Janet Haven: We're not good tapas people: Andalusia, Part II

Setting aside all the deeply, deeply serious clash-of-civilizations rumblings in my other post on last week's trip to fabulous Andalusia, Favorite Husband and I also had a truly excellent time. The week included two of my absolute favorite things: food that I don't usually eat and public celebrations that I don't really understand.

On the food side of things, Andalusia is the land of tapas. Although I haven't lived in the United States for many years, I get the impression that tapas bars were cool once, but have now gone the way of the Squirrel Nut Zippers (or have been replaced by the more urbane-sounding "small plate restaurant".) Anyway, woe is to you if you're not sitting in a tapas bar in Jerez right now, eating a plate of oily artichoke hearts, or a chickpea-and-chorizo-and-cabbage stew or a still-sizzling platter of calamari frito. Southern Spanish tapas is unrepentantly meaty, deep fried, fat-laden, salty, glorious. And it's cheap. And it's almost always accompanied by plates of gorgeous local olives (the endless varities of which baffle and delight an olive-lover like myself -- personally, I always tried to find places that served "gordo", the fat green olive approximately the size of large duck egg) and elegant small glasses of icy beer or the Manzanilla sherry of the region. It is joyful eating, where the plates keep coming, and everyone around you looks excited at the prospect of what might emerge from the kitchen, and the tab is chalked by the bartender on the bar in front of you (which he also uses as a tablet for his ponderous addition when you ask for the check.) Needless to say, I spent the week in a state of distracted delirium.

Tapas in Grenada

There was only one problem with the whole tapas deal for FH and me: we're just not good tapas people. When we ordered, we waited impatiently for the plate's arrival, then ate whatever was on it, then started looking up for the next plate to arrive. Around us, professional Spanish tapas eaters stretched small plates of cheese and jamon and olives out over hours of leisurely conversation. FH and I tried, we really did. We talked about our flawed approach to tapas; we attempted different techniques (general distraction, word games, bountiful drinking) to stretch it out. As it turned out, it was impossible for us to overcome our cultural training of prompt and dutiful plate-cleaning at every meal. Over and over again, we failed, looking up from our clamshells, our cheese rinds, our sausage casings guiltily as the waiter tsk-tsked and swept the empty plate away. Not that this put us off the tapas, mind you. Just a note to others who grew up in families with a clearly delineated dinner time that this form of consumption takes (not unpleasant) practice.

Semana Santa float in Triana, Seville

On the public celebration side of things, we managed to overlap with the first days of Semana Santa, Catholic Spain's Holy Week. Seville was in a daily uproar during our four days there, with public works crews setting up road barriers and bleacher seating for thousands. When we visited Seville's famous cathedral, we shared the space with a good-sized truck that was moving giant candelbras around and making lots of irritating echoey truck noises under the tremendous ceiling. It all seemed remote and semi-invasive until Friday night when we ran into one of the first Semana Santa processions in Triana, a neighborhood across the river from the main tourist area in Seville. And then it suddenly became clear why all the bustle, and why tourists come from around the world to see the Spanish Holy Week in person.

What happens is this: every church has a procession, and since there are so many churches, they have to double up, or more. So there are multiple processions every night, and it seems that they all follow different routes, meaning that you can wander the streets after dark and cut across the paths of competing parades. Also, there seem to be some Keystone Cops moments of processions running into each other, with lots of priestly glaring and dueling of incense, followed by miffed resolution, but that may have been part of plan; hard to tell not speaking Spanish. The processions themselves include some combination of elements: gigantic candles carried by kids in suits, priests in full gear, sticks of incense taller than me. The one constant, though, in each procession is the big float. The float seemed to be either Mary, Queen of Heaven or Jesus, at some familiar point in the Easter story (crucifixion, resurrection, Son of God, etc). They are so over the top, so glittery, so be-candled, so shiny and big and heavy that you cannot believe it's been pulled together by a little parish church. Earlier in the week, I observed to Favorite Husband that the Spanish, in terms of fashion, were obviously not afraid of sequins; as it turned out, this translates to Semana Santa floats as well. It was all sparkle; this event is not about understatement. The floats, despite their obvious weight, are also entirely man-powered; rows of men covered with the velvet skirts heave the float through the city streets on their shoulders, moving at a stately pace. Corners present problems, and so each float is surrounded by a second phalanx of dark-suited older men who look like Secret Service, but are instead the guides to the blind float-bearers.

It's not what you think: Semana Santa procession in Jerez

We spent our last night in Jerez, a dusty sherry-making town between Seville and Cadiz. Jerez sees day-tripping tour bus visitors who come in to tour the giant sherry factories and then quickly skip town, which is described in both the guidebooks I had as a pointless and ugly overnight stop. Happily for us, Saveur Magazine, one of my food-related spiritual guides, advised that Jerez had one of the best tapas bars around (the Bar Juanito in the Pescadoria Viejo, and they were right), so I decided that we'd buck the trend and stay on for the night.

On arrival, it became clear that foolish decisions had been made. All the sherry-makers were closed for Semana Santa, Jerez did indeed seem like an abandoned cow-town after the excitement and bustle of Seville, and the police appeared to be capriciously towing all the cars parked near our hotel. FH and I safely stowed our car in a garage, checked in to our surprisingly charming hotel (the Belles Artes: don't stay anywhere else in Jerez if you want to wake up to the cathedral's dome), and agreed to take a quick walk through the presumably decrepit downtown before admitting defeat and spending the rest of the day napping.

Duh. Jerez's jewel-box downtown is gorgeous, and it being Sunday, Holy Week processions were about to begin in earnest. As we walked through the late afternoon sunshine, we were joined by a flood of families walking towards the center to establish their places for the coming processions, by several different marching bands polishing their instruments, people rushing by with eight foot high incense sticks, a truck laden with life-size crucifixes (!), etc. Perhaps most, er, surprising for FH and me was the attire worn by the Semana Santa crowd; in Jerez, most of the processants were dressed in some variety of a loose flowing robe, topped with a very tall pointy head covering with eyeholes cut in it. Some of them were white, some dark blue, and a number were black. In other words, as non-Spanish-Catholics, FH and I had to keep reminding ourselves over the next few hours that we were taking part in a celebration of Jesus Christ's resurrection, not a Klan rally.

Pietà float in Jerez

Four chruches staged processions that night in Jerez; each procession wound its way through the narrow stone streets and ended up at the main cathedral, where the float was dropped off. All the floats were in by midnight, but the street party continued long into the night; tapas bars stayed open, street stands sold sausages and beer and fried everything, and quite obviously, no one was planning to go to work the next day.

Janet Haven

We're not good tapas people: Andalusia, Part II

Comments