Friday, May 25, 2012

Eating, Drinking, and Loving Italy

My partner is obsessed with Italian food. He worked in an Italian restaurant, and even though there is a tendency to fall out of love with things you work with all the time, I think this must have just reinforced his passion. Sometimes I wonder if he is with me because of my Italian grandmothers cooking. He says its just a perk, but I wonder… He is truly in culinary heaven in Italy.
             Our tour of Italian cuisine started in Florence. We had some incredible pasta and pizza, and our hostel had great meals (3 portions of rice and a full small chicken for 7 euro!) on the cheap. The real prize of Florence cuisine for me was the wine. Particularly, Chianti. The first time we had it, it was a warm night on the patio, which I have already stated already makes everything taste better. Although we had a red wine, it was chilled, which made it refreshing after a hot day. Sometimes after you walk 30 kms in a day, you just want something cold to drink, and since I don’t drink beer, wine doesn’t really fit the bill for me either. But this Chianti certainly did. It had a full flavour, but was very light. Definitely have a new favourite wine. I can’t bring the Tuscan hills home with me, but hopefully every time I drink Chianti it will be a nice reminder.   
             The next stop on our Italian itinerary was in Rome, which was sort of underwhelming in terms of food. More expensive for less quantity. After two subpar dinners around the tourist areas, we decided to follow the locals across the river to Trastavere. Here we found a slight decrease in the expense and a definite increase in the quantity of the food. We found many family owned restaurants right near the river and sat on the patio, because I have to sit on the patio unless its cold or raining. For drinks, we made our way to Campo di Fiori, a short walk from Piazza Navona. In the mornings, Campo di Fiori is a square that is filled with market stalls. In the early afternoons, all the stalls are cleaned up and tucked away, and the square turns into a giant open air pub. On our last night, we went for dinner with our two flat mates from Rome at a favourite place of theirs called Cesars very close to ruins. It was a family owned place, and our flatmates had become regulars throughout their stay in Rome. We had bruschetta, pasta, panna cotta and tiramisu for 12 euro per person! We also indulged in three bottles of wine and stayed at the restaurant until after 1 am… Time flies when youre having fun.
             Naples was all about the pizza. The birthplace of pizza is reknowned for doing it right. And did they ever. The prices of everything in Naples were extremely cheap because the city was literally drowning in trash and unbelievable sketchy. I literally mean unbelievably. It is still a shock to me. But more on that in another post at another time. The one positive perk of this was that I had the best pizza of my life for 5 euro. I had a pizza with blue cheese, spinach, and walnuts, and it was incredible. My Italian food loving companion combined his passion for pasta and pizza by selecting a pizza with mozzarella cheese covered with Bolognese sauce and soft ricotta like cheese on top. I’m not going to lie, his was definitely better.
             On the last leg of our tour in Italy, we stopped in the small town called Rutigliano (near Bari—close to the heel of the boot) where my grandparents are from. We stayed with family there, and we got to truly experience what a day eating in Italy is like. For breakfast, or la collazione, you generally eat a croissant, or a croissant like pastry filled with chocolate, or cream. This can be accompanied by a collection of cookies and/or cakes, and is certainly accompanied by espresso. Luckily my aunt knows that I am a pansy and made me a cappuccino instead. Breakfast of champions. The main meal of the day is pranzo, around 2 in the afternoon, when everyone leaves work or school for an hour or two. Pranzo consists of a primo piatto (a first plate) of a pasta dish, a second dish of carne (meat or fish) followed by salad, and peppered throughout with lots of bocconcini, a type of mozzarella cheese and focaccia, a thick oily bread covered with tomatoes, or onions and cheese. Dinner or cena is a much later meal in the evening after 8 or 9, and unfortunately I did not get an accurate representation of this because I had another massive feast for my little cousins birthday party. I hear that cena is usually a smaller meal, but we had so much food at the party that it don’t believe it could be smaller than pranzo. On a day trip, we went to some of the surrounding areas, including Monopoli, Arberobello, and Polignano, where we had a granita: a cup with pane (or whipped cream) on the bottom, coffee flavoured ice, and topped off with more pane.
             Now its time to walk it all off in Greece…

Lost in Translation

Believe me when I say that there is no better way to learn a language then by immersion. Before a few days ago, I thought I could get by in an Italian conversation. I thought that when I spoke to my grandparents, we were speaking Italian. I thought that when I spoke with train station attendants, waiters, and other passers by in Italy that I was speaking Italian. I have since realized that the Italian that I was speaking was actually akin to pig’s latin, and I was like a child playing at a language game.
             On the train into Italy from Nice to Florence by way of Milan, my partner and I were in a compartment with 2 other young female students, an old man who lives in Monaco, and a churchman who is from Africa but lives in Milan. Between us, more than 15 different languages were represented. We carried on a conversation for 3 hours switching between French, English, and Italian. I knew enough words of what they were saying, and when I spoke Italian, I did not have too much of an accent, however my grammar was horrible. Past tense was entirely beyond me at conversational speed.
             At restaurants, train stations, and buying tickets for museums and galleries, I always tried to speak Italian because of my displeasure for waltzing into a country and expecting them to be able to accommodate me. On a few occasions, my Italian was complemented (“considering you’re American”). On more occasions, because my Italian was so atrocious, people could tell that I was not Italian and responded in English. I really liked it when people responded in Italian because I like to think that I actually did a good job in convincing people that I was Italian.
             My main frustration with speaking Italian is that so many words are readily available to describe precisely what I am thinking in English, but in Italian, I always end up saying, “that is nice” or “very beautiful”, which just seems so lame and flat to me, thus making me feel like I am being insincere. I thought hard about how my vocabulary exploded when I was learning English, and it came to me: I read voraciously. With this idea in mind, I bought Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – in Italian—for a few reasons: 1) the level of reading is suitable for a younger audience, which I figure is roughly the level that my Italian is at; 2) I have read it way too many times, so I could use context/logic to figure out the meanings of words that I don’t know (elementary school reading buddies comes to mind) ; 3) the cover art is so cooool!
             For our last few days in Italy, I had the ultimate test. The full on language immersion experience. We stayed with my Italian aunt in Rutigliano, the small city where my grandparents are from. It. Was. So. Hard. I did okay during our first big family supper, because the stuff we were talking about was all stuff I had said before. Luckily, I have a few cousins my age who speak English incredibly well, so between English and Italian they managed to teach me some new things. By the first evening though, I had learnt so many new words and expressions. I even learnt how to use the past tense! Go me! My head was spinning so fast, and I felt that I was more exhausted than I would be after running 10 k. Learning a new language at immersion speed takes a massive amount of cognitive effort. However, I cannot deny the results. By the end of my stay in Italy, I was thinking in Italian first. I still occasionally accidentally respond to my boyfriend in Italian because some responses became automatic.
             As a Cognitive Linguistics and English student, I am so thankful for this experience, because it has solidified for me concepts that I have been learning about for the past 4 years. For one, I felt the impact of critical/sensitive periods for language learning. One of my aunts told me that I should go to one of my older cousins to practise my Italian with, and why couldn’t I speak as well as her. I thought about it, and her parents were born and raised in Italy, and when they moved to Canada and had her, Italian was most likely her first language. The same goes for my father and his sister, where Italian was their first language, so many of the words and the verb conjugations are automatic. The second thing that I am really interested in is the mindframes that certain languages produce. It is really hard for me to think of inanimate objects in terms of masculinity or femininity, so I often end up using the wrong article that accompanies a word. But for any native speaker of a language, knowing the gender of a word is automatic. In many cases, there is no rhyme or reason why a word would be assigned the gender that it is, but yet, its there. I wonder what impact this has on people’s worldviews that they are born into labeling things into genders. And this concept extends beyond gender. How does the language that we speak impact our worldview? We do not have words in English for some things that are not prevalent in our culture, but does that impair our way of thinking about things outside of our everyday life?

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Firenze's Art Scene



I am becoming more aware of certain scenes, that is, specific sites that seem to create, facilitate, or draw a community of creativity during a specific era. For example, in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, Owen Wilson’s character yearns for the art scene of Paris circa 1920. Through my travels I am learning the extent of the symbiotic nature between an art scene and its location. The location provides a sense of community to the artists, and a culture as a baseline or starting point at least to integrate or build off of for work. In return, the location of that art scene receives tattoos of its cultural influence for that particular era that live on through passages in books, subjects and scenes in photos and paintings, and rhythmically through music.

Through my time in Florence, I am learning about the House of Medici’s heavy influence on the arts in Italy during the Renaissance. The Medici family grew their wealth with starting a bank, gaining political prowess through the Tuscan state, marrying royalty, and even producing a few Popes in the process. This money allowed them to provide financial support to Brunelleschi, Fra Angelico, Donatello, Michaelangelo and Da Vinci.

With the death of Anna Maria Luisa de Medici, the house was extinct. Anna Maria bequeathed the entire Medici estate, including their massive art collection, to the Tuscan state, provided that it never left Florence. Say what you will about the Medici’s, but to me, that is incredible civic loyalty and passion. This donation was the cornerstone of the Uffizi, one of the world’s best collections of Italian Renaissance art.

I can see why Florence would be a flourishing art scene, even aside from the influence of the Medici family. The city is small enough to foster a strong sense of community, but large enough to have a wide sampling of people. The Tuscan hills are omnipresent, but not in a looming way: Florence, to me, is a very open and free city. Oh, and the wine doesn’t hurt either.

I wonder what we will consider to be the biggest art scene of the early 21st century. Looking at the patterns of power and economic influence and the weight that that has afforded people to spend more on artistic pursuits, it makes sense to me why France, Italy, and England were major art scenes at the times that they were. Following this pattern, in combination with my limited observation of what is happening where in the world today, I would say New York or perhaps somewhere in California.  Another real possibility could be that with the dawn of globalization, such art scenes will be harder to localize to just one geographic area. 

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

My Eyes Are Bigger Than My Stomach: How I Ate Everything In Nice


Warning: I’m about to indulge in a little layman’s foodie talk again. I apologize in advance to those who don’t care enough about food to put too much thought into it (which was me until recently), and also to those who are far beyond my level in food appreciation. I just think that food is such an important part of a region’s culture, so it would be fruitless to have a travel blog and investigate other cultures if I skipped this part.
             Our culinary experience in France had been fairly . We have been hugging the southern coast for most of the trip, so sushi from locally sourced fish was a necessity. Baguettes have been a constant savior: a quick and easy breakfast, a thank-you-for-your purchase at the convenience store (I love France). And one rather funny experience: my significant other has an affinity for beer, as individuals of his gender are wont to have, and he has been enjoying the super cheap local beer from the area. In Marseille, however, he got more than he could handle when he asked for a “Monaco”, thinking that it was a brand of beer from Monaco perhaps. When the waiter arrived with a tall glass of pink liquid, he stared in awe for a minute and then started for the bar to clear up the confusion. I read the menu more closely, and saw that a Monaco is actually beer with lemonade and grenadine. My boyfriend decided that it would be better off for him to skip the beer rather than be caught consuming a pink one. It really would not have even tasted too bad if it weren’t for the grenadine. It was pretty much a grown up shirly temple.
              Today however has been my stomach’s favourite day of my adventure so far. The hostel that we are staying at has 12 different types of cereal for breakfast (between the “Le Petit Prince” décor and the fun cereal AND coffee, housed in a common room/bar that used to be a chapel, this is probably one of the most interesting wake-ups I have ever had travelling). After breakfast, we headed down for the hostel the Vieux Nice, walked the Promenade de Anglais, and climbed one of Louis XIV’s old forts. Thankfully, we worked up quite an appetite.
             For lunch we continued on to the Port in Nice and found a little sandwich shop to try pan bagnat, which loosely translates to ‘wet bread’. I am thinking that this sounds super unappealing to most people, but my Italian grandmother always makes me this Italian specialty called ‘a chaled’ or ‘manzanella’, which is basically baked stale bread, wet, drizzled with olive oil and tomotoes, but its so good. Pan bagnat seems to be the French equivalent of this: a bun or baguette stuffed with tomatoes, tuna, olives, anchovies, and dripping olive oil. I really disliked olives before this trip, but I am actually obsessed with different types and tastes of olive oil just two weeks in. My partner and I split a sandwich to try it, but were still hungry so we found another little stand that was selling ‘socca’, another Nice specialty. Socca is pretty much a crepe of chick pea flour and olive oil. The socca was cut off a pizza tray and warmed in an oven, and coated in salt and pepper. My favourite part was the sheer amount of it for 3 euro! Best deal in Nice. We nibbled a little, saving the rest for later, and continued on to the Museum of Modern Art Contemporaire (pretty underwhelming after the Reina Sofia in Madrid,  a pretty easy comparison to the Hamilton Art Gallery.)
             For dinner, we sat on a warm patio in Old Nice. I have discovered that patios automatically make anything taste good. I ordered ‘petit farcis nicoise’, stuffed mushrooms, tomatoes, peppers and zucchini on a plate of tomato sauce, and my partner ordered ‘salad nicoise’, which seemed to be ‘pan bagnat’ without the bun: lettuce with tuna, anchovies, cucumbers, tomatoes and olives. We were both so full after dinner, but I just had been talking about a specific ice cream shop all day, so I finally bullied my boyfriend into going there. This was not procrastin-eating, or emotional eating, or hungry eating. This was eating because I am in the South of France and who knows when I will be back?
             We wandered through the winding streets and shops of Vieux Nice until we found it: the best ice crem shop in the world. Fennochio—featuring more than 50 different flavours of ice cream. They had an entire panel of chocolate flavours (chocolate pepper to almond biscuit with icing), fruit flavours (rhubarb to pear), flower flavours (rose, lavender and jasmine) and more bizarre flavours like tomato-basil, olive, beer and thyme. My partner chose orange chocolate on baileys, while I chose kinder surprise on cacao.
             The cuisine is only a small part of the reason why France is so far my favourite country in Europe. There does not even seem to be a single reason that I can ever put my finger on. The only common denominator that I can find when I think about it is the passion that the French infuse into every aspect of life is something that I admire. 

Sunday, May 6, 2012

Take Me To The Riot


            As we were arriving in our hostel in Marseille, a man came running past us yelling, “the election results are on”, and crowded around the television. Sarkozy is out. Hollande, and socialism, is in. We asked a French man watching the results what he thought of the news, and he said, “I had a really hard time getting here. I am glad that it has changed. Now it will not be so hard for my friends.” Another man says that he knows people working in Paris who have been submitting millions of euro in fake invoices over the past months to try to cover up what Sarkozy supposedly stole over the years. We realized how lucky we were to have ended up in France today of all days. We quickly threw down our bags in our locker and went back to the TV. The people watching asked if we wanted to join, but we heard cheers and honking erupting in the streets. So we followed our ears.
             Soon enough, the flares in the sky led us to the crowd gathering directly in front of Marseille’s Vieux Port. Fireworks, flares, lighters and flamables, signs, and poster flew in the sky. Horns, cheers, yells, whistles rang through the streets. People poured onto the sidewalks, and then finally, all at once, through the wonder of group think, poured onto the street. Police were on the scene, fully decked in their riot gear, but they did not try to intervene. Instead, they let the people have the street, and set up blockades at either end of the street to prevent traffic from coming through.  
             I climbed up on a cement divider to try to photograph the scene, and quickly realized that my shots were not translating what was happening truly, as it was in the air. It was an intangible feeling that permeated everyone around in Marseille. An elderly lady walked in the opposite direction of the crowds and said in French, “It is good you are recording it. Change needs to be recorded.”
             Internalizing this scene, I try to imagine such excitement over a change in political leadership in Canada. Another fellow Canadian at the hostel stated that she “riots over sporting events, not politics”. This quite succinctly summed up Canada’s mild political climate. In a sense, I feel lucky enough to live in a country where the degree of misery over political leadership never stoops too low such that an election would elicit rioting in the streets. At the same time, I am also lucky to be in a country that is passionate about politics on the day of seemingly revolutionary election.            
             As I write this now, the celebration in the streets is changing; a darker side of the crowd is manifesting itself. The bars have stayed open late. The crowds and cheering have turned rowdy. Not that there was any semblance of order before; but now the scene is decidedly more chaotic. People are jumping on the hoods of cars, breaking things. A local states that “in Marseille, the crowds start spontaneously… but they often end in fighting.”
             It is hard not to be optimistic while drunk on the atmosphere of mass celebration; however, logic and rational thought must follow eventually. I am not an expert on political science, nor am I student of economics, but I wonder about the repercussions of electing a socialist President for France right now, in the world’s fragile economic state, and right here, in one of the countries that is essential to the redemption of the world’s economy.
             Conversely, a change of leadership might be what is necessary to help Europe out of its rut, rather than more of the same. Listening to the excitement in the streets, I know that at least for tonight, the French are sure that this change can only be a sign of the great things to come. 

Friday, May 4, 2012

Egg-cellent Eating in Spain

I must admit that I am by no means an expert in food. But perhaps because I am walking for hours and hours every day, or perhaps it’s the smells and the views, or the invitation of the sun drenched patio, but whatever the reason: I find that I am hungry all. the. time. I reluctantly report that Spain has failed to satiate my hunger.
              We started out spoiled in Madrid, as one of my top destinations was the restaurant Botin’s, which is the (Guiness certified) oldest restaurant in the world, and more importantly, a favourite of my beloved Hemingway. The ambiance of this restaurant is incomparable. We were luckily seated in the basement, which literally looked like a hole in the ground with stairs stacked beneath it, and even further, in a wine cellar that fit only two tables for two. I was too struck with awe to even investigate the menu, so I had a salad, which was what I pointed at frantically when the waiter told me I had to decide right that minute because the kitchen was closing, while my more composed better half chose the suckled pig, which was incredible. After this experience however, our perceptions of Spanish cuisine had nowhere to go but downhill.
             In Madrid, I started to notice the trend of eggs in every meal. For example, hard boiled eggs in a chicken salad wrap, which did not seem entirely out of place, and did not taste awful. But here in Barcelona, after a night of wandering around looking for a place to have a good meal that was not tapas for once, my boyfriend and I realized the true extent of Spaniards love for eggs. Namely, a fried egg on my hamburger, and a fried egg as a side (along with French fries) on my boyfriends steak. I am sure that this was listed explicitly in the menu, but as the menu was in Catalan, and we both feel so rude waltzing into another country and expecting everyone around us cater to our English needs, we just thought we would go with a sense of adventure and point to anything on the menu. Have you ever tried eating a hamburger with an egg on it? I don’t recommend it.
             Aside from this general love of eggs, which is amusing more than anything, after looking through menu after menu, I am finding a particular lack in vegetables. I don’t know why, but I was expecting a diet more rich in vegetables in Southern Europe, but I have not found it here in Spain. I am holding out hope for France, Italy and Greece.
             Luckily, my conspirator is a phenomenal chef, who actually does know his way around the kitchen, to put it tamely. He makes sure that I never starve, and that I always have the right wine paired with the right meal. In Barcelona, we are staying in an apartment that features a nice kitchen and a supermarket right next door, so we have been able to cut the cost of living quite substantially by skirting the overpriced tourist traps along La Rambla. Some basic staples from the store, and some fresh produce from one of Barcelona’s two great open air markets and we are eating better than we would at restaurants for much less of a price.
             Today, however, we decided to actually do our research and find a reputable restaurant that would save our perceptions of the Spanish dining experience. Our search turned up Cinc Sentits, whose owner/chef, Jordi Artal is Canadian and Catalan, which provides us with a sense of home and a taste of Spain. The organization of the dinner was by a tasting menu, so we had a choice of either 8 smaller courses, or 6 slightly larger ones, all small enough to have room to experience each course, but large enough to provide the feeling of satiation that I have been missing for a week now.
             The chef wasted no time in flaunting his Canadian heritage: the apperatif was a shot of 100% Canadian Maple syrup, covered with a thin layer of frothy cream and a few shards of salt on the bottom of the shot glass. This mixture of salty and sweet was a theme through out the dinner. Did I mention the Michelin star? I have to say that it was one of the better dining experiences of my life, and considering all aspects (the ambiance, the service, the presentation, the taste, the quantity) the meal was reasonably priced.
             The Cinc Sentits menu states that the dishes are each inspired by local flavours, trends, and the changing seasons. Each component of every dish was sourced from around the country, (in a few cases, around the globe) and was the very best of its kind. However, I also the think that the creator was the best of his kind, and while I was looking for a redemption of Spanish cuisine, I think I am going to chalk this point up to Canada.