Marty Kaplan's Blog

In another ten days we will be heading out to the airport for our flight to Spain.  We will land in Madrid where we will spend a few days before heading to Valencia where we will be for the majority of the three months that we will spend in Spain this year.  Our original plan was to spend ten or eleven months, but we were unable to complete all the requirements needed for a Spanish visa.  Our main hangup has been and is an FBI background check.  You need to submit ink fingerprints so that they can run the background check.  We began the process in early January of this year.  After three attempts they were finally able to successfully scan my prints and complete my background check.  That is not the case for Susan.  Her fingerprints are so faint that they are unable to be read by the scanner.  We are currently seeking an alternate solution.  In the meantime, we decided that we would put the visa application on hold and take full advantage of the ninety day period that one may stay in Spain with a visa.

After much searching we were able to find a furnished apartment in Valencia.  It is a two bedroom flat with cable and internet and, perhaps most importantly, air conditioning.  We are ten minutes away from last year’s apartment and a short five minute walk away from the Central Market.  Friends who have checked the apartment out for us report that is is just like the photos that are posted on the internet.  It is an older building that has been well maintained and is located in what is starting to become one of the trendy areas in Valencia.  It is away from the hustle and bustle of traffic and the master is off of the building’s interior central patio.  It promises to be a good base of operations.

The only event that we have pre-planned for this visit is a trip to Spain’s northwestern- most autonomía (province), Galicia.  We will be attending the 2010 Spanish National Magic Convention in the city of La Coruña.  It runs from September 22 to the 25th.  We will also spend a few days in Madrid at the end of our stay and will get to barcelona for a few days so that Susan can take some current pictures of Gaudi’s Templo de la Sagrada Familia.  She began shooting this church back in the summer of 1974 and although it is still far from completion, the amount of the work that has been done in the intervening thirty six years is remarkable.

Everyone asks us what we will be doing during out three months in country and the reply is not very complicated.  We will just be living there for the three months while we visit with friends, improve our Spanish, improve our knowledge of Valencia and Spanish culture.  In short, we will live like valencianos for three months.  We plan to take more cooking classes at Fun and Food and certainly Susan will be taking more pictures of Valencia and its environs.  In addition to doing a lot of reading in Spanish, I hope to spend a goodly amount of time doing magic.  As of the moment I have no idea what the possibilities are, but there are a few things that I hope to do.

I would like to continue to do shows in a school setting.  Given the fact that I can perform in both Spanish and English that may help me get my foot in the door.  I also would like to do magic for children who are in the hospital.  Rather than being part of a show (and I would not object to that), I would like to visit individuals and spend some time with them chatting and doing a bit of magic.  Lastly, when we were last in Valencia there was some talk about one of the restaurants that we frequented doing a magic night that would include a magical menu,along with magic being performed after the meal.  I hope to pursue that idea soon after we arrive.

That’s about it for the moment.  There probably will no be any more blog entries until we are in Spain.  I have written this entry to sort of warm up my blog chops and to let those of you who will follow this blog know that I intend to make frequent additions while in Spain.

Saturday was a very low key day with not a lot happening.  The big event of the day was lunch at Palace Fesol, a restaurant that is celebrating its 100^th anniversary.  We had a lovely meal.  We began by sharing several tapas – croquetas, buñuelos de bacalao, and a pisto that was wrapped in a filo dough purse.  For our main course we had an arroz al señorito, which is a sea food paella in which the shells have been removed from all the seafood.  After coffee and dessert, we made our way back home and spent the rest of the day reading and relaxing.

Sunday was as exciting as Saturday.  We visited with a friend of ours, Paquito, who was working that morning at a nearby café.  We spent a good half hour chatting with him before we headed back home.  Susan made lunch and it was an array of tapas.  The centerpiece was a shrimp and garlic dish (gambas al ajillo) and the rest of the plate was filled with slices of serrano ham, Idiazabal cheese, paté and some green beans that had been steamed and then warmed in a tomato and garlic sauce.  We were stuffed and, not surprisingly, we took a nap and later we treated ourselves to a gelato.

Monday we felt we needed a long walk to work of the excesses of the weekend, so we headed for the Turia Gardens, an enormous green space located about 20 minutes from downtown.  We walked through the park, through the aviary and the rose garden.  The temperature was in the 80’s, so we stopped to hydrate ourselves several times.  When we got back home, Susan once again made lunch and the serving plate included boquerones, steamed shrimp, cheese, paté and sliced tomatoes.  At 5:30 we decided a gelato was in order and after our sugary treat we took a little walk.  Once again the Kindles were fired up andwhile Susan read, I slipped out and attended a meeting of the magic club.

Today we were determined to pay a visit to the Almoina.  The original structure served to provide food for the poor.  In 1985 the nearby Basilica decided to purchase the land beside it to enlarge the overall structure.  In the process of digging the foundation an architectural treasure trove was found in that area.  The archeologists uncovered the ruins of the first Roman city that was built on that site and later destroyed by Pompey.  The city was later rebuilt by the Romans and those ruins were uncovered, remnants of the Visigothic and Moorish invasions and occupation were also uncovered.  It took some 20 years to uncover and reconstruct all of this.  A building was then constructed to house all the remains and the majority of the walkways are constructed of reinforced glass so that the visitor can see all the ruins without causing their further deterioration.  We had a one hour guided tour and it was an eye-opening experience.

Since Seu-Xerea was literally steps away, we decided to have lunch there and it was truly an amazing experience.  Their menu varies from week to week depending on what is available fresh at the market.  There are five small plates that constitute your first course and then you choose your entrée.  Chef Jordi came out to visit with us and suggested that we have the rice with octopus stew.  It was an excellent suggestion.  Dessert and coffee followed and we slowly made our way home at 4:30.  Susan is currently reading and I am finishing up this blog entry.  Tomorrow we head north and on Friday we fly back to LA.  It has been an amazing sis and half weeks.

Paquito

Monday lunch with boquerones, Idiazabal, paté, Manchego and gambas al ajillo

Monday's lunch table

Today is going to be a kickback day.  We get up at 9:00 have breakfast and we are off to the market.  We buy some salad ingredients, some olives and boquerones and we head back home.  We have decided to have lunch at home, so Susan sets to work preparing a couple of salads.  She uses lettuce, tomato, olives, red pepper, Emmenthal cheese, Serrano ham and onion.  Her salad gets some white asparagus, which is not one of my favorites.  She whips up a salad dressing consisting of oil, white wine vinegar, garlic, English mustard, salt and pepper.  It is a fantastic dressing.  We cut up the bread we bought on the way home and open a bottle of Protos Verdejo and we devour a world class lunch.

The afternoon is given over to reading.  I finish SWIMMING and Susan begins THE HISTORY OF LOVE.  At 5:00 we take a walk and have our daily gelato and a cup of coffee.  We head back home and shower and dress because one of the people that we met at last Saturday’s cooking class, Brian Oberle, has invited us over for drinks.

Brian lives in the Cánovas neighborhood and it takes us about fifteen minutes to walk there.  He and his wife are renting a lovely four bedroom apartment that was built in the 20’s and has been recently renovated.  We have a drink or two and chat for about an hour and a half.

Brian is a retired Foreign Service officer who was last posted in Lisbon.  He has been assigned to a multiplicity of posts including Nigeria, Rome, Cali, Milan and Portugal.  He has also done two tours in Washington.  He is married and they have a daughter, Olivia, who is currently studying at St Andrews.  His wife, Ofelia, is a retired simultaneous translator who speaks six languages fluently.  She is also an artist.  I have included a sample of her work, which is done entirely with paint and needles.  She does not use brushes.  We decide to go out and have some dinner and so we head down the street to a place called Spaghetti and Blues.

I have been jonesing for a pizza for about a week so the choice is perfect for me.  We continue our conversation over dinner.  We are trying to gather information for what is necessary if one plans to spend more than ninety days in Spain, which requires no visa for Americans.  We are almost certain that we will be returning to Valencia again and next time it will be for a longer period of time than six weeks.  I finish off dinner with a little magic and a little after 11:30 we say goodbye.  We are home at midnight and, soon thereafter, we are off to bed.

Susan's Salad

My Salad

One of Ofelia's paintings

It has rained overnight, but the sun is beginning to peek through as we begin a new day.  We have breakfast, clear the table and wash the dishes.  We both turn on our computers and catch up on our e-mail, as well as taking care of a couple of other tasks.  We work until 1:00 and then we decide to head out to Seu-Xerea to deliver the pictures we printed and also a DVD that Susan produced.  The restaurants doors are still closed so we head to the square and have a drink. We decide to have lunch at El Molinón and then return to Seu-Xerea.

El Molinón is empty save for two other diners.  It is early after all.  It’s only 2:00 o’clock.  We order a salad, some pimientos de Padrón, setas a la placha and escalopines con cabrales.  Pimientos de Padrón are a small green pepper that can be spicy or not.  There is no way to predict if it will be spicy or not.  You just have to pop it in your mouth and be prepared.  Setas are probably closest to a portabella mushroom and these are simply grilled on the flatiron with a little bit of olive oil and salt.  Escalopines are thinly pounded breaded veal cutlets served with a sauce that is made from heavy cream admixed with Cabrales cheese.  Susan is intrigued by the sauce so she asks permission to go upstairs and chat with the cook.  She comes back down with the recipe, having taking a picture or two of the small kitchen that produces such a wide varieties of tapas.  After dessert and coffee we head back to Seu-Xerea, which is now open.

The name Seu-Xerea derives from the two neighborhoods, Seu and Xerea, which the restaurant borders.  We discover that fact while we are waiting for Stephen to emerge from the kitchen.  When he greets us he tells us that Jordi is in Albacete today discussing the possibility of marketing his own line of cookware.  We give him the pictures and the DVD and he thanks us for both.  We then head on our way.

We decide to explore a different part of the city so we head to the Torres de Serranos, which is one of the ancient gates that were part of the walls that surrounded the city hundreds of years ago.  The gates were opened every morning and closed every evening.  If you were returning from the fields and you discovered the gates locked, then you slept on the ground outside the walls.  We spend a good hour wandering the streets and we eventually return to our starting point.  On our way back home we stop at the Horchatería Santa Catalina and have a granizado de horachata and some fartons. Refreshed we head back home.

Pepe comes by at 8:00 and we head out to the meeting of the veterans of magic.  These are some of the guys who used to get together to talk magic and tricks before there was a magic club in Valencia.  There are six of us gathered this evening.  After a brief discussion it is time for show and tell.  I do two of the newer effects that I am working on and the assembled group likes both effects.  They especially like the instantaneous change of four Aces to four blank cards. We stop a little after 9:00 and we head back to our place to pick up Susan, which we do, and then we head out for dinner.  The restaurant we choose is rather unremarkable.  When we finish Susan and I head back home and end up calling it a day at midnight.

The following photos are courtesy of Susan Kaplan.

Another shot of the kitchen

This is a shot of the bar at El Molinón. I finally realized what the tall metal container was for. When you pour "sidra" (a slightly alcoholic cider) you need to aerate it to release its full flavor. To do that you hold the bottle in one hand high above your head. You hold the glass in your other hand at about knee level. You then pour. If you happen to be off target, the metal container holds the spillage.

This horse was to be part of some outdoor production.

Las Torres de Serranos

Un granizado de horchata y fartons

Today is going to be a day for me to catch up on a number of things.  I need to work on a blog entry, take care of some college recommendations that I have agreed to write and work on a couple of magic effects for tomorrow evening’s gathering of los veteranos.  Susan has decided that she wants to return to La Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias to shoot some more pictures.  She takes off about 11:00 and we agree to meet for lunch at a restaurant call La Lambrusquería that Nick had pointed out to us when we did our swing through the Cánovas section of the city.

I finish my work at 1:00 and take a shower and get dressed.  I meet Susan a little after two and we choose the menu of the day.  We both start with an outstanding spinach salad and Susan follows with a plate of pasta and I choose pizza.  We order a bottle of wine and later have dessert and coffee.  The two menus added up to 13.90 Euros and the wine was another $13 Euros.  Not bad for a fancy little restaurant.  We head back home at 5:00 and decide to take life easy.  Susan resumes her reading of The Time Traveler’s Wife and I head out to play the slots.  Luck is with me and I cash out 100 Euros, which means that I made a 65 Euro profit.  After almost six weeks, I am still ahead.

We decide to spend the evening at home.  We both read for a while and then we watch THE BROTHERS BLOOM, which we had downloaded from iTunes.  I watch for an hour and then give up and go to bed.  Susan stays until the bitter end and makes her way upstairs a little after midnight to sleep perchance to dream.

Here are some of the photos that Susan took yesterday.

We awake today with a goal in mind.  We want to go to the market and find all the vegetables in yesterday’s puchero that we were unable to identify.  We also need to pick up some food for lunch today and dinner tonight. All the photos at the bottom of this post were taken by Susan.

We have made it a habit of printing the pictures that we take of the various vendors in the market and giving them the photos.  It just seems like the right thing to do.  The Central  Market and its vendors is photographed endlessly by natives and tourists alike and I am willing to bet that the vendors who end up being photographed never get to see the results.  We decided to change that.  After we distribute the photos we took on Saturday we visit with Solaz and purchase some paté, as well as some boiled ham and Serrano ham.  Next we stop at our favorite greengrocer and pick up some fruit and vegetables.  It is apple season in Spain and we buy a couple of Fujis.  Our next stop is Basilio’s where we bought our steaks on Friday.  Today we purchase some veal.  We then head for home.

We put away the groceries and I head out to print some pictures, buy a memory stick and print out a file.  It takes me a little longer than expected because of the goodly number of customers ahead of me.  There is also a problem printing out the file.  I get home at 1:30 and Susan is in the process of preparing lunch.  We have a lovely salad and the veal, prepared milanesa style and we open a bottle of rose.

After the table is cleared and the dishes put away, we both set to work on our computers.  Susan is working on a DVD of our experience at Seu-Xerea, while I work on my blog.  We take a break at 7:30 and go out in search of a cup of coffee.  We also go for a little walk to get in a bit of exercise.  When we get home, we fire up the DVD player and watch another episode of Los Hombres de Paco.  We snack on paté and olives while we watch.  When the episode ends, we turn off all lights and head upstairs and go to bed.

Pencas

It appears that 9:00 AM is our wake up time now that we are retired.  I dress quickly and pay a visit to the bakery and get some breakfast pastry.  After breakfast we busy ourselves with a variety of computer tasks and we then do our exercise routine with the rubber resistance.  We then shower and get dressed and head out to Seu-Xerea where we have been invited to have lunch by Jordi Morera Siscar, who is the head chef. Here is a link to the restaurant http://www.seuxerea.com/page/english/00-contents/contents-00.htm

Seu-Xerea was opened in 1996.  The food is described as Mediterranean-Asian fusion.  The space is decorated in bold Mediterranean colors and there is a smoking as well as a non-smoking section and the two areas are thankfully separated.  Today, Monday, the restaurant is trying an experiment at lunchtime.  Since the fish market at the Mercado Central is closed on Mondays, the menu of the day is puchero, as it is called in Valencia.  Some of you may know it as cocido madrilène.  If you have seen the series SPAIN…ON THE ROAD AGAIN with Mario Bitale you have seen Mario and Mark Bittman devouring what some consider to be the perfect hangover cure.  The truth is the puchero is a traditional dish that most probably can be found in many areas of Spain.

We walk in and we are soon greeted by Jordi and are promptly introduced to Stephen Anderson, who serves as the host and part of the ownership of the space.  Stephen is from London and is of British and Burmese extraction.  He is a former physics teacher who taught for a number of years at the American School in Valencia.  We are seated in the non-smoking section and our pre-luncheon drinks are quickly delivered.  Pepe arrives ten minutes later and we chat for a while as we snack on some home-made potato chips that are unlike any that I have ever tasted.

We begin our formal meal with a teaser of smoked salmon ensconced in a small piece of frisée.  Next comes a lovely little salad with lettuce, cherry tomatoes, edible flowers and pine nuts.  It is topped with rolled slices of rare roast beef. Our plates and silverware are cleared and the puchero arrives.

In a matter of minutes our table is covered with a casserole dish filled with broth and noodles.  This broth is what the puchero has been simmering in all morning.  Next comes a plate heaped with vegetables.  Some are familiar and others not.  I recognize the garbanzos, the potatoes, the thistles, and the summer squash.  There is another tuber on the plate that I do not recognize and there are pencas, as well.  Pencas is a member of the artichoke family and bears a resemblance to thistles, but I am hard pressed to find an English meaning for the word.  Along with the plate of vegetables, there is a plate filled to overflowing with meat.  There is chicken, lamb and pig’s trotters all in abundant quantities.  There are also stuffed cabbage rolls whose circumference is easily that of a silver dollar.

We all start with the soup and after that each one of us devises his or her own plan of attack.  We do our best, but we are not equal to the quantity of food that populated the two plates.  Dessert arrives and we are treated to migas de chocolate with what we are told will be a magical sauce.  At the moment there is a small glass with ice cubes sitting on the plate along with the bits of chocolate.  The pitcher with the magical sauce arrives and it is pored into the glass and the sauce in the glass begins to bubble and foam.  It almost looks like an octopus is emerging from the small glass.  The dessert, of course, is outstanding.

Jordi sits at our table while we are having coffee and we chat for a while.  Both Pepe and I do a little magic and Jordi confesses that he would like to do a magic night at the restaurant that would include a special menu with a magician doing some magic at each table and perhaps a parlour type presentation as well.  I am invited to perform the next time I am in Valencia.  It is an offer that I will seriously consider.  It is close to 4:00 when we finally leave the restaurant.

The rest of the day is devoted to digesting our meal.  Susan works on her photos and I catch up with my correspondence.  Around 9:30 we go out in search of ice cream and we take a bit of a walk.  When we come home, we read for a while and eventually make our way upstairs to the bedroom.

Marty, Jordi and Stephen

Smoked salmon starterThe salad

Puchero

We discuss the possibility of a magic show.