Category Archives: Europe

Rainy Madrid – food food food


One of the (many) things that connects us is definitely our passion for good foods (and our struggle to stay in shape 😉 ). We love a (very) good glas of wine, fresh fruits of the season, local products at farmers’ markets, aged cheese, iberico jamon, a good piece of steak, and lots of seafoods. Anything that satifies our tongues will win its way straight to our hearts. A good meal is one of the most simple pleasures in life that you can really afford every single day, so why not?!

After Saigon, Madrid is probably our second most favorite city for foods simply because you can find great foods everywhere, in every corner of the city. Our absolute highlight of this trip must be our 9-course dinner at LUA. Even though it’s granted 1 Michelin Star, it’s surprisingly affordable (€60 for the menu and €28 for wines pairing), they even put our water and espressos on the house (which most Michelin-starred restaurants normally take advantage of and charge people a lot for) so the whole experience was very pleasant. We enjoyed every course and generally had a very good time.

But you don’t need to visit a famous restaurant to have a good meal in Madrid. In fact, our most favorite place to eat would be in the local Mercados (markets in Spanish), of which there is one in every neighborhood. In Mercado de San Fernando, we had 3 different kinds of tapas from a Spanish lady, 2 dishes of sushi from a Japanese couple, plus wines & beers for a total of €20. What not to love, right?!

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Mercado de San Fernando
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Iberico jamon

We read about La Carmencita being a really popular spot for brunch of the locals so we immediately wanted to check it out. We actually went here the day after our 9-course dinner at LUA, never thought we would feel hungry for foods again but we did ;-).

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La Carmencita
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La Carmencita

But the most fun place to eat is definitely the infamous Mercado de San Miguel. It is touristy yes, it is a bit pricey yes, but you also get what you pay for, and have fun eating it side-by-side with hundred hungry others fighting for one of the chairs at the few tables they had there. If you’ve never been there, imagine a giant food hall with stands after stands selling small portions of dishes (called tapas in Spanish) running from local to international for between€2 and €5 each. So firstly you grab a (big) glas of wine at one stand (red wine for him, sangria for me), then go around from one stall to the next (while sipping eagerly on your wines) trying one tapa to the next and before you know it, you’re full and tipsy and beyond happy ;-). It’s really fun. And the foods are very eye-catching as you can see in the pictures followed. We came here twice and loved every second of it.

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Mercado de San Miguel, built by the same architect that designed Tour Eiffel

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Less famous is the Mercado de la Cebada, but with much better seafoods choices. Here, you buy seafoods by the kg, have it prepared (simply boiled then springled with sea-salts and olive oil on top) by the vendor, grab the complimentary beer or wine (yes, complimentary because the vendors don’t have the license to sell alcoholic beverages) and eat them right there. It was a long walk for us to get here, but we’re glad we did.

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Mercado de la Cebada
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Mercado de la Cebada

And the cherry on top of our whole culinary experience was this little restaurant right here where we had the most delicious plate of Paella we’ve ever had, anywhere! On Sunday morning, we fought the rain to visit some local center for foods, crafts, and arts we read about. We should have known better (but we obviously didn’t), due to the heavy rain, all food vendors were closed for the day. Having had nothing for breakfast, we were desperately walking around the suburban neighborhood trying to find just anything to satisfy our hungry bellies when we came across this tiny diner. It was a small family-run business, the husband was the barman/ waiter/ everything-doer while his wife running back and fort from the kitchen to bring out new pans with yet another new dishes; the locals coming in and out watching football on the screen, obviously knowing each other by name. This was a very happy ending of our very rainy Madrid story.

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Rainy Madrid – the city


This is our second (unsuccesful) effort this year, after Mallorca,  to try to escape the bad German weather. Magically, mother winter has managed to follow us to Madrid, leaving Munich very warm and sunny over this long weekend so we ended up baring the cold and the rain the entire time we’re here… (In case you wonder.. No, we didn’t have any luck coming back home because, of course, the bad weather followed us home!).

Upon booking our flights, I started imagining us sitting outside everyday drinking one sangria after another and taking long walks in t-shirt and sandals. But none of that happened, to our (mostly my) despair! Anyway, after swearing like a hundred times (me) and trying to make plan B (him), we think we managed to make the best out of it (we even went to the Museum Reina Sofia though we’re not museum people at all, but what else should we do?!). We spent lots of time in bed ;-), managed to see a bit of the vibrant city (enough to like it), and ate a whole lot. You can really say the foods has saved this trip. Madrid is definitely one of the best city for culinary experience in Europe that we will for sure come back for more.

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Sunset dinner with panorama view on our first night

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Our dream home
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Retiro Park

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Crystal Palace in Retiro Park

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Basilica of San Francisco el Grande
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Basilica of San Francisco el Grande

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In front of Museum Reina Sofia waiting in line
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Museum Reina Sofia
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Inside Museum Reina Sofia

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Spring in Mallorca: Tramontana mountains


Leaving Palma in the early afternoon still left us with enough time to take a short trip into the Tramontana mountains and the village of Caimari north of Palma, famous for its olive oil, a tip from a young Mallorcan lady that sit next to us on the plane. Little did we know what the whole village was completely abandoned on the day before Easter Sunday. No shops were opened and noone in sight. We wandered through the whole village feeling like beeing in a scene of The Walking Dead, a serie we were so addicted to lately ;-). With not much to do, we decided to drive further onto the mountain and headed to the Lluc Monastery.

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The only photo we took of a church tower in Caimari

The road to Lluc is pretty narrow and curvy, it was also quite popular to mountain bikers, who were everywhere, so I can’t say it was a fun drive. Besides, I had to shift the gears so often that I had a sore leg the next day, a clear sign of degenerated muscles caused by always driving cars with automatic transmission ;-).

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Olive trees in the main entrance of Lluc

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Spring in Mallorca: Palma


It was a very last-minute decision to go on this trip. We were so tired of the cold weather in Munich that we were so desperate to get on just any flight heading South, but it wasn’t easy to find anything last-minute for Easter weekend. After 2 days of desperate searching for just anything/anywhere in hope for a little sunshine, we took the last 2 available tickets and headed to Mallorca for a Friday-to-Monday weekend, though we never wanted to come here.

Why?
Forgive me if I’m being judgemental, but Mallorca is very popular among all-inclusive party-goers who do nothing but sunbathing all day and partying all night, not the kind of people we want to bump into on our vacation.

So why didn’t we start planning earlier knowing everywhere would be booked out on Easter weekend?
Well, our schedule this past half year was so crazy we couldn’t fit any trip into it. Thus, I had an OP on my foot just a couple weeks ago that did not really allow me to go anywhere. But when did that ever stop me..

Did we like it at the end?
Totally. We had 8 hours of sunshine every day and even though it wasn’t warm enough for swimming, we spent most of our time outside and just soaked it all in. We also opted to stay in Porto Petro (on the east coast of the island) to be able to “escape” the crowds and have enough privacy to relax and enjoy ourselves. Since I could not walk for long, we also kept our touristy activities at a minimum level. On Saturday, we rented a car and took a little tour to Palma and other villages on the west coast. The rest of the time was spent doing not much, exactly what we needed.

What were our impressions?
All good. Porto Petro is a tiny village with a small port, very quiet and tranquil. Palma is touristy, as expected, and its harbor is about one of the busiest in Europe. But it also has a nice old town quarter that reminded me of Barcelona, and the close proximity to both the beach and the mountain is a plus. The whole island is full of olive and fruit plantations with a very typical Cote d’Azur flair: a little rusty, a little abandoned, but very chic. On top of that, the water is crystal clear.

Would we come back again?
Definitely. The island is huge and we only got to see a small part of it (J sailed around it once in a week but he only knew it from a sailor’s perspective), so we can totally see ourselves coming back here for another long weekend in the future.

Here are some photos J took of Palma on our sightseeing day.

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