To Barcelona, Part 3

April 27, 2006 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

Between that and my cold, I got a very poor night’s rest. After breakfast I went back to sleep until it was time to check out and move on. We reached our destination around 2 pm. Javier met us and let us into the apartment where Enrico will be staying for the month, near his own home in Sant Cugat, a small town within easy commuting distance of Barcelona. Once we’d dumped our stuff, he took us back to his place, where Maria gave us an excellent lunch of lentils with sausage and sliced beef with a garlic-onion sauce (though the meal was great, she apologized for the lack of fresh vegetables – they had just returned themselves from visiting relatives for Easter).

That evening we walked around Sant Cugat and had a meal of tapas and salad at a small bar/restaurant. We deliberately sat in front of the sliding glass door, to get as much fresh air as possible. Spain’s recent anti-smoking law permits smaller establishments to choose whether to allow smoking, while larger ones must create a separate smoking section. Since most restaurants and bars aren’t very big, in practice this means that very little has changed: few have decided to go non-smoking, and the Spanish smoke even more than the Italians used to. So it’s difficult to find a restaurant not full of smoke, and in my lung-congested state this was even less appealing than usual.

The next morning we met Javier at the Sant Cugat station to take the commuter train to Barcelona. We first went to the math department where Enrico will be working and saw him settled into an office etc. Ross and I did a bit of shopping, then bought tickets at PlaÃ§a Catalunya for the Bus Turistica.

This costs 22 euros for a two-day pass (they give you a book of discounts to various things, some of them useful). It would probably have been cheaper and more flexible to get a day pass for the subway, but the weather was gorgeous and I was still feeling very tired and coldy, so riding around in the sun on the open upper deck of a bus was very appealing. You can get on and off the bus at any stop, but, to really see everything efficiently, you need to plan the trip better than we did.

Enrico joined us and we set off on the ruta sud (southern route), which actually first went north up the big avenue where the two famous GaudÃ houses are located, then around to the west west and down to the waterfront. We stopped at Maremagnum, a shiny new shopping mall, mainly to use the restrooms, then walked up to La Rambla, looking for lunch.

La Rambla was the wrong place. The cafÃ©s with sidewalk tables are all horrible tourist traps, and so was the restaurant we eventually chose – they wanted to charge us 45 euros for a mixed plate of tapas for two. We don’t mind paying well for good food, but paying too much for mediocre food is deeply irritating. We selected the cheapest things on the menu. I had fried eggs with french fries and chorizo – the latter being good, I probably had the best meal of the three of us.

Travel Tip: Don’t eat in touristy areas, especially not La Rambla.

continues in part 4

travel

To Barcelona, Part 2

April 26, 2006 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

Part 2, continued from part 1

We stayed that night at a chain hotel in the suburbs of NÃ®mes. I was amused to note that French suburbs look exactly like American ones, with strip malls, motels, and fast-food joints (and many more MacDonald’s than we have in Italy). The main difference is that the signs are in French.

Easter Sunday started with a panic: we were almost out of gas, and couldn’t find a manned, open gas station. There were some automated ones, but they would not take cash, only French bank or credit cards (at least they had signs saying so). We drove around in a state of increasing nerves and bad temper for nearly an hour before finally finding a BP station with a live cashier.

Travel Tip: Always be sure to fill the gas tank the day BEFORE any major holiday.

After that, we were so irritated with NÃ®mes that we did not, after all, stop to see its perfectly-preserved Roman arena, but drove on to Spain. Somewhere along the way we ate the remains of our patÃ© and cheese at a roadside rest stop, along with a fresh baguette purchased at a truck stop – one thing to be said for France is that it is impossible NOT to find a fresh baguette, any day of the year.

At the truck stop I saw a lovely scene that I will forever regret not being quick enough to photograph: a burly, pot-bellied trucker in a muscle shirt and shorts, seated at a table in front of his huge truck, lovingly grooming a tiny Yorkshire terrier.

There is now no passport control at the France-Spain border, though the structures still exist and everyone slowed down on the French sides, for reasons unclear. Of course the highway signs all changed language, which caused me to reflect that, in a world with no political boundaries, such abrupt changes would be highly artificial – rather than sharply split languages, we would likely see a continuum of dialects. The Catalans protest that Castillian Spanish is an “imposed idiom” in their region, but I couldn’t detect a huge difference between the two. My impression was later confirmed by Enrico’s mathematical colleagues, Javier and Maria, who are not originally from Catalunya but said they could understand the language perfectly after only a few months there. Their three daughters are schooled in Catalan, with Spanish and English as secondary languages.

We spent the night in San Feliu de Guixols, at the Eden Roc hotel, whose claims to fame are a stunning location on top of big red rocks on the sea, easy access to golf and tennis, and an attached “health center” offering massages, sauna, ayurvedic treatments, etc. This last interested me, but the center was booked solid, so we didn’t get to enjoy any of these services. The hotel owner gave us a discount to compensate for this disappointment, and warmly urged us to come back again. The included buffet dinner was good, the included breakfast somewhat less so (awful coffee – it takes a lot to make up for that).

The bed, or rather, the bed/pillow combination, was also uncomfortable. American hotels give you so many pillows that you have to push some of them off the bed to make room to sleep. Most European hotels (at least in the categories we can afford) give you one pillow, so flat as to be nearly non-existent. I sleep on my side, and these pillows don’t give me enough lift to get the weight off my shoulder joint, so I get very sore. I guess I will have to start bringing my own pillow – something I have seen Americans inexplicably do even at well-stocked American hotels!

Travel Tip: If you’re fussy about sleeping comfort, bring your own pillow.

go on to part 3

travel

To Barcelona

April 25, 2006 Deirdre Straughan 5 Comments

Enrico is spending a month at the University of Barcelona, doing mathematical research with a colleague there. Since Ross had a long Easter break, we decided to accompany him there and see a bit of the city.

We left Lecco on Good Friday afternoon and reached Cannes for a late dinner with the family of friends of Ross’, there from Lecco on holiday. It was a lovely spring day, so I was miserable with allergies all the way, and when I finally got to bed that night was exhausted from sneezing for hours. (This triggered a cold or something which dragged me down for days and weighed heavily on the whole trip.)

The next morning we explored Cannes, stopping in a supermarket to buy French goodies for lunch: vacherin (my favorite cheese in the world – soft, smelly, and wonderful), patÃ© de foie gras, and various terrines. The cashier, wrongly assuming that we did not understand French, made snide comments about tourists who always buy the expensive stuff for their picnics. We needed a knife, which was eventually supplied by an open-air antiques market on the waterfront piazza – eight euros for an elegant remnant of some former grand hotel’s silver cutlery.

We drove on down the coast, stopping to eat our picnic within view of a famous house that I’ve seen in architectural magazines – can’t remember the name or who designed it, but it’s all weird humps and round windows, like a hobbit dwelling built into a cliff.

We stopped in Avignon for a stroll and coffee, but didn’t find it sufficiently compelling to stay the night. We drove on to NÃ®mes, where we had an excellent dinner at a tiny, family-run restaurant called Le MÃ©nestrel. Ross and I both had the “MÃ©nestrel” menu – four courses for 30 euros, starting with a melt-in-your-mouth pan-seared foie gras with a sauce of reduced balsamic vinegar. The main dish was steak with a pepper-wine-cream sauce (why are Europeans always surprised that I like my steaks bloody?), followed by a soft cheese with walnuts, then a sampler of desserts, of which my favorite was a violet-flavored creme brulee. By then I had eaten so much that, regretfully, I actually left behind some chocolate mousse.

go on to part 2

Italy travel

Reflections on Travelling in Italy

April 25, 2006 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

One impression I had of both France and Spain, at least the parts we were in, is that many commercial districts look somewhat seedier than similar areas in Italy. I can’t quite put my finger on why. Shop signs seem more garish, and sometimes worse maintained (fading paint, etc.), and shop windows often look cluttered and dusty. Somehow, even the smallest Italian shop usually presents a more pleasing face to the world, and even the cheap shops don’t look cheap.

In Italy window-dressing is an art, with the more expensive shops hiring specifically-trained people to do it. How do even the smallest shops manage to look so good? My guess is that there is some innate Italian sense of design, nurtured by the stylish and elegant environment in which most shops find themselves – if your competition looks good, you’d better look good, too.

Italy also spoils you for being a tourist anywhere else. There is very little tourist crap in 99% of Italy, the glaring exceptions being Florence, Venice, and some parts of Rome. Everywhere else in the world you can expect to see stall after stall of statuettes, t-shirts, ash trays, etc. with depictions of local famous monuments – probably all of it manufactured in China.

There are also few tourist trap restaurants in Italy (with the exceptions noted above). And, even in those, the food is usually decent – I suspect because no self-respecting Italian could bear to serve really bad food, no matter how ignorant the clientele.

bio

The Nose Knows: Gut-Level Attraction and Repulsion

April 25, 2006 Deirdre Straughan 5 Comments

Kerry Bailey wrote in his blog recently:

…for some reason I can’t quite pin down I hate morbidly obese people. Just something about them fills me with this unexplainable anger. It’s like this weird sort of intolerance or racism that I’m not quite sure how to squelch. …

It’s somewhat ironic that I, as a gay man, have – in those instances – so little tolerance. Anyone got any ideas as to how to defeat those “ARRRRRRRGHGHGHG urges” ?

…which inspired me to write down something I’ve been thinking about for a long time.

It seems (to researchers, not just to me) that our brains subconsciously recognize people who are fit for us to mate with – or not – and we feel attraction accordingly. One instrument of this subconscious evaluation of fitness is the nose. I began wondering about this many years ago, thanks to experiences with my own sense of smell.

In high school I started “going with” Kris, who seemed well suited to me in geekiness, interests, etc. But an incompatibility soon became evident: he smelled wrong. Really bad, in fact. Not as in “didn’t take a shower,” but there was something about his personal smell that was absolutely repellent to me. I told him about it, and he tried new deodorants, colognes, etc., but nothing helped. I finally broke up with him essentially because of this. I felt mean and shallow about it: I liked him otherwise, but just couldn’t bear the smell of him. It seemed so irrational, and he was deeply hurt.

Years later, I met Enrico. We had a picnic together with the friend who introduced us, ended up at a party together the same evening, went to a concert on the green, then to a disco, then to his place and to bed. It was a hot summer night and, as I lay there with my nose literally in his sweaty armpit, I thought: “This guy smells good!” We’ve been together for 20 years now, 17 of them married, and have a gorgeous, healthy daughter. Obviously, he was a good match for me, and my nose knew it instantly. He still smells good to me today.

Some years later I read an article in the Economist on studies showing that humans unconsciously recognize via smell people with whom they are well suited to reproduce (suited in terms of immune factors – the more different these factors are between the parents, the healthier the offspring). In the words of Cole Porter: “It’s a chemical reaction, that’s all.”

An older woman friend to whom I told this story was relieved to hear it. She was dating a man whom her family thought ideal for her (interesting, well-off, etc.). There was no rational reason for her not to like this guy, and in fact she did like him – but not the smell of him, for which she felt the same kind of visceral repulsion I had felt with Kris. She was past reproductive age, but, nonetheless, her nose insisted that something was wrong, and she couldn’t get past this “irrational” reaction.

I stayed in touch with Kris because he was my Woodstock classmate, and saw him a few times after we graduated in 1981. I even hired him for an internship with the (tiny) company I was working for in 1987. But over the years he got weird and weirder, and I was increasingly uncomfortable around him. He died in California in 1999, having lost control of his vehicle on a highway at 2 am and crashed into a bridge support. An autopsy showed that he had had a long-standing brain condition that probably caused a seizure that night. I never got all the details, but another classmate who had stayed close to Kris (and who informed me about his death) was told by the doctors that a symptom of this condition would have been shaky hands – which friends had noted back in high school: we used to tease him about drinking too much coffee. This friend also told me that Kris’ co-workers had once complained to him about Kris’ smell and asked him to tell Kris to shower more often!

So it wasn’t just me, and it wasn’t just “he’s a weirdo” – there was something physically wrong with Kris which eventually killed him, and many people’s noses told us to stay the hell away, even when we liked him as a person and mating wasn’t an issue.

The conclusion I draw from all this is that perhaps we find certain people repellent (odoriferously or visually) because they are unfit for us to mate with, and our brains subconsciously know it and try to surface this knowledge: “No! Stay away!” This reaction is “irrational”: we don’t really expect to reproduce (or even come close) with everybody we meet. But these instincts are very old and ingrained, for good reason. Human beings (like other animals) have been selected by evolution to find attractive those potential mates who are reproductively fit; the traits that make people beautiful to us are (sometimes misleading!) signs of reproductive health.

I suspect that the converse might also be true: that we find certain traits (such as obesity) repellent because we have evolved to perceive those traits as symptoms of underlying problems (genetic or disease) that make a person less fit to reproduce.

This doesn’t mean that I believe obese people are genetically “wrong” or diseased, nor that I condone treating people badly based on their weight or anything else. But perhaps it explains why sometimes, in spite of our best ideals and intentions, we react negatively to some people, and can’t even explain why we do.

Countries Beginning with I

To Barcelona, Part 3

To Barcelona, Part 2

To Barcelona

Reflections on Travelling in Italy

The Nose Knows: Gut-Level Attraction and Repulsion

Deirdré Straughan on Italy, India, the Internet, the world, and now Australia

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Deirdré Straughan on Italy, India, the Internet, the world, and now Australia