FIESTA: Food, Wine, and Barbarism in Logroño, La Rioja

ONE

It was on the floor of a large salon in Tribunal when, amid small glasses of silver tequila and jovial summer accounts, I remembered that I had a few minutes to gather my things at the place I where was crashing in the quiet, musty barrio of Lista and walk to catch the coach set to pull out of Avenida de America at 01:00 with or without me sitting in the seat I'd paid for.
The adrenaline of hustle mixed with the poisons in my blood and I felt I was transporting on something between a floating skateboard and an airport conveyor belt. At the station the bus was there and Erik stood alongside waiting. When we pulled out of the underground depot I was reading antiquated discourse and feeling my eyelids tumble down.

It was still dark when we pulled into Logroño, and we walked toward what looked to be the city center. We were already where we had to be. We were in La Rioja. Nothing left but to wait for the city to wake. But it was Friday night, and being that it was the opening weekend of San Mateo, the annual food and wine fiesta during the not yet slumberous winter season, we soon found the city had yet to go to sleep. Just outside the casco antiguo, the old city and always the place to look for in Spanish towns that have grown since the harnessing of electricity, I thoughtlessly offered my tobacco pouch to the inebriette that asked me for a cigarro. We found ourselves surrounded by inquisitive teen Spaniards who were thrilled to have come across some young Americans. That we spoke some Spanish was almost unbelievable and as the fervor grew, E and I just managed to make our escape, walking briskly down the street leaving excited voices behind.

We chewed on apples and walked into streets with plazas and fountains and trees and statues and the number of people around grew. We came to a junction. Ahead on the right, a plaza paved with pale stones reflected the yellow street lamp light up into the short leafy trees set in rows. This drew our eyes which then caught sight of a crowd of people down the street to our right, standing in that clear posture and shuffled huddle that signifies a busy bar. We moved in and found that we were crossing four or five nightclubs still very much active at 5:30 AM in this small northern city. Saw some people with food in their hands and rushed toward the source. Through exiting bodies we smuggled into a brightly lit room full of happily drunk Spanish kids singing loudly and poorly in English while an older woman angrily shoveled square slices of pizza into their hands. We got two and left laughing at the songs as we walked to the calm of the plaza.

For the next hour or so we walked the brightly lit streets and plazas, shiny having just been hosed down by the limpieza brigade and populated by sitting couples, homeward bound groups, and strange wanderers like ourselves. The town was beautiful at night, and we stopped for some time to stare up at the cathedral with its wildly ornate portal flanked by two completely bare walls rising up into elaborately carved and proportioned towers. Many of the buildings are quite old and more than a few have fallen into disrepair, taking on that elegant decadence of peeled paint, dried out sagging wood, and dirty panes. We located streets famous for their bars, restaurants famous for their specialty pintxos, and plazas where the fiesta would be centered. As the hour grew to 7:00, we found an open establishment adjacent to the central square and parked up at the zinc bar of Ibiza Café to drink café con leche for an hour or so while talking about future trips, the fiesta, and plans for the day. When we left it was light again, and the streets had taken on a whole new guise.