Unlike the places in my last post, we can actually go here! Right now, even! Well, if we had money and time for travel. And I guess it’s not a pub. It’s a restuarant–the oldest restaurant in the world: Restaurante Botín in Madrid! The fire in the oven has been burning since 1725, nearly 300 years!

I think of the Vestal Virgins of ancient Rome tending the flame in the sacred hearth lest calamity befall the city. If Restaurante Botín’s fire goes out, it means that the ovens won’t be hot enough to serve patrons… and that a nearly 300 year record will be broken. It’s a little thing, but there is a mite of comfort in knowing that an oven can stay lit for three centuries. The world is burning, but this is part of it that’s supposed to; a little fire of knowledge burning in the hearth in the back of my brain.