Hot Enough to Fry an Egg on the Sidewalk?

The first time I heard someone say that it was "hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk," I'm sure was in my hometown in Ohio, and probably in the house we moved to when I was five years old. The expression  immediately took root in my imagination. It did seem hot back in those summer days in the 1950s. I don't think anyone we knew had air conditioning in their house or their car then. We sure didn't. But that didn't matter anyway, because we didn't spend much time in the house or the car on those hot summer days when we were very young.

We played outside. Our house was in a new neighborhood without many shade trees, and without many kids, either. So I played with my sisters in the back yard or the driveway or the edge of the cornfield behind the house, or in the vacant lot two plots down the street. Sometimes we were joined by the girl across the street and sometimes by the boy from the big house down the street on the corner, neither of whom had any siblings near our ages.

I'll bet it was Brian who first told us one day that it was hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. He was two or three years older than I was, so he would know expressions like that. Maybe he even knew how hot it had to be to fry an egg. He may have led us to believe that he had carried out this experiment already with some of his more grown-up friends. He was more daring than we ever were, because, after all, he was a boy and he was older. Still, I don't believe that he really had fried an egg on the sidewalk. I know he didn''t try it with us.

This week it was hot enough in Spain so that the plastic clothes pins I sometimes use to hang laundry on the line on my upstairs terrace were popping left and right from the heat. Snap, crackle and pop--no sooner did I pinch one open than a portion of it split off and fell onto the tile terrace. It happened not once, not twice, but several times. That's when I wondered whether it was hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk, or at least on the terrace tiles.

I didn't spend a lot of time designing this experiment. I just went downstairs to the kitchen and grabbed an egg out of the refrigerator and the egg timer from the refrigerator door. I came back upstairs, cracked the egg and dropped it carefully on a terrace tile as far away from my clean laundry as I could get. I set the timer for five minutes and escaped back inside to my air-conditioned office.

When the egg timer went off five minutes later, I dashed out to see the egg. No difference. I set the timer again for five minutes. This time I noticed a couple bubbles in the egg white on one side of the egg. Five minutes later the bubbles were still there but had not changed. No change after the next 15 minutes, either.

I set the timer for 30 minutes and went downstairs to prepare lunch. When I checked on my egg just before taking the salads to the downstairs sun room, there were a few bubbles in the yolk of the egg. Back downstairs for a half-hour lunch in the sun room--where the temperature gauge outside said 100 degrees F. in the shade. My post-lunch egg check (this was after an hour and a half of "frying") revealed that the yellow had broken enough for three small spurts to bleed out of the yolk. It was really not appetizing. I was glad that I had already had lunch and that I had not eaten eggs.

Not quite hot enough to fry an egg on the terrace tile

Three hours later, after an afternoon petanca game and shopping, we took this photo to the right. Some of the white of the egg had dried up, leaving only a thin shiny film on the tile; the other side of the white did live up to its name. Except for the three spots of yolk that had escaped and turned red, the yolk still looked fresh and shiny.

I didn't clean up the mess from this experiment until the next morning, and that was a mistake, because by that time two ants were on their way into the feast. But I shooed them away and scooped up the egg with a wad of paper towel. Underneath the outer curvature of the yolk it was still a little bit runny, just the way some people like their fried or poached eggs. But they wouldn't have wanted this one.

Less Than 36 Hours in Madrid

A certain major U.S. newspaper is known for its travel stories with advice for passing a quick but action-packed weekend in world cities. Sad to say, my trips to Madrid are usually less than the 36 hours in length described by the New York Times in this series. I have been to Spain's capital probably ten times since moving to the country, but with one exception--a four-night meeting and reunion with three of Johannes' Danish engineering college classmates and their wives in 2009--all my trips to Madrid have been connected in one way or another with an airport. There have been few opportunities for sight-seeing.

In the early days, when I traveled twice a year back to the U.S., it was not possible to make the trip without spending a night in Madrid or in London. That's why I found myself one January 5 in the center of Madrid on the last shopping night before Three Kings' Day, when Spanish children get their Christmas presents. The main department store, El Corte Ingles, was open until midnight, and we watched the parade and fireworks on TV after we made our way through the crowded streets to our center-city hotel. The midnight shopping trip and parade were the memorable events from that Madrid trip.

Since then. most Madrid airport trips have been to fetch visitors from the airport or take them back for their trips across the Atlantic. Since transatlantic flights almost invariably land here in the early hours of the morning, we usually book a hotel room close to Barajas airport so we can be at the door letting passengers out from the baggage area at 6:00 or so in the morning. My longest airport trip occurred when we made the six-hour drive from Roquetas to Madrid to pick up my mother one winter day and were awakened from our fitful sleep a few hours before her scheduled arrival with the news that her flight had been cancelled due to bad weather, she was somewhere around Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and she would "probably" arrive on the next day's early morning flight. That flight delay gave us an unexpected 24 hours in Madrid, and I saw the Prado.

Last year I took the train from Alicante to Madrid to spend an overnight with an American friend who had a 24-hour layover on her way from Morocco to Washington, DC. Together we had a very enjoyable respite and saw several attractions, though not those recommended by the 36 Hours article.

But over the years, most Madrid airport trips have not leant themselves to exploring Madrid or even the environs of Barajas, the suburb that is home to its four airport terminals. We generally drive instead of taking the train, because who wants to lose money on return train tickets if the plane one is meeting is delayed? We start out the day before, find our way through the exasperating Madrid traffic, check into a hotel, and try to find something to eat nearby at a shopping center, because real restaurants are not open for dinner early enough for us to get enough sleep before we need to be up at 4:30 or 5:00 AM.

When we picked up our latest visitor last month, our trip was improved, even though we still did not do any sight-seeing. Gloria Pèrez Sànchez, the lady who lives inside the GPS, got us to our new hotel in record time, with no wrong turns and no frustration. A large shopping center was a short walk away, and we found what we wanted to eat and browsed a bit before returning to an early night in the sack. Breakfast was, of course, not available next morning prior to our 6:00 AM free shuttle ride to the airport, and Spanish hotels do not have coffee service in the rooms. But there was a coffee machine in the lobby! The plane came in on time, and our passenger and her luggage were on it. We took the free transportation back to the airport, rested, and were soon on our way for the four-hour drive home.

Taking this guest back for her midnight flight to Buenos Aires last Thursday, we booked the same hotel so that we could climb into bed after she was swallowed up by the security gates at 10:00 PM, and we took the train from Alicante to Madrid to provide a little variation in scenery. It is relatively easy to use the metro in Madrid to go from Atocha station, where the train comes in, to the Barajas terminals, though it does take two transfers and it was a good thing that we had three people to manage the six pieces of luggage (only one of which would be returning to Alicante). Our plan was to go to the airport by metro and take the hotel transportation back to the hotel, where we would find something to eat at that convenient shopping center, and then return to the airport for the flight check-in. Unfortunately when we walked into the terminal at 5:00 PM, we learned that there was a 95% chance that the midnight flight would be cancelled: the ash cloud from the Puyehue Chilean volcano was settling over Ezeiza airport in Buenos Aires.

Yes, we had read the reports and had monitored the situation as best we could, and when we had left our house at 10:00 AM, there was no reason to expect that the flight would not go off. But something had happened during Thursday our time, and now there was nothing to do but hope. We were tired and did not want to wait for the hotel shuttle. So we piled into a taxi and headed for the hotel. A longer-than-expected ride later, we pulled up in front of the AC Feria, which was not the hotel that we asked for: the Axor Feria. An understandable error, but the driver was not happy. Nor were we. The driver muttered, and I heard Spanish words that I had only read in books, and not very good books at that.

We did get to the Axor and explained that we may turn out to be three people instead of the intended two in the reservation. They were most accommodating. We used the free wireless connection to get as much information as we could, and to send messages to those waiting in Argentina. We walked to the shopping center. We had dinner. We walked back to the hotel, collected the luggage, and went to the airport. The flight was indeed cancelled. Although the European Union has established strict rules about compensation and emergency arrangements for travelers when flights are cancelled, those rules do not apply in cases of unforeseen and uncontrollable meteorological problems, or "acts of God," as I translate the clause on which Air Europa was basing its actions.

We received a tentative reservation for Monday evening, four days hence, with a phone number to call on Sunday to confirm that the flight would go through--if it did not leave as scheduled after that confirmation, the cancellation arrangements would be enforced, and a hotel would be supplied. We returned to our hotel and phoned Renfe to add another ticket to the two return fares for Friday noon. No way, Jose. While the Thursday afternoon train to Madrid had been half empty, there were virtually no places available on the train from Madrid to the coast on a summer Friday afternoon. So we were up before dawn--at 5:30, I believe--to get a cab to the Renfe station, and by 7:00 we had gotten a credit on our two afternoon tickets and bought three for the morning train, which left at 7:20.

By noontime--26 hours after leaving the day before--we had retrieved our car at the Alicante train station and were back home in our Montebello house, adjusting to the four-day vacation extension and hoping for strong winds in the southern hemisphere to move the volcanic ash out of Buenos Aires.

We have just made the phone call and been told that the Monday midnight departure is scheduled sin problemas. We have reserved our now favorite hotel for Monday night, for two persons. We are driving instead of taking the train, trusting Gloria to get us to the hotel, and the hotel to get us to the airport. And we are hoping for an uneventful trip and less than 36 hours in Madrid.

The Torrevieja Tapas Trail 2010

We seldom go in to the city of Torrevieja, which is the largest seaside city in our area, for anything other than shopping. The western part of town is the commercial area, where we find Carrefour, the largest hipermercado, which supplies us with everything from computer paper and cartridges to canned atún en aceite de oliva for our lunchtime salads. Right next door is the Habaneras shopping mall with most of the small specialty shops and department stores popular in Spain, and nearby is the favorite bricolage (hardware store) of the project master of the house, and Iceland, the British Overseas Market supermarket that I use to fill my food freezer on occasion. But we rarely venture beyond this shopping area into the old part of the city, with its narrow streets, tall buildings, and wide open seaside promenade.

So last Wednesday morning, when we and our Danish guests had been holed up in the house for two days straight competing in a coughing and sneezing marathon, and the sun came out briefly for the first time since Sunday, we drove in and parked along the promenade and took a cautious walk along the harbor. That lasted less than a half hour before we decided we needed to replenish the supply of cold medicine, an item not available from any of the small white tents along the waterfront offering crafts, copies (probably illegal) of music and videos, and other merchandise. A postal carrier pointed out the closest farmacia, and that's what made us walk through a side street just two blocks in from the water. We also found a delightful hole-in-the-wall Taberna Tipica where we warmed up with a cup of café con leche at the bar. It was just after noontime, and we watched the bar staff preparing huge casseroles of delicacies for the tapas and lunchtime trade that would commence in a couple of hours.

I thought of that bar yesterday when once again, finally, the sun came out blazing and I remembered that this was the last chance for the special tapas marathon in Torrevieja, running this year from Thursdays through Sundays only for three weekends. Our house guests had gone home, fortunately making it out just prior to the wildcat strike by Spanish air traffic controllers and after piles of snow had been cleared in Denmark. But we picked up English friends, once again a little after noontime, headed into town, where we were lucky enough to find a legal street parking place just across from the café bar where we had drunk coffee earlier in the week. The interior was still dark with rich wood furnishings and hams hanging from the ceiling. But we ate outside, because today there was an empty table in the sun among one of the four or five in the street, which is where Torrevieja establishments customarily place them on good days, which is most days.

The idea of a special tapa trail, or marathon, or festival, is that various establishments, usually within walking distance, offer a tapa and a drink (wine, beer, soft drink, or water) for the bargain price of 2 euros. You go from bar to bar, sampling, and getting your tapas card stamped to show that you were there. If you get nine stamps, you can vote for your favorites, and the establishment and you might win a prize.

At the Taberna Tipica, we had poached white fish and boiled potato in sauce, served in the typical round clay tapas dishes, all carried out on a single plate, with the traditional chunks of a baguette. Perhaps we should have stuck around for a second one, which I realized later would have been the innovative tapa, as opposed to the traditional one. Instead we walked a half block to another place on the corner. By this time it was cool enough to go inside, and we clustered in a large wooden booth after the server explained that we could have either of two tapas for today, or we could try the specials featured last week, too. Our first, a meat tapa, came on individual small, square, white plates, with knife and fork. Serious eating, and it was good enough that we ordered a second. This one, also a knife-and-fork tapa, was one beautiful large shrimp, resting on its side on soft bread, spiced and sauced nicely, with a few gulas as a garnish. I had to look up gulas in the dictionary, and it wasn't there, which was just as well, since I was able to enjoy the baby eels (they looked like spaghetti) without thinking about baby eels.

Our server told us that the restaurant that had won last year's contest was just around the corner, so off we went. By now business was picking up, the bar was crowded, and we had to stand next to the wall counter that so many Spanish bars have--just wide enough for a glass and a small tapa plate. My friend and I looked at each other and agreed that the vino tinto that we had been drinking was just a little taste in a very large glass, so we could continue, though our driver by this time had switched to Sprite. I'm not sure what I ate here--I pointed to something round that had a fried quail egg on top, but when the tapa came it had morphed into what appeared to be a mini Scotch egg covered in another delicious warm sauce.

Around the corner once more to an ultra-modern, glass-surrounded bar, with high tables and high stools. Two of us ate the traditional tapa here, a substantial one with a bite of rabbit, pork, chicken, and duck, and the other two had the innovative one, which turned out to be a mini apple dumpling in milojas (puff) pastry. The bartender told us that cava was available in addition to the wine, beer, etc., so I finished off my tapas trail yesterday appropriately with dessert and Spanish champagne.

The Rain in Spain

When I woke up this Sunday morning and swung my feet out to the small fluffy rug that lies between my side of the bed and the sliding glass door to the French balcony, they hit an unpleasantly wet surface! After two straight days of cold and damp air, Saturday at noon the occasional small raindrops had started to descend steadily, and even though it was gentle, it had rained persistently from Saturday noon long into the night. I listened carefully but did not hear any pitter-patter on the roof or outside on the pavement. The rain must have stopped.

It was still too early to expect any daylight to be seeping into the room, so I turned on the overhead light. How much of a leak did we have, and where was it coming from? Only the rug was wet, but it was really wet, almost sopping. The simple white muslin almost floor-length curtains were not moist at the bottom, however. My terry-cloth slippers, safely tucked under the nightstand at the head of the bed, seemed to be dry. The socks I had worn to bed and shed some time in the night--apparently onto the rug that was gathering rainwater--were a bit damp. The stack of newspapers I had been perusing before falling asleep were moist on the bottom. The tile floor around the rug was cold to the touch, but not wet.

The reja--the metal window grille that is raised and lowered throughout the day to let in heat and light or keep them (and the winter cold) out, depending on the season and siesta schedule--was down, and presumably had been down the entire night. The two sections of the sliding glass door were locked with their round disk in the center of the structure, so presumably they had been closed properly throughout the night.

My breakfast appeared, prepared and brought up by my favorite butler, who also investigated the leak and promptly promised to re-caulk the area under the door. 

Two hours later and the sun is shining gloriously for the first time since Wednesday. The reja is up; all traces of water have disappeared from the French balcony floor and the upstairs terrace, where I have moved the bedside rug to air-dry (and rearranged the two sweaters I had washed yesterday and left in the outside laundry shed to dry flat--they were no worse for the rain, but no better). No one is presently looking at the caulking to be done. From my bathroom window I can clearly see the mountains in the distance and and oranges on the trees in our neighboring grove. We are off to the outdoor market to enjoy a sunny Sunday in Spain.

Settling In

I was home again to our house in Montebello by Tuesday noon this week. The clear and sunny sky that greeted me at the Alicante airport disappeared soon, and we had two gloomy and cold days, and I missed the central heat of houses in the U.S. But on Friday morning the sun came out and warmed the rooftop terrace to above 70 degrees, so I did some laundry and hung it out to dry. When I came home from our pétanque game and a wine-tasting preview that evening, I started another load of clothes in the washer so I could be the first person within view of my rooftop to hang clothes out on Saturday morning. It proved worthwhile--Saturday was as beautiful and warm as Friday had been, and I did two more loads of laundry.

This Sunday morning I opened the bathroom window to enjoy the view and listen to the birds as I prepared for the day. We walked by the orange grove--oranges still on the trees, and brighter orange than a month ago--to our own pétanque playing field in Montebello, and I won two games out of two. Then we went to the outdoor Sunday market (Zoco), which was very crowded today with people out enjoying the sunny weather. Strawberries are coming into season and every produce stall had them, but I'll wait for a week or two until the price comes down and they look a little more ripe, and in the meantime be content with the sweet and juicy mandarins that smell like spring as soon as I thumb one open for our fruit salad at lunchtime. I was comfortable in sandals without socks and just a thin undershirt and linen open-necked blouse--maybe I can put away the turtlenecks and heavy socks I brought back from Ohio with me.

We sat in our sunroom for soup, fruit salad, and two big rundstykker rolls from the Danish baker at the market. Goldie rolled around on the tile floor catching sun rays, and we enjoyed the view of our trumpet plant that is once again blooming, now for the third time since last May. And tried to fathom that people are digging out from 28 inches of snow or more on the mid-Atlantic coast.

Spain's Big Chill

The BBC reported yesterday that a big chill was bringing cold and misery to millions of Europeans. I didn't need the BBC to tell me. It's been cold and miserable for about two weeks on the Costa Blanca and in other parts of Spain, too. Even though we didn't experience anywhere near the problems that many others faced in central and northern Europe, we had uncharacteristically cold weather, and lots of inconvenience.

Outdoor temperatures have been in the single digits Celsius. That's in the 30s, Fahrenheit. I finally got out all my winter clothes, and I wore as many of them at one time as I could get over each other--four layers being about as many as I could fit. It may not have been as bad as it seemed, except for the fact that we had had the warmest November in 140 years. Then again, I think it was as bad as it could get, though not the outdoor part.

In a land where central heat and thermalpane windows are virtually unknown, long-term cold seeps into the houses, and it stays there, right on top of the beautiful ceramic tile flooring and marble stairways. We got out all the area rugs we could find--even the ugly ones--and we bought a large new carpet that almost covers the living room floor. We wheeled in a small portable electric radiator and turned on the electric wall air conditioner/heater in the adjoining dining room so we could sit, huddled in blankets, while watching reports from the global warming energy summit in Copenhagen. My upstairs office has the only other portable electric heater in the house, though we occasionally moved it to the bathroom during shower time. I went to bed early and read under the warm down comforter, my feet encased in down slipper boots, and moaned when I had to take one hand out from under the comforter to turn pages. I refused to get up in the morning until the wall heater had been on for a half hour. My neighbor told me that she was going to bed and not getting up until March!

In desperation, we went to the Ambifuego store and made a purchase that we had been hoping to put off until we had been in the house for a year. We ordered a propane-fueled fireplace insert that "burns" fake charcoal. In this season of miracles, they told us that they could install it in just a week--on December 24. As I write, the installation man is fitting the wires to the propane bottles, and I expect soon to be called downstairs for lessons in how to work this heater.

Of course, the weather finally broke, and yesterday was in the balmy 60s F. We take full credit. If we hadn't made this major purchase now, I am convinced, the weather would have stayed cold for months. It just goes to show, you do have to throw some money at the problem to get a better indoor climate. I'm glad to have an alternative to using so much electricity, but I'm even more glad just to get warm again.

Gota Fría

At the end of September, Monday the 28th to be exact, we experienced our first gota fría in the Alicante region, and, according to reports, the worst in this area in twelve years. A gota fría, literally translated, is a cold drop (as in drop of water). In this context it refers to a weather phenomenon in which a cold front meets the warm air rising over the Mediterranean and dumps muchas gotas of agua onto the land below.

When we get rain here, which is not often, it almost always comes very conveniently at night. This time it started on Sunday mid-morning, and continued on and off all that day and night. Monday morning during a temporary "off" period we went out to the grocery store, since the rain the day before had kept us away from the local Sunday market. We bumped into friends at Lidl, decided to go for a cup of coffee, and sat too long inside talking as the rain poured down.

When we left we drove through rain-filled streets with water up to our hubcaps. We made our way slowly towards home, which thankfully sits on higher ground than the surrounding area, but we still had to get through that lower surrounding area. At the roundabout leading from the highway toward Montebello, we encountered more water, a couple cars coming toward us very slowly, and another abandoned on the side of the road. As we rounded a curve, we saw a car up ahead stalled in water up to the windows. We turned around and headed back to Ciudad Quesada, the closest commercial area, to find a more comfortable place to wait until the water went down.

El Bancal restauante was the first dry spot we came to--though the downstairs ladies room was flooded so the mens on the upper level became unisex. We warmed up in the restaurante with a tasty goulash soup and glass of wine. After ninety minutes or so we ventured out again, but only because a man there spoke on his cell phone with a friend in Montebello, who told him that the roundabout at the highway was now cordoned off but we might be able to get in by driving north to the town of Algorfa and then back south to come in "the back way." We did, holding our breath for much of the half hour it took to follow this detour, and arrived at our Montebello entrance intact and with motor still running.

Our house and most of the develoment were weathering the torrent with no problems, though the following day we discovered that a wall surrounding the green rubbish dumping area--adjacent to the back road by which we came--had caved in with the force of the rushing water.

Subsequent newspaper reports said that the torrents brought 100 liters of water per square meter in just four hours. If you don't know exactly how much that is, you are not alone. It is a lot! Hundreds of drivers abandoned their cars, and dozens of people had to be evacuated from their homes. But amazingly after the rains stopped, the water receded rapidly. By the next morning, when we had a 9:00 appointment to have the car inspected prior to its official inpection, we were able to drive out the front road, but the appointment was postponed as garages had more business than they could handle rescuing and cleaning mud-packed vehicles.

The news reports that this was the worst gota fría in twelve years. Also that it was only the first one of the season.

Rain in Spain

Last Sunday it rained in Spain--not terribly hard where we live, but the thunder was loud enough and the lightening close enough that I didn't want to tempt fate by keeping the computer connected to an electrical outlet, no matter that it is protected. We went out to visit friends in the early evening and remembered to leave a light on because we knew it would be dark by the time we returned home. When we came back at 9:30 the light was off, though street lights were still lit. Fortunately a flip of the circuit breaker restored power to the house.

It rained on and off for the next three days, and the temperatures dipped into the low 70s F. though it seemed colder in the early morning when we went out to play pétanque. By midweek I was beginning to wonder whether it was time to bring out long-sleeved clothing and relocate my summer sleeveless next-to-nothings to my winter undershirt drawer. Procrastination pays off sometimes. I did not renovate my wardrobe, though I did start to wear 3/4 length pants for the first time in three months.

Our garden benefited greatly from the rain--everything is clean and fresh--but the local Euro Weekly News paper is telling us that the rain caused flooding in Orihuela, the largest near-by city. In the Valencia region, it was feared that extended rain could damage the rice crops, but the storms seem to have passed over by now. Grape vines were damaged in the Utiel-Requena wine district west of Valencia, however, and the grape harvest is expected to fall by 50% this year. That's not good news for the local wine industry that we are beginning to explore.