Who Knew?

There’s something refreshing about coming to a city with no expectations.

We arrived after a ten-hour flight over Siberia from Beijing to Frankfurt, a misconnection, and then a two-hour flight over the Alps and the Mediterranean to Barcelona. To me, the hotel in BCN was stylish; to Hilde it was functional. I think we realized simultaneously that to our Western sensibility, despite or because of emerging from the sensibilities of China, that those were the same thing. The next morning that functionality was born in on us by the ease and efficiency of the Renfe AVE high speed train. In the time it would take to get from one far end of Beijing to its other extremity we got from BCN to our hotel in Zaragoza. Of course the physical distance is nearly the same.

 Santos comes from near the heart of the Roman world to a provincial and provisional city. For him it’s a pleasant enough place, undistinguished: pleasant—OK aesthetically, in its culinary character, culturally—but not too anything: perhaps, not anything quite enough. Dong Nan experiences Zaragoza as extraordinary: a window to a world she’s only discovered piecemeal. She’d traveled as a tourist in northern Europe and traveled and lived in the U.S. But nothing had prepared her for this sun-struck flooded desert, Mediterranean world.

 For me, Zaragoza was a litany of surprises, introduced from multiple perspectives of students, Griffin, the Resident Director, my wandering alone and with Zhang Tong and Dong Nan. An endless string of “Who knew?” moments:

- The name itself is a corruption of Caesar Augustus. Zaragoza. Oh. Right. Now I get it.

- Mushrooms. Here it’s such a central feature of the cuisine that the names supplant the category—the incredible flavor of a cream soup floating a pate, the, again incredible, flavors grilled in garlic and stacked with shrimp on toast. In China there are the two classes, mushroom and fungus. In Italy, funghi: not fungus but mushrooms. In the US, a class of food with doubtful nutritional value for sauces, pizza, and a vegan-correct, if unsatisfying, replacement for steak. But here a skewer of astonishing flavor. I get why my friends insisted that Griffin take us to the mushrooms.

- Pilar. Pillar. Column Really. I’d known, vaguely, that it was a common name for women. I’d had a vague sense of the connection with the Virgin Mary. But Virgin on a stick? (Apologies. Too provocative for a title, I supposed, and not intended to be irreverent or iconoclastic.) What kind of vision is that? And she’s the patroness of the Iberian world-wide empire. The Virgin of Guadalupe for the Aragon-centered globe complete with conceptual map-fountain-monument. What better suited to move me into compliance

- The Ebro and the Roman bridge were a revelation. The river is in flood because of storms in the mountains. The Pyrenees. I’ve never come so close. And I thought all Spanish rivers were mere arroyos. And seco at that. And here it was straight out of Goya and El Greco. In Goya’s home region. How had I missed that?

-The park by the University where we had a robust beer and buttery olives like I’d never tasted. And would not have without the suggestion of Griffin as the color was the dull green of a dirty martini. Fountains in the dappled sunlight dominated by a colossal Neptune—looking far from home and a little forlorn this far from the sea—who represents, I suppose Spains dominance of the sea.

- Fresh Air and sunshine after a cold, smoggy Beijing spring.