Since I’m now almost Catholic, I decided to look for a new national identity to go with this religious persuasion and tried Irish food. You can see it in the photo. It had potatoes, cabbage, and carrots. And a very unusual kind of meat called brisket. I have no idea why Irish food has Jewish-sounding meat but the dish was very good.

Vatican has made such an effort to select a Pope who would be untouched by pedophilia scandals that it forgot that Latin America has tragedies of its own.

And this isn’t just bad luck. There is no country, no continent where the Church could go to find a high official of Catholicism who wouldn’t be involved in something really bad. The Catholic Church has been a negative force for far too long. A string of scandalous Popes is only a symptom.

In Madrid, we found this really amazing restaurant run by a famous chef. The food they serve there is to die for. Everything was quite simple but the ingredients simply screamed freshness.

Before the beginning of the meal, the restaurant serves bread with this really amazing tomato paste. (The photo is ugly because, for some reason, my camera refused to adapt itself to the restaurant’s lighting.) The paste is made by putting a fresh, delicious tomato through a blender and not messing with it in any other way. No salt, no additives, nothing but a tomato that is so fresh it almost breathes. Delicious!

 

The really hilarious part of the experience, however, took place when my sister decided to research the reviews of this restaurant and discovered an angry complaint from a group of American tourists:

“And what is with this disgusting tomato paste?” they asked. “Something is seriously wrong with it. It tastes of rotten ketchup!”

I’m now wondering which state in this country has been so abandoned by nature that its inhabitants don’t recognize a fresh tomato.