7 Minutos

Siete Minutos

My standards aren’t very high when I go to see a movie in Spanish. It’s basically more of a language exercise than entertainment, but it’s not like I don’t want to be entertained in the process. I go to a little movie house in my neighborhood called Cinestudio d'Or which shows a double feature for 2.50€. Cheap tickets are a definite plus when you are thinking about seeing a movie that you know probably won’t be very good. It’s not like I think American movies are any better and I never pay to see them. I just like sitting in a theater and being forced to listen to Spanish for a couple of hours. Going into a nice, air conditioned movie theater is sort of nice on a very hot afternoon especially if you bring in an ice cold can of beer.

7 Minutes begins with a pretty unoriginal premise and then goes straight to the clichés we all expect from “romantic” “comedies.” I like to put both of those words in separate parenthesis because they are rarely romantic or comic. This movie does little to change my mind on the subject. Why every writer and director wants to be like Woody Allen is a mystery to me seeing how he hasn’t made a good movie in over a generation. At least this movie didn’t have some talentless fuck from the recent cast of Saturday Night Live or one of the other small stable of actors that Hollywood puts into every “romantic” “comedy” they crank out every year like strings of lousy sausages.

I hate being a critic, at least about individual works. I certainly don’t mind slamming the entire movie industry. I enjoyed this movie simply because I liked the fact that I could understand about 93 percent of it. ¿Bastan 7 minutos para encontrar el amor de tu vida? (is 7 minutes enough to find love?) refers to the speed dating session a group of hopefuls attend at the opening of the movie. Like just about all American movies of this genre, it seems that Spanish directors also feel the need to pitch their idea with a silly gimmick. Whatever (lo que sea is how I think that is translated into Spanish), at least I made it to the end, which is more than I can say for the Turkish movie dubbed into Spanish that was the second half of the double feature.

Besides the language lesson, watching Spanish movies—good and bad—strengthens my cultural literacy here in Spain. The cold beer was great after a long bike ride earlier in the afternoon. Besides, I just like going to the movies.

More Thoughts on the Tour de France 2009

¡Mark Cavendish racking up stage win número cinco!

More Thoughts on the Tour de France 2009

I have thoroughly enjoyed this year’s Tour de France after suffering through three years of drug scandals. I have to admit that being able to watch Lance Armstrong again was definitely a big reason for me to tune in this year. Ever since he was matched up with former Tour winner Alberto Contador on the Astana team sparks have been flying as to just who would be the leader of the team and who would take on the grunt work of being a domestique. Both Contador and Armstrong aren’t the kind of athletes who are used to taking a backseat to anyone and the conflict between them seemed to be about the only thing the press here in Spain really cared to cover during these first two weeks of racing.

For the most part the Spanish press treated Armstrong like a foreign invader or an unwanted houseguest. On the other hand, I just don’t think that Astana team director, Johan Bruyneel, really has Alberto Contador’s best interests at heart. He is, after all, Lance Armstrong’s longtime associate and friend. I think that both Armstrong and Bruyneel just expected Contador to take a back seat on the team. Contador isn’t just some young upstart; he’s a past Tour de France champion so why the hell should he even be on a team that has another rider vying for the top spot? Contador took an inordinate amount of shit from his teammates for an attack he made late in the day on stage 17 in which he left Andres Klöden behind. This left both Klöden and Armstrong off the podium at the end of the day and put in their place the two Schleck brothers who were riding with Contador in the breakaway. There is no doubt that Contador made a tactical error in his ill-planned effort to drop the two Schleck brothers but I think he more than made up for this in the next day’s individual time trial.

I wanted to see one of two things in this decisive time trial: either I wanted Lance to come from behind to take the stage and assure himself a comfortable position on the podium, or I wanted Contador to blow everyone else off the course and prove, once and for all, that he is the best rider in the race. I got option number two and a bit of option one. Contador won the stage by beating the world’s best time trialist, Swiss rider Fabian Cancellara, by three huge seconds. All of Contador’s detractors can now politely shut the fuck up. He just about sealed his victory in the general classification and should breeze into Paris with no problem. Armstrong ended up overall at number 3. Now there is the problem of keeping Armstrong in the running.

Lance helped himself out in the time trial even though he came I 16th overall—not a very Armstrong performance. As I said, he did well enough to fight his way over Frank Schleck for third position. Whether he can keep that today in the grueling Mount Ventoux stage on the eve of the ride into Paris is another matter. It will make for a very interesting fight for third position and possibly even second if Andy Schleck has any problems. Andy Schleck is an excellent climber so I don’t see him unraveling today.

Lance was able to pick up four seconds in Friday’s race over his next rival, Bradley Wiggins, because organizers said that the peloton was split up enough at the end to give separate times. Lance will need every second he can get to begin Saturday’s tortuous climb up Mount Ventoux. It has been great to see Wiggins, an ex-Olympic pursuit rider—adapt his style to road racing. He has done an excellent job. He is a good time trailer and a great climber as well. He has all of the necessary elements to win the Tour some day.

The green jersey is still in contention as Mark Cavendish pulled off a surprise victory on Friday—if you can say that a rider who has won four previous stages is a surprise. It’s just that few people were predicting a sprint finish expecting there to be a successful breakaway leaving the sprinters somewhere back on the steep climb of the day. Cavendish gutted it out over the mountain and had a tremendous finish to give him five stages this year. Not a bad Tour for the kid from the Isle of Man.

Summer Menu

If you had to plan an ideal menu of Spanish and Mediterranean cuisine it would probably come close to what we had this past weekend at the country home of a couple who recently left my hectic neighborhood of Ruzafa for the peaceful hills of an agricultural community south of Valencia. It’s a startling contrast whenever I spend time at their place where I will spend days without hearing a car horn or a jack hammer—two instruments that are major contributors to the soundtrack of life in the city. We have always eaten well when we spend time together but these last few days were exceptional. I haven’t visited them in months and it was like we were making up for lost time in the kitchen and on the patio grill.

I had bought a huge supply of tomatoes which are on sale all over Valencia in the usual summer gold rush manner. I hauled almost four kilos of them along with me for the weekend. Upon arriving I almost immediately started making gazpacho. This is a dish that belongs in your refrigerator all through the summer months. It is also easy to make and open to a lot of personal interpretation and adaptation. It’s impossible to mess up and the only cooking required is when you drop the tomatoes in hot water to remove the skins. The important thing to remember about gazpacho is that after it has been left in the fridge to chill you will want to take it out and adjust the seasoning. My huge batch went from bland and uninspired to delicious after I added quite a bit more olive oil, garlic, and salt after leaving it overnight to chill.

One of the things that I most missed about Mediterranean cooking when I left Greece many years ago and returned to the United States were grilled sardines. I don’t think we have the tradition of eating these little fish except in canned form. It just so happened that my friends had just visited their local fish merchant and picked up about three kilos of very fresh sardines. Although the people along the Mediterranean think rather highly of sardines they aren’t willing to pay much for them. They cost about 2€ a kilo. The modest price of this variety of fish means that they sell quickly which insures that the quantity you buy is always fresh. Anyone who has done a bit of angling knows that fresh fish are harder to scale than older stocks; a small price to pay when preparing sardines—and cleaning three kilos of sardines is quite a bloodbath. I rarely ever cook sardines at home, mainly because I don’t have a grill and also I don’t want to drive my neighbors away with the smell they make while cooking. Grilled sardines are one of the few reasons I ever bother to go to a restaurant in Valencia. Of course the odor isn’t a problem when you have a grill on the patio of a country home.

We cleaned the fish and then sprinkled them with very coarse salt before placing them on a double-sided grilling rack over a hot charcoal fire. High quality charcoal is something my friend takes very seriously so he buys it in huge 40 kilo bags from an Argentine who supplies a lot of backyard barbequers in his area. When the sardines come off the grill you simply splash on a bit of olive oil and you are ready to serve. I don’t even bother with lemon. These sardines are about 20 centimeters (8 inches) in length so they have a healthy backbone. With smaller sardines I just eat them bones and all but on these the meat separates easily. After a swelteringly hot day the heat had waned considerably and we were able to eat outside on the patio. Other factors in our favor were the Mediterranean summer dining rules which allow you to begin an evening meal at 1 am. This was going to be a tough meal to top and it was only Friday.

I’m the kind of guy who brings along his own chicken when you invite him over for the weekend. Friday afternoon I had cut it into pieces and seasoned it with salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, paprika, and garlic. I drizzled olive oil over all of it and put it in a covered glass dish in the refrigerator. On paper this doesn’t sound like the most imaginative dish I the world but it is amazing the results you get with a good charcoal fire. We had this chicken for lunch the next day and it was slow grilled to absolute perfection. The gazpacho came out well, if I do say so myself. A slice of bread and a glass or two of wine (who’s counting?) and we had another great meal.

There is a wonderful community swimming pool just a few blocks down the street so I headed down there a bit after lunch. As much cycling and running as I have been doing lately haven’t really prepared me to take my position on the podium of World’s Underwater Swimming Champion, a post I held for many years—at least in my own eyes. I could barely make one lap of the pool (25 meters? perhaps less) underwater without drowning. I used to be able to make it twice this distance. I am just out of practice as I haven’t been snorkeling since I moved to Spain and it’s been a long time since I really worked to improve my underwater swimming skills. If I ever want to be a Navy SEAL I had better get cracking.

None of us were even thinking about dinner that evening until late into the night. Of course, there was enough gazpacho to withstand a month-long siege but we didn’t have anything else planned. I made an appetizer with some of the leftover sardines. I just mounted them on a thin slice of bread in the Spanish manner of montaditos. Along with a glass of white wine we were off to a good start to another fine meal.

My host whipped up a dish that should be in everyone’s repertoire: pasta aglio olio: pasta in a sauce of olive oil and garlic. This Italian standard has been mastered by every resident of that peninsula and has made into way into the diet of just about everyone else living on the Mediterranean. It is as simple as it is delicious. Boil pasta (tagliatelle in this case), heat a good amount of olive oil, add minced garlic, and toss the pasta in the oil. I make it with red pepper flakes as well. We served this with fresh basil and Parmesan cheese. People tell me that this is a late night dish in Italy, usually served after you have been out all night dancing or whatever. We call it “drunk food” in American where we are a little less moderate in our intake of beer, wine, liquor, shots, tequila, more beer, another round of shots, etc.

As he made the pasta he also started a huge pot of fish stock to be used with Sunday’s traditional Valencian rice dish. The stock contained two heads of rape (monkfish?), some galeras, a truly terrifying version of shrimp, and langostinos. A good stock is crucial for a successful Arroz a Banda that we would be making for tomorrow’s afternoon meal.

I feel stuffed just writing all of this down and I still have another big meal left to describe. I have previously posted a video for Arroz a Banda so I will spare us all this meal. I would like to say that he changed his recipe a bit this time around and added cuttlefish to the dish. I think that it is safe for me to say that I ate rather well last weekend.


Gazpacho

Ten Reasons To Be In Spain

1) Sometimes a guy just likes to take a leisurely stroll down a quiet cobblestone street while being pursued by a herd of homicidal bulls. That guy isn’t me because I was born with certain birth defects which preclude my participation in these events: a dominant cowardly gene and an excess of common sense. There is no known cure.

2) 82.3% less news about Michael Jackson (and there was plenty about him in Spain).

3) This may seem astonishing to many of you but as a male of the species I really don’t find nude women on the beach to be repugnant. I think that I could live without the naked, fat, 60 year old foreign tourists but you have to learn to take the good with the bad, the ugly, and the “Oh my God I wish I had never seen that.”

4) As far as consumer mentality goes, Spain has helped me to realize that life isn’t better just because you have a choice of 95 breakfast cereals at the supermarket. I don’t even like cereal.

5) Like almost all Spaniards, I have learned to have a healthy respect for food. People here won’t even eat a bag of potato chips without first decanting them into a nice serving bowl. I have learned that Menú del Día translates into English as “Two hour lunch with a nap afterwards.”

6) Vacations in Spain are an art form. We don’t even have a word in America for puente which in Spain means to milk as much out of a day off as humanly possible. A café in my neighborhood run by a Chinese family put a sign in their window that said they were taking off two hours early on a Saturday night to celebrate Chinese New Year. Most Spaniards needed three days to do that holiday justice.

7) 86.3% fewer serial killers than in the USA.

8) Two ice-cold quintos (small, 1/5 liter bottles of beer) for 1€ at a bar in my neighborhood (I have never claimed to be a complicated man).

9) I can buy a pig’s head at my butcher. I have never bought a pig’s head but I like having the option.

10) Honestly, I can’t be bothered to find out about anything in Spain I don’t like. You'll have to give me more time here for that.

Tour de France 2009

We are well into this year’s Tour de France with two members of the Astana team sitting high in the standings. Alberto Contador and Lance Armstrong are teammates and seem to be at each other’s throats if you believe the press coverage, especially here in Spain where Armstrong is seen as a sort of unwanted stowaway on the Astana express. Which rider will come out as the overall leader after 21 stages? All I have to say is that there aren’t too many folks who have made money betting against Lance Armstrong.

I think that Armstrong’s relative lack of cycle training in the past couple of years is going to work to his favor as the race grinds on. He is going to find himself in better and better form as the kilometers pile up. He will use the early stages like a training regimen and when the race turns once again to the grueling mountain stages in the Alps he will give Contador the fight of his life—or vice versa.

As much as I would love to see Lance win another Tour, what I most want to see is an exciting race. This is what the Tour desperately needs after the last three years of doping scandals. This was what the Tour needed when Armstrong won his first Tour which came in the wake of a drug scandal. He ushered in a lot of great publicity for the Tour by winning after his successful fight with cancer. His subsequent victories created an interest in the Tour in the vast and theretofore untapped American public. Many Americans followed the Tour on a day-to-day basis for the first time—at least in Seattle. I’m sure that many Americans have tuned in again this summer.

I think Lance will win it on the penultimate stage of this year’s Tour on Mount Ventoux, with a final climb of 21.1 kilometers (13.1 miles) at average grade of 7.6%. That last uphill should be a desperate struggle between the two teammates and one that I hope will go down as one of the finest moments in Tour de France history.

(If you are a bike fan and have important things to do today, things more important than watching video clips of past Tour de France moments, then do yourself a huge favor and don’t follow the link I provided.)