Archive for August, 2006
Fiesta de Vilafranca del Penedés
It’s Wednesday, August 30 and what a great day for us. Sebastian, his two nieces (yes, Sebastian is Uncle Sebastian or as we say here in Spain, tio Sebastian), Alex and I went to the Fiesta de Sant Felix in Vilafranca del Penedés.
Alex has read about this pueblo in her research papers which date in the 1300s. The pueblo itself has it’s origins in the 12th century. The same time that Henry the Second of England married Elenor of Aquitane, the Tower of London took in its 1st prisoner, Crusaders marched into Beirut causing a bloodbath. You can see this is an old pueblo.
Anyhow, we drove up to Villafranca in Sebastian’s car and arrived before the activities took place so we managed to get a half decent spot in the square to watch everything going on. The principle reason we were going was to watch the Castellers. Villafranca has a very famous and accomplished team.
Castellers are the people who belong to a colla castellera (team) devoted to making the most impressive castells (towers of human construction) in popular festivals in Catalonia.
Their typical clothes are white trousers, black sash, shawl and colored shirt with the team’s emblem. While performing they usually go barefoot so that they don’t hurt the other castellers as they climb and so that they have more sensitivity in their feet.
The sash is the most important part of their clothing since it protects the lower part of the back and it’s very useful as an additional help in climbing. This piece of cloth has diverse lengths and heights depending on the casteller’s position inside the tower and also on personal taste. Its length can range from 1,5 to 8 meters, and it is usually shorter for higher positions.
The castellers, which are a team of acrobats (some of them children), arrange themselves into a multi-tiered structure or tower, sometimes as high as seven-people. The Vilafranca team built one today of 10 people. Alex has photos and comments of their team.
Once the base is constructed a person then climbs to the top of the tower – they are known as the enxaneta and are usually children eight to twelve years old. The accidents are unusual during the construction of a castell. The 6 of august os 2006, in Matarò a 12 year old child fell off the castell and died. Before this, the last mortal accident was in 1981 in Torredembarra. To date there have only been three fatalities in the Castellers history.
Castellers have a motto: “Strength, balance, courage and reason”.
In Catalan the word castell means castle, although a castell with two persons per level is a torre (tower) and is usually called a pilar if it consists of just one person per level.
The tradition originated in the Spanish region of Catalonia; more specifically, in the southern part of that region near the city of Tarragona. The tradition later spread to other regions of Catalonia, and has become very popular. However, the best and most skilled castellers are still found near Tarragona although the Vilafranca team is considered one of the best.
Here are some photos of some of the other teams competing and some different structures.
This one is not considered a castel and was for demonstration purposes. It was probably to give less experienced castellers a chance to perfom.
The following sequence of photos shows the progress of a team as it constructs a very impressive tower. Here they are building the second level.
The third level, notice the climbers on the side going up for the fourth level……
The fifth level ………
Getting ready for level six……
Here they are capping the tower with the enxaneta climbing to their positons.
One of the other perfomances that I really wanted to see were ‘El Correfoc’, ‘diablos y demonios’, devils and demons armed with all sorts of fireworks go through the streets. I’d seen them briefly in Gracia and I couldn’t believe what I saw. I have a few photos of them in Vilafranca.
Here they are marching towards the square. I had to get out of their way, those sparks burn.
Once they were in the square they danced around and let their dragon loose.
They finished up with really noisy rockets. The sound in that square bordered on painful but they were spectacular.
We drove back along the coast and stopped in Sitges for a clara (Beer and lemonade). The ride along the coast is magnificent. I can only imagine what it must be like all down south.
I’d like to thank Tio Seb for a truly enjoyable day.
Delta del Ebro(Delta de l’Ebre)
This past week was really something else. The football game on Tuesday, an amazing dinner at Cardamon (C/ Carders, 31) on Thursday night and a great weekend with friends at the delta. The restaurant is in the old part of Barcelona and is in a building built in 1734. That’s older than I am, wow. The food there is great and it’s not too expensive. Naomi introduced us to this place a few weekes ago.
Then on Friday, Francisca, Jackie, Sebastian, Naomi, Alex and I took the train from Barcelona to Delta del Ebro. The following description is an excerpt from the Barcelona city guide.
The Ebro Delta covers 320 square kilometres and is the second largest wetland area in the western Mediterranean, after the French Camargue.
It has many natural habitats not common to the rest of Catalonia: large lakes of salt water (such as La Tancada) or fresh water (such as L’Encanyissada), kilometres of beaches with sand dunes (El Fangar) and salt wastelands (Erms de la Tancada, Punta de la Banya), places where underground fresh water comes to the surface (Els Ullals), shallow bays (El Fangar or Els Alfacs), riverbank woods and fluvial islands that, together with the ecosystems created by man – rice fields and salt pans – constitute a unique landscape of great natural wealth.
This diversity of ecosystems and flora and fauna has led to the protection of a large part of the Delta and in 1983 it was declared a “natural park”. It is in fact an ornithological paradise where you can see more than 300 species of birds.
We rented a nice little house in Sant Carles de la Rapita and arrived Friday evening around 7:30.
Off we go to explore and walk by the sea towards Sant Carles. On the way we passed by the fishing port. Lot’s of activity there.
We found a place where we rented bicycles to go cycling the next day. Sebastian is quite the cyclist and has cycled all over the place. Places like New Zealand and in the Himalayas (almost as far up as base camp for Everest climbers). You can tell he is comfortable on the bike just by looking at his form……….but that’s a whole other story.
Sant Carles is a tourist town and very popular.The mountains on one side,
the sea on the opposite side and the delta to one end. The delta itself is very flat and a large part of it is used by farmers to grow rice. Because rice grows in water, there are many irrigation canals flow control gates in the fields.
We cycled along the dirt roads that run all over the area and went down any road that headed in the general direction we wanted to go. It was quite windy so the heat wasn’t much of a problem.
We eventually ended up in a conservation area and nature park. This was the wetlands of the area.
Lot’s of birds. As a matter of fact, the park is a very popular bird watching area so there are lots of blinds for observing the wildlife as Francisca is.
We ended up in a pueblo (small village) called Poble Nou where we stopped for lunch. The menu consisted of 6 plates. The food was amazing (as usual) but we only ordered the menu for three because we would not have been able to eat all the food that was on the menu for one. There were six of us and we still walked away stuffed.
We cycled from there to the beach at platja dels Eucaliptus which was about a 30 minute cycle from the resaurant. I must confess that my butt was becoming slightly tender. Once we got to the beach I was in the water in minutes. Floating in the salt water was soooooo relaxing. Soon, we had to start back. We had no idea how far we’d gone or how long it would take us to get back to Sant Carles. We had to have the bikes back by 8:00 or risk paying extra but you know, we were on a holiday so if we got back later, so what. We weren’t going to race back to get there on time. Ok, a confession, even if we wanted to we couldn’t race back to get there on time. All we could do was hope to get back period. The following photos were taken in the middle of the ride, please note the expressions on the faces of the cyclists, Jackie and Alex. Let me just say that we all didn’t look that fresh at this point.
We finally made it back to the shop and we were still in good spirits, tired but very happy to be back and we were on time. We calculated that we had cycled at least 50 kms that day. I know it doesn’t sound like much but it was a full day.
We started walking back towards our casa and picked up food from different shops along the way. Francisca and Sebastian were playing catch with a half full water bottle which brought looks of concern on some passers by. About a kilometre from our casa I decided it would be far easier to run than continue walking so I finished up with a short run.
That night Sebsation cooked on the barbeque and we sat, drank wine and chatted the evening away.
Sunday was a quiet day for me, too much sun the previous day. The chicas went to the beach and Sebastian and I stayed at the casa playing chess. Actually, he was playing chess, I was playing Rambo. We left for the train station at 4:30 and that was the weekend.
Alex and I had a great time.
Mac Pro – A Dream
The new Mac Pro quad Xeon 64-bit worksation is out and I want one. I can dream can’t I ????? It was less than a year ago when I switched from a pretty powerful Dell and Windows XP to my current Mac PowerBook G4. It’s not that I was fed up with Microsoft or Windows XP. I used to do music on my Dell and had no problems at all. I used Cubase and had all kinds of controllers hooked up and I never had a problem. I was going to Barcelona with Alex and I needed a machine more for my digital photography than for anything else plus it had to be a laptop for portability. I’d heard that Mac’s were the machines to own if you were doing anything with graphics or music. I wasn’t happy with the laptop choices and since Alex already owned a Mac I thought I’d give Mac a try. Besides, I was already attracted to them because of their design and packaging. I know, I know, packaging doesn’t add to the computer in any way but I thought that if they spend that amount of time and effort in the packaging and seeing the PowerBook’s simplicity and design, well, the combination sold me. I really love my laptop. I’m not in the business of high powered database design or business modelling anymore (I think I’d use Microsoft if I was) so the Mac is just what the artist ordered.
Now they have come up with the Mac Pro.
The design of this machine is amazing. You can go to the Arts Technica site for a complete review. I just wanted to dream here and show just a few of the features of this machine, like the insides…
Those 4 hard drive bays are drawers and all you have to do is drop a hard drive into them, close the drawer and it’s done. No cables. It takes a pro only 30 seconds to install one. You can install 4 500 GB drives. I couldn’t fill those in a lifetime.
Of course, to display all this power I’d have to have the Apple cinema display, the 30 inch HD display. It’s awesome to see.
Feast your eyes on more than four million pixels in the first high-resolution 30-inch flat-panel display designed for a personal computer.
Then, to top all of this off and provide a beautiful interface to Adobe Photoshop CS, I would add an Intuos Cintiq 21UX tablet. This input device is amazing, go see it at Wacom’s site.
So, if I could, this is what I would order…..
The Mac Pro with Both Bluetooth 2.0+EDR and AirPort Extreme
A 500GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s, one 16x SuperDrive Accessory kit, two 3GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors, this is extreme but 16GB (8 x 2GB) of memory, Mac OS X and an ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB (2 x dual-link DVI) graphics card. The 30 inch Apple Cinema HD display and the Wacom Intuos Cintiq.
All I can say is Wow ………………..
On Sunday Life is a Beach
Talk about spontaneity. Naomi called this morning to inform that they were heading up to Sant Pol de Mar. alex was feeling better and she thought a day at the beach was just what the doctor ordered. We gathered our beach gear and went over to Jackie and Sebastien’s place. By the way, I DO have to mention here that Jackie loves the sugar pie (big smile on my part). Naomi had to head home to get her beach gear so we agreed on the 12:48 train. As the time approached to leave for the station, Jackie had a shower and was applying cream to protect her body against the harsh beach environment. Now, let me explain a little something about German and Canadian attitudes towards schedules. We LOVE to have extra time to be where we are supposed to be without the stress of hurry and worry. Now for those who are last minute arrivals(am I referring to Jackie) and are used to being like this, I do believe there is no stress or worry. Needless to say, Sebastien told Jackie we’d meet her on the way to Placa Catalunya. We started our walk towards the station with a stop at the bank, a five minute wait at the top of Ramblas and another few minutes at the entrance to the station. We decided that we would now go for the 1:18 train since Jackie was nowhere in sight. We went into the station to buy our tickets and a familiar voice hollers out from inside the turnstyles. Jackie had been there for a while. She was waiting for us and we were all stressed about her being late. Anyhow, we bought our tickets and called Naomi to tell her we were back on track for the 12:48. She says she’s out of the station buying some water, taking it easy and if she gets there fine if not, she’ll meet us there. Now that is the way to be, totally relaxed. In the end, everyone got on the 12:48 and we were on our way.
The day was great, not too cold and not too hot. It was quite windy so surf was up and we could body surf one metre waves for approximately one metre. Really short runs. Naomi was in the sun soaking up the rays and got some really nice color.
It was time for food so the following went to the beach restaurant.
Sylvie
Alex and I
Detlef , he owns a german restaurant (Pano de Boca) in Lisbon. Read about it in Naomi’s blog.
Franko
Jackie and Sebastien
Kevin (Sylvie’s brother visiting from Germany) Sylvie’s other brother stayed on the beach and slept through it all. I gather they had been partying pretty intensely. In Barcelona, parties usually end sometime after the sun comes up
Our sweet Naomi (aka Shark)
and this is what we had, a lovely paella.
We were all pretty stuffed after lunch and our bellies were sticking out (but just a little) so we decided we needed to put our bellies back into their proper sizes. After all, we were at the beach. I really think that Naomi had a very crushing experience with cheeky Jackie and Sebastien close behind.
We had a great day and everyone went to another beach party that evening. Alex and I headed home as she still isn’t quite up to speed.
International feast
Friday night we were invited to our friends Sebastian’s & Jaquie’s house for an amazing party. It was a dinner party with a twist. Each of us had to bring the ingredients and cook something from our country of origin. I made bobó de camarão, my favourite brazilian dish, and Alan made tarte au sucre, a Quebec specialty. You can read about the feast at Alan’s blog.
Anyways, a lot of people asked me for the recipe for my bobó so here it goes:
Ingredients:
1 kg yuca (or mandioc, manioc…)
1 1/2 kg of shelled shrimp, the larger the better (if you buy them with shells, by about twice as much)
8 tomatoes
1 green pepper
1 large onion
1 litre chicken stock (you can use chicken cubes as well)
3 tbsp olive oil
3 tbsp dendê oil (palm oil) – you can buy it at latin american food stores; it must be brazilian since the african variety won’t work.
2 cups coconut milk
some parsley & shallots
Instructions
Clean and shell the shrimps. Season to taste – I add lime juice, black pepper and salt. Reserve.
Peel and cut the manioc and put in a pot with the chicken stock. Boil it until tender, drain and reserve both the cooking stock and the manioc. Mash the manioc coarsely with a fork or potato masher, adding some of the liquid to help in the process. Once the manioc is mashed, add the coconut milk and mix through.
While the manioc cooks, blend the tomatoes, peppers and onion in a blender. Heat the oils in a large heavy-bottomed casserole and add the tomato mixture. Let it simmer until it is well cooked, about 30 mins.
When the manioc pure is ready the tomato sauce should be done, so add the shrimp to the tomato sauce. Let it cook for about 10 mins, that is until the shrimps are thoroughly cooked. Add in the manioc pure and mix well. If it’s too thick, add some of stock used for cooking the manioc. Keep mixing until it boils – the manioc is heavy and will stick to the bottom and burn unless it is stirred. Add some parsley & shallots (optional) and serve over white rice.
Note: this is a very forgiving dish, so don’t worry too much about being perfectly exact on measurements. I added way too much liquid and didn’t have enough time to boil it off and yet, everybody loved it.
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