I didn’t put my head to rest until the sun came up on Sunday morning. I was literally out salsa dancing alllllll night. It started like this…
Cole and I made another terrific dinner..
Remember that Turkey, we boiled it down into a stock.
We used it to cook onions, mushrooms and asparagus and then made a risotto.
And then baked the risotto inside of green tomatoes and topped it off with a thick slice of Parmesan cheese.
Afterwards my friend Lorianne came over for a Vermot and then we went to BIG BANG a bar/dance hall tucked away in the Raval district.
Big Bang has been open for quite a while now, and only plays 1950′s swinging American music. Everybody dresses up rockabilly style and dances all over the place. We managed to steal a little table in the corner where I learned more about Loriann’s life on Broadway (which she left to come to Barcelona). About an hour later my friend Deanie arrived with some friends.
About an hour after they arrived we decided to go to a ‘house party’ at an apartment nearby, which I’d heard about from my flatmates. The house happened to be one of the buildings Cole and I looked at during our apartment search, and it was so cramped and full of sweaty people, smoke, and crazy music. It kind of reminded me of parties in Allston that my friend Jaclin used to take me to in high school. This strange mix of university students and other kids that were too cool for school. Well,
One of them was named Claud, and was the spotlight in everybody’s attention. Claud is very tall, slender, and from Senegal. He speaks Wolof, French and Castellano fluently, some Catalán and English. He had that fantastic disheveled faux-Basquiat hairstyle and overall look that so many people are sporting in Brooklyn these days. He apparently liked our gang and invited us to, yet another, ‘house party’, this time in El Born.
It was a twenty minute walk and along the way I met Josep, an architect and aspiring chef from Barcelona. Well, he told me he was a cook, told Cole he was an architect, but told both of us he was studying at Hoffman, the prestigious culinary school in El Born that was present in the street festival I wrote about. We discussed all kinds of traditional dishes, including Capipota, which I love but cannot find in any restaurant or cookbook at all. We agreed I must host a dinner party and he would come bearing the ‘old soup,’ as he called it.
We arrived at the party, and I’m still kicking myself for not carrying my camera because the view.was.fan.tas.tic.
Because El Born is so near the ocean, you noticed only about fifteen rows of buildings and then nothing further, because it is simply the sea. Directly in front of our balcony, however, was the rooftop of the Mercat de Santa Caterina, and I’ll steal a photo off the internet so you can see…
http://www.mercatsantacaterina.net/
Actually we were higher up than this, which meant we had a full view of the roof and the last rows of buildings before the ocean. But you get the idea.
The party consisted of about 20 – 25 people, many from Latin America, and everybody was salsa dancing! Actually, I spent most of my time learning how to salsa, until about seven in the morning when I left with the ladies and came back home. Today I’m going to go print out my CV, recharge the minutes on my cell phone and then go hand out flyers for my friend’s bar for a little bit of money. Some other stuff is happening but my superstitions are forcing me to keep my mouth closed!
