Andorra: a microstate of mind

When my mind leaves lockdown and wanders back through memories of past holidays, it often pauses in Andorra to remember the three hour bus ride from the beaches of Barcelona and the clean streets, well-kept history, sparkly river, accessible ski resorts and incredible beer shop of the capital, Andorra la Vella.

I was a little surprised therefore that the novel Andorra mentions none of this. I was further confused that it talks so much about the sea, bearing in mind that this is a land-locked principality.

But whilst the book teaches you nothing of geography, it does capture the claustrophobia of living in one of the world’s few remaining micro-states. It also has an amusing art-reflecting-life-reflecting-art moment as the main character was inspired to go to Andorra after reading a book written by someone who has never been there.

I should probably go on a food photography course

Our Andorran dinner was Trinxat, though we swapped the bacon for vbites vbcn which we buy from Indigo wholefoods in Moseley. The recipe requires you to boil up a whole cabbage and mash it with a potato masher. That is harder than it sounds and so in future I would chop the damn thing first. Other than the mashing it was easy and tasty — I’d just do everything differently the second time around. We suplemented the grease with an Andorran chicory salad, which was probably the most appetising thing I’ve made so far!

For dessert I failed to make this Andorran custard but succeeded in buying a Crème Caramel from the supermarket which I guess is pretty similar.

Of more importance though is that the Andorran drink is flaming mulled wine, which filled the kitchen with the smell of Christmas and made life in general just that little bit better.

Now, this is going to be a bit of a recurring theme throughout the blog — despite Wikipedia telling me that several films were filmed there and the Travel book telling me that the film Dies d’Hivern by Josep Duran exists, the only thing I could actually find on the internet was an episode of a Rick Stein travel show that took you to all five European microstates in one turgid documentary.

In Andorra, when such things were possible. Bottle tops fill me with great joy. As does finding little beer shops in mountain towns.

So that just leaves the music, we started with the celebrated Andorran violinist Gerard Claret, but the kids soon got bored and so we moved onto the Andorra viral 50. It was nice to see that people in Andorra are listening to Tik Tok songs just like everyone else!

Next week it is Angola.

24 October 2020