Over-The-Top Hamburgers

Lisa and I were in Albuquerque a few weeks back to run some errands. At the end of the afternoon, I had a hankering for a quick hike, so we dashed over to the volcano cones that mark the western edge of the city. We hiked up one of the cones and took this picture of a pair of military helicopters just after the sun had set. We were starving after the hike, but we were having a hard time choosing a restaurant that really excited either of us. None of our usual choices really seemed to be right. Out of the blue, Lisa suggested the Nob Hill Bar and Grill. This agreed with me perfectly. It was new, and it met our craving for bar food in a nice trendy, upscale bar.

I enjoyed it so much that I insisted that we return a week later after a hike in Ojito Wilderness west of Albuquerque. Here are a couple of pix of the Ojito Wilderness:

As a bit of background, I recently stumbled into an blog and webcast about all the places to get hamburgers in the Chicago area. It's called, "The Cheeseburger Show." This show is hilariously surreal (thanks to its creator, Kevin Pang). It also showcases the many different burgers you can find out around Chicago (including my favorite, Paradise Pup). In one particular episode, he blew my mind when he featured a cheeseburger at David Burke's Primehouse that was alleged to be so good that it didn't need ketchup (for Episode 2, look here; if you'd like to see the super-hilarious uncensored part of Episode 2, look here). I found the idea that you could enjoy a hamburger without ketchup to be thoroughly preposterous, but not long after seeing this video, I came face to face with the $18 "Dirty Kobe Burger" at the Nob Hill Bar and Grill in Albuquerque. I've changed my mind about the ketchup thing.

The Dirty Kobe is not made of real Kobe beef, but instead from from beef from some local producer that produces beef that is alleged to be similar to that of famed beef from Kobe, Japan. Maybe they use the same breed of cow; I don't know. It's topped with bacon, chili con carne with cheese, fried onions (not grilled, but deep fried with breading), a fried egg, and "beeronaise" (whatever that is). It's all served on a nice sturdy bun. One sane person cannot possibly eat it alone. Lisa and I have shared one twice now, but we were not been able to finish it either time. Sadly, I don't have good picture, but this one gives you the idea:

We discovered two different beers at the Nob Hill Bar and Grill that pair with the Dirty Kobe really well. These are both British beers:

Tonight for supper, Lisa had the idea of making burgers. She also wanted to deep fry some onion rings to top the burgers just like at the Nob Hill B&G. The next thing you know, I decide that I've got to do what I can to replicate the Dirty Kobe. We did pretty good. Ours was small enough that a single person could eat it and only have a stomach ache for a few days. We overcooked the burger and the egg slightly, but no worries: it was great. Again, I don't have a great photo, but you get the idea. And you don't need ketchup. Here is our version:

Chocolate Con Churros

Not far from La Puerta del Sol in the center of Madrid is La Chocolatería San Ginés. Although I am not an expert on the subject, I have been told by native madrileños that the CSG is the world-wide standard for chocolate con churros. It is the standard by which all other churros are measured. It's like the Yankees to baseball. It's Yellowstone to national parks. It's the Louvre to art museums. It's Elvis to rock and roll. It's Everest to mountains. It's El Camaron to flamenco. It's Coke to soft drinks. It's Saudi Arabia to oil. I could go on, but the point is that the CSG is the gold standard.


The churros at the CSG are served plain, without sugar. There are sugar packets at the table that you can add to your churros on your own. There is no cinnamon in sight. The churros are served with hot chocolate. As you can see, it's served in a cup, but it is barely liquid. It's more like warm, thin pudding. It's a very rich chocolate much stronger and closer to dark chocolate than your basic hot chocolate in the US. The churros are fried dough, of course, but are not overly greasy. There is a good crunch and a light, steamy interior. They are satisfyingly crunchy and chewy. You dip them in the chocolate.

Chocolate con churros is a common mid-afternoon snack, una merienda it is called. It is a very filling snack what with all the fried dough and the thick chocolate. It is substantial, but the truth is that you need a filling merienda around 5:00 p.m. to tide you over, because you probably won't have supper around 10:00 p.m. In other words, without la merienda, you'd starve while waiting for dinner.


By pure chance, we stopped for the night one night in Astorga in northwest Spain. Astorga is located along the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgramage route to Santiago de Compostela, the site of St. James' remains (more on this some other day). Aside from the pilgramage business (which was and still is a business), it turns out that back in the 1800s and 1900s, Astorga was one of the main chocolate manufacturing centers of Europe. There is not much chocolate manufacturing in Astorga any longer aside from a few artisanal producers. I guess the Swiss cornered the market somehow. Aside from chocolate, there are a few other interesting sites in Astorga. For example, there is a gothic cathedral for the pilgrams that is famous mostly for being overwrought (pic here).


Right next to the cathedral is the most famous site in town, the Palacio Episcopal (above). It was designed by Antoni Gaudí, a famous Spanish Catalan art nouveau architect who lived around the turn of the 20th century. The building was commissioned by the local bishop to be the bishop's residence, but upon completion, it was deemed so extravagant that nobody dared live there.


El Museo del Chocolate of Astorga.


The cathedral and Palacio Episcopal were interesting, but for us, the most interesting site in Astorga was El Museo del Chocolate. The museum itself was not all that interesting. There were lots of displays of antique chocolate-making mortars and pestles and forms. There were also a very large number of displays of antique promotional items like the one above. The coolest thing, though, was a video that showed the old-school technique that they used to make the chocolate. This was very interesting. Afterwards, the gift shop was also very interesting, because you could sample and then buy all sorts of different handmade chocolates of varying percentages of cocoa. After extensive sampling, we eventually bought some dark chocolates and some milk chocolates, both with almonds. They were all very good, but the milk chocolate had a richer flavor and creamier texture to my palate. The dark was good and flavorful, but a little too brittle and waxy. The brittleness lessened the richness and creaminess that I prize. We also bought package of the chocolate that you use to make the chocolate for chocolate con churros. I think we left the place with five pounds of chocolate (literally).



Here is a picture of Lisa's first batch of chocolate con churros from just a few days ago. It took us five months to get around to making them mostly because neither of us has ever made a churro before. The chocolate came from the bar we bought in Astorga. The churro recipe was from Lisa's brand new Spanish cookbook, Spain and the World Table. The first batch of churros was excellent, but next time, we will omit the cinnamon and probably use one less egg to see if we can come closer to matching the CSG churro gold standard. And the chocolate? Delicious!

Cutre

Here are your heroes at the 2006 Big Shoulders Swim Race in Chicago. My pasty, hydrodynamic body is shaved clean of it's furry outer coat in hopes that I might swim faster. We left for Spain later this same day, and I spent the next three weeks itching all over as my silky coat slowly grew back in. Note the high-quality French-made flip-flops on my feet.



A pixelated closeup of my legendary flip-flops.

Not long into my very first trip to Madrid in 2000, I was itching for some regular exercise. In the prior year or two, I had taken up some informal swimming in Las Vegas. I had not yet risen to the level of formal, United States Masters Swimming-level workouts, but I was getting wet regularly. In 2000, I definitely had the need for more exercise, having ballooned up to my heaviest weight ever (205 or maybe even 210!). Plus, I just had a need to be active. After a trip down to El Corte Inglés in La Puerta del Sol of Madrid, I outfitted myself with goggles and a swim cap. My problem was that it was early January, and nobody had flip-flops in stock. Spain is a beach-happy country, but there is not an abundance of flip-flops in mid-winter. Also, there is no beach in Madrid. This fact is noted in a silly pop song about Madrid that notes that, despite all it's wonders, "Al llegar agosto, ¡vaya, vaya! Aquí no hay playa, ¡vaya, vaya!" This translates more or less as, "When August comes, go, go! There is no beach here. Go! Go!" This alludes to the long-standing tradition for residents of Madrid to go on vacation in August that I have previously noted. You can see a video for that song here.

I don't recall all of the details, but I know that for a short time, finding flip-flops was a high priority. Simply put, flip-flops were a necessity at a public pool in Madrid. Our local pool dated back to the 70s, more or less, I believe. I realize that a large part of Franco's government was fascist, but the public pool in our neighborhood met my stereotype of what a public pool must have been like in communist Moscow circa 1975. I guess totalitarian regimesm, regardless of ideology, share a common style of public swimming pools. The facility was a large concrete structure completely lacking in amenities. There were no lockers, though there was a guy with whom you could leave your valuables. This caused me some anxiety on account of my ongoing, irrational fear of losing my passport. The changing area was a bare concrete room with spigots for showers sticking out of the wall in one corner. The pool itself was fairly decent from a serious exercising point-of-view. It was simply a large, deep concrete rectangle. The water was cold. This was not a pool for playing. It was for exercise only. It was used for lap swimming only. It actually would've been fairly decent setup for me except for the fact that the pool attracted a pretty large crowd. I was by no means a fast swimmer at that time--pretty slow, in fact--but there were so many other swimmers paddling around that it was impossible to get a head of steam before you were climbing up some Spanish matron's back side. Each lane was crammed with 10-15 people trying to get some exercise all at the same time. Unfortunately, there was no system to allocate swimmers of similar abilities to particular lanes. The bottom line is that it was very difficult to get a decent workout in that milieu, and so I eventually abandonded my swimming career in Madrid.

But wait, isn't this all about the flip-flops? Yes, it is. After a day or two (or three?) of searching, we stumbled into musty little variety shop on some side-street. They had my flip-flops. They also had other eccentric knick-knacks, although I cannot remember any of the details aside from stacks of boxes and claustrophocially-spaced, shelving units crammed into the tiny space to allow for maximal offering of merchandise. Nines informed me that the shop was "cutre." For some reason, I've always remembered that word and linked it to my flip-flops. More interestingly, cutre means, in a literal sense, "cheap and nasty or dirty," according to my dictionary. I believe that Nines defined it more like "tacky," but she clarified that for the hip, there was "good" cutre and "bad" cutre. This shop qualified good cutre in the same way that you might think of a cool second-hand shop with lots of trendy, retro clothes and assorted knick-knacks.

The very sad news that I must report is that I lost beloved Spanish flip-flops a couple of weeks ago. They were made in France. Say what you want about the French, but those guys can make flip-flops! Those flip-flops have been a peculiar keepsake of mine for years with many memories tied to their cheap plastic and rubber. The are memories not just in Spain, but from all over the place. In the same sense that I wonder if Floyd will ever die, it seemed to me that my flip-flops might live on forever too. They're both black, after all. I have no idea how I could've lost my flip-flops. I know I had them at the Las Vegas pool one day. A couple of days later, I returned to my locker, but they were not in there with the rest of my gear. I must've left them sitting out on the bench right next to my locker. I find it hard to believe that I would walk away leaving my stuff just sitting there, but I must've done so. I think I also lost a towel at the same time. Sadly, they were not in the lost and found. As excellent as they were, I doubt they could've been of value to anyone else, being old, worn, and most importantly, someone else's intimate footwear. I suspect that the guy who "cleans" the locker room must've chucked them. I'm now wearing some soulless Wal-mart-class of flip-flop that leave me empty and hollow on the inside. For a while, I was hoping that my lost flip-flops might turn up somewhere, but I'm now afraid they're gone.

Hostal Aliste

Hostal Aliste, our home for the first two nights and again at the end of the trip. 3rd Piso = 4th floor to US citizens. McDonald's is everywhere.


This is the view directly across the street from our room in Hostal Aliste. I've looked in vain for my own reflection, but I cannot find it.



Here's a typical street-view of downtown Madrid taken from our room.

We spent our first two nights in Spain in Hostal Aliste, a sort of budget accomodation. There is a lot of action in this area. It is located a couple of short blocks from the Puerta del Sol. The Puerta del Sol (Gate of the Sun) is so-named because at one time, the eastern gate of the city was located there facing the rising sun. The Puerta del Sol is now the central nervous system of the not just Madrid, but of the entire country (and if you ask a madrileño, it is also the center of the Spanish-speaking universe, but don't tell the Mexicans or Argentinans this). There is a marker along the south side of the plaza called "kilometro cero" ("kilometer zero"), which is the origination point to measure all distances to other places in Spain.

Hostal Aliste is also a few short steps from the Gran Via Metro stop. Nines and I once passed through this area late at night when there was a knife fight going on. I was naturally curious, but Nines dragged me out of there cuanto antes (in other words, as fast as she could). I have since learned that such fights can be staged to draw in onlookers who are then distracted while a pickpocket picks them clean. Who knows?

It is also right around the corner from the Restaurante Iowa which I have already mentioned. They have some the biggest, cheapest, and tastiest tuna empandas around.

The other famous site near Hostal Aliste is the prostitutes of Calle de la Montera 50 feet away around the corner. Sounds a bit rough, maybe? Not really. Rick Steves calls them, "the unthreatening prostitutes" of Calle de la Montera. This has been the streetwalker zone of central Madrid for as long as I have known the place, and I believe for much much longer. I didn't take any photos of them myself, but through the magic of the internet, you can get an idea thorough others' pix of the hookers of C/ Montera here, here, and here. I wouldn't say we befriended any of the girls, but we did spend several days at Hostal Aliste at the beginning and ending of our trip. There were several regulars who I am sure recognized us from having been in and out and about so much. They also seemed to take their breaks around the corner from C/ Montera not 20 steps from our front door. Whenever I was with Lisa, they hardly made eye-contact with me, but the one or two times I passed through on my own was a different story. One or two of those who "knew" me actively tried to get my attention while Lisa (i.e. their "competition") was not in the area. Sorry girls. :((

The prostitutes of Calle de la Montera have changed quite a bit over the ten years I have known the place. When I first visited Madrid, there were many short, indigenous-looking girls from Central and South America. More recently, there are more girls from Africa and Eastern Europe, though there is still a mix of Latinas for the traditionalist. These changes have evolved as immigration patterns (legal and illegal) have shifted. These days, there are very many illegal immigrants from Africa and Eastern Europe, while it is getting harder and harder to get into Spain from the New World. My man, Dan Savage, says that there are many sex workers who like their jobs and take the jobs out of choice. I do not believe that is the case for most of the C/ Montera girls. I think they are stuck. You can see it on their faces. They work long, long hours. There were a few girls who were nearly always present when we passed through, day or night.

We arrived at Hostal Aliste around midday on August 30th, 2009, fresh from our agonzing 20+ hour trip from Albuquerque. Tired or not, we had work to do, so we simply checked in, dropped off our baggage and hit the streets. More on this later.

It was the end of the summer when we arrived, which meant that it was still brutally hot in Madrid. There is not much in the way of central air conditioning in most of Madrid. This means that most places are really hot in the summer. It is for this reason that most people from Madrid take off for the mountains or beach in August. Our room did have a small AC unit, but a remote that cost an extra five Euros each night. I was too cheap to pay for this, so we sweltered instead. Even more ironic, for the first two nights we were there, they accidentally left the remote for the AC in our room even though we did not pay for it. Unfortunately for Lisa, I am from Iowa, which means that I did not use the AC. We hadn't paid for it, after all. I cast the situation as an opportunity for Lisa to really experience "real" Madird (as opposed to "Real Madrid," which is the local soccer team).

The Itinerary

I finally got around to reconstructing the actual itinerary that we followed while in Spain 3 months ago. I've also attached a crude map that shows some of the primary towns we visited. Click on it for detail.

Saturday 8/29/09—Depart Albuquerque
Sunday 8/30/09—Arrive Madrid. Eat snails. Bum around. Visit Prado. Chocolate con churros. Tapas in a Basque-style bar.
Monday 8/31/09—Bum around Madrid some more. Plaza de Toros. Egyptian shrine. Palace. Plaza Mayor. Flamenco. Reina Sofia.
Tuesday 9/1/09—Madrid to Salamanca. Street dance in the evening. They played “El Rey.” Tuna band in Plaza Mayor. They played Volver, Volver.
Wednesday 9/2/09—Leave Salamanca in rental Car bound for Leon. Medina del Campo. Tordesillas. Madrigal de las Altas Torres. Sleep in Parador de Leon.
Thursday 9/3/09—Visit Leon. Travel by car along Camino de Santiago to Astorga.
Friday 9/4/09—Chocolate museum in Astorga. Travel by car along Camino de Santiago past Cruz de Fierro. Lunch in Molinaseca. Best tomatoes. Tuna salad. Nice castle in Ponferrada and cool metal sculpture. Extensive backcountry wandering around. Private castle somewhere?? Excellent castle not on map in Castro Caldelas. Lousy castle in Maceda. Sleep in Baños de Molga.
Saturday 9/5/09—Baños de Molga to Santiago. Mass. Parking ticket. Overpriced lunch. Dissatisfied with Santiago. Drive to Porto do Barqueiro. Punta da Estaca de Bares. Tuna empanada in Porto do Bares.
Sunday 9/6/09—Porto do Barqueiro. Walking on sandbars in Ria do Barqueiro. Another tuna empanada in Porto do Bares. Drive northen coast to Llanes. Street dance with fraulein-looking girls doing local dance. Cider. Beach in cove.
Monday 9/7/09— Llanes to Bilbao for lunch. Lost ticket in parking garage. Bilbao to San Sebastian. Return car one day early.
Tuesday 9/8/09—San Sebastian. Beach. Tapas.
Wednesday 9/9/09—San Sebastian to Madrid. AVE to Toledo. Toledo: torture exhibition, cathedral, overpriced beer, and annoying sketch artist. AVE back to Madrid.
Thursday 9/10/09—Day trip to Corboda and La Mezquita.
Friday 9/11/09—Madrid. Jamon de bellota (finally!). El Parque de Buen Retiro. Buy souveniers. Stay up late.
Saturday 9/12/09 Depart Madrid. Arrive Albuquerque via NYC and Salt Lake City

Snowshoeing The Red Mountains

Ice Climbing in Ouray


The Yankee Girl Mine



Lisa Breaking Trail

Red Mountain #2 Mine Ruins

Below the Yankee Girl Mine

We spent the first day of 2010 snowshoeing in the trackless snow of the old Red Mountain Mining District 13 miles south of Ouray, CO. These mineral-rich mountains are literally red and yellow and orange below the snow. This area was once one of the most prolific mining areas in the the US, with literally hundreds of old mines scattered all over. I've seen a map of mine claims in the area, and nearly the whole area has been claimed out. The area we snowshoed was the had some of the richest mines of all, including the Yankee Girl Mine, which produced over $12 million in silver back in the 1880s. Quite frankly, the whole area should be a national park on the scale of Glacier or Yellowstone. It is huge and magnificent. I doubt it will ever happen, though, on account of all the mining claims in the area. There is not much in the way of mining at the moment, but that could change again someday. It's now a paradise for back-country skiers, four-wheel drive enthusiasts, hikers, and mining history buffs. But the whole thing, from Durango to Ouray, ought to be a national park.

There's also a picture above of someone climbing the ice cliffs outside of Ouray.

Moonrise at Bisti Wilderness 12/31/09

Bisti moonrise at dusk.


Bisti moonrise.



Lisa at Bisti.

Lisa towering over a hoodoo at Bisti.

I have to catch a cold once in a while. This is true despite my frequent use of hand sanitizers and my inherent Iowaness. It happened on 12/29/09. I felt it coming on in the afternoon, but fought it down until after swimming 3000 yards that evening. It was all downhill from there. I shambled into work on 12/30/09, but not too determined to be get much done. I had a single memo to write, and then I packed it in for a long day of sitting by the fire alternately dozing or reading the book my parents gave me for Christmas, "Winter in Madrid." I have not blasted through a book in a very long time--not since I started trying to learn Spanish. Back in the old days, it was not uncommon for me to plow through many books each year. As I approached the end of each book, I became more and more withdrawn and somewhat surly if asked to do something simple like answering a question about what I'd like to eat for dinner. This has mostly disappeared since I switched to reading in Spanish, because it takes me months to crawl through a book.

I enjoyed "Winter in Madrid" partly on account of my interest in Madrid, but also because it includes a lot of history about the Spanish Civil War and the years afterwards. This bit of European history has always been a bit brushed over in the US, but it is extremely fascinating. Franco's victory in the Civil War led to Spain existing in a sort of time capsule up until the late 70's. I now wish I could've seen that Spain, because modern Spain has turned its back on the Franco era with remarkable speed. In just the ten years between my initial and most recent visits, I can see old traditions fading fast. It appears to me that "pure" Spanish culture is now rapidly modernizing and globalizing so fast that it will not be recognizable in another twenty years. The iron-fisted effect of the Franco years led to what seems to me to be a sort of museum country as I read about it and hear about it from those who were there. I'm not saying this is a good thing, since so many people were so profoundly oppressed for so long.

Back to my point: After I came down with this cold, I took a day off, December 30th. The next day, New Year's Eve, I was already scheduled to be off so that Lisa and I could run up north for a long weekend. Our hopes were to leave town early on the 31st to visit Chaco Canyon followed by the Bisti Badlands at moonrise to watch the blue moon rise on the last day of the year. My cold interfered, delaying departure arrangements, as did Lisa's job, but we managed to get away in time to get up to arrive at Bisti before sunset.

Bisti is about a remote a location as you can get to in the Lower 48 states. Despite this, it has some notoriety among photographers and desert rats. Despite a first glance that might lead you to believe it is a barren wasteland, a closer look will prove you right but with the caveat that it is also really cool, highly-photogenic barren wasteland. It makes mediocre photographers seem great, especially if you're there at sunset (I wouldn't know about sunrise, but it's probably a good time to be there too). Because of it's notoriety, we ran into a young woman and her presumed father visiting while we were there. My guess is that they were Japanese, but if not, then from some other Asian country. I'm going to pretend that they were Japanese only because they met the stereotype: highly goal-oriented and gadget-happy. It was the first time I heard Japanese spoken out there in the middle of nowhere.

The girl was very friendly. She was very interested in seeing the "cracked eggs" formation. She seemed quite surprised that we'd never heard of them. She said they were a "very famous" formation at Bisti. She seemed quite disappointed that she couldn't find them and that they had only seen a lot of rocks that look like mushrooms (aka "hoodoos"). It is this disappointment that leads to me to label her as a "goal-oriented," because to me, Bisti is all about wandering around on your own without a map to see what you see. In this way, it is all a surprise, and each strange thing you find is all your own. Part of the pleasure is the lack of trails, guidebooks, signs, and maps. She offered us GPS coordinates to the cracked eggs as we headed out into the wilderness, but we were short on time. I didn't want to spend the time fighting a GPS when we had a blue moon to scope out. I'm not sure why she couldn't find them, having the coordinates and all. Maybe her batteries died.

Naturally, I was curious about the cracked eggs. I'm goal-oriented too. I may or may not have seen them on one of my visits to Bisti, but I can't say for sure. Fortunately, I am also gadget-happy too, and so I was able to put internet to its intended use (i.e. answering trivial questions). Here is a link to a picture of the cracked eggs: http://www.naturescapes.net/012008/tv0108.htm

As for us, we didn't get any super-magnificent photos this time around, but we got a few which were interesting. They're up above somewhere waiting for you to click on them to see the full-sized photo. We also got to see a fine blue moonrise.