shday8: madrid y córdoba.

shday7: madrileña verjaarsdag.

Our hotel room door. Birthday breakfast. Post-Prado Buen Retiro. Pre-dinner snack at Ultramarinos Quintin, which ended up being one of Nelson's food highlights of the trip: an unpictured smoked pear soup, served cool and frothy, almost like a milkshake; and this (pictured) salad of mango, hearts of palm and white asparagus and pomegranate, totally surprising in every bite.

Then a cab to Bodega de los Secretos for what would hopefully be a just-unusual-enough birthday dinner. In the end it was probably just about that: featuring the variably pleasant smell of centuries-old underground brick, a revolver from the 1936 Spanish Revolution because revolutionaries used to hide out in these cellars, and I guess pretty good overall cave-y ambiance if I do say so myself, despite a slightly-too-short loop of late-era Van Morrison. Into our mouths went a goat cheese and apple salad, a trio of steak tartare (wasabi, truffle, and anchovy), a mushroom risotto, a colorful ravioli the details of which elude me, and a very good Tempranillo which I uncharacteristically managed to remember the name of. And thankfully excellent torrijas for dessert (not pictured).

Oh and then we watched a couple hours of karaoke and drank icy-cold Mahou while we digested. I was thiiiiiis close to trying some Prince.

shday6: august in madrid.

I did a lot of research for Madrid, because, well, traveling through Spain with a vegetarian who doesn't really love eggs usually means that your faces are a study in contrasts with every new menu you're handed. Your eyes light up with possibilities while theirs dull into the familiar resignation of having to choose from the same 5 options every day: bread with cheese, tomato, or olive oil: croquetas of cheese, mushroom or spinach; fried eggplant, mushrooms or peppers; the dreaded goat cheese salad; or a "vegetarian special" of risotto or lasagna.

Depending on how hungry you are as you read this, that might not sound too terrible, but believe me after a few days you'd be presenting with a similar lack of hope in your facial features when walking into a new restaurant. Madrid, being the EU's third largest city and the capital of Spain, seemed like the one place in this country where you might reasonably expect to find vegetarian tapas that weren't those same old five things.

Wellllllll...yes-a and-a no-a. There are vegan and vegetarian tapas bars here, but yeah, the menus all just looked like backstage food for a politically correct punk band. As soon as I see hummus or the word "wok" on a restaurant menu, I kind of judgmentally dismiss the whole enterprise, an approach which left us approximately 5 restaurants in town to choose from on a Monday night.

Unfortunately, it's Spain, and also it's August. Sooooo, the first three vegetarian places on my list for tonight were closed for vacation, "see you in a couple weeks!" Madrid is a big, hot city, and after shuffling our way with decreasing ardor through a soulless big-city shopping district and then a run-down bordello 'hood to the third shuttered address I just said fuck it and we took a (cheap, cheap) cab back across town to a place that TripAdvisor had just done told me about during a desperate last-minute search before I left the hotel called Taberna El Sur.

It kind of saved everything. An efficient but laid-back and jovial bartender; Nelson ordered what was easily one of the best quiches I've ever had, even better because you just don't expect anything from a quiche anymore do you. This was spinach and maybe manchego and nearly unrecognizable cooked-to-disintegration raisins, and probably a good bit of butter, om nom nom nom nom. There was one glass each of literally award-winning red and white sangria.

And there was a horrible-looking, monstrous grilled octopus tentacle that I almost didn't order but Nelson talked me into it, the octopus was already in the kitchen, dead or at least very unhappy, plus she has a macabre fascination with my omnivorousness...that second horror show picture is her work. In the end it was worth breaking my no-octopus rule, just perfectly grilled, smoky and tender, like a good steak, eyes closed you'd have never known what it was other than "chomp". Oh and there were mushroom croquetas too, also better than average, but kind of irrelevant amidst the other excitement.

shday6: san sebastián to madrid.

Decided to stay in San Sebastián for lunch because well why wouldn't you, plus this was our last shot at remotely tolerable weather for a few days. From the pictures it looks like we ate a ton of food but everything is actually very petitely portioned. Breakfast ended up being outside at the mercifully open-all-day Bodega Donostiarra: a northern version of the "crushed fresh tomatoes, olive oil and bread" that is Nelson's standard breakfast when in Spain; a giant-looking but in fact mini tuna sandwich with pepperoncino and anchovy; and a great drink called mosto that we saw the guy next to us order and Nelson asked the waitress what it was: it's unfermented grape juice, olives, lemon, and orange. The new summertime booze-free drink. This seemed like a "real" place for "real" people and it was a perfect breakfast.

Then we watched big waves try to destroy the city for a while and pondered how the river meets the sea and what this means for the creatures living at the border, then we went to Zazpi for lunch and had more giant-looking but tiny things. It also looks like we spent serious dough, but it's Spain yo: that's a €3 risotto with algae and mussels, a €3 ravioli of rabo de toro: and somehow €5 worth of padron peppers. Oh and Nelson's hilarious panachè of tiny vegetables.

shday5: san sebastián.

Some piece of random crap internet travel writing I kept encountering while preparing for this trip would remind me every few days when I found it again, "One can't help but be enchanted by San Sebastian upon first arriving there bla bla bla," or some such crap travel writing opening-paragraph malarkey.

But, well, "I must say"...they were, ehhh...kind of right. Very little not to like. One can't help but be enchanted by etc. Above: entering the "old part" of the city (a city which, according to Wikipedia, has been "fucking burned to the ground" about every 50 years or so since the beginning of time, need to look into this a bit for accuracy). Below: yes, ok, we stood in line goddamnit for Borda Berri for a total of 4 minutes before it opened, along with 20 other tourists who'd been there for who knows how long. Nelson mentally rolled her eyes for pretty much all 4 minutes ("Spanish people would never be in line at 8:30pm for tapas"). She's a bit of a racist.

Grapje! Anyway, the whole Borda Berri experience is quite something. You don't detect a lot of pleasure in the service or the whole process, it's as cozy and inviting as a frozen yogurt stand, more than a little like a "tapas ride" at a theme park. But the food was pretty amazing for the prices. We had a watermelon gazpacho with mozzarella (€3.50), a risotto falso (meaning orzo) with Idiazabal (€2.80), and then one of the best things I had on this whole trip, a squid and squid ink ravioli (€3.80, pictured). Indeed, there was only one Spanish person there, and he really got all the attention from the staff, guess they're straining to keep it real amidst all the hubbub. Anyway, overall: I would've gone back again later if I'd been hungry.

And then we walked around some more. Had a pretty serious glass of Rioja on the steps of the basilica and watched a Chinese mom prepare an incredibly complicated meal of powder and water for her confused-looking baby. And of course we watched everything else.

We had a little ramekin of baked provolone at Atari. And then walked to the harbor as the real Spanish people started to show up for dinner.

And then we walked back to where the hotel was and detoured along the boardwalk. Marveled at their version of the Bimhuis and debated the pros and cons of putting giant text on the side of your building. Had two too-giant ice cream cones that we couldn't come close to finishing. Walked further northeast looking for the perfect nightcap, a bit of a standard Morse wander towards the outskirts of town looking for something that doesn't exist, managed to find the worst tinto de verano ever served. I didn't finish mine, which should tell you something. Then we marveled at some Basque on the way home. Lots of marveling.