We maintained optimal health throughout a month in Spain and Portugal in which we consumed booze and pork, and food in general, that was some of the most diet enriching that we've ever had. It was a good, good month that flew by all too quickly.
The Ticks
- The Portuguese cafe scene is the bomb. You can't walk 100 metres without passing at least two or three old school cafeterias. We walked out the door looking for a coffee in Santiago de Compostela going where have all the cafes gone?
- WC translates as aseos in Spanish. Yes, like adios for your arse!!
- Pork glorious pork, in all of its wonderful iterations
- The scent of orange blossoms all around Sevilla making it the best smelling city that I've ever been to
- The Spanish lifestyle is not a misinformed stereotype. Siestas really do exist and they're bloody great
- Portuguese people are just lovely
- FOOD: great fish from tins, tapas, pork, pernils and bifanas, pulpo, that seafood feed at Cervejaria Ramiro, pintxos
- BOOZE: ginjinha, sherry, canas (little gulpable beers), vermut, Basque region cider, green wine, port... That list goes on
The Crosses
- Santiago de Compostela pilgrims in all their pomposity
- The hype and let down of the Francesinha
- The cost of intercity transport!
- Those bloody hills in Porto
- We did love the Spanish siesta but sometimes you want a beer at 4pm!
- A rather questionable gentleman's incessant questioning as to whether we were "married" (as he drew an invisible like between Nix and I) or "married married" (as he drew an invisible circle between the three of us)
The Food
Tapas was great, pintxos was better and our feast at Petritegi was legendary. But even though Spain threw everything it could at them, the Bifana of Beira Gare in Lisbon and the Pernil of Casa Guedes in Porto withstood every advance. Those two sandwiches now live in our food folklore.
Read more about them here and here.
An extremely honourable mention goes to our lunch at Cervejaria Ramiro. I still haven't cleaned the shrimp brains from my flavour saver. That's what it's there for right?
The Drink
For Nix it's txokoli, with manzanilla a close second. A few of the words that Nix threw at me when I asked why she liked it so much: lightly carbonated, cold, matches perfectly to round upon round of pintxos, palate cleanser, theatrical seeing as it's poured from a height, it's cool to say.
For me it's ginjinha, the sour cherry liqueur that you drink out on the streets of Lisbon and order from little hole in the wall shops. It doesn't only taste great and go down deceptively easy but you immediately get lost in its history and drift back a hundred years to when the locals were spilling out onto the pavement doing the exact same thing.
If you like to eat and drink, you will love these two countries.
In order not to contradict previous statements by me on this blog, can I point out that I've grouped Spain and Portugal under the same recap due to the time period that they've fallen in rather than me viewing them as one big country.
