If you learn nothing else from this blog, let it be this: that you really ought to conquer a good plate of paella in your life. Real paella that is, paella valenciana, with rabbit and chorizo sausage and crack cocaine. Avoid the fishy, soupy ones they'll sometimes try to serve you here in the South, and go for the real thing, even if it's just at a particularly ambitious Spanish restaurant in Boise. You won't regret it.
Modern Spain is a bit like its famous dish; sparklingly, astoundingly good in parts, a disappointing mess in others. The stereotypes are true, to a point--it really is the land of siestas and bullfights, flamenco and whitewashed pueblos sloping gently into the glittering Mediterranean, flowery hillsides and everlasting sunshine. But it's also a land of crippling inefficiency, apathy, racism, graffiti, underemployment, under education, and worst of all, insufferably awful bread.
Seriously, it's a mystery how they've managed to live in such close quarters with the French all these years and not pick up a single tip to make a passable baguette.
It's a country of paradox, as I suppose all living things when examined up close. There's romance and prejudice, passion and profound malaise, weeks of sunshine and floods of torrential rain.
The United States from afar looks different than it does up close, like a good Monet. It's a brash, headstrong young country, pulsing with vitality and a vigorousness that's unseemly to our more stately European sisters. The fearsome dowagers of the Old World eye us a little askance, drawing in their skirts as we strut by, astounded by our youthful impetuousness, our manic, frightening energy and our mischievousness in hoodwinking them into occasionally disreputable schemes.
Modern Spain is a bit like its famous dish; sparklingly, astoundingly good in parts, a disappointing mess in others. The stereotypes are true, to a point--it really is the land of siestas and bullfights, flamenco and whitewashed pueblos sloping gently into the glittering Mediterranean, flowery hillsides and everlasting sunshine. But it's also a land of crippling inefficiency, apathy, racism, graffiti, underemployment, under education, and worst of all, insufferably awful bread.
Seriously, it's a mystery how they've managed to live in such close quarters with the French all these years and not pick up a single tip to make a passable baguette.
It's a country of paradox, as I suppose all living things when examined up close. There's romance and prejudice, passion and profound malaise, weeks of sunshine and floods of torrential rain.
The United States from afar looks different than it does up close, like a good Monet. It's a brash, headstrong young country, pulsing with vitality and a vigorousness that's unseemly to our more stately European sisters. The fearsome dowagers of the Old World eye us a little askance, drawing in their skirts as we strut by, astounded by our youthful impetuousness, our manic, frightening energy and our mischievousness in hoodwinking them into occasionally disreputable schemes.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Leave me a comment! Por favor?