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Last posts

Dans Le Noir: Eating in the Dark

Mónica Boixeda Barcelonian

The best cooks in the world are constantly looking for new dishes, new combinations and they love experimenting with food. But having dinner is also about the atmosphere, right? For a romantic night out with your hubby, you’d pick a different restaurant then you would for a bachelor party. But what about eating in the dark? It’s the newest restaurant in Barcelona: Dans Le Noir. The concept is simple: the surprise menu costs €39, the a la carte menu €34. A waiter guides you to your table, where you sit down and try to discover your knife without cutting yourself. You never realise how difficult it is to drink without actually seeing your glass until you try it. Don’t worry if you have to go to the bathroom, you’ll not break your neck, since (like in kindergarten) you have to ask to the waiter to accompany you. Another advantage: when your glass of wine is empty, you can secretly drink that of your neighbour without anybody noticing! It’s not that we are scared of eating in the dark; it’s that we are a little worried about what we are going to eat. Because let’s be honest: €39 for a menu without drinks is expensive. And imagine you don’t like to food at all. The first dish tastes like wilted lettuce with sour tomatoes. Then they give you fried potatoes (drowned in oil) with a leathery steak and overcooked beans and for dessert you get a vanilla flan. But when you exit, they tell you that you had a cucumber-tomato salad with balsamic vinegar, followed by tenderloin steak with oven... read more

The sensitivity of the writer Stefan Zweig

Mónica Boixeda Barcelonian

I admire Stefan Zweig for his incredible masculine sensibility, for his overwhelming ability to express women´s feelings in a way that no woman could, and for his mesmerizing writing that makes you travel to the privacy of human beings in perpetual conflict with their obsessions, passions, anxieties and secrets. Zweig committed suicide in Petropolis in 1942 with his wife, after a life devoted to writing, journalism and translation of other works. He was born in Vienna (1881) and had a Jewish education. He is a classic of German literature, a great genius whose sensibility marked his whole life, all his work and all his readers. The disappointments of the war The outbreak of World War represented the end of the humanism for Zweig and at a personal level it was a moment when he fell into a deep depression. Like many artists of his generation, Zweig is deeply scarred by the atrocities in Europe, but with the support of the writer Romain Rolland, he went ahead. The inhumanity and death prevailing in Europe at the beginning of the century traumatize Zweig so much that he focuses his attention on the search of human feelings. He gets into the souls of his characters, travelling through Europe and India, he becomes friends with Sigmund Freud, he translates Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Keats… He wrote some poems, theatres, plays, and especially short stories such as Amok (1922), 24 Hours in the Life of a Woman (1927), Letter from an Unknown Woman (1927)… The female characters of Zweig In Zweig´s works, the action is not based on facts, but on the character’s feelings, where... read more

Turkish Baths, the best pleasure in Istanbul

Mónica Boixeda Barcelonian

Travelling to Istanbul and not enjoying a relaxing Turkish bath is like going to London and not trying a typical English breakfast, a sin! The Turkish baths, known as Hamams, are the quintessence of Turkey. While the pearl of the Danube collects eastern and western scents to combine them together in a unique essence, the Hamam could be the Turkish equivalent of Western spas. The Turkish bath is a place to relax, where you combine the wellness with some body treatments. Here several elements are combined: the dry heat, the moist heat, the cold, the massages and the peelings. In fact, the word Hamam means “the place that heats”. These look a lot like the former Roman baths, not only in their structure, but also in their socio-cultural function. Though now a bit of this tradition has been lost, much of the Arab social life used to be developed in the baths; moreover, it was common for the bride to celebrate her bachelor party at the Hamam. Usually in the Turkish baths men do not mix with women as in most of the Western spas. The Turkish bath is like a wet sauna, but with a closer practice of the Roman bath: one must first relax in the warm room – a room heated with hot air; then you go to an even hotter room, called hot room and then you dive into a cold pool. Then, you receive a full body wash and a massage; to finish, you access the cooling room where you take a further period of relaxation. There isn’t a limited time to enjoy the... read more