The ever-blossoming Changle Lu sometimes seems long enough to house every quaint fashion boutique and restaurant Shanghai has to offer. Bellissimo, a recent addition to the crowd, is a cute Italian café / restaurant with good service but an unrefined menu.
From what I hear, there are two cities for opportunity in Spain. One is Madrid and the other depends where you come from. Assuming we’re not Catalan, Bilbao is considered an emerging metropolitan of creativity and business. It is the #2 destination for career driven graduates and (in-keeping with the likes of Oviedo and Aviles) home to a great whopping chunk of globally recognized architecture.
As if by some architectural destiny, our course through Spain took us almost directly from one piece of great white dominance in Aviles to another in Oviedo. Niemeyer’s Centro and Calatrava’s Palacio de Congresos are both laughably dazzling, imposing and modern… and white. The difference is that Calatrava got it all right.
Between the cloudy northern coast and the sun-drenched plains are Spain’s mountains, the Picos De Europa. Thanks to the creative art known as geography, they are the seeming gatekeepers of the country’s precipitation. Taking a drive through the narrow foggy forest lanes is a ghost train & rollercoaster in one. Being from China, we used the technique known as “goodbye brake hello horn” and cruised along without harm save for a few dagger-eyes.
Imagine a 30cm square board of polystyrene. Now make a handful of high-school geometric shapes out of more polystyrene and arrange them on top. Write your name somewhere. You now have a conceptual model at about the same level as every first project of every first year architecture student in the world.
We've been told that the North coast of Spain is a sliding scale of gastronomy. To the left; quality produce. To the right; preparation excellence. Somewhere in the middle and the perfect balance, they say, is Asturias. The coast itself doesn't feature on the folklore and this is seemingly for one good reason. The Picos de Europa.
Seme is a simple, laid-back café serving up a fine cup of coffee and a curious assortment of Western dishes. Their prawn cup (RMB32) misses with half a dozen limp prawns accompanying a simple potato salad. Better, but seriously vampire resistant, is a tomato Seme salad (RMB24) drenched in a garlic and oil dressing. Sparse on the ingredients and without proper bacon or plump tomatoes, their club sandwich (RMB38) is barren. Better composed are their handmade tagliatelles (RMB42), especially an impressively loaded and creamy carbonara.