La Toma

Starting on May 9 Gaucin, our Pueblo Blanco in Andalusia, reenacted the sacking of the village by Napoleon’s troops in 1810 and the subsequent peasant uprising of 1812 called La Toma which the drove the French from the town.  Just two years later the French were chased out of Spain for good. 

Each year the citizens of Gaucin and surrounding towns reenact the French takeover and their overthrow on a spring weekend. It’s some fiesta. It’s like celebrations of Paul Revere’s 1776 ride and the shot heard round the world in Concord, Massachusetts but with more revelry.  That’s Spanish for drinking.

 

There's one hell of a lot of frivolity given the carnage.

 

Like the reenacters of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, their Spanish brethren, especially those playing French soldiers, have spared no expense in acquiring period specific regalia for the big battle.  These players belong to the Napoleonic Association of Abuera. Who knew such a thing existed? The rebels are played by men and women from Gaucin and Ronda and their costumes are more modest. They are after all peasants.

 

 

This is as close as I’m going get to being a war correspondent.  “This is Steve Immel reporting from the front lines near the Plaza Mayor in Gaucin, Spain. Back to you, Chet.”

 

 

Short sighted in Taos

WD, the ailing hard drive, was pronounced dead after a lengthy surgical procedure at a hospital in Novato, California.  According to doctors the drive had sustained severe head trauma and numerous broken bones and was unable to survive the delicate surgery.  No usable organs were harvested for future use.

This begs the issue of the sheer stupidity and lack of foresight that caused this crisis not to mention the quandary, read expense, of going straight back to Spain to recapture the magic. When I got the news Friday morning my reaction was mixed.   Certainly I was disheartened that Drive Savers couldn’t recover the data but my penurious self was $2,500 richer at least for the moment.

Those of you who have asked about the outcome know that I have jestingly said that I will have to go back to Spain, retrace my steps and get the lost shots. On Friday when I got the news that WD had died I concluded that I didn’t deserve to reward myself for failing to take measures that would have backed up the images. I deserve what I got.

Then again, this is a monumental loss for somebody who is possessed with recording his adventures and this hair shirt is really itchy.

According to those whose opinions I hold in high regard, namely three people so far, it is unanimous that I should go back to Spain and complete the job.  Still I waffle.

The thing is, if I take the “saved” $2,500 and put another $1,500 or so with it I can probably engineer a boots on the ground data recovery process of my own and, one could argue, do it better this time since I know the lay of the land and there would be precious little searching for places or subjects.  Just sayin.’

Here’s what’s at stake, amigos.  I lost the middle three weeks of a four week trip. So I don’t have images of Granada and the Alhambra; Seville and the cathedral (the third largest in the world) and Alcazar; Jerez with its sherry and famed equestrian academy; Ronda and the new bridge from which the partisans threw officers of Franco’s Guardia Civil; the beach and market at Estepona; all of Madrid and most of Gaucin and La Castilla del Aquila. That’s a lot to lose.

I'm struggling with this folks.

Best and besterer

I have a penchant for declaring things the best ever. Occasionally I actually mean it.

In Spain we experienced a couple of bests or at least ones that tied for first.  Both involved food, surprise of surprises. In the interest of fairness gained from a lifelong culinary adventure I will name herein the contenders for First Prize in the categories of Orange Juice and Steak.

Zumo de naranja not jugo as used in Latin America is near and dear to my heart and palate. Rich, sweet, viscous orange juice is a top tenner among all foods to me and we had the honor of drinking the best orange juice in recent memory at Casa Antonia in Gaucin.  When we didn’t eat breakfast at home we repaired to the little bar on the plaza for desayuno of Café con Leche, Zumo de Naranja Natural (fresh squeezed) and Pan Tostada. On more than one occasion we ordered a second round of the profound juice from the oranges from Enrique’s trees outside Gaucin. I know this because I asked Enrique where he got his oranges, the very same question I asked the proprietor of an obscure shack between Corona del Mar and Laguna Beach more than thirty years ago. These august juices contend for the best ever to pass my lips.  I am unable to show you the rich, viscous nectar from Casa Antonia for reasons well established in these pages.  The best I can do is show the outdoor café at which we partook of the juice. In the event the erstwhile files are retrieved I will post pics of Collins glasses filled to the brim with the stuff of legends.

Ever the thorough researcher, my study did not stop with where the oranges came from but also uncovered the variety of orange yielding this elixir. And here I had a tiny surprise.  In California the regal Valencia is the king of juice oranges while the humble but larger Navel is the one for eating because it’s so easy to peel. Imagine my surprise to learn than Enrique’s oranges were not the vaunted Valencia but the rude Navalina.

 

And then in a discovery at the opposite end of fooddom came the steak of a lifetime at El Churrasco in Cordoba. The epic steak described as Lomo de Buey and that we would call Sirloin was simply the juiciest, most tender, most flavorful steak ever or at least since devouring The Lindey’s Special Sirloin at Lindey’s Steakhouse in Arden Hills just north of Saint Paul, Minnesota more than forty years ago. Lindey’s is still going strong after 56 years which informs us about doing something simple really well. I recall a visit a mid-winter visit to Lindey’s with our good friend Harold Bissner when the thermoter dipped to 56 below.  Mind you this was in our new, yellow BW Beetle.  In ordinary climes one would have expected a empty restaurant but this was rugged Minnesota. There was a wait.

El Churrasco

And at El Churrasco as at Casa Antonia, the provenance of their magnificent steaks was paramount. The duly proud manager said that the restaurant bought its beef about fifty kilometers north of Cordoba and done so for decades.  The obvious follow up was how long they aged their beef. The steak had some serious age on it. The answer was three weeks off premise and another one to two weeks in-house.  That’s a boatload of aging and it yielded mythic results. The ample fat was as buttery as marrow.  I defy you to have that steak and not sneak a bite of that fat.

Me high on steak
 

This whole episode had us talking about El Churrasco for the rest of the trip and doing research on how to dry age our own beef.

 

Thanks to the resourceful and talented Peggy Immel for the supporting images. I got nothing.

 

Thanks for asking.  The hard drive is in the loving hands of Drive Savers where they are surgically extracting the files, a process that will take four or five business days and at a price on the north end of their estimate.  I am, as they say, cautiously optimistic and still not smiling.  Failing that I will be on the redeye to Spain to retrace my steps and recapture the shots lost due to operator error. I’m only kinda joking.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edifice Complex

Had it not been for a prompt from good friend Sarah Turner we might not have made it to Cordoba. But for her glowing recommendation of the Mezquita, the Great Mosque of Cordoba, we might have ducked that little adventure and missed the mosque and, worse yet, missed the steak of a lifetime. More about that religious experience later.

And on the lamentable subject of the AWOL hard drive, the new cable arrived from Western Digital but to no avail. It’s not the cable, bunkie. Tomorrow I’ll have a local computer shop try to extract the files from the errant hard drive and, failing that, it will be overnighted to California for the lovely folks at Drive Savers to try to save the drive at the cost of $700 to $2,700. I am not smiling.

The Mezquita cum cathedral was worth the trip.  The mosque is considered to be one of the outstanding examples of Moorish architecture and is certainly spectacular. Muslims have been petitioning the Catholic Church to use it for services since 2000 but that request has been denied by Spain and the Vatican. Given the tourist hordes and their handy Euros I don’t see that changing ever.

This is hallowed ground if history proves such a thing.  A Roman temple initially occupied the site.  In fact, pieces of the temple were used to build the mosque’s 856 columns. From about 600 the building was shared equally by Muslims and Christians but when Abd al-Rahman I defeated Yusef al-Fihri, the governor of Andalus, he committed to build a temple to rival those of Bagdad, Damascus and Jerusalem. So starting in 784 al-Rahman and his successors spent a major fortune over two centuries converting the church into to a mosque. That effort came full circle as the mosque became part of the grand Cathedral of Cordoba in 1236 when the Spanish defeated Moors.

 

 

Religions have a thing about displays of opulence which I’m thinking is not quite what religion should be about. Still monuments to piety in all faiths impress.  Muslims demonstrate their faith inwardly.  The exteriors of their mosques are fairly plain affairs but when you get inside,  “Whoa Nelly!” in the words of the immortal Keith Jackson. Catholics get to display their importance both in and out.  I guess that means they win the edifice competition since the poor Muslims are limited to grand interior motifs.

 

That's not me. It's my stunt double.

Free food and more

We’re back on New Mexican soil on a day with cool temperatures and light rain that has just turned to bright sun. We were so beat after the flight from Hell that started in Barcelona, on to Madrid and then to Albuquerque via DFW that we drug our sorry selves to baggage claim where we declared ourselves unfit to drive and spent the night near the airport. The toughest thing about being in the rural Southwest is the epic effort it takes to go back and forth to Europe.  It is, in a word, a bitch.

Today’s little effort is supposed to be a short look back at beautiful España from the perspective of the remarkable hospitality we received there. But, alas, I’m dealing with a pesky PC to hard drive problem wherein my computer reads my 2TB portable only sporadically.  My biggest worry, of course, is that I’ll lose several thousand images taken over the course of a month in a place that's 5,000 miles away.  I pray, in the figurative sense, that it’s only a faulty cable for which Western Digital is famous.

And so, there may be a paucity of pics to support this treatise. Right now the hard drive does not read so it doesn’t look promising in the short term.  So you’ll get no pics at all or ones that have the barest relevance to the story at hand, Spanish hospitality.

The lasting memory I will have of Spain will be its welcoming people. The joyous way they live life is both instructive and inspirational.  Nowhere in the world have I felt as befriended as I did in Spain. The heartwarming trend began at Xampu, the little tapas bar in Barcelona that we visited on nights one and two and where we were welcomed back as old friends Thursday night.  Because we wanted a more upscale dinner on our last night we chose a two week old seafood restaurant called HaHa!Mariscos. No entiendo el nombre.  I had seen some glowing reviews of the place on the net and quite by chance we had noticed its beautiful seafood display when we were walking home from the beach in the afternoon.  At the unseemly hour of 9PM we were greeted by the proud owner Kai Finkener, an expat German who had been in Barcelona 35 years.  As he told us, “I’m more Spanish than German at this point.” The engaging service would support his belief.

We shared tuna carpaccio, each had whole seabass that Kai carefully deboned, a lovely Sauvignon Blanc from Rioja and finished with the eggiest flan ever.  Our tab was 46 Euros or about $65.  Double that back home.  More importantly we left with a new friend who asked us to consider his establishment our home and meant it.

 

First View of Gaucin

In our pueblo blanco, Gaucin, Lola Colon welcomed us to the wonderful La Lateral.  And on our second visit Lola called her partner Carlos Patilla out from the kitchen to meet us.  I was a rare kind of hospitality that exemplified the ‘Mi casa. Su casa’ attitude we experienced throughout Spain. At the spanking new La Granada Divina also in Gaucin and where we dined three times owner Neal Brown and I exchanged restaurant war stories and parted with big hugs and the shared disappointment that we wouldn’t see other again.

San Jose Waterfront

Free Food

 

In tiny San Jose on the arid Cabo de Gata we chanced upon a little bar near the yacht harbor.  It was filled with thirsty regulars at least one of whom was a certified barfly. We sat down for a simple vino blanco and a beer and as if by magic a tapa of sautéed prawns appeared, just a hint of curry in its buttery sauce.  It was just like the Anthony Bourdain segment in Granada.  You really do get free food. With the second round came Patates Bravas, kind of like spicy home fries. The third round came with some fried chicken wings, the universal bar food.  There was no fourth round nor was there dinner.  Dinner, shmimmer.  We don’t need no stinking dinner.

More to the point, proprietor Claudio late of Milan made us feel like long lost friends. That place could have become my new favorite bar in world if I could just remember its name.

First Night

No trip with the Immels would be complete without a little food commentary.  So here’s a taste.  Get it?

 

First tapas happened the fashionable hour of 10pm on a day that wound up being a 48 hour stint with a total of four hours of sleep.  You’ve heard my whining already.  We had enjoyed a hearty menu del dia at a restaurant with the ignominious name El Glop.  Glop is was not but was three enjoyable courses of appetizer, entrée and desert and which included a glass of wine, beer or sangria.  The price was something like 11 euros which is typical, economical and filling.  It is absolutely the way to stretch your dining dollars in Spain.

 

In the evening we walked around L’Eixample looking for the perfect tapas venue.  Most were commercial and unprepossessing but after two passes we entered Xampu on the lovely Gran Via.  We had good luck over the years picking places on gut instinct.  The puns just keep coming don’t they?

 

Our repast was entirely basic on the night, thin slices of Jamon Iberico, queso in olive oil, good crusty bread and copious quantities of Rioja. We liked it so much we had a second round of little plates and returned the next night.  I had worried about ten o’clock meals and if old people could do that and here we were accomplishing the impossible of nights one and two.

Fair warning

Monday’s post was uninspired methinks.  I suffered mind numbing computer gremlins and so many images that I clicked Publish out of pure desperation. Lo siento.

Today’s photographs, too many you may think, come from a street photography perspective and from my more or less 5’11” person's eye level.  These capture the shear vitality of Barcelona more personally than Monday’s postcards. At least I hope they do.

For what it’s worth we’ll be back in Barca for the last four days of our grand tour of España.  Steel yourself for even more from my new favorite city in the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Step by Step

Never have I been in such a quandary about what to post.  Not only am I dealing with the array of locales to share but I can’t even get out of Barcelona.  Two days in that place and I’ve got a brain cramp not to mention my mouse hand. I guess that’s the bad with the good.

As suggested last time, Barcelona is a city that is richly enjoyed and one best seen on two feet.  Here is the barest glimpse of the Catalan capital from a stroll from our L’Eixample hotel to the bustling waterfront by way of the city’s Arc de Triomf and adjoining park and back through the canyons of the old town. Blessed little copy this time, sports fans.

 

 

No Doze

As reported, our first day in Barcelona was a sleep walking blur. Yet, despite a combined four hours of shut eye in the previous 48, I pronounced Barcelona to be my new favorite city in the world. Not that I’ve seen them all by any stretch so perhaps I should amend the accolade to “my new favorite city in the world so far.”

The crux of the claim lies in the robust and natural way folks use the place.  The city absolutely vibrated with youthful energy, accent on youth.

I was so whipped that body and soul demanded a nap when we were granted a glorious early check-in at the Ayre Hotel Caspe in Barca’s tony L’Eixample neighborhood.  Pronounce it Luh Shahm Pluh in Catalan. But Frau Gerta my German sleep therapist insisted that “Der vill be no shleepink!” and that I had to remain upright till at least 6pm or, failing that, my zees must be had in the bright light of day.  And so, we walked the eight blocks to the chock a block Placa Catalunya where I crashed on a soft pallet of cement for a sweet hour of sleep.  Vantage point as shown below.

Spain Shpain

I have been trashed, wasted and put up wet. There are no Sketches of Spain to be had just yet. So here's Rose.

Los Extranjeros

This candid portrait, street photography really, has stuck with me since the moment this lovely woman of a certain age walked out of her hostel in Antigua, Guatemala. The fortuitous background shadow sets up her sunlit visage perfectly.

Below are our subject and her angular mate engaged in conversation during a pit stop on our way to Lago Atitlan.  The couple, like so many others that I encountered in Guatemala, were on their way to work among the poor of the country, in this case the Mayas.  It seemed that every adult extranjero (foreigner) in Guatemala was providing aid of some kind. One nurse, a part time resident with another home in Alaska, had just assisted in more than a hundred eye surgeries.  Another was building schools for Mayan girls who traditionally are not allowed an education. Only the first born males go to school. And yet another was installing water treatment systems. Potable water is in short supply. The needs are acute despite Guatemala being the richest country in Central America in terms of natural resources.

 

 

Don't forget to click on the link to the actual blog page rather than rely on the email presentation. Then, when on the real blog, click on the first image so that you can see it and all that follow full size.

 

 

Legends, myths and echos of the past

Legendary RCA Victor Studio B was run by the equally legendary Chet Atkins who built the facility in 1957.  Until the studio was completed musicians recorded in the stair well of a nearby office building to get the echo Atkins wanted and which became part of “the Nashville Sound.”  Back in the day my singing partner and I recorded in the bathroom where the tiles worked similar magic and later in 1960 when we cut our single Once Upon A Time the echo was provided by an empty 2000 gallon water tank on the roof of Audio Recorders in Phoenix. It was the same studio where Duane Eddy had unleashed his “twangy guitar” three years before. 

 

Our record, alas, was on the old Oblivion label.  You may not have heard of it.

Studio B is the studio Elvis Presley built.  More than 200 of his songs were made in the unprepossessing cinder block building at 222 Fifth Street on Nashville’s Music Row.  Reputedly Elvis could enter the studio through the back door while everybody else including some of the biggest names in country and pop history had to get by a gate keeper at the front door.  Such were the perks of being the biggest star on the planet.

I'm told that Elvis had to be in the mood to record so appropriate lighting was supplied for the King. Sometimes the colored lights were the only lights. The plaintive Are You Lonesome Tonight?, a noted blue light ballad, was recorded with so little light that the pianist could barely see the keys. And, who knew?, the piano man on that midnight session was Elvis himself.

 

Legend has it that Elvis was on piano with only a double bass and the Tennessee Three singing back-up. Except I’ve just listened to the recording and I’m pretty sure I hear the soft strumming of an acoustical guitar and can't identify a piano at all.

Because the studio was so dimly lit I couldn’t hand hold a long shot of Elvis’s piano (that’s how it’s known) but I could brace myself against it for relatively sharp shots of its innards and of my cousin Kristin’s skilled fingers caressing the keys.

 

Dry America

US 84, Sudan, Texas

The very dry Sudan, Texas

Prohibition is a blight. There’s a thread of consequences that accompanies it.  There are no good restaurants and that’s a nonstarter for me. There’s a dearth of style, vitality and worldview in these loathsome places that are stuck in the 1920s.  And in absence of any forward energy is an aging populous that sees the New York Times as elitist left wing propaganda and thinks Fox News actually produces news.  What’s more these desiccated burgs inbreed like West Virginia cousins and can’t attract educated, well travelled newcomers that would infuse new blood into the community.  It’s a double whammy of reduction and repulsion.

As of November 2013 there were eleven entirely dry counties in Texas, 194 were “moist” or mixed and 49 wet.  As you’d expect the wet counties include all the major metropolitan areas and most southern counties.  The sticks of east and west Texas contain most of the dry counties to the surprise of absolutely nobody. How they vote is a given. They’re as red as Jim Bob’s nose.

84 year old Marian Steich helped make Winona, Texas the first “wet” town in Smith County. The tea totaling, church going great grandmother decided that folks should be able to decide what to drink and where to buy it.  Steich says, “I’ve never understood why you have to leave the county to buy beer to enjoy in your own home.” And she adds,“I watched this town die, she says, “Now I’d like to see it grow.” She made an alcohol to growth connection even I wouldn't have attempted.

 

In tiny Winona, population 600 and nestled in the buckle of the East Texas Bible Belt, residents finally voted by the slim margin of 18 to repeal prohibition and town tax revenues quintupled with the addition of four package stores. That's nobody's idea of ideal growth but none of the drys’ warnings about crime and littering have come true.

Winona mayor Rusty Smith who cops to the occasional beer reports, “We’ve seen a reduction in speeding on the highway. Cars are stopping in Winona now.” That's opposed to getting out of Winona as fast as possible.

Not to mention drunk driving. Alcohol related deaths are nearly four times higher in dry counties, 6.8 deaths per 10,000 people to 1.8%.  The logic being that people are going to drink and they’ll drive as far as it takes sober or otherwise to get demon rum.

One in nine counties is still dry, but Tennessee communities allowing alcohol sales have grown 55% since 2003. In the same period, 22 more of Texas’s 254 counties and 235 of its municipalities have turned wet or at least moist. In Texas the “wets” have won 80% of alcohol elections in the last eight years. Even in Kansas, where Prohibition lasted from 1881 to 1948, fifteen counties have seen the light since 2002. What's the matter with Kansas? you ask.

Put a cork in it. Prohibition is a lame duck candidate with no war chest, a platform that doesn’t hold wine and whose prospects are evaporating fast. The trajectory toward universal lubrication is immutable but there are still die hards.  So in the public interest, here are the Texas counties not to visit.

Bailey, Borden, Collingsworth, Delta, Hemphill, Kent, Martin, Palmer, Roberts, Sterling and Throckmorton.