Hay Bardenas!

My one rule for my job here is: find a way to get invited on every field trip possible. So far I'm 2/2: I got to go to the Planetarium in Pamplona with my 4th grade Science classes in November, and yesterday, I got to accompany my 2nd grade Science classes to the Bardenas Reales as part of our unit on plants, animals, and landscapes.

The Bardenas Reales are Navarra's only desert and most interesting claim to fame. Living in New Hampshire, deserts are super exotic, the kind of thing you read about in books and associate with scalding heat and certainty of death. So when I first saw pictures of the Bardenas and learned that I would be living one town over from an an honest to goodness desert I almost fell out of my chair. Although it turns out the Bardenas aren't technically a desert, it's a semi-desert, which I guess means that it rains sometimes especially in the spring and there was more water and green than I was expecting to see. Oh well.

The Bardenas are hugely important here in Tudela. You can't walk around the town without seeing pictures of the Castildetierra, the most famous landmark in the Bardenas, EVERYWHERE (for all of you New Hampshire folk out there, it's like their equivalent of the Old Man on the Mountain. The day this thing is eventually worn down by the wind will be tragic). The Bardenas are Tudela's claim to fame, attracting tourists but more importantly a little bit of fame, as the Bardenas are frequently used shooting advertisements, music videos, and even Hollywood movies. Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz, Penelepe Cruz and Javier Bardem were all here last year to shoot The Counselor and the Bardenas also appears in James Bond movie The World Is Not Enough.

The Bardenas have inspired a number of local legends as well. My students told me one of the most famous ones: Sanchicorrota, a 15th century bandit who hid in a cave within the Bardenas and escaped detection by putting the horseshoes on his horses backwards, so as to confuse anyone who was following him.

The whole field trip felt distinctly Magic School Bus like- a class of 2nd graders taking a guided bus tour through this other-worldly landscape. Unfortunately, once my roommate and I realized this, it was really disappointing that we couldn't actually travel back in time Magic School Bus style to see the formation of the Bardenas instead of just learning about it from Miss Frizzle, I mean our guide. The Bardenas' distinctive rock formations and white color (one region is called the Bardenas Blancas) comes from the water that once covered them, when Navarra was once a sea. The white is due to visible salt deposits covering the dry soil in the area. You can also see different colored layers in the rock formations, due to the deposits of different layers of silt. They have found fossils from all kinds of marine animals, including crocodiles and flamingos and the Bardenas are the sight of continued archeological investigations, looking for both fossils and remains from human settlements in the area. *Claim to fame! The Bardenas are also the site of the oldest egg fossil in the world. And home to the heaviest flying bird in the world, the avutarda or Kori bustard, which migrates between Africa and the Bardenas and weighs up to 40 pounds.* And if ten years down the road my career has fizzled, I am absolutely going to be writing a Magic School Bus series in Spanish about a field trip to the Bardenas!

A little spring flooding.  

Keeping my eyes peeled for Brad Pitt

Notice the different layers in the rock as the Bardenas were formed

The salty "white" Bardenas

Castildetierra

Calle Laurel

Spain is famous for its tapas, but Northern Spain has its own take on this national tradition: pinchos. Although the name comes from the fact that pinchos usually involved a toothpick, or pincho, this cornerstone of Basque and Navarran cuisine has evolved to include all types of tasty little morsels, regardless of whether the toothpick is present or not.

Calle Laurel in Logroño is mythical in Spain- a street packed with some of the best pincho bars in the country, each serving up their own special pincho. Just 2 to 4 euros in each bar will get you a zurito, a baby-sized beer, and a pincho of your choosing. The city´s night life revolves around this street: delicious food and their famous La Rioja wine.

It would be a sin to live in Tudela, just a short train ride down the Ebro River from Logroño and not ir de pinchos along Calle Laurel, so I jumped on the chance for a spontaneous Saturday night getaway with my Irish and Canadian friends (also known as Tudela´s entire English speaking population). Laurel did not disappoint.

Tapa No. 1: Bar D.O. Laurel. Solomillo de ternera a la brasa con ensaladita (veal sirloin with a green salad). The best meat I have ever tasted! At the time I thought nothing could top this, and it was in fact the highlight of the night for me. Simple but done well.

Pincho No. 2: Bar Angel, champiñón a la plancha (grilled mushroom stacks topped with shrimp). This is the only pincho this bar serves. They just have one grill, furiously grilling up mushrooms to keep up with the orders. Served fresh of the grill, it´s impossible to eat without making a mess (and burning your entire face in the process), but so delicious you probably won´t care.

Pincho No. 3: Bar El Canalla. Timbal de Carrileras con salsa de boletus. A small meat pie, with a potato base topped with minced pork cheek and a mushroom sauce.

Pincho No. 4: Bar Calderas. Tosta de foie con queso de cabra (toast topped with goat cheese and foie, with sugar and balsamic vinegar drizzled on top). An incredible combination of sweet and savoury, this was my second favorite of the night.

Pincho No. 5: Bar Rte. Laurus. Bacalao y langostino en tempura (Tempura cod and shrimp) in the background. Jamón, goat cheese, raisins and walnuts on bread in the foreground. Both delicious! Also note the "to-go" window, Calle Laurel is way too packed to fit everyone inside the many bars, so people just order from the street and continue on to the next one.

Unfortunately, doing pinchos on Calle Laurel is not one of those things that you can do once. Knowing we only tried 5 of the hundreds of pinchos available on that street means I'm dying to return and sample more of them. Or move to Logroño!

Italia Part Two: Firenze

Apologies for the delay in part two of this Italy post, springtime has arrived in Tudela and I couldn't drag myself away from the sunny plazas to get any work done this week!

My hostel

Florence is one of the most incredible places I've ever visited. Yes, it was swarming with tourists, yes almost everything about it was touristy, and no I can't see myself in a million years every living there, or even studying there for a semester. But the art, culture, history, everything in Florence is overwhelming, intoxicating, inspiring, and I loved being there.

There's the Duomo, with Brunneleschi's impossible dome.The 460ish steps to the top of the dome would be worth it just for the view of Florence, but even more incredible was seeing the interior of the dome, looking down on the floor of the cathedral and being close enough to almost touch the frescoes covering the inside of the dome.

Italia Part One: Milano

In theory, solo travel sounds great to me. In practice, my only time truly travelling alone, I missed the bus to the airport, ended up in a cow field in absolute middle-of-nowhere Galicia just 36 hours before my flight back to the US left from the opposite side of the country. I was therefore a little nervous about trying the solo travel thing in a country where I don't even speak the language ("little nervous" meaning by the time I reached the airport, I was completely convinced that I had forgot my camera, boarding pass and all my ticket information). The paranoia was unnecessary though. The trip went perfectly and one of the best trips I've ever taken. Here's part one of my trip: my first morning in Italy spent exploring Milano while waiting for my train to the "main attraction" of the trip, Firenze.

Two feet, a new city, and an entire morning to explore it with no itinerary. Despite waking up to a cold (surprise! what a great time to get sick!) and running on far too little sleep, it was impossible to not be excited to get up and see Milan. At first glance, though, Milan is dull and gray, a monotony of heavy stone buildings, especially on a cloudy February day where the sky matches the dreary buildings. The center of Milan made me feel insufficient, surrounded by high-fashion and glamorous Italians. But a little wandering and the city started to grow on me. Away from the center, the city begins to feel older, more Italian, more livable. Suddenly the streets were alive with well-dressed men in business suits ducking into offices in dramatic stone buildings with charming patios. I wandered into a park behind a castle, and instead of tourists found a woman pushing her baby carriage with one hand and holding a book with the other, slowing occasionally to a complete stand still when ever she got too absorbed in her book. Afternoon arrived and the neighborhood cafes began to fill with friends meeting for lunch. I almost got run over by a pack of 12-year-old boys on scooters. This is what I love most about traveling- when a city offers you a glimpse of what it's actually like to live there.  Nothing special, just an everyday, overcast, February Friday morning in Milan.

Starting the day in full-on tourist mode, drinking a cappuccino from the rooftop terrace of the
Rinascente department store and admiring the Duomo cathedral next door

Piazza del Duomo

Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, one of the world's oldest malls

Castello Sforzesco

One of Milan's many hidden patios

This is what I imagine UNH would look like if it was in Italy

Los Juegos Olimpicos, a new perspective

When no one in Spain even seemed to be aware that the Olympics were starting, I realized that a Spanish perspective on the Olympics was going to be very different from what I was used to. America loves the Olympics, and why wouldn't we? What's not to like about watching your athletes win gold medal after gold medal after gold medal? Things are different in Spain though, especially for the Winter Olympics (It is March, after all, and I haven't seen a single flake of snow all winter). Spain has NEVER won a medal in the history of the Winter Olympics. Never. In the US, I always felt like the world stopped for two weeks as we all fell in love with the athletes and their stories. Not so much here in Spain!

Even if they're not medal favorites though, the Spanish athletes still get a lot of love during the broadcasts. Since there were only 20 Spanish athletes or so at the Games, they all got a personal introduction during the Opening Ceremony, with a photo, their name and sport. Every event with a Spaniard competing in it gets televised (the downside of this is when the poor athlete doesn't do well. One girl fell in the cross country skiing race and they replayed it ALL NIGHT LONG because she was the only Spaniard who had competed that day and they had nothing else to show).

In the US, I think we tend to forget about the athletes who are living their dream just by competing at the Olympics, since we have so many gold-medal-winning-athletes to focus our attention on. When there's only twenty athletes though, you get to hear about some of the more "ordinary" ones and how hard they worked to get there. There was an article in the newspaper here about a man who lives not too far from me who was competing in biathlon. He had been a triathlon athlete, but had to stop training a few years ago due to the economic crisis and get a "real job" as an engineer. The only way he could "train" was by designing and building his own pair of roller skies and rollerskiing to work every morning. He found out 10 days before the Opening Ceremony that he would be competing in Sochi.

The commentary was also incredibly entertaining. For starters, there was the difficulty they have pronouncing non-Spanish names. The commentators would frequently debate how a name was pronounced. A direct quot from one broadcast is: "It's like those Polish names, way too many syllables!"  Spaniards can also make anything sound exciting. A figure skating fall is so much more entertaining when its accompanied with an "Oooy vaa!"

Watching hockey with Spanish commentary is hilarious.  Words like powerplay, checking, faceoff don't get translated, just pronounced with a Spanish accent. The penalties aren't translated either, so the commentator will say "women body checking" or "high-sticking" then spend the next minute translating that to Spanish and explaining what it means. They call the puck a "disco" and saying "desvió ligeramente" instead of "tipped in" sounds like ballet on ice instead of hockey! All in all, watching hockey in Spanish was a very weird experience.

It was impossible to not feel homesick while watching the Olympics, impossible to see athletes from your country who are so proud of where they´re from and not miss home. Watching your country and compatriots as an outsider and seeing a foreign country from the inside- it was a weird experience, and one I'm glad I could experience.