Life in Cartagena

Spaniards love their food. They are convinced that it is the best in the world. The Spanish talk about food a lot. There is a movement in Catalunya for independence from Spain which does not sit well with most non Catalans. As a result lots of Catalan achievements are disparaged by other Spaniards but nobody had a bad word to say about those nice Roca brothers when their restaurant in Girona was recently chosen as the best in the world. One of the traditional dishes from Cartagena and the Mar Menor area is caldero which is basically a slushy rice and fish stock dish. Three of us were talking, in a gruff voiced, manly, sort of way about caldero. I asked whether the alioili or al-i-oli usually served alongside the rice is a vital ingredient or not. Just for the moment think of alioli as garlic mayonnaise. The atmosphere stiffened when one said yes and the other no. My father and I used to have a similar discussion about the pros and cons of lamb with or without mint sauce I ha...

We've been busy this weekend. Flamenco, old pals and lots of eating. Last night we went for an Indian with a couple that we met in the UK some years ago. She's Spanish, he's from the UK. We went relatively early and got to the restaurant about 9.30. It was odd, a big pink industrial unit on a small industrial estate in not the most exciting part of the region. The pink building had an elephant motif. There were lots of cars parked outside. Inside it was humming. Nearly all the tables full. Waiters rusing here and there. The odd word of Engliish floated through the ether. Most of the diners were, like us, slightly pink from the recent sunny days and British. The Spanish member of our group took on minor celebrity status amongst the waiters which lasted the whole evening. We had to wait a few minutes for a table. We got our drinks. We read the menus. We ordered. As we crunched through the papadums people were leaving. As the waiter handed out the various rices and mai...

I didn't think it was a difficult question. What do you have for breakfast? It's one of those traditional little questions for English language learners. Now Maggie often guffaws at those adverts on the telly for beauty products. You know the ones, 83% of all women think that our wonder cream reduced their wrinkles in just seven days. She is sniggering at the low sample given in small print at the bottom of the screen - from a sample of 86 women. My sample is even lower but earlier this week in a conversation class I asked a group of beginners what they had for breakfast. It isn't the first time I've asked the question and so I wasn't surprised that people drank milk, ate biscuits or considered that pouring Nesquik type flavoured milk on their cereals constituted both food and drink. The next day I used the same question about breakfast instead of the more usual question about what they had done the day before, over the weekend or some such. The difference wa...

I've told you about tapas trails before. The idea is that lots of participating bars and restaurants offer a drink - wine, beer or soft drink - and a little snack for a fixed price. Usually they are run as a competition to find the best tapa chosen by popular vote. This year the Cartagena trail ran from the 20th February until yesterday. The price was 2.50€. Seventy seven establishments took place, well 76 really as one of our favourite restaurants seems to have gone bust between signing up for the competition and it starting. There is a little leaflet listing all of the participating eateries and when you buy a tapa the bar or restaurant stamps your list. Providing you visit at least six places you can then vote for your favourite tapa and there all sorts of prizes for the participants most of them depending on a draw from amongst the returned leaflets. It's a really nice idea in that you get to see the inside of restaurants that you might never otherwise visit either be...

My sister was in Reykjavik a few years ago. She tells me that a traditional Icelandic delicacy is rotten shark meat cured by burying it in a hole for a couple of months. We didn't quite follow in her footsteps but we went to Iceland yesterday. There was no rotten shark, no thermal pools, no Northern Lights and no glaciers. Instead there were lots of Britons and all those British foods we crave like balti mix, chilli con carne, chow mein and goulash. Iceland, the shop, is another little island of Britishness in the midst of Spain. Apparently there are ten stores in Spain run as a franchise by Overseas supermarkets. Three of them are near to us here in Cartagena but the closest is the store at San Javier. Walking in there is like walking into the Iceland in Huntingdon. English is the language and even the products that are readily available in Spain come as their UK equivalents - Diet Coke not Coca Cola Light, Walkers crisps not Lays  - even the meat is imported. It's my bi...

I was wandering around the Mercadona supermarket hunting for salad dressing. I tried the fruit and vegetable coolers - that's where the dressings lurk in Consum and el Corte Inglés - I looked amongst the mayonnaises, barbecue sauces and ketchups before trying the olives and jars of pickled carrots section and, finally, when it wasn't with the olive oils and vinegars I gave up. It's possible they don't have salad dressing in the French Dressing, Thousand Islands mould. After all Spaniards generally dress their salads with oil, vinegar and salt and don't feel the need to add strawberry or mustard flavours. Mercadona is now the biggest retail outlet in Spain but one of the secrets of its success is to sell its own brand and to keep the choice fairly limited. If Mr Mercadona, Juan Roig, doesn't think they'll shift enough salad dressing off the shelves they won't sell it.  I've lived here a while now. I've been to supermarkets hundreds of ...

As a boy my parents had lots of rules for me about when I could and couldn't eat with my hands. I forget most of them. I do remember that they weren't good for porridge or soup but that, even if you were dining with the Queen, chicken could be eaten with ones hands. I was musing on this, covered in saffron coloured paella stock up to my elbows, as I fought with some strange, spikey, overgrown prawn like crustacean in my lunchtime rice. It's Maggie's birthday, a milestone birthday, today and we were dining posh at a restaurant called Venezuela in Lo Pagan. It was a big dissapointment to be honest but I'm no restaurant critic so what do I know. In a restaurant when Spaniards order an orange, apple or banana as their pudding after a meal the fruit comes accompanied by fresh cutlery. I have watched, amazed, as a fellow diner neatly operates on an orange with a knife and fork. And yet etiquette seems to allow that same diner to dip his or her hands into the paella ...

There always seems to be something going on in Cartagena. Generally it's not Earth shattering stuff but nice little event after nice little event. Gay Pride last week, classic sailing boats this and we also have the Gastronomy Fair - The Taste of Cartagena. The Gastronomy Fair is simple enough. Nineteen local restaurants with a stall selling three little tapas each. Nearly sixty tapas to choose from. The idea is that the tapas are a bit special - roast pork cheek with peach, crunchy leek and a reduction of soya (I'm not absolutely sure that English uses reduction for a sauce but it sounded right enough) or a pear cake with paté and spicy pepper sauce. The food was great but the thing that impressed me most was the information sheet that came with our food vouchers. It listed all the tapas so it was dead easy to decide what you wanted and ask for it at the stall. How unusual, a menu. What a fab idea to use written information - who knows,it may even catch on.

Lots of Spanish men have grey hair and quite a few are as tall as I am. My clothes come from Spanish shops and I have my hair cut here. Nonetheless people recognise me as a foreigner long before I speak. I too play the game of recognising Brits in the street. I'm often right though I'm far from infallible - sometimes they're Dutch, German or Belgians but mostly, when I get it wrong, they are Spaniards. Last night we went out to get a couple of drinks and eat something at one of the Cruces de Mayo bars. As is so often the case at fiesta type events we had to buy tickets first and then hand the tickets over at the bar in return for the food and drink. I suppose it centralises the cash handling, increases security and also leads to a slight over-expenditure on the part of the customers - just to be sure. We joined the scrum at the bar. For once I wasn't too worried about shouting my order through the din. At the bar, there were price lists everywhere...

Compared with mint tea half way up Everest or sucking down fish head soup in Vietnam I suppose Spanish bars are pretty tame. Nonetheless, drinking and eating in one last night I was reminded of how vibrant they often are. In amongst the tumult and background noise that every Spaniard copes with by simply talking, or shouting, a little louder we had the extra fun of the din produced by the Real Madrid - Bayern Munich game. And there we were. Not an unusual situation for us nor for the four Spanish people we were with but we had two other Britons with us, a couple of teachers from a school in the UK which is partnered up with Maggie's school here in Cartagena. The visitors were being entertained. We were out for a snack. As always when out with a biggish bunch of Spaniards to eat tapas someone ends up making all the food decisions. Yesterday I suspect that the chap who thought he was in charge of the order had actually ceded control to the waitress but nobody really minded as l...

I mentioned the Cartagena Tapas Trail recently. Nice idea, fixed price for a snack and a drink; lots of different snacks. They sold 400,000€ worth in the couple of weeks so other people must have liked the idea too. Here in Cartagena we have a coffee called Asiatico. It's a coffee made with condensed milk, brandy and a local liqueur called Licor 43 - usually with cinnamon and sometimes with other little embellishments. It's nice, a bit of a change from time to time. There's been an attempt to promote it as being typical of the area. You can buy massively overpriced kits as tourist souvenirs that feature the oddly shaped glasses along with all the ingredients. Yesterday the Asiatico Trail opened. There are 47 places to buy an Asiatico. But come on, this isn't the same is it? With the tapas it was something different at every stop. But 47 cups of very sweet and slightly alcoholic coffee? There may be some variation and the price is OK at 1.40€ but I can hardl...

We were in el Descanso del Icue. It's a bar. We were having a snack and a glass of wine. At the bar there were three men. A couple chatted at one of the tables and a red faced man, toying with an unlit cigarette, wandered back and forth between the bar and nowhere in particular. Like us they were all Brits. Earlier in the evening we'd shared a table with two other Britons. Now it's hardly unusual to come across Britons anywhere in Spain. We're an inquisitive and resourceful bunch. We turn up everywhere. Only the other day I was having a coffee in a bar on an out of town Industrial Estate before I gave a class to one of the busiinesses there. There were three other Britons in the bar, telecomms engineers from the look of their jackets. I noticed them but didn't think much about it. I may have stared a little longer than would be considered polite though when two backpack wearing tracksuit clad British tourists joined us. There were more of us out tonight in tow...

There's something wrong with our sofa. If I sit on it I nod off. I don't think it's anything to do with the whisky - definitely a sofa problem. So the best place to read anything is in a bar. If I fall asleep on a bar stool it hurts as gravity does its thing. I have little routines about which bars I use to get a coffee and so where to read. On Wednesday and Friday morning en route to my classes in Escombreras I stop off at a nice little spot just beside a petrol station. My two cups are served by a very pleasant woman and habitually set me back the princely sum of 2€. But not today, today with a new younger woman behind the bar I paid 2.20€. Odd I thought but, being British, I said nothing. As I drove away though it rankled a bit. The it struck me that it happens quite a lot. In the place I use on Ramon y Cajal for my intercambios the four drinks for the two of us usually come out at 4.40€ but a couple of weeks ago they were 4.80€ and in Santa Florentina it was 20...

I finish early on Wednesday evenings. We went for a drink. On the way to the bar Quevedo we passed a cake shop. Maggie mentioned that she'd been intending to buy something there for a while. Cartagena is neither Gotham City nor Metropolis but, just like The Man of Steel and Batman, I'm a man of action. I strode, manfully, purposefully, into the shop. I spotted a notice on the door "We specialise in Hinds and Explorers" it said, well it didn't actually, it read "Ciervas y Exploradores," but being almost bilingual nowadays I hardly noticed the difference. Inside the cake shop there was a little coffee bar. I ordered up a cuppa mud (Tom Waits, Phantom 309 composed by Red Sovine) and a nice little pastry to go with it. Maggie's memory was jogged. "Ahh, they're sweet pastry with meat fillings," she said. Indeed they were. The ciervas are the bigger tartlet ones and the exploradores are the ones dusted with sugar. Typical of Cartagena said...

The first time was in Santa Pola as I remember. We were new to Spain and I was in a shop that sold fishing tackle. I spent two or three euros. There were three of us. Despite turning up mob handed and the meaness of our purchase the shopkeeper pressed us to take a little something and to have a wee dram. At Christmas it's not at all unusual for a shop, an office or even a bar to have a tray full of seasonal delicacies like turrón, mantecadós and polvorónes on offer for customers. Sometimes the offer runs to liquers or spirits. A touch of seasonal cheer. I was in the dentist the other day. Lots of glistening packets. "Sugar free I suppose," I said, innocently. "Sweets wouldn't be sweets without sugar" said the receptionist. Spain, still refreshingly unreformed and unrepentant.

Slaughter - now there's a good word. Slaughter - spurting blood, severed limbs and sinew, shattered bones. Blood and guts. Matanza in Spanish. The leaflet said come and see the traditional slaughter at the Fortress of the Sun; the Workshop in Time. Nice wording I thought. The copy writers must have burned the midnight oil to come up with those. We knew what to expect, at least from the slaughter. Lots of pig products. We've lived in Salamanca province where gutting a squealing pig in the back yard is still a bit of a family event. It's no longer legal to slaughter animals away from properly licensed premises but the home slaughter of the pet pig at this time of year is such a strongly ingrained tradition in some parts of the country that the authorities continue to turn a blind eye. So we weren't expecting the pig to die in front of us. We were just expecting lots of cholesterol rich food and that's what we got. Lorca is the place that was hit by an earthq...

A caldero is a small cauldron shaped cooking pot. It has given its name to a fish and rice dish that is popular all along the Murcian coast and the Mar Menor. So caldero, like paella , takes its name from the pan it's cooked in. I am told that in it's original form it was a cheap and easy meal for fishermen. They were able to use up the fish or fish parts that weren't saleable. The fish, along with tomatoes, local peppers, garlic and saffron is used to produce a stock in which rice is cooked. It is the rice that is the essential part of the meal but, if you have any decent fish available, that can be cooked in the stock too. Normally the fish is served separately. So it really is rice with fish rather than a rice and fish mixture. The whole lot is served accompanied by ali-oli - an emulsion of garlic in olive oil - which lots of we foreigners mistakenly believe to be a garlic mayonnaise. Now Spaniards eat a lot of fish. Even the smallest of supermarkets often have e...

Cartagena has been celebrating its annual Carthaginians and Romans festival over the past week. There have been various re-enactments of key events in the story including weddings, seaborne landings, a pitch battle and lots of  parades.   Yesterday evening we saw the parade of thousands of people from the various troops dressed in their outfits and we also went on to the big camp where each of the groups sets up a bar cum restaurant to raise money for the next year's event. It's all pretty impressive but, at the same time, it's also old hat; we've seen it before. Alongside the camp there is a market. The traders who spend most of the year selling their overpriced sweets, jewellery and cakes dressed in medieval costume, at medieval markets, don togas for this one. We wandered around, we drank spiced "Roman wine" we ate garum but the stall that impressed me most was one selling a microbrewery beer called Icue.  There's a little statue...

When I started this series of blogs I didn't really want to write a diary of our daily lives in Spain. The idea was to comment on the things that happened to us and around us. I know the difference is subtle but, at least in my mind, there is a difference and I have tried to maintain that difference over the years. I've just bought a takeaway lunch from "El Fogón de San Francisco." San Francisco is the name of the square where the takeaway is located and fogón means something like stove or gas burner. Maybe the San Francisco kitchens would give the correct sort of idea. One of my students told me that this place existed just a few hundred metres from the new flat so I went to have a look. They have a daily takeaway menu. I got a salad, curry and rice with raisins, dates and other dried fruit and a spongy, trifly sort of pudding called pan de Calatrava for 6€, just over a fiver. The menu was pretty extensive. Whilst I was waiting in the shop I thought that this...

My students tell me all sorts of interesting things. Coffee spiced up with spirits is available in any Spanish bar. Just ask for a Carajillo and you will get your coffee, usually, with a dash of brandy. It's also very common to see a Carajillo made with rum or whisky. The coffee is usually the short, thick solo (the Italian espresso) but people ask for every possible mix. Round these parts they are very proud of a coffee called Café Asiático. One of my students ended up fighting his corner that this particular variation on Carajillo had been invented in Cartagena, specifically in the village of Albujon. The traditional recipe involves coffee whitened with condensed milk. The main tipple added is brandy but it should also, apparently, have a a few drops of Licor Cuarenta y Tres added. Licor 43 is a locally made liqueur. If you're going to go the full hog an Asiático should also include a couple of floating coffee beans, cinnamon topping and some lemon rind. It sounded to m...