Madeira, m'dear?

We've travelled through some of the great petty-theft centres of the world. Rome, Madrid, Lisbon; we've walked, taxied and tubed through them all and never lost a penny. In fact, we've become a little smug, thinking ourselves to be impervious to even the best Fagin. But then we were mugged by Madeiran fruit sellers.

Yesterday in Funchal, Madeira's ultra-safe capital, we visited the Mercado dos Lavradores and shopped for fruit. Here, the weary traveler walks a daunting gauntlet of sellers who use cunning and deception to attract him to their stalls; they say things like "good afternoon, sir, would you like to try a passion fruit?" and "please feel free to sample a pear-banana." It's terrifying, and we found ourselves at a passion-fruit stall where we were mercilessly pressed to try sample after sample of some of the most delicious fruit we have ever tasted. After choosing five or six pieces of fruit for us, the seller let us go - for fifteen Euros, or about 22 dollars. Well, we'd been caught be surprise, and the fruit was good; but we're not the kind of travellers to be cheated twice. Four stalls further down, we bought an avacodo for ten dollars.

We also bought the interesting object posted below: a kind of pineapple about the same size and shape as a banana that is nothing short of miraculous. It's covered in hexagonal scales that fall off as the fruit ripens, which it does from top to bottom at the rate of about two inches a day. Each day, therefore, the fruit reveals just a few kernels of perfectly ripened flesh, a kind of slow-motion, fruity, strip-tease.



We've come to Madeira to recover from an incredible week in La Alberca, Spain. We spent the week at Pueblo Ingles, a language school that promises complete immersion in English to Spaniards, who, for reasons commercial, emotional and perverse wish to improve their English. We Anglos, as we were called, were fed and housed for free in exchange for about 15 hours a day of English conversation with Spaniards who paid in excess of 4500 dollars for the privilege. Sounds pretty labourious, but we had one of the best weeks of our lives here, bonding with men and women who are genetically incapable of being anything less than charming. I haven't danced in at least fifteen years, but at La Alberca, we danced and drank until three, four in the morning. Man, those Spaniards know how to party.

Oh, and the avacodo was worth every penny.

Manna in Madrid

People say that Big Macs taste like cardboard. I happen to think they taste like really good cardboard, but it’s a shame, nevertheless, to eat one while you’re in one of the great food centres of the world. It’s not often that we’ve had to resort to McDonald’s on this trip, but here in Madrid, we’ve suffered the trials of Tantalus trying to feed ourselves. Temptation is everywhere. Shop windows are stacked with cured legs of ham, pastries and cheeses. But always there’s a pane of glass or a steel rolling shutter with the sign ‘Cerrado,’ closed, pasted to it like an evil magical incantation that keeps food always within sight but never in reach. Madrilenos don’t eat until long after the rest of the world is wracked with gnawing hunger pangs. In the rest of the world, if you go without food as long as your average Spaniard does, the World Food Programme starts sending cargo planes. Breakfast? Lunch? In Madrid, no es posible. After 9:00 pm, well, that’s different. Food is what you do after 9:00. And you’d better, because there’s nothing else until tomorrow night if you don’t.

I’m lying, of course; but only a little. It is quite possible to find yourself at a cafe chocolateria, eating churros dipped in hot chocolate for breakfast; it is possible to eat tapas at five or six dollars a mouthful; it is possible to eat stale, unbuttered baguettes slapped with a slice of cheese and a morsel of cured meat. Some would find this charming. I find it leads to crankiness, so we eat at McDonald’s.



A Big Mac is a triumph of the culinary scientist’s art; it’s a precisely calibrated flavour missile designed to deliver in perfect proportions the three things that homo sapiens sapiens evolved for hundreds of thousands of years to crave in his food: fat, sugar and salt. Certainly, obesity, diabetes and hypertension are modern-day scourges, but we are a viable species because our genetic programming made us so adept at finding fat, sugar and salt. The desire for them is written into our very DNA. The chemical stew that is a Big Mac insinuates molecular tendrils right into our Genetic Code and whispers “Survival.” It is mother’s milk; it is the fatty liver of a freshly killed antelope brought down by tooth and claw; it is chemical manna from corporate heaven. And in Madrid, it is…disappointing.

A Big Mac, it seems, is not always a Big Mac. A Madrileno Big Mac is not exactly a Florentine Big Mac which is not exactly a Calgarian Big Mac. A Big Mac is a subtle thing, varying with exquisite inflections of flavour to exactly satisfy the palate of a fellow brought up on Manchego, rather than Asiago, rather than Cheddar cheese. A cheddar-fellow eating a Big Mac in Spain does not taste a Big Mac like he knows it at home. There is something slightly wrong with it.

Some maps of the world do not show political boundaries. A culinary map of Europe would have no borders: it would show a continuum of more-or-less indistinct flavours from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean to the Adriatic. If you were to take a journey through this map, you wouldn’t know where you were. What might be, for a moment, a recognizably Spanish paella would gradually morph into an Italian risotto and eventually into a Croatian black crni rizot. You’d never be able to locate the precise moment when one cuisine became another. But the folks at McDonalds know. They have crafted an exquisitely subtle blade, and they have divided the continuum at the precise moment that a Spanish palate differentiates itself from an Italian palate. They have studied this moment, and they have captured it in their Big Mac.

Eating a Big Mac in Spain is like being given whole new set of Spanish taste buds equipped with Spanish neurons firing into Spanish taste centres; it is a chemical shortcut to being Spanish; it is Spanishness stripped to its essence, condensed to a few extra grains of paprika in the Special Sauce, a mote less of salt and a mist more of vinegar. More than any other food in Spain, it is the Big Mac that tells you where you are.

Berlin: just another prick on the wall

Goldfish are commonly said to have a three-second memory, which has given rise to many a joke about the delight a goldfish must experience every three seconds or so as it drifts in circles around its bowl and sees the same bubble-burping castle as if for the first time. Well, "Ich bin ein Goldfisch," as they say here in Berlin. Despite having crossed and re-crossed a dozen lines of longitude and latitude over the last few months, my ability to locate myself in a cartographical sense has not improved beyond that of our minimally-neuroned cousins (Respect, of course, to the salmon and its impossible ability to navigate hundreds of miles of open ocean.) By contrast, Cara will strike out into an entirely new city, and within minutes, she’ll put away the guide book and say “I think we’ll take a short cut here.” I’ve even seen her give directions to locals who have wandered into an unfamiliar part of town. She leads me along like a stunned Chihuahua, and I simply take in what I can. While Cara is building a mental atlas rivaling Google Maps, my geographical knowledge of the world remains, shall we say, impressionistic at best.

Which is a fair description, I’ve come to realize, of my knowledge of the world in general. Like every Canadian, I revel in Rick Mercer’s “Talking to Americans.” You might remember the one where he gets a Harvard professor to congratulate us for outlawing the practice of abandoning our seniors on ice floes; but like any honest Canadian, I’m also privately relieved that the rest of the world hasn’t thought it fair game to subject Canadians to the same exercise. My understanding of the Berlin Wall is, I hope, not typical of my fellow citizens. I have a collage of vague knowledge of the Wall and the whole East/West Berlin thing; I knew that there was a whopping great wall; I remember Reagan asking Gorbachev to please take it down; I remember East German shot putters. But in the interest of journalistic integrity, I have to admit that I never thought to ask myself why East Berlin was communist and West Berlin wasn’t. I never asked myself why American and Russian tanks were facing each other down in Germany. The Potsdam Conference, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift? That’s all way outside my scope as a goldfish. I always thought the Wall just ran in a straight line right through Berlin. I didn’t know that it entirely surrounded West Berlin. I also never realized that the East Germans built the wall, not around their own country, but to enclose someone else’s. Is it my goldfish mind that finds this, frankly, quite cheeky? Is it because I lack gravitas, not to mention historical vision, that I think this might be one of the funniest things one country has ever done to another? I can imagine the discussion:

Ulbricht: …well, why don’t we just build a wall around them?
Khrushchev: But Walter, can we really do that?
Ulbricht: Come, Nikita! Live a little! Build a wall, I dare you…

And so, West Berlin went to bed one night and woke up to find that the crazy neighbour had built a fence around them. I’m ashamed to say that that makes me giggle. Berliners themselves, whose families were torn apart, and whose teenagers bled out in the death zones, wouldn’t find it so amusing.

Still, the wall is gone now, though not entirely. Myriad chunks of it are for sale, for a couple of Euros apiece, in tourist shops all over Berlin. I suspect that if all those chunks were glued back together, there’d be one or two extra walls left over.