Three absolutely insanely tasty meals I've had on this trip so far -- highly recommended to anyone who travels here, is super-hungry, and has a lot of kizzash to spare. (I'm totally all up for meals that cost a single euro, but sometimes nice things cost crazy money.)

1) Chez Maxime (Aix-en-provence)
Your waiter explains the history and culture of your wine to you: why did they open up vineyards in that area, and why are they special? When he brings San Pellegrino to your table, he makes jokes about the year on the bottle of water and that that's a very good year for water.

Get the prix-fixe menu. Expect for several bonus dishes to just arrive at your table when he decides that you need to try more things. My ordered menu: Le tian de légumes rôtis aux saveurs d'ail douxet de basilic à la mozzarella followed by jambonette de canard au romarin et miel des mille fleurs and then Entremet mousse chocolat amer et chocolat blanc,génoise au rhum. But there was a whole lot of other tempting options.

2) Casa Sansa (Perpignan)
One of the few places open on Sunday in this area, this French/gypsy restaurant cannot be missed. Get the "Suquet de Peix": Cousin de la Bouillabaisse: Grondin, vive, boeuf, rascasse (poissons selon arrivage), langoustines, gambas, moules, coques, calamars, poireaux, pommes de terre, cuits et servis dans le fumet de poisson amélioré au sagi, jambon, ail et liaison poudre d'amande.
It's basically a whole bunch of seafood thrown in a bowl together and cooked until the broth is extremely flavourful and each piece of seafood is better than any fish you've ever had before. The fact that I recently cooked whole red snapper (heads-on, eyes-on, etc.) helped to get over the squeemishness of this dish, but it tastes amazing.

3) Cinq Sentis (Barcelona)
Sit down and order the "sensacions tasting menu" with the wine pairings. Then sit back and enjoy an 8 course insanely amazing evening of tastiness: tapa, appetizer, shellfish, wild fish, meat, digestive, pre-dessert and dessert. I never before knew that desserts require a pre-dessert course, but man was I wrong!
Shown above a few of the courses: a welcome shot (warm maple syrup, chilled cream, cava and rock salt), fois gras coca (thin pastry base, caramelized leeks, chives, and burnt sugar crust), scallops (with a sunchoke puree and jamon chip), and chocolate with cracked bread, olive oil and salt. Everything was amazing!

So there you go. Three absolutely stunning meals I've had on this trip that rank amongst the best I've ever had. Tonight? Fruit, bread and sausage from a Barcelona market. Mmmmm.

That is all.

It starts with a spark of interest. I visited New York a few months ago and decided to go to the Museum of Natural History, where I learned that everything that I learned about dinosaurs and evolution in school is so totally outdated that I'm no longer qualified to even talk to a five year old about it.

The next step is wikipedia, looking up things like Cladistics. The next thing I know I'm eating through a wealth of books from The Red Queen (first 2/3s of the book are gold, then he goes off on an unfortunate sexist rant) and The Ancestor's Tale (very highly recommended; I don't think I've ever learned so much from a single book). It turns out that I find evolutionary biology and statistics to be fascinating, and I didn't even know it!

Similarly, with the economic crisis happening, I've started looking out for ways to learn more about it, from listening to a This American Life show about the economy (a great way to learn a lot in only an hour), to reading Paul Krugman's blog, to finding other informative essays about the topic. I'm making sure that I understand it, not only because it's relevant and current, but because I'm genuinely interested.

The crazy things about these two examples (and there are many more) is that I hated biology, statistics and economics in school. I specifically went out of my way to not have to take courses on them. In Grade 11, I was probably one of the only students in my high school who elected to stop taking biology classes. And in university I managed to avoid the intro to economics class that everyone else was taking, and weaselled my way out of taking all of the statistics classes that were required of me. These were things that I actively worked to avoid, and I'm now actively seeking out.

So what changed? I don't think it was me, because the idea of sitting in a Grade 11 biology class and memorizing the parts of a cell still sounds incredibly dull and stressful to me. I think that what has changed is that I'm no longer being evaluated on these topics. I don't have to memorize formulas and definitions, I can just sit back and enjoy learning for learning's own sake. It's an entirely different experience. When I read an interesting sentence now, I can say "wow, I want to learn more about that" and hop onto wikipedia and soon I'm immersed in answers to my own questions. But in school such things would be a waste of valuable time that you need to dedicate to memorizing the difference between "miosis", "meiosis" and "mitosis". (For the curious, they're the constriction of the pupil of the eye, the process in which the number of chromosomes per cell is cut in half, and the division of a parent cell's genome into two daughter cells, respectively.)

There's something so liberating in just being able to dictate the direction of my own learning. I can run off on tangents and read as much back history as I need to and pick up books that I find enjoyable and suddenly decide, on a whim, that I want to know everything that there possibly is to know on drugs of last resort. This is way more fun than doing problem sets and exams.

When you're a kid, the excitement of Hallowe'en is two-fold. First of all, by the end of the night you're going to end up with a sack of candy. The cost of this reward is that you'll have to spend as many as ninety minutes going door to door and having to deal with adults incorrectly guessing what you're dressed as, and insisting on taking a picture of you and other equally embarrassing activities.

The second reason to be excited by Hallowe'en as a kid is that you get to dress up in a costume. Sure, you may have been wearing a full snowsuit under your Robin Hood costume, and yeah, most people would have guessed you were Peter Pan instead of Robin Hood if they could see past the snowsuit at all, but that wasn't the point. For an evening, you got to be someone.

The excitement of Hallowe'en varies a bit when you hit adulthood. For some, the holiday seems to represent taking ones own kids out trick-or-treating and wondering how you're going to throttle back the candy consumption to a non-ludicrous rate. For others, Hallowe'en still involves a glimmer of the fun of dressing up, and in San Francisco the hallowe'en costume stores have far more adult costumes for sale than children ones.

For me, Hallowe'en is now all about:

1. Hosting a themed party with the least stereotypical Hallowe'en theme I can think of. Last year was Pandas. This year is a Communist Party.
   
   
2. Looking for the most outrageous Hallowe'en costume on Google campus. Two years ago was the current winner, and, incidentally, the reason why we now have a child-safe party at work the day before the "adult" Hallowe'en party. Use your imagination.
   
   
3. Simpsons Hallowe'en episodes! I don't know if they still play marathons of these on TV (does anyone still watch TV anymore?) but that's what owning the DVDs is for. Oh Kodos, what whacky scheme will you think up this year?
   
   
4. Death Bed: The Bed That Eats People. Horror movies will never be the same again.

Beware of zombies, witches and Sarah Palins in your neighbourhood, and have fun out there. Happy Hallowe'en, all!