Me Gustan Tus Zapatos...: Calçotada 2011

A calçotada is a typical get together and meal that Catalans celebrate during early on the year.

In February the Capabilities Development team in Barcelona took a journey to the country side to enjoy a calçotada .

It was a great opportunity to meet friends and have a great day in the country side. This tradition was started in the Tarragona area and has become increasingly popular over the years.

There a few unwritten rules:

Locals from the area where this started generally never do Calçotadas in Restaurants. This is a sin. It will be as silly as having a BBQ in a restaurant, you lost most of the spirit of it.
The trick is the calçots sauce. It is really traditional and takes more than 1 day to prepare. Lucky, we had Carme's mom that looks after this.

The event was held at l'Espluga de Francolí ( see google maps ) . This is where Carme and her family lives - our host. The largest town in the county has 7,000 inhabitants.

We hit the Poblet Monastery. The visit took two hours, it is a really well conserved and while you visit you will see monks since they live there and they all year (we did not see any monks).

I would not recommend the Hostal Sanglar as a place to stay. We were the youngest people by 30 years, the heat did not turn off, the bed was like a rock and you could peep into other rooms via the shared outdoor balcony. We still had a fabulous time.

We also enjoyed drinking vino from a porron.

"…and drank out of a dreadful thing called a porron. A porron is a sort of glass bottle with a pointed spout from which a thin jet of wine spurts out whenever you tip it up; you can thus drink from a distance, without touching it with your lips, and it can be passed from hand to hand. I went on strike and demanded a drinking-cup as soon as I saw a porron in use. To my eye the things were altogether too like bed-bottles, especially when they were filled with white wine." - George Orwell