Despite the bleak looking construction ring around it, Burgos was excellent. We found a hotel right off. The guy who ran it asked if we were "pilgrims." At first we didn't understand the word (peregrinos); we thought maybe he meant foreigners, or something. So we said yes. He was very kind to us. It turned out that he thought we were pilgrims who walk, bike, or
bus/train every year across Spain to Santiago de Compostela, in the northwest.When I realized what our innkeeper was talking about, I told him that we weren't pilgrims. But I didn't want to offend him, so I told him we were pilgrims of a different sort. He seemed to understand that, and he was still nice to us.
As soon as we got settled in, we wandered outside and into a busy looking bar and restaurant called Casa Ojeda. Inside, we sat down at a table--a bit of a splurge for us, since the Spanish, like the French, add a surcharge if you sit at the table instead of eating at the bar. We ordered our usual: a couple of beers and something small to eat.
The waiter was really friendly. We managed to talk to him a bit in Spanish. Soon he brought something we hadn't ordered: morsilla, a specialty of Burgos that is famous all over Spain.
My friend Maria, who has spent a lot of time in Spain, told us to check out morsilla, but when I read a description of it in our guidebook, I decided to skip it. The description says it's a kind of blood pudding, blah, blah, blah. I pictured some awful meat dish, with entrails. But the stuff our waiter served looked good. It was really black, and had a lot of rice in it. It was thickly sliced sausage that was shaped a little bit like sushi. It was delicious.
Then our waiter--stupidly, we never asked his name--asked us if we liked it. We said yes, enthusiastically, and he told us what was the best meal to order: morsilla as a first dish, and cerzado asado
(lamb roasted in a horno de lena, or wood-burning oven) for a second. (It's customary to order two courses here). We had trouble understanding him, so we got him to write it down on a napkin. At some point during the meal we walked over to the wood burning oven where a chef was using a long wooden paddle to arrange all the food inside. We asked what he was cooking. He said cerzado, but we didn't know the word yet. So he baah-ed like a sheep. What a restaurant!The next day, we walked around town and had a great time, but the best part of the day was dinner. We went back to Casa Oj
eda, found our waiter, and told him we wanted to order the dinner he had suggested. He was really happy to have us. He sat us down and asked what we wanted to drink. We asked for glasses of red wine. He seemed relieved. I think he was afraid we were going to order beer, and beer wasn't what he had in mind for our perfect dinner.Our waiter came back with a whole bottle of wine! It was Prado del Rey, an inexpensive, but great wine from the region. Then came the Morsilla, which was just as great as before. Then came the cerzado asado, which was incredible. It wasn't tough at all. The meat just fell right off the bone. And, as happened many times throughout the meal, our waiter brought us something we didn't ask for: french fries.
We loved the food. We talked a little to our waiter but he was pretty busy serving other people, too. For dessert, we asked what he recommended. He told us, and of course we had no idea what he was saying. He went off to get it, and another waiter asked what we wanted. Before we could answer, our waiter chased him off. Then he came back with a thing called Mil Hojos (1,000 pages?) a light cream filled pastry that just blew us away. He also brough
t coffee, and then foisted an after-dinner drink on us. I've never had an after-dinner drink, and I never even understood why they would, but after that, I learned to appreciate the custom. Our waiter offered to leave the whole bottle on our table, but one was definitely enough.
It was an excellent meal, one of the best either one of us has ever had. About halfway into it, when we realized that our waiter was steering us towards this dish and that, we decided to surrender, and just go for it. Somewhere after the cerzado asado we started joking about who would have to go out to the ATM machine to get cash to pay for the dinner, as it was becoming evident that we didn't have enough on us. Luckily, they took credit cards. He charged us only $31. I think he didn't charge us for anything we didn't actually order. If we had paid the full price it probably would have been more like $50.It's a good thing the restaurant took credit cards. Our last morning in Burgos, March 1, we had what I call an ATM frenzy. Our ATM card worked well for us all over Asia, but only at 50 percent of machines in
France (even the ones marked with the Plus symbol, which is the network our ATM uses), and only at 10% of the machines in Spain. That morning, we needed cash. We went to ATM machine after ATM machine and were rejected several times. Eventually, around noon, we got one to work. We never did figure out if it was a question of finding the right bank, or going at the right time (maybe we can't use our ATM cards on Monday mornings, because our California bank updates its computers around midnight on Sunday? That was one theory we had), or what.We had this problem several more times in Spain.
If you're going to Spain try to keep a little extra emergency cash on you because you never know when you can find a working ATM.
Next: Gregorian Chants in Santo Domingo
