LBB Note #6: Revenge of the Spanish

If you asked at any point during my previous note "Why is he eating at an Argentinian restaurant if he's in Spain?", then you are a completely sensible person. That's why the following day I decided to go out to a Tapas bar a few blocks from my flat, again with the roommates. We each picked a tapa (the arrangement where tapas are free as long as you drink does not apply in Valencia), and waited anxiously in the outdoor patio for it to arrive.

Chris ordered fried shrimp in a dry tomato paste. I don't know what that paste had, but that is hands down the best tomato-based food I have ever eaten. Spicy (not hot), flavorful, strong and pairing very well with the shrimp, Spanish food came out strong.

Brandon ordered Patatas Bravas. A fairly simple, basic dish of potatoes in a tomato based sauce (not the same one as the previous one). Again, the amount of flavor put into even the humblest of ingredients (like the potato) is astounding. The sauce was hot and spicy (by European standards), and slathering a good amount of it on the perfectly seasoned baked potato with chives, salt and butter gave you a full palette of flavors.

My dish arrived last, and again I sort of cheated the Spanish out of an original dish. I ordered Bacalao (cod) ceviche. I know, I know; ceviche is of Central or South American origin (Which is disputed up to this day. Most people assume it's Peruvian, but there is evidence both for and against this theory), BUT there were no limes in Pre-Columbian Latin America, so it does have some Spanish aspect to it. The ceviche was good, not great, and I've had better. What was a welcome change to the tried and tested ceviche combo was the bread that came with it. Baked in house, it was still warm from the oven and it had some sort of garlic seasoning on it that went well with the fish.

Accepting the better judgement of both my roommates, it'll only be Spanish food from here on out.

LBB Note #5: AIDICO Visit

If you talked to me at all before I came to Spain and asked me what I would be doing here, I would have told you that I would be working at a company called AIDICO. I would be at one of their many labs and coming up with hazard mitigation techniques for six weeks. That wasn't meant to be.

Spain and AIDICO are still in a tough place. A result of the Paro (which is what the Spanish call their labor crisis, a topic that is impossible to avoid if you spend any more time than an hour here), AIDICO was forced to scale back all of their operations, declare bankruptcy, and leave us in no-man's land less than a month before our scheduled arrival date in Spain.

By now you know we were picked up by UPV, and I'm currently doing my research there. On Wednesday we had the day off  from the university to tour the facilities at AIDICO and see some of the research and labs they have over there. 

I don't know why we took the picture like this. We look like the try-hard Avengers.

AIDICO is on the outskirts of Valencia, quite a ways away from our flats in Benimaclet. It is located in an industrial park and surrounded by research institutions that specialize in other fields, like nanotechnology and logistics. The whole park has a very forward-thinking architecture style.

The bridge leading into the industrial park, with Dr. Yazdani and Ana Barella in the foreground.

The first thing we saw was the concrete lab. Pretty standard stuff; cement, gravel, sand and water, and plenty of mixers rolling and mixing concrete. From here we went to the imaging lab. I was really surprised by some of the ultrasound, x-ray and other imaging devices they use to see the condition of structures without having to tear into them for inspection. 

From there it was on to the fire lab. Here, in a large hangar away from the rest of the buildings, two large furnaces (one oriented horizontally and another vertically) were used to do fire tests on structures. 

Vertical furnance

Door fire test

At AIDICO they also have a simulated project-in-progress that's used to test safety equipment for construction workers. They usually throw off sandbags that simulate real people off three or four stories.

Construction safety lab

We ended the trip with a visit to the Nanotechnology building in a separate area of the industrial park. There they are adding microfibers to concrete structures so they could to analyze the stress and strain forces remotely, as well as corrosion resistant paint on concrete. I saw my first electron microscope, so that was really cool.

AIDICO seemed like it was a bustling and interesting place half a decade ago or so, but now it just seems like a technical ghost town. I'm glad to be over at UPV.

Let's cook, Jesse!

LBB Note #4: Ar-gen-tina!

On the topic of eating too much, this is a food episode from this past Sunday.

There is a fairly large group of South American immigrants in Valencia. I can immediately pick out their accent from a mile away. It's the lisplessness of their Spanish that automatically betrays them (and I can only imagine it gives me away too).

One of the largest groups here are Argentinians. When deciding what restaurant to eat at at the end of the week's supplies of groceries I decided to go to an Argentinian asado place that was a five minute walk from our front door, dragging along my two roommates. Anyone that knows about beef knows that Argentina has arguably the best beef in the entire world. Superior than it's Uruguayan and Brazilian cousins, and, in my personal opinion, narrowly besting Texas beef (Please don't tell anyone I said this, they won't let me back in the state if they find out); if I was stuck on death row and had to pick a final meal, I would bring in some guy fresh off the Pampas to cook half a cow for me.

Walking into the front door we were greeted by the sing-songy Spanish of a mid-thirties guy in chin-length dirty-blond hair. This guy looked (and sounded) as Argentine as they come; we were in the right place.

We ordered the house standard: a parillada for three. The food took a long while to come out, but the just the smell of beef on the barbie and the charcoal beneath it was almost worth the wait. When it finally arrived, it was a pile of sizzling meat on a small portable grill. There were red-hot charcoals at the bottom of the contraption, and the heap of meats on top were spitting and splashing their juices all over the tablecloth. It was beautiful. The IGD (Improvised Grilling Device) radiated its heat all around the room and into our faces. I swear I could feel my eyebrows curling to the heat of it.

There were four cuts on the grill:
-Chorizo criollo is heaven in tube form. Pork and various spices crammed into pig intestine and gently grilled at a different heat than the rest of the cuts.
-Secreto de cerdo was honestly the wild card of the meal. I didn't know anything about the cut except that it came from a pig (It's kind of in the name). Apparently it was the cut that's between the paletilla, which is the front ham, and the panceta, which is in the chest area. It was tender and light without being mushy and just the perfect pork taste.
-Tira de asado was the third cut. It was a cut of beef I'd also never seen before: ribs cut parallel to the spinal cord instead of perpendicular to it. What you're left with is the cross section of four or five ribs, and obviously the meat around it. It was my least favorite of all the cuts, but by no means bad.
-Bife. The pièce de résistance, the main event, the moment we were all waiting for. The best cut of beef in the entire world, this particular one was cooked just right. Sitting between rare and medium rare, the point where it's still tender and flavorful without it being a literal bloody mess, the taste is simply the best. You can't go wrong with ingredients this good.

I also want to send out an honorary mention to the unsung, supplimentary staple of the asado: chimichurri. A mixture of herbs in olive oil, it adds a special taste that no other condiment does.

Tale of the tape, against the three of us I estimate we were served around five pounds of meat.

Pictured: Five pounds of meat.

While we did have to take several breaks, and we did go through about three liters of water to wash the food down; we soldiered on and finished the whole thing (I did have to help my roommates at certain points, but the goal was ultimately reached).

This meal is now the best one I've had in Spain. (The Spanish have to step it up)

LBB Note #3: Chronicle of a Regular Day

It's been a week already since I started working, and I am already getting into a general routine during weekdays (weekends are frankly a mess, a lot more improv). So I'll do my best to describe what a normal day looks like for me:

8:20- Wake up, shower, get ready.
8:45-Walk out of the apartment and take the ten or so steps it takes me to get to the tram stop. Take the tram.
9:00:00:00- Walk through the front door of the lab. Normally at this point we would get the assignment of what we will be working on that day, be it some probe testing, a lecture to brush up on our Electrochemistry, or research on our laptops. We would start that shortly after I walk in.
Around 10:00 or 10:15- Have our breakfast break. (If you noticed I didn't eat when I got out of the apartment. That's because Spanish people normally only drink a cup of coffee and eat a small snack before going to work. They get a 30 minute-or-so break mid-morning to get some small pastry or orange juice.)
10:45-2:00- Finish the work of the day. Get off around 2, depending on how fast we finish what we needed to do.
2:15- Start cooking lunch (at the beginning, I had a bit of trouble with the sea salt they use here; I was mostly putting too much)
2:30-3:00- Eat
3:00-5:30- Siesta (To be fair though, Spanish siestas are usually a bit shorter. I just think that if they're worth doing, they're also worth overdoing). For the siesta I normally commandeer the sofa in front of the TV for about two hours or so. If you were to walk into our living room around these times you would probably find me in a compromising sleeping position and attire.

From when I wake up from the siesta, (which is honestly one of the better things Spanish colonization brought to the Western Hemisphere. Shame it isn't that widely practiced over there any more) the rest of the afternoon and evening is free for whatever I feel like doing.

During the first week when there were some parts of the city left unexplored I would normally go out and look at whatever the locals told me to look at: a walk through the nearby botanical gardens or the old town, taking a tram to the beach and going for a swim, riding a bike through the park*. Now that I have settled in and looked at all the tourist attractions, I normally go out for a run on the beach boardwalk. After the first week and the daily rounds of Tapas I was having every night, I needed to add some cardio into my daily schedule. I don't want to take too much of Spain back with me.

*Valencia's main park is on the original course of Valencia's Turia river. After a catastrophic flood in 1957, city officials decided to divert the course three kilometers south of it's historic flow. In it's place, city authorities founded a meandering park.

IRES Assignment 1: Grandfathers, Civil Engineering and Dragon Curves

I think this introduction is a bit overdue. I have already posted three pretty hefty blogs (I said they were gonna be short, I guess that's not gonna be the last time I lie on one of these) and unless you're a part of my family (which, statistically speaking, you probably are), you have no clue who I am or what I do.

My name is Carlos Miguel Leyva Paredes, and I am a Civil Engineering major.

I am one of six current participants in the IRES program to Valencia, Spain. Paid for by a grant from the NSF, it chose from various community colleges, Prairie View A&M and the University of Texas at Arlington the best undergraduate candidates for a six week research program here in Spain. The program is currently in the second of three years of research. The purpose of the IRES program is to foster both interest in Civil Engineering and further studying opportunities, all the while creating international networking chances.

I somehow made it through the cracks, and now here I am.

Day 6: I have infiltrated their ranks and gained their trust.

When I read about this opportunity at first, I thought it was tailor-made for me. A Spanish speaking country, in fact the one country in the world I was most interested in visiting, at a University that I had previously considered while still in High School. Every single piece seemed to fit in perfectly. Most of all, it was within the discipline of Civil Engineering. Much like how everything came together for this trip, everything in my life has been coming together for me to go into Civil Engineering.

I was born to an engineering family. My mom is a food technology engineer, my dad an agricultural engineer. Some of my uncles and aunts are in engineering, and my maternal grandfather is a Civil Engineer. If I were to pick a single person that was most influential in steering me in the direction of Civil Engineering, it would be him. I'm not alone in this: my older cousin has already graduated as an Engineer and my younger brother is my roommate at UTA. Take a wild guess at what he's studying. Pupi must done something right to have three of his nine grandchildren studying Civil Engineering.

As far as when I knew I was "destined" to study engineering, I could give you the cliche answer that every undergraduate engineer gives. "From the time I was a toddler I loved playing with Lego's and I was really good at math early on...blah, blah blah", and while it would be true, it's not the reason I decided to be an engineer (plus, it's really hard to get people to read through these already, why would I make them even more boring?). The main reasons are much simpler. It pays well, there's a really good job outlook coming out of college and I enjoy it. I enjoy solving problems, seeing a solution where there wasn't one before and doing things people didn't even think of. Showing off my ingeniousness; what's not to enjoy? If among all the money and fun I get to help some people, all the better.

So when I get the degree (if I do get it), what happens then? Short answer is I don't know. If two years ago you would have told me I would be writing a series of blogs while doing research in Valencia, I would have probably laughed in your face. I have a vague idea of what I want to do. I graduate college, get a job, make money, take a sabbatical, come back to school, work a little while longer to save money and then I take that money and set up my own business. Sounds simple, right?

There's a quote in Jurassic Park where Chaos Theorist Ian Malcolm explains that Jurassic Park will fail because it's a simple structure bluntly forced on a complex system.

Dragon curves: look them up.

If a single sentence describing the next ten years of my life isn't a simple structure forced on a complex system, then I don't really understand chaos theory (a completely possible scenario).

What it all boils down to is a manageable amount of time. It's different to plan for ten years than it is for two, and I believe that setting my goals for two years is currently the best thing. In two years I hope to be getting my degree. What happens after that might as well be drawn from a hat. The only sure thing for me at this point is that getting my degree is a vital stepping stone to the next level of things I want to accomplish, regardless of what they may be. And this program is helping immensely to get me up there and beyond.

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. 

LBB Note#1: Fresh Off the Proverbial Boat

I'm currently sitting in a Valencian side-street having a plate of tapas. Besides being a sentence I never thought I would ever type in my life, it's also a good summary of what I have done for the last couple of days.

The flight was exhausting, but honestly not half as bad as I thought. Drifting in and out of a sleeping stupor induced by the constant humming of engines and the impromptu sounds of a flying sardine can of people can tire you out. The shortest night of my life, just three hours.

At sunrise we got to Barajas. Flying over the Spanish countryside was a stark contrast to the monotone navy blue of the Atlantic night. Ravines and hills littered the landscape, and any flat area was immediately occupied by an orchard or a neat lines of crops. The Madrid skyline could be barely seen in the distance, a stop along the way.

I had my first  Spanish culinary experience in an airport restaurant. I know, I know; airport food tends to be expensive and lacking, which is why I decided to go simple: a ham sandwich. The sandwich had two ingredients: Jamón Serrano and white bread. It only took one bite to realize why Spain is so big on ham.

After a short flight I found myself in sunny Valencia.

We arrived in the neighborhood of Benimaclet after a forty minute ride on the metro. I walked out from the underground station and the sterile, controlled environment in which I had been for the past 18 hours. Back into the real world. A gentle ocean breeze, cool and tasting of a hint of sea salt, blew across my face.

Europe did feel crowded (confirming one of many stereotypes pushed on me about Europe and Europeans), eight-story buildings enveloping me and a fair amount of passers-by tending to their Saturday afternoon business.

We must have stood out like a sore thumb. Seven guys of varying hues and descents with a good amount of luggage standing around doing nothing ("Cómo pollos comprados", as they would say in my native Honduras). Ana Barella, our caretaker in Valencia, eventually rescued us from our own awkwardness. We had drawn lots to see who would get what flat, and the three of us that would stay on the west side of the neighborhood went with Ana to see the apartment that would be our home for the length of the trip.

What an apartment at that! Three bedrooms and one and a half bathrooms, complete with hardwood floors, a modern kitchen with stainless steel appliances; stocked with any and all the cooking utensils you may ever need (the stove even had a dedicated paella gas burner), and a big living room (by European standards). The point was hammered home when we opened the roof access door a short flight of stairs up from our front door and were greeted by a panoramic view of Benimaclet with the Mediterranean Sea as a backdrop.

After being shown around the neighborhood and settling in the other three group members at their place (we got the long, long, long end of the stick when it comes to apartments), it was off to a late afternoon siesta. We woke up in time to get groceries and watch a football (soccer) game in the tapas bar downstairs.

Sunday was reserved for sightseeing. After waking up mid-afternoon due to jet lag issues (I swear it was the jet lag, mom), one of my roommates and I grabbed a Metro ride to the south end of the historic district and decided to cut through it south to north. No travel guides, no maps, just pure serendipity. The no-nonsense apartment buildings in Benimaclet were replaced by taller, much more ornate buildings in the downtown area. A bullfighting arena, an elaborately decorated train station; as well as plazas, statues and fountains commemorating various Greek deities, conquering Kings, and religious figures.

The deeper and further you went into old town, the narrower and more crowded the streets got. Buildings were old. Really old. Thousands-of-years old. There was a healthy amount of tourists walking around, and locals were also out on their late afternoon stroll.

The gate into old city. Moat, turrets and all.

The central plaza, with the cathedral in the back.

It was on one of these narrow, winding side-streets that I sat down to have tapas: tempura shrimp on garlic bread and a morcilla montadito.

I could get used to Spain.