Who Knew?
There’s something
refreshing about coming to a city with no expectations.
We arrived after a
ten-hour flight over Siberia from Beijing to Frankfurt, a misconnection, and
then a two-hour flight over the Alps and the Mediterranean to Barcelona. To me,
the hotel in BCN was stylish; to Hilde it was functional. I think we realized simultaneously that to
our Western sensibility, despite or because of emerging from the sensibilities
of China, that those were the same thing. The next morning that functionality
was born in on us by the ease and efficiency of the Renfe AVE high speed
train. In the time it would take to get
from one far end of Beijing to its other extremity we got from BCN to our hotel
in Zaragoza. Of course the physical distance
is nearly the same.
Santos comes from near
the heart of the Roman world to a provincial and provisional city. For him it’s a pleasant enough place,
undistinguished: pleasant—OK aesthetically, in its culinary character,
culturally—but not too anything:
perhaps, not anything quite
enough. Dong Nan experiences Zaragoza as
extraordinary: a window to a world she’s only discovered piecemeal. She’d traveled as a tourist in northern
Europe and traveled and lived in the U.S.
But nothing had prepared her for this sun-struck flooded desert,
Mediterranean world.
For me, Zaragoza was a
litany of surprises, introduced from multiple perspectives of students,
Griffin, the Resident Director, my wandering alone and with Zhang Tong and Dong
Nan. An endless string of “Who knew?”
moments:
- The name itself is a corruption of Caesar
Augustus. Zaragoza. Oh.
Right. Now I get it.
- Mushrooms. Here it’s such a central feature of the
cuisine that the names supplant the category—the incredible flavor of a cream
soup floating a pate, the, again incredible, flavors grilled in garlic and
stacked with shrimp on toast. In China
there are the two classes, mushroom and fungus. In Italy, funghi: not fungus but
mushrooms. In the US, a class of food
with doubtful nutritional value for sauces, pizza, and a vegan-correct, if
unsatisfying, replacement for steak. But
here a skewer of astonishing flavor. I
get why my friends insisted that Griffin take us to the mushrooms.
- Pilar.
Pillar. Column Really. I’d known, vaguely, that it was a common name
for women. I’d had a vague sense of the
connection with the Virgin Mary. But
Virgin on a stick? (Apologies. Too provocative for a title, I supposed, and
not intended to be irreverent or iconoclastic.)
What kind of vision is that? And
she’s the patroness of the Iberian world-wide empire. The Virgin of Guadalupe for the
Aragon-centered globe complete with conceptual map-fountain-monument. What better suited to move me into compliance
-
The Ebro and the Roman bridge were a revelation. The river is in flood because of storms in
the mountains. The Pyrenees. I’ve never come so close. And I thought all Spanish rivers were mere arroyos.
And seco at that. And here it was straight out of Goya and El
Greco. In Goya’s home region. How had I missed that?
-The
park by the University where we had a robust beer and buttery olives like I’d
never tasted. And would not have without
the suggestion of Griffin as the color was the dull green of a dirty martini. Fountains in the dappled sunlight dominated
by a colossal Neptune—looking far from home and a little forlorn this far from
the sea—who represents, I suppose Spains dominance of the sea.
-
Fresh Air and sunshine after a cold, smoggy Beijing spring.
