LBB Note #2: Reconnaissance

I looked through the wood-fire smoke up at the twilit Valencian sky. We're not in Texas anymore.

The local Tapas festival was held in our neighborhood of Benimaclet this week for two days, Tuesday and Wednesday. A single, narrow street was filled on either side by stations manned by local restaurant crews. The wood-fire Valencian paella was the first station we came across, and I really wanted to try it. The only previous paella involved Alkali (one of the other IRES guys) yelling at the top of his lungs at a paella standing on a window sill. As we took a seat, I didn't expect much from the tourist trap restaurant, but the paella still managed to disappoint. This Benimaclet paella was something entirely different. A balding older man toiled around the deep and wide matte-black pan, adding last-minute ingredients and throwing more wood on the fire. Ana and her two kids, Paella connoisseurs Jorge and Hugo, gave their personal seal of approval.

Paella in Honduras (and I can only assume in the rest of Latin America) is a fairly popular dish. Whenever you have a large amount of people that you need to feed efficiently, you light up a propane burner and put a large paella pan into the fire. Problem solved. 

As I dug into the heavily spiced mixture of rice and meats with my plastic fork, I realized that what I had know as paella all my life wasn't quite the true Valencian paella. The usual shrimp, calamari, octopus, and other seafood that were in my childhood paella were replaced by grilled rabbit and chicken. Pinto beans the size of AA batteries and green beans were also, unexpectedly, in the mix. I was told by our hosts that this was the real Valencian paella, and the one with the seafood was called Paella de Mariscos. 

Other treats I had at the tapas festival include, most remarkably, clochinas. Clochinas are medium sized clams, boiled in what I can only guess is a mixture of salt, water and lime. Simple. Best food of the trip so far.

From the pot into our gaping maws

Besides food I also tried horchata. "But Carlos, you're Honduran and living in Texas. How have you not tried horchata?", you may be thinking. Well, the Mexican horchata that is common around Texas is very different than the one I grew up with. Mexican horchata is mostly rice based, while Honduran horchata also adds Morro seeds to the mix. Valencian horchata is a completely different drink from both. It's based on a tubercle called chufa, and it has a very different taste than Honduran horchata. It's a much lighter and watery beverage, not as dense and heavy in sugar as its Latin American cousins. Because of this, it tends to be more refreshing but not as flavorful.

Besides the tapas festival, we also visited the beach for the first time. It's fairly easy to get to it from Benimaclet, just a short ten minute tram ride has us pretty much on the sand. The locals enjoy the beach. At any point during the week there will be a pretty healthy amount of people sunbathing, bathing, or drinking half-naked in the general proximity of the waterfront. The water of the Mediterranean is colder and saltier than my Caribbean Sea, and a lot calmer. The water was at a nice cool temperature against the mid-80's of the early afternoon, and the constant refreshing sea breeze from the Mediterranean makes the heat a lot milder than what the thermometer reads.

Our final visit on this particular Valencian tour was Mestalla. The oldest stadium in Spain, and home to both the Spanish national team (sometimes) and Valencia CF, I made it a priority to visit it. It's a historic stadium, being the venue of the opening match of the 1982 FIFA World Cup between hosts Spain and a small Central American nation called Honduras. Honduras tied that match scoring a single goal, and though it happened ten years before I was born; I could tell you the exact sequence that lead to the goal and the celebration that followed. This is not due to the fact that I'm a die-hard Honduran football fan (which I am), but rather that after our first World Cup appearance in 1982 we failed to qualify for another World Cup for almost 30 years. From that day until 2010, the national sports show that ran every Sunday morning would play highlights from that match almost every week, specifically that goal. Every time the National team was very close to qualifying and needed a morale boost, the whole country would reminisce about the time Pecho de Aguila scored against Spain, shocking the world. When the country needed a patriotic boost because times were hard (which was often), they'd go back to recordings of the goal. I'm still convinced to this day that no Honduran alive then doesn't know the exact place they were when the goal was scored and how intensely they celebrated it. It was nostalgia on an astronomic scale. Some of that nostalgia must have rubbed off on me, because I wouldn't have forgiven myself if wouldn't have gone. 

But Mestalla's charm isn't just due to that game. It's also the city's team. Valencia CF has been traditionally one of the strongest teams in the Spanish league. Not quite as big and powerful as the teams from Spain's bigger cities, but successful enough to periodically reward it's supporters with a big win, it's a team with history. I believe that my only major gripe with this trip is that we came two weeks after the Spanish football season ended. I won't be able to see Mestalla in its full glory, with a capacity crowd of 55,000. With plans on the cards to demolish the aging stadium and replace it with a newer one, I'm worried that I won't be able to do it at all.