Obsessions of West and Central Africa!

This post is a long time coming, but we figured we'd wait til the end of this segment of the trip and do one big post covering all 15 countries we've visited so far! Either that, or we've just been lazy. You decide...


I guess we'll start with the three European nations we hit en route to West Africa.


Belgium - Chocolate. That one's easy. Brussels's streets are line with chocolate shops, each one fancier than the next. Luckily, if you hang around long enough and look serious enough about possibly buying something, most of them will give you a free sample!


Gibraltar - "Apes." They're actually baboons, which are monkeys, but all the tour guides call them apes. They were brought over from Africa by army soldiers in the 1800s (I think) for...um, company? Now they run "wild" over the Rock of Gibraltar, except they seem to know exactly where the tourists with the food congregate. Saying Gibraltar's obsessed with them may be a stretch, but hey, we only spent a few hours there and don't really have any other candidates.


Spain - Ham. Or jamon, in the local parlance. Brussels's chocolate shops are replaced in Spanish cities with shops with huge haunches of pig hanging in the window, selling all manner of pork products! In Madrid there is even one emporium called the Museo del Jamon. (It made for a strange gateway to the Muslim world, where pork products are impossible to find...)


On to West Africa!


Morocco - "Berber artisan cooperatives." A.k.a....carpet shops. A guy starts guiding you through the medina (old town) and you think you're just gonna see the sights. Then he steers you to the amazing "artisan cooperative" where you are in luck the Berbers are in town, selling their amazing crafts, just for one day only! (Except that miraculously, they're still there when you walk by the next day, and the next.) Suddenly you find yourself trapped in a carpet showroom, with carpet after carpet being unfolded for your "viewing pleasure" and a slick salesman countering your every objection to purchasing ("Can't carry a carpet around the world? We ship to America!"). And then you start thinking, to your horror, "Hm, that carpet does look nice, and shipping it wouldn't cost so much..." You barely escape. Luckily, this only has to happen to you in one city (OK, maybe two...) before you catch wise and just refuse to even enter such places!


Mauritania - Tea. We thought Morocco was obsessed with tea until we got to Mauritania! A super-strong blend of green tea, fresh mint, and loads of sugar, decanted over and over until your tiny glass is just basically filled with tea foam, and drunk in three rounds over the course of an hour with your new friends, tea is an unavoidable but excellent Mauritanian experience.


Senegal - Pretending to have Internet access. In no other country have we entered so many buildings that had the word "cyber" or "internet" over the door, only to find that the place didn't even have electricity, much less computers or a connection! Senegal's sign-painters are apparently afflicted with an optimism that they will one day have Internet access, and are painting for the future, not the present...


The Gambia - "Happy couples!" For some reason, Gambians like to shout the phrase "Happy couples!" at pairs like me and Andy (i.e. whities)as we walk down the street. This is then often followed by some sort of fairly innocuous attempt to sell you something. We surmise that there was some sort of tourism-promoting PR campaign at some point that proclaimed The Gambia the place for happy couples.


Most of the time it didn't bother us, but one time we had just lost a bunch of money to a malfunctioning ATM (since recovered) and Andy was really mad. Upon emerging into the street, we heard someone call to us "Happy couples!" and begin their approach. Andy barked, "We're not happy right now, leave us alone!" And you'd better bet he did.


Mali - Mud. A lot of West African countries have houses made out of mud, but Mali takes mud art and architecture to a whole 'nother level. It has the largest mud-brick mosque in the world at Djenne, a town filled with other intricate mud-brick buildings. It also sells beautiful bogolan, or mud-cloth, dyed with different pigments derived from, you guessed it, mud. If you don't like mud, you might not enjoy Mali.


Burkina Faso - Mobylettes. The Burkinabe are crazy about their motorbikes, or mobylettes. The nicest store in Ouagadougou is a fancy mobylette emporium. Mobylettes swarm through the cities, and you see pairs that have crashed sprawled across intersections. But if, like me, you are reluctant to take one (without a helmet, down a bumpy dirt road!), people just don't understand.


Ghana - Fish. All of West Africa likes fish, but Ghana is especially obsessed and puts fish in everything. This was a real bugbear to us as we tried to eat street food, because almost every sauce had at least a hint o'fish in it. Every market has a huge, stinky fish section...and it doesn't matter if a town is many miles from the ocean or river--that's what dried fish is for! There is one toll booth in the middle of nowhere outside of Tamale in the north where women with huge baskets on their heads swarm passing tro-tros to sell people dried fish. How this situation evolved, I will never know, but everyone knows the fish-lady toll booth.


Togo - Pate. This is more learned from our Peace Corps friends than directly experienced, but Togolese people are really obsessed with the starchy staple they call pate. It's made of pounded corn and is fairly tasteless (unless you get the fermented version...bleh) but if they have to have a meal without it, they'll go a little crazy. We had to try it, of course...not bad, but we (like most other yovos we met in-country) don't really get what the fuss is about.


Benin - Celine Dion. You know those immortal lyrics, "Near...far...wherever you are..."? Wherever you are apparently includes Benin! We heard Celine playing at the bus office, at the Internet cafe...well, maybe that's it, but it made an impression. Celine seems to be fairly popular in much of West Africa, singing in French, English, and even Spanish.


Nigeria - Locks. OK, we know that Nigeria has a poor reputation for security, but it seems to have an excessive number of indoor locks. In the apartment we stayed in in Lagos, every room had its own lock and key, and in two different hotel rooms we were given a refrigerator with a lock on it. You know, in case those dastardly thieves tried to steal your yogurt...


Central African obsessions:


Cameroon - Beans and beignets. Or maybe that's just what we were obsessed with when we were there. But in every town you can find at least one lady frying up beignets (balls of fried dough) and selling them for 5 cents US apiece. The same lady also always has a big pot of beans (a bowl costs 20 cents) and another big pot of a warm sweet porridge (a cup costs 10 cents). This magical trifecta was our dinner many, many times.


Gabon - Speeding. Good lord, those Gabonese drivers drive fast. Our guidebook features warnings about reckless drivers for several African countries, but only in Gabon do we feel like we're taking our lives in our hands every time we get in a vehicle. And it doesn't matter if it's a taxi or a bus. In most other countries, if a car is driving fast, it will at least slow down as it goes through a village, but not in Gabon--the driver just leans on his horn to warn all the children/goats/other cars to get out of his way. (Honorable mention Gabon obsession: mayonnaise.)

There you have'em, the obsessions from this first leg of our Africa travels! Take them with a grain of salt, of course, and feel free to let us know if you agree or disagree!

Eating like Europeans

The foods of Europe may not be as foreign as some of the places that we go, but we think they are still worth a mention. Even if the foods themselves are known to us Americans, they are often served differently than we are used to. Here is our food week in Europe.

Our culinary adventures began on the plane to Belgium. We took Jet Airways, a rather nice Indian airline. As an added bonus of riding an Indian airline, we got Indian food. Here is dinner--some rice with dal and sag paneer (I had to pick out the cheese and give it to Tara), yogurt (also went to Tara), salad (I got Tara's), chappati bread, and very tasty rice pudding.

What trip to Belgium would be complete without Belgian fries? We had quite a few of them in our single sitting. We choose to eat them with the classic mayonaise, plus a spicy mayo that they call "samurai" sauce.
When we arrived in Madrid, our guests were kind enough to prepare dinner. Serge made this, which looks like a restaurant dish. The bottom is a blended fish and cream, with eggplant in a sauce, topped with scallops. I, unfortunately, don't eat seafood, but Tara still mentions about once a day how much she loved it.

More my style is donuts. This was a donut we found in Madrid, which was a cake donut topped with sugar, and which had some almond extract in it. I am normally not a fan of almond extract, but this one was mellow enough that it was good.

While in Belgium, we bought a couple of fun chocolate bars in the grocery store that we later ate in Madrid. This one is an Indian masala chocolate with some curry, coriander, and spice. The other was a Moroccan green tea and jasmine one. Both were really interesting and good. I love jasmine, so that one wins by a nose.

Regular readers are aware that Tara loves churros. Madrid also has churros, though they do not normally have sugar on them, and they are always served with a glass of hot chocolate. The chocolate seems to be like super thick, super strong Hershey's chocolate syrup. Way too strong for my taste, but Tara loved it.One nice discovery is that almost all drinks in Spain come with free tapas. This is the chorizo that came with Tara's wine at one tapas bar. I generally find tapas too small, but they were reasonably large in a couple of places that we went.

While walking through one of the markets, we discovered this enormous asparagus. Nothing special about asparagus, but I have never seen anything like this at my local supermarket. We barely got away before it attacked us.

While running from the asparagus, we ran straight into this guy, who came straight out of that Animal Planet fishing show where the guy tries to capture killer fish. You can see part of a fisherman still sticking out of his mouth.

At our second tapas restaurant of the evening, we ordered pork loin in a curry apple sauce. It was very good, though a bit small. It may not yet be clear, but they really like pork in Spain. In 1492, they threw out all the Jews and Muslims. Apparently, as a way to really stick it to those groups, they have only eaten pork ever since. Or so I'm guessing.

The small glass of beer is call a cana, and is very popular in Spain. It is also accompanied by a small tapas, which seems to be random. Sometimes you like the tapas, sometimes not.

When we went to Toledo, Tara was able to get marzipan. The one below is in the shape of a ham. Like I said, they really like pork. The middle is apricot jam, which does improve the taste of the less tasty marzipan. Tara ate a lot of it for breakfast.

In an effort to keep lunch cheap in touristy Toledo, we went to a little market. Tara bought some yogurt while I was happy to find peach nectar after its long absence from my life. Sadly, they prefer healthier drinks in Spain than in South America, so the peach nectar did not contain extra sugar. Therefore, it was not worth buying. I am happy that we are now in Morocco, where they seem to have a finer appreciation for sugar.

To warm up for Morocco (and just to warm up in general) our wonderful host in Granada took us to a Moroccan tea house with some friends. Here you can see the tea assortment. I got jasmine and Tara got 1001 Nights. I knew what to expect and Tara did not, but both were so strong that even Tara added copious amounts of sugar. I added whatever twice copious is.

Here we are together with our tea. I know, you aren't reading a food post to see us together, but you can see the cute glasses in which they serve tea in Morocco. This is convenient since I regularly say that I would like a glass of tea and Tara tells me that no one serves tea in glasses. As it turns out, she is wrong.

In many cities in Spain, the streets are lined with orange trees. The oranges are beautiful, but they seem to call your name to eat them. This is a cruel trick. If in Spain, resist the urge to jump up and grab one, climb a wall to reach one, or make your wife squat down so that you can stand on her to get one (no, I didn't do that, but thought about it). As it turns out, these oranges are gross. Incredibly bitter. It would take at least one pound of sugar per orange to border on edible. Afterwards, I had to eat an entire liter of ice cream to get the taste out of my mouth. Spain likes what are called bocadillos, or little sandwiches. Pictured here are a calamari one (probably the best known bocadillo) and a ham one (or course) from a famous place called Brilliante in Madrid. Tara thought the calamari was excellent. I thought the ham one tasted like ham.

Also at the Moroccan tea house, we had these nice pastries filled with hazelnut something. Now that we are in Morocco, similar pastries cost about one-sixth the price.

That's all we have for Europe. We hope to bring you more exotic foods soon. In the meantime, have some ham for Spain!

The rain in Spain stays mainly in...Gibraltar

Where were we? Ah, yes, we were speeding south on the famous European high-speed, er, bus from Madrid to Granada. It was a rather unremarkable journey--Andy and I slept most of the way--but I would like to point out that after all the supposedly "third-world" places we have been, Spain is the first country we've been to where the driver actually lit up a cigarette on the bus. It was parked at the rest stop, but still. Spain needs to catch up with the rest of Europe with the no-smoking-indoors rules...

The main attraction of Granada is the Alhambra, and what an attraction it is! It's a huge complex of old Moorish palaces, military buildings, and gardens, built in the early to mid 1000s, when Arabs controlled southern Spain. Here are some pics.

Great view of Granada and the surrounding hills from atop the Alcazar:

Best ceiling ever:

One of the many lovely courtyards in the palace complex:

Star-shaped ceiling dome with windows--note the fantastic blue color in the ceiling details:

We were lucky to have beautiful blue skies sandwiched between two days of rain in Granada!

Bottom line: If you ever go to Spain, make sure to visit the Alhambra. It was my favorite place on my first trip there in 1999, and probably my favorite again on this one. So cough up the 12 euros, and get there early in the day (tickets were sold out by 1PM the day we went, and that was in the relatively quiet winter season...).

After our visit, we made our way to our second couchsurfing host of the trip! Gabriella is an Italian astrophysicist studying in Granada, and she has a great apartment down an alley in one of the old parts of town. We couldn't have asked for a better host--right away, she proposed taking us to her favorite part of town, the old Moorish part that we would never have found on our own. Best of all, it had a great view of the Alhambra from afar. Check out the snow-covered Sierra Nevada mountains in the background.

We then met up with two of her astrophysicist friends and went for Moroccoan-style tea and sweets at one of the local teterias, or tea shops. There is a whole street of them in Granada, aptly named Calle de las Teterias. Andy will post pics from that outing in our next foods post. Everyone was so nice to us, and didn't even try to strangle Andy when he quizzed them on all the "discoveries" they are or aren't making about space.

That night, we found ourselves staying up too late yet again sharing a wonderful homecooked meal and conversation with Gabriella and another friend of hers (he gave us Morocco travel advice, and we taught him some more English swear words--good trade!). Meals are wonderfully epic and social in Spain. Then we bedded down for a few hours. One of my favorite things about beds in Spain is that they have one pillow, no matter what size the bed is--the pillows are just always made long enough to fit.

We had bought tickets for the 7:15 AM train to Algeciras, so we needed to be up and out early. When we got up, it was still dark and wet from the overnight rain. As we walked to the train station, we passed plenty of other people...still out from the night before! Most of them were hitting the all-night schwarma shops, getting their post-clubbing drunk food. Those Granadanians are party animals, I tell you.

Turns out that the 7:15 train on a Sunday is not the most popular train in Spain. We had a car all to ourselves and settled back for one of the prettiest train rides I have ever been on, four hours through the south of Spain. We passed many Irish-green fields and olive groves...

We finally arrived in Algeciras, found a hotel room, dropped off our stuff, and headed off for our final excursion in Spain...or, I should say, in the UK. We were off to Gibraltar!

In case, like me, you didn't really know much about Gibraltar, here's the short version: The rock of Gibraltar is a giant limestone rock jutting out into the Mediterranean. It was considered by the Greeks to be one of the pillars of Hercules, and has been of military importance (and therefore sacked) for centuries. The British got ahold of it in the early 1700s, and never gave it back, so, now it's basically a British military base and colony of 30,000 people sticking off the bottom of Spain.

You have to go through (a very lax) passport control to get into the town, and once inside you can get pounds sterling out of the ATMs, buy fish and chips, and pose for silly pictures with Britannica such as this phone booth:

So, here is the famed rock. Note the fog. The rain finally caught up with us in Gibraltar...but it was on and off all afternoon, and amazingly, whenever we were visiting an outdoor part of the rock, it stopped raining! We really had the best luck with weather in Spainbraltar.

The bad weather led to strange lighting that made the views from the top of the rock incredible. I think this is one of the best pictures Andy has ever taken. Way off to the left of this picture is the Mediterranean and Africa, while to the right the land you can see is Spain. It was cool to gaze out toward Africa the day before our voyage there.

The options for getting to the top of the rock are few and expensive--there is a funicular, but it costs 20 or 30 euros per person and closes in the rain. We ended up paying a little more than that for a 2-hour taxi tour, stopping at all the highlights. Pricey, but apparently it was Andy's dream since childhood to visit Gibraltar or something, so it had to be done.

In addition to the views, there were other cool bits of the tour. We visited some limestone caves that were very impressive (well, except for the endless loop of Theme from Canon in D that is piped in through a sound system in there...sigh).

And, of course, there are the apes. The British soldiers brought some apes from Africa to Gibraltar as pets back in the day, and now there are five or six families of 60 baboons each living wild up there. Well, "wild"--they hang around in certain areas waiting for tourists to come feed them.

Here you can see a shot of two apes. The dominant is sitting on top of the submissive one.

There were also military tunnels to visit, and an old Moorish castle that had been sacked a huge number of times. On the ramparts of the castle, we discovered another fascinating bit of wildlife: a slug.

We returned to Algeciras for a quiet night--it's the big port city, but there's not too much of interest for tourists to see or do there. The next morning, we slept in, then walked a few blocks to the port, and paid 20 euros each to get on the next passenger ferry to Tangier, Morocco...

...which is a whole new world (yes, the Aladdin reference is deliberate). More on that soon!

Northern Spain...with a side of Brussels

Hello there, and welcome to Andy and Tara's world tour...part deux! Our plan for this part of the trip is to spend 7 or 8 months backpacking around Africa, then on to India and Asia. But first, we managed to squeeze in a very whirlwind tour of three European countries.

We officially kicked things off almost a week ago with a flight from NYC to Brussels, Belgium, on Jet Airways. Yeah, we'd never heard of them before, either, but they had the cheapest deal to get us to Europe. Turns out that they are an India-based airline, which means we got Indian food for our dinner on the plane. That made it pretty much the best international flight I've ever taken.

Also, there were the little TVs at every seat with a decent selection of both Hollywood and Bollywood films. I chose to finally watch "Up," and therefore spent the first couple of hours of the flight almost bawling in my seat. (Oh, and marveling at how they totally ripped off Angel Falls and the Gran Sabana in Venezuela for the fictional setting of the movie!)

Anyway, on to Brussels. We spent 7 hours there, and that was quite enough time to see pretty much everything there is to see in the place. Not the most exciting city in Europe, but not a bad place to spend a long layover, either.

We found this guy outside of the comic strip museum. We assume that he is a famous Belgian cartoon character--can anyone confirm this?

The cathedral was free, and it was freezing outside, therefore we visited it. It was stately and, you know, cathedralesque.
Brussels's top tourist attraction is probably Manneken Pis, a statue of a little boy peeing. Or I should say fountain, since the water comes out of his weenie. Andy had been hearing about this statue for a long time and was seriously disappointed at how small it was. I had warned him not to get his hopes up!I had been to Brussels with my sister (hi Brooke!) in 2002, so I had seen a lot of this before, but I don't think Brooke and I ever made it to the EU Congress building. Andy and I did. You can't really tell from this picture, but it's super-modern and looks kind of like a giant space vessels plopped down in the middle of more medeival settings. Also, it has a duck pond out back, probably so that the French have a constant source of fresh foie gras.
So, add in some chocolate and Belgian fries, and that was Brussels. We jumped on our connecting flight that night and arrived in Madrid around 10PM. Then it was off to our couchsurfing hosts, Melanie and Serge, who are awesome. And not just because they had a gourmet dinner on the stove (people eat late in Madrid!) and insisted we partake. We had so much fun getting to know them, that suddenly we realized hours had gone by since we'd arrived, and it was time for bed.

It was raining in Madrid the night we arrived, but the next day was mostly clear. After stopping by the cathedral (free, so we went in) and the Royal Palace (not free, so we passed), we headed for the Retiro, Madrid's huge central park.

Some of its highlights were the Palacio de Cristal, a beautiful glass palace...and the troupe of peacocks that roams in the northern part of the park.
Madrid also has fantastic art museums. Melanie and Serge turned us on to the Caixa Foundation museum. In addition to having an amazing free exhibit of the contemporary Spanish artist Miquel Barcelo, which we loved, it has a neat vertical garden outside. It also afforded us our very first elephant siting of the trip!
Nearby is the Atocha train station, which has a mini botanical garden inside. You can check out the turtles while waiting for your train.
That night, we visited the Prado during its free hours, and went out for tapas at a few different places. More on that in the food post. The next day, we did a day trip to Toledo, a medeival city an hour away from Madrid.

The cathedral cost a whopping 7 euros each to visit, but it was pretty impressive. Note the famous stained glass window.

It also has this very cool structure in the center. We forget what it is called, but it was very fancy.
We also visited a synagogue in Toledo (they had a thriving Jewish population until Spain threw the Jews or forced them to convert out during the Inquisition), went to a couple of museums with lots of El Greco paintings, and I ate marzipan, for which the city is known. Yum.

That night, back in Madrid we hit the Reina Sofia modern art museum during its free hours (we love the free museum evening hours!) I forget the artist, but these were some fun ballet costume concepts on display, along with many Picassos, Dalis, Miros, and other works.
Here we are with our hosts, Serge and Melanie. Their apartment really felt like home for the three nights we were there. Serge is an incredible chef, hence the wooden spoon held aloft. We hope that they will come cook for us...I mean, visit us, one day in America when we have a spare room!

Then we took off for Granada, which I'll have to post about another time, because my time here is up. We are off to Morocco in the morning!