¡Teruel Existe!

Apparently the population of Teruel province (roughly the southern third of Aragón) has decreased by about 50% over the last hundred years. There´s this ¡Teruel Existe! (Teruel exists) campaign to promote the province. I´m not sure what it consists of, exactly, but I´ve seen a lot of ¡Teruel Existe! bumper stickers.

The 6:40am train was less painful than I thought it would be. We passed all these wheat fields that looked really nice in the morning sunlight. Sun shining on wheat fields makes me inexplicably happy. And closer to Teruel, the dirt turned red and there were red hills off in the distance. Kinda cool.

I got to Teruel city right in the middle of Fiestas del Angel, the yearly weeklong celebration of the founding of Teruel. I guess that´s why I had so much trouble finding a hotel room. It´s kinda cool that I´m here for this festival, but the museums are closed all week because of it. I went to the cathedral, but there really wasn´t anything else to do but walk around. There is some cool architecture here: A lot of Muslims stayed in southern Aragón after they lost ruling power (in Spanish they´re called mudéjars) so there´s a lot of Islamic influence. And a lot of very red brick. (Does that have anything to do with the fact that the dirt here is red? I dunno.) But Teruel is really small—you can see all the interesting buildings in about an hour, and then what do you do? Worse, most of the plazas are blocked off in preparation for the night´s festivities, so there aren´t even good places to sit and observe. And festivals like this are really good for making you feel like a total outsider, if that´s in fact what you are. Whine.

For lack of anything better to do, I took a little siesta today. I had the TV on in my hotel room and the local station was covering the festival. I´m pretty sure I´ve seen all there is to see here, because everything they were showing on TV looked familiar. Then they switched to interviews with various locals, and when I went back out a while later I found that the interviews were being recorded live a block away from my hotel. Small towns are good for stuff like that.

But. All of these Teruel stories are a long digression from what´s really important here, and that is the ham. The streets of Teruel smell of ham. Not all of them, but enough that I can say it without really exaggerating. It is so good. Omigod it is so good. I´m not really a food person; I like food, but I´m not very good at talking about it. I was trying really hard to figure out what was different about Teruel ham compared to regular old serrano ham (which is already pretty fucking good), but I´m not used to thinking about food that way. The texture is a little different: cut a little thicker and slightly drier. And it was a little bit smoky; it almost tasted a little bacon-y. That´s all I got. It was just really, really good. And, a whole plate of it only cost three euros. In fact, I had a plate of the best ham ever, three tapas, and two glasses of wine all for four euros. I didn´t really need the second glass of wine (which was actually the third before 9pm--I was bored in Teruel, okay?), but when bartenders are giving out free alcohol you kinda have to drink it.

I didn´t really get the maño thing before Teruel. Zaragoza is a biggish city, with presumably more non-Aragonians; Torla was full of hiker tourists; I wasn´t in Huesca long enough to notice much. But here in Teruel, people are definitely more brute-ish. Drunken fighting (mostly good-natured, but still), yelling, shirtless fat men singing loudly. Okay, so there is this festival going on, but I´ve been to other Spanish festivals and they´re normally far less brutish. There isn´t even a good ice cream place here.

Aside from being more brutish, Friday night´s festivities were pretty typical for Spain: drinking, music, fireworks, little kids up way past any reasonable American bedtime. On Saturday morning the park and bus station were full of passed-out people. I saw one guy wake up from sleeping in the grass, pick up a pair of hot pink thong underwear that for whatever reason were laying next to him, put them on over his jeans, walk about 20 feet away, and pass out again, face down, the pink triangle of the thong displayed prominently on his ass. Maños.

While I was at the bus station waiting to leave Teruel it started raining, hard, and the red dirt made all these red rivers running down the streets. It would have been miserable if I´d been outside in it, but from inside the dry bus it all looked pretty cool.