A Fair and Balanced Look at The Trip

A couple things to add to yesterday's epic blog entry (definitely the longest on record in the annals of The Pope of Chilitown):

1. After reviewing the piece, I realize that making fun of Glenn for eating Flaka Jaimies while not taking my own share of "credit" for eating that vile mass of grossness behind the FJs in the picture is the very epitome of the pot calling the kettle a consumer of disgusting foodstuffs. Yes, those are potatas bravas; yes, that is indeed a pile of mayonnaise glopped on top of fried potatoes; and yes, perhaps the hardest to admit (as much to myself as to you)... those are my hands in the picture, holding a fork poised over the patatas, ready to dig in. (Quick side note: Glenn insisted on taking pictures of every meal we ate. We had to wait a couple minutes after our food was served for him to get the perfect shot. Just thought it needed to be mentioned...)

Anyways, I've always been a fan of mayo and all its evil kin; I generally avoid it, but I do like to dip my potato products in it. But I know how it looks. Though I must say, the fact that the FJs are sitting in a pool in their own neon-orange secretions is pretty disturbing. And if you're wondering about the pink tinge to the potatas sauce (and I know you are), it's not straight mayo; it's sort of a whipped mayo with some hot sauce in it. Finally, we didn't eat the entire pile of mayo; there is photo evidence of this fact, when we took an FJ and sat it up in the remainder of the mayo. Like a cross-section of John Madden's aorta.

Vincent: ...you know what they put on French Fries in Holland? Jules: What? Vincent: Mayonnaise. Jules: God DAMN! Vincent: I seen'em do it. And I don't mean a little bit on the side of the plate, neither; they fuckin' drown'em in it. Jules: Uuccch!

Oh yeah, that reminds me of another joke we made about the FJs: when the waitress put the plate down on the table, I pulled it in front of me and said, "Hey Glenn, what part of the pig did you get?" This was a favorite joke of our grandpa's, involving his two recurring Swedish characters, Sven and Ollie (he's a full-blooded Swede). They get off the boat in New York and immediately go in search of the street vender selling hot dogs, because they were told to eat one as soon as they could. So they get their hot dogs, and Ollie turns to Sven and says, "hey Sven, what part of the dog did you get?"

Finally... in the interest of full disclosure, there is another story I feel I must share. I honestly forgot about it during the course of writing The Trip, but was reminded of it when I walked up to the top of the park next to Park Guell later yesterday afternoon. I fear Glenn and Noreen would accuse me of revisionism is I didn't tell the story, so here goes.

We were walking to the top of Park Guell, and took a break about halfway to look around. Remember, this is the second day. They have only begun to suspect that I don't really speak Spanish. So I gesture towards this pointy thing way off on a hill in the distance and start to expound about it being Tibidabu (the Church Thing from earlier blog entries). This old man standing close to us is listening, and has obviously gleaned two things from my English explantation: me signaling towards this pointy thing on the hill in the distance, and the word "Tibidabu." He walks up to us and says something to the effect that it isn't in fact Tibidabu, that Tibidabu is around behind the hill we're standing on. We can't in fact see Tibidabu at this point. I ask him, "okay, well, what's that thing then?" My second mistake. He looks at it, shrugs his shoulders, and says, "antennae grande."

Here's my big gripe about the Spanish language: there are so many words that don't sound anything like their English equivalent. But "antennae" is the exact same frickin' word! It couldn't have been "radidamente"? Something, ANYTHING, but "antennae"??? Because if it was anything else I could have saved face and played it off: "oh yeah, he says that's some other big church... c'mon, let's get outta here..." But nope. No hiding what "antennae grande" means. We had a laugh over that one, lemme tell you. And by we, of course, I mean Glenn and Noreen. They were very nice about it, though; they only razzed me until the end of the next day or so. Of course, it's quite possible that all the beer had something to do with that...

I'd like to say, in my defense, that Antennae Grande is in fact the self-same Son of Church Thing I mention in the previous posts about my quest for Tibidabu. You know, how I was looking at Tibidabu/Church Thing, and trying to walk to it, and also saw this other Church Type Thing even further away? That I was going to try to walk to at a later time? Yeah, turns out that's Antennae Grande. Shut up. My point is, I obviously associate CT and AG with each other, which clearly explains why I would confuse the two of them. Clearly.

And not that it really matters, but the fact that Tibidabu was obscured at that point added to the confusion. If I'd seen both CT and AG, I would have clearly been able to identify CT as Tibidabu.

Clearly.