Star Gazing in Spain

Looking at the sky, I see visions of blueberry gazpacho and our shared humanity

Amigos, don’t you love the summer sky at night? Gazing up in the dark, with the sounds of the crickets chirping…or the big city buses rumbling by…whatever the sounds are where you are, there is the big sky above that connects us all. 

These days when I am home on the southern coast of Spain, I go to the beach in the late afternoon and start a fire, make a paella for my family, light a cigar, and look up at the sky as it gets dark and think about the world, and the universe…there’s so much beyond who we are and what we know. I love it so much, I even bought a telescope during the pandemic. I started watching the stars every single night for two, three, four hours. I love those moments where time seems to stop and I am just able to look up and wonder. 

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Like many of us, I’ve loved to see all the photos coming from the James Webb Space Telescope…they are truly going beyond the horizon of the human imagination. I especially liked the photograph tweeted by the French scientist Étienne Klein of a slice of chorizo, claiming it was a nearby star! He has good taste using a Spanish chorizo, don’t you think?

To me, chorizo IS a star!! (photo by the brilliant Étienne Klein)

I think this one looks like a purple tomato and blueberry gazpacho … what do you think? 

For years I have been getting an alert on my phone every time that the International Space Station flies overheard. And earlier this year, feeding my passion for space and food, I even made a space paella to feed the astronauts on the ISS, sending a taste of Spain out into the universe...check out this video to see more!

Some people are going to be saying, ‘Jose, before we send people (and paella) to space, we should be fixing every problem on planet Earth.' I think yes, sure, that’s a good point, but maybe we should look at it a little differently. Maybe by exploring space we can help solve so many of the problems that we see on Earth today. 

I think my fascination with space comes from my birthday: July 13, 1969…just seven days before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin of Apollo 11 took humanity's first steps on the moon's surface. Or maybe it’s just that the stars remind us that in times like these we need to come together to remember our shared humanity. Believing in longer tables, believing in sharing, remembering we're part of the same planet, the same universe, all of us, together on a big blue marble.