Popagandhi

Hello. There will be no picture with this post. All too many posts about travel have a picture here, and a picture there, all the better to illustrate that I’mhereandyou’renot effect postcards once had, back when we still sent them. Where am I? That depends on when you ask. When this journey began I found myself in Hulu Langat in a jungle house with ten of my friends, including these ones. Then somewhere in Kuching, eating Sarawak laksa with the famous Kenny Sia, who taught me how to properly stir my Teh-C Special; a Sarawakian take on the ubiquitous Teh-C, with a dollop of gula melaka at the bottom. On the floor of the lovely Ernesto’s studio, getting myself a traditional Iban tattoo. Miserable in a village called Lalang, one that was every bit as weedy as its name implies, escaping by boat behind a fat minister, and a drunk political secretary throwing up into the river Skrang behind us. Competing in a tribal 100m race for the grand prize of one bottle of tuak. Not winning it. Being part of a fun Gawai festival in a another longhouse, one not named after weeds and thus a lot friendlier. My little boat crashing into rocks, conversations in Mandarin and Teochew with drivers about the secrets of the local cockfighting circuit. Eating dinner at El Bulli in the seaside town of Roses. Seeing friends, climbing rocks and drinking pastis for a laugh in Aix en Provence and Marseille. Rugby games on the telly (go Catalans Dragons!), fantastic Catalan paella in little alleys and elbow sculling beer competitions with five Australian men in tiny Perpignan. A week in London: Spamalot, an assortment of friends, the good life. Now: Barcelona, again, because I have a flight to catch from here, and I really do like it that much. Some 48 hours ago: cycling around Barcelona, to the La Sagrada Familia, back through Gracia, hunting for the obscurely located Passadis Del Pep for hours on our bicycles, only to find it shut. Sitting at 3 am in a balcony in El Born drinking a little bottle of vending-machine vodka because the St Joan fireworks kept me from sleeping.

It’s been a busy month.

I think I love Barcelona. With zero Spanish, and less-than-zero Catalan, I don’t speak either of its languages. But even the linguistically impaired can see Barcelona deserves every bit of the international hype and attention it is now getting.

Ham is the centre of my universe. Cured meat, all of it, is as close as it gets to perfection in my ham-dominated world. It was what made me happiest as a toddler, and today I continue my pursuit of ham-driven happiness in a slightly obsessive way. It’s no secret to foodies that Spanish ham, or jamon, like the king of them all jamon iberico, is superior to even the best prosciutto without even much of a fight. I can’t even stop looking — window lusting — at the endless shops selling jamon of every sort, whole legs, half legs, vacuum packs of them. Barcelona’s eating culture, beyond the ham, suits me perfectly. Dinner peaks at 10.30pm, and 9.30pm is seen as an ungodly time for dinner. Lunch is a long affair between 2pm and 4pm, where every restaurant is required by law to offer an affordable 3 course set lunch between 7 to 15 euros (usually about 10), even in the top end restaurants. The majority of these menu del dia will hardly excite the tastebuds, but if you search hard enough, carefully selected set lunches can let you eat very well for very little. The tapas culture lets you eat plates of everything, at anytime of the day. Because of the dominance of ham in this country, the idea of eating slices of ham for fun, one I have advocated forever, to much derision and strange stares, is finally acceptable social behaviour.

And I think if you’ve written hysterical sentences like ham-driven happiness and window lusting for ham in one paragraph, it’s time to stop writing about it.

Most of my time here in Barcelona has been spent living in various forms of accommodation within the same area in and around El Born. People’s couches, nice hotels, and a four-bed hostel room. Barcelona neighbourhoods have a life of their own. Dodgy, recently hip El Raval, the old city in the Gothic Quarter, vibrant and picturesque El Born, the slightly posh and very gay Eixample some people refer to as Gayxample, classy Gracia, among others.

Twelve days in any other city might seem a bit much, but it seems there’s plenty to do, and loads more to eat. There are the trendy cutting edge places, recently fashionable in international gourmet circles, places like Albert Adria’s Inopia, Abac, the Roca brothers’ Moo, Cinc Sentits, and all those other places you hear about constantly in food magazines and websites. The fun lunch time riot that is getting a seat at Pinotxo for honest, happy food made from ingredients in the market where it’s located. Then there are the little ’secret’ places. Agullers, an unmarked restaurant at number 8 c/Agullers (no sign at all, just look for number 8), for cheap and good seafood if the bursting-at-the-seams Cal Pep around the corner is too hard to get into; or if you just want a great meal without the hype and the tourists. The fun, grubby Pollo Rico (Tasty Chicken) for cheap and well, tasty chicken like you’ve never had it. The three wacky grandmothers at Can Bertram. Vila Viniteca on c/Agullers is a wine shop of much renown, but next door at number 9 its high end food store and its four-seat cafe (menu only in Catalan!) sells and serves up the best in ham, cheese, olives, Spanish canned food (very expensive and excellent quality), chocolates, oils, specialty rice… while an excellent place for some vino lies in the hard to find street of c/Banys Vells, where an ancient-looking stone building houses the charming wine bar of Va de Vi. London is great on the food and nightlife front too, but I plain cannot afford London.

I’ve moved from my place in El Born to venture deeper into Barcelona away from the tourists, to split my time between Poble Nou and Gracia in residential neighbourhoods. I’ll be trying to explore Barcelona on my own, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, barri by barri, and writing about places and finds as I come across them. If what I’ve already seen from the surface is anything to go by, then I think I will really love this place.

A week from now I’ll be getting my mini-holiday from my holiday (someone introduced this concept to me some time ago; whoever you are, I have to thank you!) by going on a food crawl in Penang, Ipoh (??) and Taiping for hawker food that’s actually still great. There’s nothing in the world like great Malaysian Chinese hawker food, especially that kwayteow soup from Taiping I’ve been dreaming about since I last had it. And then I’m wearing my square hat and gown and getting a scroll, so I guess it’s time to grow up and do shit.