During a stay at the Hotel Le Meurice we had lunch at its eponymous lobby level gourmet restaurant. I had dined there with a friend years earlier and remembered the striking dining room and formal ambiance. In the intervening years the hotel had renovated the common areas and I was unsure what to expect. As soon as we entered the restaurant we took a liking to the opulent yet cozy dining room.
The name Tanzania derives from two states, Tanganyika and Zanzibar that united in 1964 to form the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, which later that year was renamed the United Republic of Tanzania. The largest country in East Africa, it is just over twice the size of California, with a population of 42 million people, 99 percent of them Africans, with the remaining one percent Asians, Europeans and Arabs. Tanzania is one of the world’s poorest economies in term of per capita income (2010 estimates are around at $1,500 per year), with agriculture as its main source of employment and revenue, followed by tourism and gold mining. Unemployment and poverty are commonplace; crime and petty theft said to be rampant, especially in urban areas.
This small hotel had many features we liked. Some of the characteristics that stand out are its residential neighborhood location, friendly staff, pretty rooms with a garden view and internet connectivity, intimate ambiance, in house bistro and a lovingly tended one acre garden.
This striking music hall, built between 1905 and 1908 as the headquarters of the Orfeó Català , a nonprofit organization dedicated to the promotion of Catalan culture, had more than a century of history when I first attended a sold out concert there on a cool spring evening during a week long visit to Barcelona. It was love at first sight.
When I first heard the name Via Veneto I thought of the famous shopping street in Rome, Italy and wondered what kind of cuisine the restaurant served. Soon I discovered the restaurant offered a contemporary interpretation of Catalan dishes within a nostalgic setting designed during the Italian Dolce Vita era.
As a lover of fine foods and wines including bubbly, one of my favorite libations, I was excited to visit Wines and Cavas Eudald Massana Noya, a Spanish wine and cava estate within easy driving distance from Barcelona during a weeklong visit to that northern city. We arrived in the middle of the afternoon on a sunny spring day. After welcoming our group warmly Eudald Massana Noya, the owner, and Ester Tous Font, his wife, walked us out to the vineyards where, with the help of an English language interpreter, he told us, in Catalan (the language of the region) about the vineyards, winery and the property’s organic and biodynamic farming practices.