, and even from schedules posted at bus stations. Also, if you get carsick, sit in the front. Bleh.
-If you're American, don't use Quick-Checkin with RyanAir. Quick Check-In is great, because the alternative costs €8 more and you get the last, worst seats on the plane, and you might get bumped off the plane if they oversell it and it sucks not to do quick check-in. So we were big fans of quick check-in when we left for our first flight to Girona. On our second flight (back to Girona from Granada), the gate attendants freaked out when we handed them an American passport.
"You cant do that! You can't use quick check in! Only for Europeans! If you were at another airport, they wouldn't even let you on the flight!" oops! Well, we already used quick check-in for our third flight, and we liked it, and we weren't really even sure that they were right, since we have European residence permits.
Well, folks, you can't. Our next flight, they saw our passports and told us we can't get on the flight, and we'd need to run downstairs and check in. We made it, sweaty and panting, but only barely. Nope, Americans are not allowed to use quick check-in.
-Pick your Sundays carefully. A small town like Girona is going to be mostly closed on Sunday. Oops (Though it's not like we had energy to go do things anyways).
-Flamenco concerts are an important part of a Spain trip, particularly if you're going to Seville or Granada. Book them in advance. In Seville, one was sold out and the other was closed for the month. In Granada, they only put on a show if they have enough reservations (and ours was basically sold out).
-The 'vacation from your vacation' part of a vacation is an important part, and it belongs in the middle. We were pretty wiped out by Feb 6th, and kind of over-museumed/architectured. If we did something like Barcelona Feb 1-4, Ronda 5-7, Granada 8-11, that would be been even better. Girona at the end was a little weird, because although it's a good place for a vacation from your vacation, by that point, an even better place for that would have been sleeping in our own bed at home.
-Go to Ronda and Barcelona at some point in your life. Perhaps repeatedly. Both deserve multiple days in a trip.
-Oh yeah, when you go somewhere and the food is good, remember to buy local spices. Im having a very hard time finding the Guindilla peppers that flavored some of my favorite dishes there, and it would have been a cinch to get them there. Lame. (Also, I could have bought a Paella pan cheap there, and didn't think of it.)
Thats all folks! I hope all this was somewhat entertaining :)
Espain, Feb 7-9, Nerja and Granada
We reluctantly left Ronda for the beaches of Nerja on the evening of the 7th. 3 hours of busses later, we arrived. The town is a relatively small beach town, but a beach town nonetheless; it felt a little bit sleazy somehow to me. Anyway, we arrived at our hotel, which was closed with no reception desk, and then, mistakenly thinking that I didn't already give them my credit card number (I did, they charged it. Oops), we went across the street to another hotel and stayed there.
We went to the beach for dinner, in search for the famous Paella place known as Ayo's, but found a huge line of closed restaurants, with the exception of an Irish pub, 2 places that were no longer serving food, and a chinese place called "Oriental".
"Oriental" was relatively packed. The waiter/owner asserted this was because it was the Chinese New Year, and because he has the best food in town. We sat down next to a group of elderly English people. We got a tray of dips and shrimp crackers to go with them, which were very good, and then we heard, from the table next to us, "You know, its always about you, Mary. Me! Me! Me! That's all it's ever about! ...", to which Mary replied "Well you, Susan, are a shit", and then things went downhill from there.
We got the impression that these people were lifelong friends who went to Spain together, and would no longer be lifelong friends after this evening. To this was added some of the worst food we've ever had, a table of Dutch people making fun of the waiter/owner's accent, and we ended that night by leaving a big tip for what was clearly not a good day as the owner of the "Oriental" restaurant, and went to bed.
Granada was pretty cool. Our hotel, Casa Federico, was very hip, somewhat overpriced, and very poorly managed. They didn't provide breakfast even though our reservation confirmation said they would, the whole night was filled with the ringing doorbell that the night receptionist wasn't waking up to answer, and the next day, they *weren't there in the middle of the day* when we wanted to go to our room. Lame.
Anyway, Granada was pretty cool. We went to the Alhambra complex - a fortress, a muslim palace, and lots of gardens, which were all very neat. Large chunks of the Nasrid Palace were closed, but overall it was still very cool. We went back down to town, and went to the Arabic Baths. This is a place where you enter a dark, candle-lit room full of steam, mostly silence, 7 baths of different temperatures, and a load of masseuses, then you get a 15 minute massage and soak your troubles away for an hour and a half, taking breaks for sweet tea, candies and water. A+ gold star.
Our night was rounded off with some arabic tapas and a Flamenco concert, which was amazing/inspiring/great. The music and dancing are equally and insanely intense, and we just had a great time. If you have a chance to see some good Flamenco, take it. It's worth every penny. After the concert we walked back to town (the busses stop running by that time at night), went by some neat views of the Alhambra at night, and went to bed.
Espain, Feb 6-7, Arcos and Ronda
We got on the early bus to Arcos de la Frontera, one of RIck Steves' "Back Doors" of Spain. Its a beautiful medieval town, all white, with narrow, narrow streets, 2 churches, and a cliff-top view over a huge valley. We went to the convent, where they have a 1-way mirror and a lazy susan, and you ring the bell and say "Cookies? (Or "Patas??")", and they say "5 Euros", and you put 5 euros on the tray, and they rotate the tray 180° and on the other side is a box of delicious, blessed pine-nut nun-cookies. Mm. Down the street, there is a bakery that serves Sultanas, giant macaroons that so good, that people who dislike macaroons would find them one of the best things in the world (I tend to dislike macaroons). We went to the end of town, looked at the view, went to our restaurant for lunch.
This restaurant, apart from having really fantastic food (I will note that fine dining in Arcos is like 1/3 the price of fine dining in a big city, with the same quality of food), had the best menu translation we have yet seen. I need to go back to Arcos just to take pictures of the 2 pages of the menu I missed with my camera (I forgot to take pictures of the back of each page). I had some Rabbit in Sauce, which was delicious, but not nearly as amusing as the "Lomitos of deer to the from Cadiz one" under the Meets section that Melanie ordered. Next time I shall endeavor to order the "ATTACKED OF ELVERS!" or the "ATTACKED OF FANTASY OF MUSHROOMS WITH HAM IBERIAN!!". Those seemed more like meals for later in the day.
We took a bus to Ronda that afternoon, and met some nice Irish people who were heading to the same Hotel, so we shared a taxi. They've been travelling a lot for quite some time, and have been avid users of Homeexchange.com, where you stay in someone's house while they stay in yours. This is very neat.
Anyway, Ronda is the best city I've ever been to, and Hotel San Gabriel is fantastic. I could stay there for weeks. Ronda is a magical town in southern spain situated on top of a canyon, divided in half by a 120m deep chasm, through which a river flows and cascades down in a waterfall towards the valley 750m below. We got there in time for the sunset, which you can see from several beautiful viewing gazebos on the side of the cliff overlooking the valley, and at the moment the sun set, a flock of hundreds or thousands of birds flew up from the cliff face, and made no sound other than the flapping of hundreds or thousands of wings. Ronda is a magical place.
Hotel San Gabriel is a really pretty place, with comfy beds, hundreds of books in every language spread everywhere, a little movie theater with comfy seats and a dvd collection, and the best breakfast of home-baked breads and marmalades we'd had in Spain. We came into town with a local tapas bar suggestion (Bodega San Francisco), which was seconded by our hotel owner, and proceeded to feast on some of the best food we've ever had. After trying a couple ham sandwiches, chicken, pork and shrimp skewers and some butter-fried-shrimp-rice, we mistakenly ordered 2 raciones (raciones are main-course sized versions of tapas) and got a gigantic, 2-person salad and an unholy pile of battered shrimp. These too were consumed in a frenzy of deliciousness. The bill? €22. Awesome.
Our next day involved the aforementioned breakfast @ San Gabriel and a hike through the cliffside trails. If you have the chance to go to Ronda, take it. It's just great.
