Cecilia Tan's Blog, page 31

Barcelona Day Two

DAY TWO

La Rambla

Cuitat Vella/Barri Gotic

Food Market

Walking walking walking

Roca Moo

Today we started out on Rambla Poblenou, to use the free wifi and grab free wireless from 100 Montaditos and pastries from Boheme again. Kate got a thing called an “angel hair squash” pastry, which had extruded strings of sugar and… agar? No idea what it was made of but it had a texture sort of like spaghetti squash, hence the name, inside a fluffy pastry. More mini palmeras, mini chocolate croissants, and a mini chocolate muffin that turned out to have nuts in it like a brownie, tided us over until we could make our way via public transit to the Gothic Quarter/Old City/Cuitat Vella/Barri Gotic, which we planned to walk through on the way to the giant food market we’ve heard so much about and La Rambla, which is the big walking street with lots of shops and cafes, much bigger than our local Rambla Poblenou.

We wandered the old city for a bit. Because of the festival of Merce going on, we saw some folk-dancing performances, and went into an old church. They have concerts at this church almost every night at 9pm it looks like, and I would really like to see the 4 Guitars, but it looks like the nights with concerts are all nights we have dinner reservations already–drat. We may try to see a classical guitar concert at the Museu de la Musica after Sagrada Familia tomorrow.

Eventually we made it across the old city and to the giant food market, Mercat de la Boqueria. It is a lot like the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia, or the big one in Toronto (St. Lawrence market? the one near the convention center and across from the hotel we stayed in at Worldcon), but here there are more actual food ingredients shops (raw meat, fish, vegetables) than prepared foods than either of those two. Ostrich eggs, lamb heads, fruits, exotic mushrooms, vegetables, seafood, all on sale and display.

One of the first places we came to sold a cone of Iberico ham for take-away, and so I happily snacked on hammy bliss while we wove our way through the place. We also picked up fresh squeezed fruit drinks. Many stalls sell brightly colored fruit nectars and juices in take-away cups, everything from dragonfruit (pitaya) and kiwi to pineapple, orange, melon, you name it. The orange here seems to be blood orange because everywhere we’ve ben it’s very red. corwin had orange, I had dragonfruit (which is magenta), and Kate had pineapple coconut.

We had free tastes of olives and cheeses. I bought three cod fritters on a stick with a bonus fish croquette on top. We saw shops that had small eating counters that offered to cook anything you bought. Great business plan!

We bought exotic fruit jellies from a stand that sold nothing but exotic fruit jellies. We saw the largest oysters I’ve ever seen, though we didn’t end up eating any.

Eventually we decided we wanted to sit down and eat, so we got in line to sit at Kiosk Universal, one of the large grill stands near the southeast entrance. We had a huge plate of assorted grilled mushrooms, another of grilled mixed vegetables (peppers, eggplants, carrots), and ordered a plate of scallops and a plate of razor clams. If you’ve never seen a razor clam, it looks like a straight razor. Except instead of a blade inside, there is the best clam you’ve ever had. The scallops were amazingly good, too.

After that we decided we wanted to have some coffee and find a restroom. Barcelona has no shortage of cafes, so we went to see if we could find one that also had free Wifi. Not even a block from the market we found one that attracted us with its fantastic art nouveau storefront.

Turned out to be the shop of a crazed pastry and chocolate genius named Christian Escriba, who as far as we could tell was like the Ferran Adria (El Bulli) of pastry. We had a dessert called “La Rambla” that was a tiny piece of orange sponge cake, surrounded by a healthy thick layer of chocolate mousse, covered in a dark ganache so glossy that you can see reflections in it! (See my Instagram or Twitter feed for all the photos of that if you can’t wait until I get home and make a proper Picasa album. If I get around to it.)

While corwin and Kate had two “iced coffee” each (a shot of espresso and a cup of ice, perfect) I had chocolate with violet in it. They spritzed the cup with a violet spray and the sugar crystals were also violet flavored. I was instructed to stir it well.

When we went into the place it was empty, but after we’d been sitting there 15 minutes or so, it filled up. I don’t know if we started a trend or if it was just closer to merienda time. (Merienda means snacktime, like tea time, in the Philippines. I can’t remember if Spain still observes merienda or not…)

Oh yeah, and for posting a TripAdvisor review of the place, while using their free wifi, they gave us a few free bonbons to eat, including chocolate-covered mint leaves and one that had a pistachio, almond, and another nut on the top. (corwin ate the other nut and I don’t remember.)

Once we were refreshed and everyone had checked their social media/email we moved on to our next stop. Confession: I’m now writing this entry on the morning of day 4 and I can’t remember what else we did on day 2. Oh wait, now I remember. We wandered back through the Barri Gotic to get to the Picasso Museum. Kate bought a scarf and I bought a watermelon popsicle from a stand selling 50 different flavors of fresh frozen fruit. You could even get it dipped in chocolate, which seemed like overkill to me, plus it couldn’t top the chocolate I just had at Escribá. However when we got to the Museu Picasso we found the line to buy tickets to get into the museum was 30-45 minutes long.

We weren’t in any mood to wait in line, so we continued our wander, all the way up to Casa Batllo, which was closed! It was one of three days a year they close early. corwin was quite disappointed by this and worried we were going to run out of time before the end of the vacation to see all the things in Barcelona he wants to see. But we wandered around the corner from there to another little rambla and found another nice tapas place to eat some solid food and then he felt better.

From there we walked back down to the Metro and back to the hotel to get changed for dinner. We took a cab to dinner because by then it was getting late. Our destination was Roca Moo, the Barcelona outpost of the Roca brothers, this one run by head chef Felip Lluria (I better check the spelling of his name because I’m writing it from memory).

The tl; dr of the meal is this: it was a fantastic gastronomic experience on par with the best high-end foodie gourmet we’ve eaten, with lots of “wow” moments. Kate said it was the best meal she’s ever had. I rate it below the meal at Moto in Chicago, but probably in the top ten.

Actually, I probably have to make a separate post about the meal. Check my instagram for the full slide show. I didn’t feel the least bit bad about photographing the food and then in the gaps between course posting the photos. Because everyone else in the restaurant was doing it.

Barcelona, first two meals, hotel, end of first day

It’s 3pm Barcelona time and it has taken us three hours to get to our hotel from the airport via public transit. Every station is under construction and every transfer we made we had to walk from one end to the other, plus we always managed to come out the wrong exit. But we did happen to walk right by the Casa Batillo, the Gaudi house that is 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea themed. It was the one thing a friend of ours told us we should not miss. We didn’t go in–there was a huge queue. I was as amused watching the large crowd on the sidewalk taking pictures of the house as I was of the house.

But anyway, here I am at the Travelodge Poblenou. Nice clean accommodation, in fact, it’s sort of “hotel room a la Ikea.” Seems like a pretty nice neighborhood, lots of cafes and bars, but a little bit away from the main tourist drags. Hey! We can see the towers of Sagrada Familia from our hotel room! As well as a huge phallic building that looks a lot like a building I saw in London.

The thing we need most now is showers after spending the last 14 or so hours traveling. It’s hot here in Barcelona, too, so we’re sweaty from lugging our bags around on the trains. I see why it is called “luggage.” Showers and then to find something to eat. Kate arrives later–she hasn’t even left Amsterdam yet.

LA BIENNAL

So we walked the Rambla de Poblenou, a very nice promenade lined with cafes and tapas restaurants that runs past our hotel, and after getting a tiny palmera to eat while we walked (a palmera is an elephant ear cookie) from a bakery. They had huge ones, too, as big as both my hands put together, and huge ones DIPPED IN CHOCOLATE but there was no way I was going to have the capacity for one of those. The neighborhood is partly residential, there are some elementary schools along the street, and lots of parents were picking up their kids when we were walking around 4:30.

We settled on a tapas place called La Biennal, and had a fantastic meal that I teased my Twitter and Instagram followers with photos of. Wow, my grammar is shot from jet lag. After eating we took a two-hour nap, which was the most we’d slept yet since leaving Boston 24 hours earlier. And then Kate arrived and we discovered that the big phallic building has a crazy colorful lightshow on it at night! This week is the Festival of Merce, the patron saint of Barcelona, so there are all kinds of huge celebrations going on. It’s actually good, I think, that we’re leaving town on the day before the huge to-do because that day the trains shut down.

Once Kate had unpacked, we went to eat another great meal, this one the other direction on Rambla Poblenou, at La Mar Bella, where we had a seafood and meat paella with langostines on it, plus mussels and pork ribs and squid tentacles, and a giant baked puff pastry stuffed with blue cheese, and white asparagus, and a dessert I’d never had before. They called it helado de limoncello, and it was lemon ice cream with a lemon curd center, rolled in crushed meringue. Delish.

Walking home I was tempted by a gelato stand with tiny tiny cones for 1,10 euro, but I was too full and my throat hurts a little so ice cream was probably a bad idea.

I hope the sore throat is just from airplane dryness and my usual allergies. I’m dosing up vitamin C and going to bed now.

The wifi here is dicey so uploading a lot of pictures isn’t working well, but whenever I have been able to snarf some wifi from cafes or airports I’ve been posting to my Twitter feed or Instagram, so look for me there to see all the photos, some of which are interesting road signs and buildings, but it’s mostly food so far. On Instagram I’m ctan_writer and on Twitter I’m @ceciliatan.

View from our hotel window, Sagrada Familia on left, big phallic building on right.

Barcelona Trip Journal!

Barcelona Journal

Sept 20 2013

Well, it’s 4:42 am in France, where we’ll be changing planes at Charles DeGaulle airport. So I’ll get to say I’ve been to France. I’ve given up pretending to sleep for now. I think I slept about 20 minutes right after takeoff and maybe 15 minutes a little while ago. But it’s hard to be sleepy when I’m excited about the trip. This is the trip we’ve been trying to take for two years. We wanted to go for our 20th anniversary but we didn’t quite have the time or the money at that point–that was two years ago. Since then corwin’s gotten into a better financial situation (and so have I), and I’ve gotten into a worse health situation that forced me to rethink my priorities and quit doing So Much. So that helped carve out the time for a vacation. Our first Real Vacation since we went to Disney World in 2008.

I’ll have to do a teensy bit of work while on the trip. Some correspondence about the Baseball Research Journal to keep that production schedule moving, and some writing, and I need to post some Daron’s Guitar Chronicles that I didn’t have a chance to before we had to leave. But not much. From what I can tell, there will be Wifi in all the hotels.

Daron is always with me on planes. I’m not sure what it is about airplanes that makes him so present in my head. He’s also usually there on long car trips if I’m driving alone. Spoiler alert for DGC readers: I’ve been planning to write about his trip to Seville ever since going there myself 9 years ago. But this trip is to Barcelona. With some driving into the mountains to see castles and eat in ridiculously good restaurants. Here’s the itinerary of cities/restaurants:

Sept 20:

No plans other than recover from jet lag and wander a bit. We’re staying at a Travelodge in Barcelona that had a ridiculously cheap 4-night family special, pre-paid. Kate will be flying in later tonight to meet us.

Sept 21

Dinner at Roca Moo. Since we couldn’t get into El Celler Can Roca in Giron, this is the next best thing.

http://www.hotelomm.es

Sept 22

Sunday. All the good restaurants are closed so we’ll be winging it. I’m sure there will be a tapas bar somewhere.

Sept 23

We get our rental car and drive into the mountains to Cardona, where we’ll be staying in a castle:

Parador de Cardona. And eating in their in-house gourmet restaurant. We stayed in a few paradors on our last trip, in Jaen and Ronda, and the food was terrific.

http://www.parador.es/en/parador-de-c...

Sept 24

Moving on to St. Pau del Mar, where the Restaurant of Carme Ruscalleda is. Carme is one of the chefs who lectured in the Harvard Science and Cooking course. The restaurant has some Michelin stars I think and is one of the Relais & Chateau properties (like Menton in Boston).

http://www.ruscalleda.com/

Sept 25

Moving on to Giron, where we could not get reservations at El Celler Can Roca, but it seems likely we’ll find good food anyway. Also, the Roca brothers have some kind of incredible gastronomic ice cream parlor? I hope corwin packed lots of Lactaid for himself. Meanwhile, corwin’s superpower is being able to fid amazing restaurants wherever we go.

Sept 26.

And now to Olot, to dinner at Les Cols. We opted not to say in Les Cols Pavellons, though, as they have no rooms for three people. Also some of the Yelp reviews made it sound like staying in a room made of all glass and stone with trickling water running through it all the time was actually not that comfortable. Also expensive. We’ll spend it on the food instead.

http://www.lescols.com/web/?page_id=9...

Sept 27

Back to Barcelona. We’re moving into a more upscale hotel, Hotel Onix Fira, and that night we’ll have dinner at Via Veneto. Sadly, the chef we made friends with during the Harvard course has left there to start some new project in Japan or China? Alas. Here’s hoping the food is still good even without Carles Tejedor.

http://www.viavenetorestaurant.com/

Sept 28

We really wanted to try to get in to Tickets, the bar that the former El Bulli impresario/chef/genius Ferran Adria now owns, but we couldn’t get a reservation. However, some of Ferran’s disciples started a molecular gastronomy place across the street called 41 Degrees/41 Grados. It’s apparently much like the old El Bulli experience, but with some kind of added multimedia element…? We’ll see. I like to be surprised so I didn’t look into it too closely after corwin discovered it.

We’ve also been advised tro try to walk in to lunch at Tickets. Could happen…

http://www.ticketsbar.es

Sept 29

Another Sunday! We’ll explore and see what we find.

Sept 30

We fly home!

We’ve already bought tickets to see Sagrada Familia, including a trip into one of the towers. All other art and museums we’re going to play by ear. There’s so much that we’ll be able to easily pack our schedule when we’re not eating…

LATER:

Now I’m in Charles DeGaulle airport. It looks a lot like we walked through a section of the DC Metro, and now we’re sitting on a set from Logan’s Run. Hm. I have eaten a pain de chocolate and a rose petal flavored macaroon, though! So yay! I get to add another country to my list of places visited, even if it is only the airport.

They have the paprika Pringles here, but man, they are expensive! “Duty free” my arse. Vitamin Water is also crazy expensive. Maybe that’s just the airport? Dunno.

Slow Surrender forthcoming in Dutch!

I just got the news that Slow Surrender and Slow Seduction (book 2 in the series), have been picked up by Dutch-language publisher Bruna! I don’t have any news about when they will be out, though.

In other news, I finally finished writing Slow Satisfaction, the third and final book in the series. There were so many loose ends I wanted to tie up that it took me longer to write the last four chapters of the book than it did to write the entirety of book 2! It’s with my editor now and I’ll soon find out if she likes the way I brought it all in for a landing.

Last bit of news, Apple now has some kind of an ibookstore widget thing, I’m testing it out:

Get a hot Slow Surrender bonus scene: I’ll trade for it!

Help me celebrate the release of Slow Surrender in paperback and I’ll reward you with an exclusive erotic scene between Karina and James!

Here’s how it works. Trade me a photo or screencap for the story. The story from James’s point of view, revisiting some of the scenes in Slow Surrender, but from his side of things. James being James he wouldn’t just write a scene, he wrote a whole treatise on “The Art of Love” (and sex and desire).

I’ll email the special scene to ANYONE** who emails me a screen capture/photo of the following:

* The paperback on sale in your local bookstore (or Target!)

* Your copy of the book with your cat (or other pet)

* Yourself with your book (or your ereader showing the cover!)

* Your book with a string of pearls!

* Your review or recommendation of the book to your friend on any social media! (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Goodreads, Livejournal, your own blog, Pinterest, G+, Yahoo email list, etc!)

Email your photo to ctan.writer (at) gmail.com OR tag me and post it on any of the social media where we are connected: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc…? However Remember, it’s very important to email me also so I can sent you the scene! Please include a statement in your email that you are 18 or older. Yes, the scene is that hot!

WHAT ABOUT PEOPLE WHO ALREADY DID IT?

If you got the bonus scene already because you helped out when the ebook came out, then this time you can trade in your new photos or screencaps for a SPECIAL SNEAK PEAK at Slow Seduction, book two in the series! (Yes, a much bigger preview than the little one in the back of Slow Surrender!)

If you want both the preview AND the James scene, well, trade me two separate photos of two different recommendations, reviews, or books “in the wild”!

Any questions, leave a comment on my blog (http://blog.ceciliatan.com) or contact me in email: ctan.writer at gmail dot com. Those are the two best ways to contact me!

**Note: You Must be 18 years of age or over! Don’t get me in trouble!

FIND Slow Surrender: Hachette’s web site| Amazon.com | B&N Nookstore | iTunes/iBooks |Google Play | Goodreads | Kobo | Powells | Sony

Connect with Cecilia Tan: Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads | Tumblr | Livejournal | G+ | Blog

Geeky Kink Event Schedule

Right now here’s what it looks like my schedule is for the Geeky Kink NE event this weekend! (One of the major presenters at the convention had to cancel because of a family emergency, so these times for events are still subject to change.)

Saturday 2pm: Celebrity Munchausen

Saturday 8pm: The Patented Cecilia Tan Erotic SF/F Reading

Saturday: 10:45pm: Slytherin Hazing Session

Please bring your wands and come dressed Hogwartian if you can!

Sunday: 12:15: Circlet Press 21st anniversary Bingo Game

(There will be prizes!)

Among other fun events taking place during the convention, there’s a Cosplay in Character Meetup, a clothing/gear/accessories swap, Strip Magic the Gathering (instead of poker), cotton candy bondage, and much more. This is going to be fun.

Rave “extended review” of Slow Surrender from RT Book Reviews!

In the Amazing and Wonderful Things that Happened Today Department: I discovered that RT Book Reviews, the biggest, most influential romance review entity, posted an “extended review” of Slow Surrender. They had already printed a short take in the magazine, a rave, so it really blew me away to see this!!

“Slow Surrender made me love the billionaire Dom again and you should definitely check out this perfect example of everything this subgenre should be.”

“Karina is no blushing ingenue. Finally — finally! — we’re given a heroine who’s willing to go along on this adventure, and without the Nervous Nellie nail-biting and hair-twirling the genre seems to be plagued with.”

“As for James, he escapes the confines of the controlling Dom construct that has so many of these “heroes” veering from Domination into downright abuse.”

“It’s lush and erotic without devolving into that weird place where sex sometimes becomes too graphic, and best of all, the sex actually advances the plot. Each sex scene is a logical stepping stone to the growth of this relationship between these two people.”

Read the full review: http://www.rtbookreviews.com/rt-daily-blog/extended-review-slow-surrender-cecilia-tan

Squeee!

FIND Slow Surrender: Hachette’s web site| Amazon.com | B&N Nookstore | iTunes/iBooks |Google Play | Goodreads | Kobo | Powells | Sony

Connect with Cecilia Tan: Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads | Tumblr | Livejournal | G+ | Blog

Interviewed at Romance Beat

Some quotes from the interview I did with Romance Beat last week!

“I’m so happy that “50 Shades” busted open that door [to the mainstream reading about BDSM], but honestly, I felt it wasn’t as kinky a book as people were expecting it to be, given all they had heard. I wanted to deliver a book that would get more and more kinky as the couple fell more deeply in love, rather than the other way around.”

“
I hope that people who are into BDSM in real life will read [Slow Surrender] and think not only ‘wow, that was hot’ but that it was realistic. And I hope people who haven’t tried BDSM in real life will think not only ‘wow, that was hot’ but that BDSM can be one of the most romantic forms of sexual expression there is.”

Click here to read the whole interview.

FIND Slow Surrender: Hachette’s web site| Amazon.com | B&N Nookstore | iTunes/iBooks |Google Play | Goodreads | Kobo | Powells | Sony

Connect with Cecilia Tan: Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads | Tumblr | Livejournal | G+ | Blog

Chatting tonight! 6:30 pm to 8:30 eastern US time on uStream!

All righty! The online chat to celebrate the release of Slow Surrender is tonight!

(To submit a question for me to answer in the chat, either email it to ctan.writer at gmail dot com, or leave it in comments!)

My plan is still to run simultaneous feeds to Google Hangout (YouTube) and uStream, though today I had trouble getting a test of Google hangout to run… We’ll do whatever we can. Ustream is a definite–I can run it off my phone if necessary!

I’ll read some hot snippets from Slow Surrender, talk about what life is like for a BDSM romance writer in a post-50-Shades world, and maybe even read some exclusive content never before published…? Tune in and join the party!

My uStream channel is: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/cecilia-tan

The words I used most in SLOW SURRENDER

Interesting to see that the word “clit” appears way more than “cock” eh?

Below is a screenshot taken from the Google Books page for my new BDSM romance, Slow Surrender, which shows the most commonly used words in it!

FIND Slow Surrender: Hachette’s web site| Amazon.com | B&N Nookstore | iTunes/iBooks |Google Play | Goodreads | Kobo | Powells | Sony

Connect with Cecilia Tan: Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads | Tumblr | Livejournal | G+ | Blog