Ouch April 18, 2008

Michty me, whit a day yesterday was. After leaving the flat to go and do some shopping, we were no sooner done poking our noses around El Corte Inglés, than we got a phone call telling us about some disaster that’s befallen our block of flats (dealt with, thankfully, and no longer a problem). We’re not the kind of people who like crap things to happen, and it took us till about four o’clock to deal with said situation. We were in the mood to get slaughtered.

Guess what!

We decided to go back to Casa Lucas for dinner, where we’d been on Tuesday. After such a shitty day, we were in no mood for pissing about, so we went where we knew was good, and we weren’t disappointed. We started by sharing a ración of croquetas - potato croquettes with some jamón rolled in breadcrumbs and fried - and then shared a tuna tataki (we think this means raw tuna with seared edges) on a bed of apple puree. Outstanding, and just what was required. This was all washed down with a couple of glasses of very good red wine. The first of several.

We moved onto another place and witnessed something that must be a growing phenomenon in Europe, and something that sociologists haven’t yet named. We went into said place, and it was full of 30 and 40-something Spanish men having a glass of wine, or a beer. Unfortunately, the bundesbus must have showed up round the corner, and in the blink of an eye, the place was full of our Prussian cousins. In the same blink, it seems, every native of Madrid had left, and the only non-German speakers left in the pub were Gill, me and the bar staff. Incredible. The only plausible names for this phenomenon I could come up with were ‘blitzkrieg’ or ‘doing a Guernica’, but since neither of those are very PC, I won’t say either.

So the night continued, a glass of wine here, a cup of Basque cider there. A decision was made that we should go into the Canarian place we were in, to try the white wine, that the wummin said was brilliant. It really was. We had a couple of glasses of that, and a honey rum for the road. We were ready to go home, I think, and we were both müllered (much like the pub above - hehe!)… but something interesting caught our eye.

Parenthesis: Lonely Planet books, or any sort of guidebook for that matter, are a curse. The second one of them recommends something as ‘authentic’, ‘real’, ‘earthy’ or even vaguely good, it is automatically no longer any of these things. How can anything be authentic, when, by the very nature of appearing in such a book, it is guaranteed to be full of guiris at every turn? We think this is certainly the case with the flamenco bar we almost went to the night before, and doubtless a dozen other places we’ve been. Rule of thumb - if it’s in a guidebook, don’t bother with it. It’s for that reason that we’ve left most place names off of here, just in case anybody randomly finds this blog and makes us responsible for the ruination of somewhere that we’ve liked! (If you have randomly found us and really want to know, go ahead and contact us - we’ll try to remember!)

We passed a pub that still seemed to be a wee bit busy, and have a wee bit of action happening. We blundered in, got a glass of wine and went to the back to see what all the fuss was about. There was a wee man playing a guitar, and another wee man playing a fiddle, and they were making the most exciting, emocionante flamenco noise that I’ve heard. Really - it more than made up for what we missed the previous night. There was us, and maybe 10 other people in the place, all clapping and oléing along with the music - an incredible experience. Perhaps more incredible, the chap on the fiddle was called Ken and he was from Edinburgh. I drunkenly asked him to play Mairi’s Wedding, which he very graciously did, segueing into My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose - beautiful, though I’ve heard it sung better elsewhere. We had a wee blether with him before we left. A small world right enough.

My head’s bursting - more to follow.