Well, it’s official. 4.5 months after my arrival in Algeria, all of my shipments have finally arrived!  And they saved the best for last.  In addition to framed pictures, a printer, and miscellaneous paper goods, this shipment contained such exciting goodies as a kitchenaid mixer, a breadmaker, and food.  From America.

Now, I initially felt a little bit like a sellout walking through Sam’s Club in June, piling my carts (yes, plural) with peanut butter, salsa, brownie mix, etc.  Part of me seriously judged myself for wanting to bring American groceries to Algeria. I mean, Algerians eat, right? So surely it was a little ridiculous to bring all this stuff with me.

Cut to 4.5 months later. I haven’t starved. Far from it, in fact. I just bought a treadmill to combat the fact that I have done the opposite of starve. But I digress. The bottom line is, even though it is not NECESSARY to have American food in Algeria, it is fun. And one of the things I’ve learned living in a country where there is not tons do is you have to take your fun where you can get it. And opening my boxes of granola bars, chocolate chips, peanut butter, maple syrup, and salsa was FUN.

My apartment is in a state of limbo – boxes have been unpacked, but I haven’t finished putting everything away. Which means there’s stuff everywhere. But it’s getting closer to actually feeling like home. And that’s a good thing. As was the toast with peanut butter I had for lunch today.

Yesterday would have been my friend Kate’s 30th birthday. November 9th. The day the Berlin Wall came down. That was always the joke in high school. Instead of saying “Happy Birthday, Kate!”, I’d say “Happy day the Berlin Wall came down!” We thought it was funny. I’m not sure why, exactly, it was just one of those things.

Kate died 5 years ago. Just a few weeks before the 2008 elections. She was one of my fellow Hillary-girls during the primaries. I think she even met Hillary at one point.

But in mid-October, a few weeks before I was jumping around on the 30 Rock Plaza, celebrating the election of our first black president (despite my initial Hillary affiliation, I got on board with Barack eventually), I was sitting in a church in Columbia, SC, crying harder and for longer than I ever thought possible.

Death is an odd thing. People talk about those who have passed as “being in a better place”, or similar euphemisms designed to make us feel better. And maybe they work for some people, I don’t know. All I know is they don’t work for me. Death sucks. It’s horrifically sad. There’s no way around it in my mind.

Kate was probably one of the nicest people I knew. She didn’t trash talk like most of my friends (and me, let’s face it – I do it to this day). She would laugh at the rest of us bitching about this or that, but she would rarely participate. Mostly she was just plain nice. Whatever negative thoughts she may have had about people, she kept them to herself. I will never be that good of a person.

And smart. She had just graduated from law school and was supposed to clerk for the South Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice. Who does that? Smart people. That’s who. I remember once, at a gingerbread house party I threw in college, or maybe shortly thereafter, she said she wanted to be the “crazy liberal justice on the Supreme Court.” She may have just made it.

24 year-olds are not supposed to die. They’re just not. Grandparents, yes. It’s still sad, but it’s a different sad. When young people die, you don’t just mourn the person you knew. You mourn the future you never had with that person. And Kate was destined for a pretty damn good future. I would have liked to see it and share it with her.

I’m not a terribly sentimental person in general. But on days like today, I think of Kate. I think of  Kate’s family. I think of her parents, her brother, her sister, and her little niece who never had the privilege of meeting her. And it makes me sad. Some days, life goes on as normal. That’s how we’re designed. We HAVE to move on, we HAVE to live our lives. It’s part of being human. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t sometimes take a break from our daily routine, our day-to-day stresses, minor victories and defeats, and remember.

I don’t really believe in an afterlife. I think when you’re dead, you’re dead. But sometimes I really hope I’m wrong. Because it’d be really great to get to get to say to Kate again, one day, down the line: “Happy day the Berlin Wall came down!”

After being back in Algeria for 5 days I decided it was time to get out again. This time for just a short jaunt to the UK. Flight schedules being what they are, I had to settle for the Air France trip involving a layover in Paris, instead of the British Airways straight shot. This also meant getting up at 4am to make the 7am flight. BUT, I’m going to London, so I’ll live.

I’m not sure that the Algiers airport and I are going to be the best of friends. Especially at 5am. I think I’ve heard somewhere that it is one of the most secure airports in the world, which is great. However, it’s possible they go just a tad overboard. Here’s how it all goes down. As you enter the airport, your bags are scanned, as are you, plus you get a full pat down. Then you go check in and get your boarding pass from one guy, then go 3 desks down to another guy so he can stamp your boarding pass. Then you are allowed to proceed to passport control. But before you get to passport control, a security guy checks your ticket and passport. Then you go to actual passport control, where they stamp your passport. Then you go through another scanner checkpoint (within view of passport control), where they check your passport AGAIN before you scan your bags and walk through the scanner. Then, just when you think you’re free and clear, you encounter ANOTHER checkpoint, where they may or may not check your passport. I’m not sure what determines whether they do this or not. Then you’re good to go until boarding. At that point, one guy scans your ticket and checks your passport, then you go a few feet past him where they check your ticket and passport AGAIN and let you onto what I’ll call the “pre-gangway” – a gangway-like tunnel thing where you wait to have your bags searched again and be patted down again. Only then are you allowed to actually board the plane. Now, granted, I’m not a security expert, but it seems like maybe one or two of those steps could be eliminated in order to streamline the process. But that’s just me and I do appreciate feeling secure while traveling.

The other issue that made me less than thrilled at 5am was that somehow I managed to book myself an international ticket that did not include a checked bag! ARGH. Now, I know I’m only going for 4 days, but I plan on buying stuff, so I brought a checked bag, only to have the guy at the Air France desk tell me I would have to pay. Obviously the only option was to cough it up, which I did, although not before I did a bit of arguing, after which I was told it was a “new rule” on Air France, and I really shouldn’t book through Expedia anyway. Airlines are ridiculous. The silver lining in all of this is I had the entire baggage argument in French with very little difficulty. Turns out being pissed off is very similar to being drunk in terms of my ability to just let the French flow. 🙂

At any rate, in retrospect, my morning at the airport could have been much worse. I was on the same plane as some very friendly Americans who had been in Algiers working with the Embassy, so we grabbed a couple of espressos and chatted while waiting to board, which happened on time. And as I write this, I am sitting in the airport in Paris, having had a fabulous slice of quiche and a couple of mini macarons, about to board a plane to London. All in all, I’m pretty much willing to put up with whatever hyper-security and airline ridiculousness I have to in order to make this kind of trip happen!

Our last night in Barcelona, we wanted to go see what is supposed to be a fabulous light show (involving fountains – the “magic fountain“, no less) off of the Placa de Espanya. Our two hour post-wine tour nap plus a severe misjudgment of how long it would take to get there resulted in our missing it by about 4 minutes. Heartbreaking – we were SO close! Here is a photo of the aftermath – foam was apparently involved! Oh well, worse things have happened.

Finishing off our 30^th birthday trip with a day-long wine tasting tour in the Penedes region of Spain was definitely the way to go. While normally I’m not a fan of bus tours, this one was well worth it. The wine region is about an hour drive outside of Barcelona, and it seemed like the wineries weren’t just open for drop-ins. They were all specifically designed for group tours. So the bus thing worked out.

Our first stop was Jean Leon winery, a small (relatively speaking) winery with a gorgeous view.

Jean Leon has the ultimate “American Dream” type of story. He was born in a poor town in northern Spain. At age 19(ish), he stowed away on a ship to New York (after 8 failed attempts) and became a cab driver. Now, as a consular officer, I do not condone illegal immigration in any sense, but his wine is pretty great, so I won’t worry about it too much. (Also he’s dead now. Our tour guide said to not be sad that he was dead because “he knew very well how to live life”).

Eventually Jean stopped being a cab driver, moved to Hollywood and started working as a waiter at Villa Capri, owned by Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio. He became friends with James Dean (as you do) and they decided to open their own restaurant. Dean died before it opened, but Jean Leon kept going and ended up the proprietor of one of the more exclusive restaurants of the stars, La Scala.

He decided he wanted to create a special wine just for his restaurant, so he returned to Spain, bought some land, raised some grapes, and made some wine. It ended up being wildly successful; Reagan selected it as the official wine for his inauguration. (Say what you will about Reagan, but he knew good wine.)

ANYWAY, this winery was probably my favorite visit of the day from the standpoint of the place itself (more on the booze part later). After getting a tour of a little museum and hearing the Hollywood history, we went outside to see some samples vines of different types of wine, AND WE GOT TO TRY THE GRAPES. We just happened to be there during harvest time, so they set us loose among the tiny, tourist-friendly vineyard and let us pick grapes right off the vines. BEST. GRAPES. EVER.

Then we checked out the building where they process the grapes into wine (this turned out to be TINY compared to the subsequent places we visited).

We also visited the wine cellar, which was very cool (and also very small – relatively speaking).

We finished off the trip with the tasting of a lovely Cabernet, overlooking the vineyards.

Tasting only one wine was a tad disappointing until we realized it was only 10am and we had 2 more stops during which we would have ample opportunity to get drunk.

Next stop was the polar opposite of the tiny winery created by a rags-to-riches, American Dream Spanish guy. The Miguel Torres winery is massive and has been owned for generations by a filthy rich family. We watched a video about them on the bus and the matriarch of the family looked like she was plucked out of an Upper East Side apartment in 1950. Think Trey’s mother Bunny from Sex and the City, only less attractive and wearing more blue eye shadow. The family also has a vineyard in Chile, and one of the daughters has one in California.

One of the best things about this winery was that when we arrived, in addition to all the foreign tour groups, there were also multiple groups of Spanish children, clearly on field trips. I was definitely deprived on the field trip front.

Small children on a field trip at the winery, waving at our tour train.

This particular winery is so big we had to take a little train around the grounds, where we saw the zillions of vats of wine, which was quite striking, especially compared with the one-roomed winery of Jean Leon. The train tour was quite nice overall, except for a really weird part when we went through the wine cellars and had to sit through a weird, hologram-ish presentation about the wine. The images appeared on screens in front of the barrels of wine. It was very strange, and sadly, impossibly difficult to photograph for posterity.

Massive wine vats

BUT they made up for afterwards. The wine tasting involved a lesson in pairing wine and cheeses. We tried 3 wines and 3 cheeses, first with “good” pairings, where the wine and cheese complemented each other, and then “bad” pairings, where the cheese and wine supposedly clashed. Our teacher was very dramatic, clutching her throat while describing how the “bad” pairings resulted in a horrible, metallic taste in your throat. A little extreme, in my opinion. Call me uncultured, but while I could detect a difference in taste depending on the pairing, I would still happily eat any of the cheeses while drinking any of the wines without too much of a problem!

Post wine and cheese, we proceeded through to the bar, where we could try even more kinds of wine (and brandy, which the Torres company also makes). This is where the fun really began. We each got a type of wine and a type of brandy, then ended up having to basically chug them both (or should I say “rapidly sip”? Is that classier?) due to the imminent departure of our bus, and due to the fact that we wanted to make some purchases in the store. The rapid sipping led to some rapid decision-making, including the purchase of a large bottle of brandy, which I don’t even really drink. Maybe Dad can make a dent in it at Christmas? Anyway, we made it back onto the bus on time and in pretty high spirits. (Get it – spirits?)

The final stop was the Cava vineyards of Freixenet, where we finally got someone to take our picture together:

This was another massive enterprise, with a pretty long tour at the beginning that we both agreed would have been much better if we’d been drinking glasses of Cava along the way. Nevertheless, it was cool to see the cellars that stretched about 4 stories underground, where all the cava was kept. They had bottles from decades ago that were sadly, no longer drinkable. The bottles had flat bottoms on them, which apparently used to be the thing until they figured out that flat bottoms on carbonated alcoholic beverages resulted in exploding booze.

Flat-bottomed cava bottles

Then, we took another little train, ending up at another bar where we had a couple glasses of Cava, plus some much-needed sustenance. We were on a roll with the getting people to take pictures of us thing, so we went for a second:

Finally, after dropping a few euros in the Freixenet store, it was back on the bus, back to Barcelona, and an impromptu 2 hour nap in the hotel before our epic dinner (described in painstaking, photographic detail here.)

A final component of my birthday gift from Mom and Dad was a scooter (moped) tour of Barcelona. Now, I had never been on a moped, but figured it couldn’t be THAT hard. Boy, was I wrong. First, though, here’s a picture of us towards the end of the three hour tour, once we’d gotten the hang of things (more or less):

But before we got to that point, we had to learn how to ride a moped. Our first clue that this was maybe going to be harder than we anticipated was the reaction of the people at the scooter tour store when they found out that neither we, nor the Canadian lady who was also on the tour, had ridden mopeds before. They did not seem happy.

Fortunately, the tour guide was a very nice (and very patient) guy who gave us a 5 minute lesson. After kinda-sorta figuring out how to control the amount of oomph to give the gas handle, we took off. Into traffic. With other mopeds (apparently everyone in Barcelona rides mopeds) whizzing and weaving in and out of traffic around us as we valiantly tried to stay upright and not run into anything. Slightly terrifying, but one we got going it wasn’t bad.

First we headed up to the Sagrada Familia, where we stopped for a bit and walked around the outside of the cathedral. Then, after getting back on the bikes and surviving a rather dramatic curb-jumping incident (not me), we continued on to Parc Guell. Apparently Gaudi (of Sagrada Familia fame), was commissioned to design and build the park to attract rich people to that part of town. It’s pretty fancy and very full of tourists.

Another vantage point in the park:

Part of the park was set up as a laundry area, where the rich people’s clothes would theoretically be washed (we assume not actually by the rich people themselves).

Some of the columns in the laundry area was designed to look like clothes being wrung out:

After the park, it was back on the mopeds for a trip up to Parc Montjuic (where we had been the day before, but it was actually a great place to ride mopeds – wide, windy roads and very little traffic for us to hit. Here’s a view of Mt. Tibidabo (My only connection with Mt. Tibidabo is that Friends episode with the story you tell when you want to have sex.) But moving on. You can also see Placa de Espanya from this vantage point.

The way back to the scooter place was during rush hour, which provided more excitement (and more than a few horns blaring in our general direction). But we made it! And overall, it was fun! I think for the next moped trip I’ll try something with a little less rush hour traffic – like Tuscany.

When I was in Barcelona 10 years ago, we visited the Sagrada Familia, Gaudi’s unbelievably massive project that has been underway since the late 1800s. 10 years ago, the inside of the church looked something like this:

Now, it looks like this:

But the church is FAR from finished – the goal is apparently to complete the project by 2026, the 100th anniversary of Gaudi’s death (by streetcar – yikes.) They’re not sure if they’ll make it, and I’m not either. There’s still a ridiculously gigantic tower that has to go up, bigger than the current towers, one of which we went up, and it’s really tall.

This is the end goal – they haven’t even started the massive middle tower with the cross on top! To put it in perspective, we climbed one of the towers at the very front, above the diagonal pillars.

Before our afternoon at the Sagrada Familia, we spent a while roaming around Parc de Montjuic, which rests on top of a hill and has lovely views of the city and the port.

We got to the top via funicular rial and cable car, which was definitely the way to go. Do we think it’s called a funicular because it’s really fun?

Then we had a very pleasant walk downhill through gardens, stopping at the Olympics Museum (which was more of an all-inclusive sports museum – golf, cricket, and race cars were involved and the last I checked, they don’t play those at the Olympics. And I LOVE the Olympics). But there was still some cool stuff.

Seles’, Sampras’, Navratilova’s, and Sanchez-Vicario’s Shoes

Olympic Torches over the years!

Then we passed by Barcelona’s Olympic Stadium (they hosted the games in 1992), and continued on down the hill, which ends with a gorgeous fountain in front of a gorgeous building that houses the National Museum of Catalan Art. Gorgeous weather, great day, zero complaints from this girl.

Our voyage from Nice to Barcelona took place on a budget airline I’d never heard of before, nor could I pronounce it: Vueling (turns out it’s pronounced “voo-ell-ing”). It was a perfectly fine budget airline – the rows were more squished together than any other airline I’ve flown, but the flight was only an hour long and I have the shortest legs of pretty much anyone I know, so it worked out OK.

Once we arrived in Barcelona and found our hotel (H10 Raco del Pi, right in the middle of everything, highly recommend it), we decided to kick off our Barcelona leg by hitting up the city’s history museum. The museum was very cool and is basically an excavation site showing multiple levels of ancient Roman stuff throughout Barcelona’s history. You get to walk among the ruins and the audio tour was pretty interesting. Especially the massive wine room where they made their wine. Ancient Romans liked their wine. I may have been OK at being an ancient Roman.

We also checked out an amazing cathedral that was just steps from our hotel. Very fancy.

That evening, we took a cooking class, courtesy of Mom and Dad’s 30th birthday gift! It ended up being just us and a newly-engaged couple who are in the Air Force in Germany. We made yummy pumpkin soup, Spanish omelette, paella, and crema catalana (their version of creme brûlée), plus tomato bread, which is the easiest thing in the world, delicious, and a staple of Barcelona – it was served in every restaurant we went to. You too, can make tomato bread. Here’s what you do:

1. Toast bread (we did this in the oven, but I guess you could use a toaster. It helps to get it really crispy, though).
2. Cut a clove of garlic in half (no need to peel it – hooray!)
3. Rub the garlic on the bread a few times (I went a little overboard on this – a little garlic goes a long way for this purpose).
4. Cut a small tomato in half (they use fancy tomatoes for this, I can’t remember what they were called, but they had less water in them so they’re apparently better).
5. Rub the tomato on the bread.
6. Drizzle olive oil on top of the bread.
7. Eat the bread. 🙂

It was amazing. Here it is with the Spanish omelette:

Also, the wine was flowing throughout the cooking experience, which just makes everything better!

I figured I might as well keep the food posting going by kicking off my Barcelona posts where the Nice posts ended – food and alcohol.

Once again, we were very very spoiled on this front. The croissants in Barcelona have left a little to be desired, thus further supporting my theory about French bakers being uniquely endowed with the croissant gene, but other items made up for the lack of buttery, flaky goodness in the croissant department. Such as the trays of thinly sliced pork products that seem to appear with delightful frequency.

Our lunches in Barcelona tended more towards the “grab and go” end, but the dinners really stood out. For example, Cal Pep is a fantastic (tiny) tapas place where you go, wait in line for 30-40 minutes (don’t worry – you get to drink wine while waiting), then sit at the bar while cute Spanish men bring you food and more wine. People eat late in Spain, so we figured “when in Rome” and showed up a little after 9, sitting down to eat at around 9:45. We ordered a bottle of wine, which we finished, only to have the waiter spontaneously pour us more.

Followed by two brim-ful glasses of Cava. We thought the waiter thought we were cute/charming until the two British guys sitting next to us told us that they had gotten multiple glasses of free booze on their last visit. We still think there was some eye flirting going on on the part of the waiter. At any rate, we shut the place down around midnight.

A second culinary highlight happened on our final night in Barcelona. We went to a friend-recommended place slightly off the beaten path (getting away from ALL the tourists was not the worst thing in the world). It was called Imprevist, and we decided to take the decision-making out of our evening and order the tasting menu, with the option of wine tasting. Ho. Ly. Cow. We were served EIGHT small plates, each one accompanied by a different type of wine. We had a lovely waitress who spoke just enough English to give us a basic idea of the kinds of wine we were downing. She seemed to get a kick out of it, and we definitely did. The only reason we survived was the fact that the meal took about 2.5 hours. And it was GOOD. Check it out.

First dish – butternut squash/bacon/other delicious things soup (plus Cava):

Second dish – cod paste with yummy crunchy things (plus white wine):

Third dish – tiny potatoes with melty cheese and bacon (plus a different white wine):

Fourth dish – foie gras with crunchy bread (plus a third white wine that was a tad too sweet for my taste, but I drank it anyway):

Fifth dish – out of this world ravioli with even further out of this world sauce (plus a slightly strange dark rose wine):

Sixth dish – cod in a creamy sauce that I thought was way too salty, although Traci really enjoyed this one (plus a fourth kind of white wine). You’ll notice I ate this before taking a picture – the wine had kicked in by this point and I was less attentive to the photography:

Seventh dish – lamb, caramelized onions, sauce of some kind. AMAZING. (Plus delish red wine):

Eighth dish – dessert composed of some kind of flan. Not the best I’ve had, but by this point, who really cares? (Plus we finished things off the way we started – Cava):

Other good food was had, but these were definitely the highlights. Drink-wise, I have to point out one more place we went courtesy of Mom and Dad and 30th birthday presents – Cavamar. It’s right off the beach and has really good Cava-sangria, where we went after a slightly terrifying trek through Barcelona on mopeds (more on that later). But for now, I’ll just post a pic of the Cava-sangria. Mmmmmmm!!!

I can’t move on to the next phase of our trip without giving at least a little space to the amazing food (and drink) we downed while in Nice and its environs. Pretty much everything was at least good – most was delicious.

First and foremost – the croissants. OH MY GOD. How French croissants are so much better than croissants anywhere else (including Algeria, which was owned by the French for a very long time) I will never know. But we took full advantage of our presence in out-of-this-world-croissant country.

In Monte Carlo, we opted for the overpriced tourist option – the cafe right outside of the casino. And, yes, it was wildly overpriced. BUT, unlike some of its overpriced tourist counterparts in other cities (I’m looking at you, Times Square), the food was YUMMY.

(The Casino is directly to the right)

I’ve discussed the drinks on the top of a mountain in a previous post, as I have our lunch in Cannes. Upon our return to Nice after Cannes, we were beat, so we opened a bottle of wine at the apartment. And then another. And then we decided we should probably stumble down the hill and find the closest restaurant that would feed us. And boy, did they! Yummmmmmy!

But we truly saved the best for last. La Merenda, a suggestion from a friend, is a tiny little restaurant that prides itself on having no phone, so you have to stop by in person to make reservations. Which we did. When we rolled in that evening, we joined about 18 other people, all elbow to elbow in the restaurant. The food was down home French cooking and all our options were chalked up on a blackboard that the waiter passed around the tables. We had friend zucchini flowers, and salad with cheese and figs, followed by sausage and lentils and beef stew. Plus their house wine (which in France is pretty much always amazing in my experience). Totally stuffed, the long walk home in the crisp, fall air, was a welcome end to the evening – and to our time along the Cote d’Azur!