Have you ever been really wanted as in desired or prized or coveted? If not, then travel by car through Slovenia. There, upon entering the highways, you’ll have to purchase the “vignette” which is a little sticker you put in the window of your car to blaze through toll centers and just pay once. It’s a horribly primitive punch card affair which makes it feel as if you’ve suddenly entered the 19th century and are taking the train to Vienna to visit the current Emperor. But, it loves the bejesus out of tourists, if for no other reason than getting to screw them while milking them like a cow.

You see, the these little passes come in three flavors: weekly, six month, and yearly. The cost is 15€, 30€, and 95€ respectively. If you’re doing a lot of driving around Slovenia, it’s a good deal. If you’re not and are just passing through, given that it sits between Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Croatia, it’s bullshit. You see, the one week pass isn’t one week, it’s six days and spare hour change. If you’re taking a full seven day trip to Croatia like we recently did, you’ll have to buy two of these passes or a monthly one, which is essentially the same cost. And let’s emphasize that driving more than two hours in Slovenia is difficult given how small it is, so given the distances being traveled, the cost is prohibitive.

The Slovenes love it because it’s cheap for them when spread out over a year. The EU however, is not enchanted and even warned Slovenia that they needed to reform it to not discriminate against those from outside Slovenia due to all countries needing to be treated equal in the EU, unless of course you’re Germany, in which case you run the EU.

Thankfully, there are some solutions. Friends of ours who are Istrians and have an apartment to rent wrote up how to fully avoid the Slovenia tolls when going from Italy to Croatia. You can also view the route on Google Maps. Sure, it takes a few minutes longer, but it sure beats blowing 30€ for the “favor” of passing through Slovenia.

There are tradeoffs when you switch countries. In moving to Spain I gained wine (lots and lots of it), but lost the cocktails (most all of them). Getting a decent cocktail is difficult because decent liquor is hard to find and outside of Barcelona, it’s impossible to find.

The problem is twofold. The first is that the selection of proper alcohols in Spain is quite shoddy. You have to pay a trip to shops like La Fuente or Escola Magetzem to begin to find the basic selection you find in the US at a store like Bevmo. And even with these shops (who, given the setting are quite good) you don’t find the selection that you do in the specialty shops of the US in cities such as San Francisco and NYC. Then of course there’s the price as my beloved monkey wrench of a Bourbon, Bulleit costs $22 a bottle in the US, but 27€ in Spain, when you can find it.

No bar wants to spend more than 20€ on a bottle and it shows given that you see the same exact 20 or so liquors in every restaurant’s “bar” no matter where you go. Whether it’s some xarnego joint in Sant Marti, a more upscale restaurant in Eixample, or the charming, yet funky Café Antic in the village of Porrera in the interior county of Priorat.

The photo above is what comprises this typical bar and this shot happened to be taken in a “Balkan Grill” called Paško’s in the horribly over-developed beach town of Roses near the French border. This one is actually better than most as the Gin selection has both Beefeater and Bombay Sapphire. This would be due to this town seeing a lot of British tourists and they probably found that having some of the yack piss Gins out there showed that the English know the difference and will not order any liquor that comes from a plastic jug.

Yes, there’s the Martini Rosso & Bianco (which I’ve found to be crap after having discovered Miró) and the ever present Osborne. A bottle of Anis de Mono is required which, after having tasting this liquor personally, I’m sure the old men who drink it, do so rectally. But then, the whiskeys fall flat as they always do. Always, it’s Scotch, which really, if it’s not aged until it’s old enough to drive is crap. The only American brown water they ever have is Jack Daniels of which, I am not a fan no matter how “Gentleman” they try to label it these days.

Naturally there are no bitters, no fresh fruits, no anything really except bottles that cost less than 20€ and can be kept forever or the ill-trained staff staff polish them off. The Spanish bar is not one of options.

For some time I’ve made a rather huge effort to stay on top of updating the photo galleries and what is essentially a photo “blog” on my site. That effort pretty much stalled nearly a year ago with a photo that was from a trip to Menorca. Tasty, yes, but it got a bit old. So, rather than try and catch up with everything, I’m taking the coward’s way out and just shutting down the whole section altogether.

Why would I do such a thing after trying to stay on top of the photos for seven or so years? The simple answer is that in the public space, photography has no worth anymore. I can’t count the amount of times I’ve had my photos “borrowed” for use on other sites that just link to the file and don’t even bother to steal them outright. Then of course there have been the occasional requests to use them legitimately, but when I quote a price that’s over $25 but under $100, I never hear back and I assume that they go ahead and use them anyways.

Of course, there’s the Google Images issue as well and while some might say that GI increases traffic to your site, I say that it doesn’t increase worthwhile traffic. Once people see the image and chose whether it’s worth stealing or not, they never come back. All it ends up doing is costing me bandwidth and providing Google with content. Neither of which fall in to the plus camp in my book.

My more grand issue in all of this is that I’ve come back around to the worth of text, and photos merely being something to increase its value rather than being something worthwhile on their own. I say this because I am constantly in awe of my friend Croatian Dinko‘s (as oppose to Bosnian Dinko) photo blog that he updates with quality photos on a regular basis. He does it because he can approach it as something of a hobby. Every so often he makes some money on it, but in reality it’s more for fun.

This is my problem in that I don’t really have that luxury anymore. It’s not that I think my photos are so good that they can’t be shared, but more the fact that beyond the threat of theft, they’re worth more to me in something like the new Priorat guide which I feel has solid textual content but isn’t worth much without the photos to back it up. Had I just put them up for fun on this site, they would have netted me zilch.

Suffice to say, I’m rather sad to take them down and thought a long time about it as shown by how long they lasted up there in a languid state. But, there are too many other projects happening and more in the pipes that won’t let me really do anything with those in the near future. If you were a loyal fan of the photos, you can enjoy my less professional dickings around on Instagram or the account for Vinologue which I contribute to but is mostly E.

Somewhere, somehow, fruit cutting technology was lost. Well, it’s obvious that someone out there must still have it as they have found some way to dice up fruit to present it in plastic cups for tourists at La Boqueria market.

It wasn’t always like this and even having started centuries ago, there are many of us who are residents of fair Barcelona who still shop there on occasion. Some more regularly than others. There are those, like me who shun it. It was definitely the case that up until a few years ago, you could find any manner of wonderful, consumable items there (there’s a mushroom stall that’s fantastic). Despite tourists already flooding it, locals would get up early and go there to buy these few items. However, these element seems to have been lost and while still a fantastic market, there are others in the city where I can go and buy a string of rubbing tomatoes without some idiot grinning behind a ridiculous, cock-extension of an SLR while taking my photo.

Now, like most things in the center, La Boqueria seems to be mostly for tourists and for some reason, they’ve all come to the conclusion that buying a fucking cup of cut fruit is the best thing to get there. So naturally as one asshole vendor started doing this one day, others saw him cashing in and followed suit to the point there the front section near Les Rambles is mostly a cut fruit in a cup market.

As to why people buy this, I’m at a loss. I can really only think of two reasons: horrid laziness and the illusion of healthy eating. These cups of fruit are insanely more expensive than actually fruit which is, when in season, insanely affordable in Catalonia. Of course then you have to peel it yourself which yes, is hard, but putting a bit of backbone in to it, by god, you can do it, much like I’ve seen monkeys do in the wild.

Then there’s that health thing. These half liter cups of fruit have upwards of 250 calories. That’s two glasses of wine. When push comes to chug, I’ll take the wine and eat an actual meal as a cup of fruit is little more than naturally occurring junk food when eaten like this and you can see that it’s not doing much given the sacks of lard sloshing their way through the market.

The politicians have by and large given the center of Barcelona to the tourists. I didn’t really believe it before moving here, but yes, it’s true and it’s not possible to live a normal existence there anymore. If they were to actually care, there are things that could be done about it. For one, they could put up gates around the market and charge people 10€ to go in. If you have residence in Catalonia, speak Catalan, or are an old lady with a Rolser, then you don’t get charged. This would be a moneymaking system to liberate the market from the brain dead tourists who treat it the same as they would television and buy nothing, but get in the way of those of us who do. The other solution would be to place snipers around the corners of the market and shoot anyone who walks in to it holding a camera. My fear with the second is that it would be a horrible waste of perfectly good bullets.

There is wonderful aspect of living in a quasi first world country like Spain in that shopping for food is beautiful. I love the hell out of the market and buy all my fresh meats and vegetables there. Of course the last couple of months aren’t those known for fresh vegetables, so it’s been a lot of potatoes lately. This is changing though with the first strawberries being seen from Huelva.

You develop a relationship with your food stalls at the market. It’s beautiful, even though you never learn each others names. Well, I probably have a name which is something along the lines of, “that tall, foreign boy who speaks Catalan, but is hopefully taking lessons to improve it”. Likewise, E and I, when first moving to the la Ribera area around Born Market, honed in on a stall with organic beef from the Pyrenees. It is without a doubt the best dead cow I have ever had in my life. I went there religiously 2-3 times a week for burgers, ground meat, and the occasional steak, all deftly serve up by a girl who became known simply as “burger lady”.

Time has gone on and burger lady and I had reached a relationship wherein I was a loyal customer and she would put down her 11:00 coffee to serve me. It was beautiful. Then, change happened. Easter week or “setmana santa” or as I like to call it, “week of fucking nothing possible happening” came about and burger lady’s stall was closed. I asked a nearby stall what had happened to her. They told me that they were sure if she took the week off or quit to which I told them they should consider become journalists for being able to state the obvious so well. But, my meat was hanging in the balance at this moment and this last week of subpar chicken and other non-beef meats was unsatisfying on various levels.

Two days ago, I go back to try again and suddenly, burger lady has now become burger guy. Apparently the previous provider of silken cow flesh did indeed quit. As these things go, she left the stall a mess without even a plunger for the meat grinder to be found. Burger guy was doing his best to pick up the pieces and assured me that, like Zeppelin once said, “the meat remains the same“.

Thankfully I’m encountering the new burger guy just as he’s starting so we can establish a relationship early on. Of course now that this change has happened, I will probably move from this neighborhood or do something else idiotic to interrupt my beautiful flow of un-American, non fucked-with beef.