Friday 11.19.2010

One More Stop

We’re up at the crack of 7:00 this morning for the last leg of our trip. We gobble down the pastries we bought yesterday afternoon, get packed up and check out of our hotel. We were very pleased with our lodging here—certainly budget level but with a great location and pretty good service from the staff.

It is our normal half-mile walk to the Place Catalunya in sunshine and crisp temperatures. We catch the aerobus for the airport at 9:30 and enjoy the feeling of being in the biggest vehicle on the road for a change. We get dropped off before 10:00 and get in a hundred-person-line for check in for our 12:25 flight on Air Europa. After not moving for ten minutes John spied a sign for baggage drop-off, which Mary checked out. Since the guy at the hotel had printed our boarding passes for us, we could use this line with three people in it. One of the people was a diva, however, and tied up the clerk for 15-minutes before the first class desk person waved us over and got us through in a minute. Another long line at security, but as we approached they opened another line and we were first in the new line. Still lucky.

While we waited we got an egg McMuffin and a real coffee from Mac and got a table where John could get some computer work done. Mary went shopping in the duty-free shop for some pre-flight medicine. We moved to our gate area where Mary produced two little bottles of Rioja and a couple plastic glasses. It seemed a very well thought out plan.


The plane was packed and we all had to take buses to get to it out on the tarmac. There is none of the American sense of personal space as it seems normal to go full frontal contact in tight spaces. We think they must not teach physics in Spanish schools since no one understands that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time.


The flight is a bit late arriving in Madrid and there is a bit more of a delay as we wait quite a while for luggage. We have decided that since we don’t know the ropes, we will take a taxi into town as we did in Barcelona and then weigh our options for leaving on Tuesday. The cab driver gets immediately into six lanes of stopped traffic heading into town and does his cabby best of zooming in and out of exit lanes to move up six cars at a time. After about ten minutes of this he explains to us that he is going to take a longer way into town but will get us there much, much faster. We think we understand him. He takes us on a 90mph thrill ride on inner and outer loops and finally into surface streets in the city. When he pulls to a stop we are across the plaza from our hotel, charged about ten euros more than we expected, but are probably an hour earlier than if we would have stayed where we were. It was an ok trade-off and how could we argue.


We have changed hotels here in Madrid. Our original choice was a compromise of price vs. location and we opted for a great price in a mediocre location. A couple nights ago we began to rethink that decision and to explore other options. As it turns out we found a higher rated hotel in the best location in the city for a few euros more. We are now at the Hotel Europa, which is on the “Times Square” of Madrid, the “Puerta del Sol.” The hotel has one star on the sign out in front that certainly made us nervous, but the place looked fantastic when we walked inside. The room was even better. It is roomy with a king bed, a big flat screen TV, a great marble bathroom and a window and little terrace overlooking the square. Mary mentions that there are a bunch of “old guys” downstairs so maybe part of the place is a pensioner’s hotel, but our room is definitely 4-star.


We take our get acquainted walk around “our” square and then up several spokes that run off of it. Virtually every city we have been in on this trip, from the smallest to the biggest, has had a pedestrian shopping area in the center, some longer than others, some wider, and sometimes there are just more of them. That is the case here. Many of the streets running off the square, and there are eleven of them, are pedestrian malls. We walk about six blocks up to Madrid’s “Broadway,” the Grand Via and poke into a couple stores. Mostly we just walk around to get a lay of the land and know which direction we will head in the morning.


It is a gray afternoon in Madrid and not the most welcoming of weather conditions. We are not initially impressed after the elegance of Barcelona, but will withhold further judgment until we get a better look. We go back to our great room and look at the swarms of people out our fifth story window instead of reading a book. It is much more entertaining.


Note: As we write this on Saturday evening there is a march of about a thousand people into our square with banners and flags. They are surrounded by police all the way and are now listening to political speeches. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s blog.


At about 8:00 we move into the Plaza Santa Ana neighborhood where a lot of the tapas bars live. The first place we try is a tiny operation, which we initially think is a one-man show. The fellow behind the bar is pouring drinks, serving food and cooking on a little grill behind the bar. Eventually someone else shows up to take over the grill. For the first time John gets something even he can’t eat. It is a dish we think is chorizo but it is deconstructed into fat, gristle and garlic chunks that are unchewable and inedible. We have some Patatas Bravas that are always good. A little later we move to a ceverzaria on Plaza Santa Ana and nibble a bit more with a beer.

School is still out on Madrid, but it has been a pleasant evening, we’re in a perfect location in a lovely room so there is a great deal of promise.

Today's Picture: Mary's view of Puerto del Sol, Madrid's Times Square.

Thursday 11.18.2010


Lawdy, Lawdy it’s Gaudy Antonio Gaudi


The rain is gone and the air is fresh and cool this morning with bright blue skies. In order to prevent crabbiness we hustle down to Passeig de Gracia and find “Tapas Tapas” for a morning sandwich for John, croissant for Mary and a couple cappuccinos.


The Passeig de Gracia is the Michigan/Fifth Avenue of Barcelona that extends out of the top of the Placa Catalunya. If you picture a vertical bow tie, the knot is the Placa Catalunya, the lower bow is the old city and La Rambla stretching down to the harbor, and the top bow is the “Eixample,” an upscale neighborhood of fancy apartments and hotels with every big name in retailing represented (we’re not talking Target and Wal-Mart here). The people strolling the streets in this neighborhood are noticeably different than on La Rambla.

Our restaurant is on the “Block of Discord,” a collection of crazy-exotic building designs for a one-block stretch of the Passeig. The culprit behind these styles was Antonio Gaudi, either the greatest or the craziest architect in the world at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. The houses here and elsewhere around the city are fairy tale-like designs with weeping windows and mushroom peaks.

We continue our walk north along the Passeig oohing and aahing at the fancy shops and opportunities to double the expense of our trip with one little shopping bag of goodies. There is one more big Gaudi design a few blocks north along with many copies by his compatriots and competitors. Love it or hate it, it is dramatic and, for many, defines the personality of this city.


We make a right turn and angle a bit back south to Gaudi’s acknowledged greatest work, the “Sagrada Familia,” or Holy Family Church. Gaudi worked on this for the last 43 years of his life, which ended under a trolley car in 1926. The church is still under construction and will be for another thirty years (estimated), but one look and you get the idea. When finished this church will be certainly the most unusual temple of worship in the world. Much of the work since Gaudi’s death has been designed and built by others, but to our untrained eyes it seems they have captured the essence of the original. We took a bunch of pictures, but they don’t do it justice, so once again we suggest that anyone who is curious should find it on the internet and check it out. Our jaws were on the ground.

It is recommended that if one wants to continue the Gaudi tour, one should catch a bus from near the church and ride it uphill a couple miles to Parc Guell. We think, "how far can it be that we can't just walk on such a beautiful day?" We are huffing, puffing and sweating forty-five minutes later as we back door the park and now understand the bus recommendation. There are some hills in Barcelona after all. The Parc Guell was supposed to be a 30-acre upscale housing development when it was conceived and Gaudi was hired to make it a unique property. Alas, the rich folk didn't want to make this walk either so no housing sales and Gaudi's infrastructure was blended into a city park with beautiful city and harbor views.


It is mid-afternoon which means John has to have a small pizza-bread sort of thing and a cold beer from a little stand for the bargain price of 12 euros (almost $17). US Open pricing here to go with the views. Mary passes. While snapping pictures of all the unique elements of the park our camera battery dies, so once again look at the park on the internet. We are a bit refreshed and since you can't remember pain we decide to walk back down and it really is easier. We pass our hotel and find the tapas bar we enjoyed last night so Mary can get something, and with different people and late afternoon aging tapas it isn't the same. It will have to do. There is a little Patisseria on the way back to our hotel so we pick up a couple treats for tomorrow morning.


We take the late afternoon-early evening break and have a plan for this evening. Several people have told us about a tapas bar near the market and we think it is in Rick Steve's book as well. Taberna Basca Irati is "only" about a mile walk from our hotel and near La Rambla which makes it perfect for our last evening memory of Barcelona. Here they give you a plate, you help yourself to anything you see, and at the end of the evening they count the toothpicks and you pay accordingly. They also come marching around with hot tapas right out of the kitchen and you just grab from the tray like an upscale cocktail party. It is easy, fun and the food is pretty good. There are a couple Japanese girls next to us and we volunteer to take their picture which leads to further conversation. They are from Osaka and are doing a week in Spain which is the reverse of our final week so we get some pointers on Madrid. We are toasting with "Cheers!," "Salud!," and "Compai!" Still just tourists.


It is a pleasant evening for our last walk from the middle of La Rambla back up to Placa Catalonya. There is a group of break-dancing gymnasts who are as good as the folks you see on the dancing shows on TV. The finale has one of the guys doing a running cartwheel into a backflip over the top of four standing volunteers he has lined up. Pretty impressive. We're very comfortable here now and our three-day stay is just right for a first impression of the city. This is another destination that we agree we could return to.


No stop at the pub tonight. We actually have to set the alarm to get moving in the morning to catch a bus for a flight to Madrid. Hasta Luego Barcelona!

Today's Picture: Gaudi's Casa Mila on Passeig de Gracia.

Wednesday 11.17.2010


Ramblin’ on La Rambla


We are really dragging this morning and it is almost 11:00 before we get out the door. Some of that is on purpose. We know that when we will be walking all day there is really no hurry because after four or five hours of steady walking we will be finished anyway.

The trouble lies with John who tends to be a bit crabby when hungry and we have plans to eat at a special little tapas bar at the market. We hike the mile to the market and the place we want is packed with people lined up behind the stools shouting out orders in Spanish or some reasonable alternative. We can’t compete. After trying a couple other options we stop at a little organic stand in the back of the market (Orgasmic Organic!?) where there is no line. John orders a taco with peppers and Mary has a cheese crepe thing and once those are in the box, the fellow keeps adding paella, couscous, pasta salad, green salad and some sauces. It winds up being a big box of food. We pull up a table at a little café on the edge of the market and buy a cappuccino to earn the seat. We’re now ready to go.

It’s after 12:00 and the big Cathedral, about six blocks away, closes at 12:45 so we hustle over there for a peek inside. What more can we say about Cathedrals? It is really big, really old and pretty spectacular. When the Pope was on his recent trip to Spain, this is where he came in addition to Santiago. Barcelona’s patron Saint Eulalia is entombed below the main altar. The thirteen-year-old was crucified on an “X” shaped cross after refusing thirteen times to deny her Christianity while under Roman rule. We are always surprised when we read things like the baptismal font was installed in the 1400’s.

We simply wander through the old city and harbor area for the rest of the afternoon. The city and Catalan government buildings are right behind the Cathedral with plenty of Catalan flags around along with one Spanish flag. There is another market that seems a little dressier but without the character of the older, bigger place.

On the harbor we walk out through a maze of pleasure crafts in a huge marina to a big shopping mall with theaters, stores, and McDonalds, all with a sort of seagoing motif. It has been cloudy, cool and spitting rain most of the day so it is a chilly and damp walk back to the base of La Rambla and the Christopher Columbus statue. The old port area here is decorated with old crates, suitcases, shipping containers and raw materials that would have been lying around a couple hundred years ago. Nice touch.

With the weather the crowds are smaller on La Rambla than they were earlier but still substantial. We move undercover to walk the market from end to end. It is an amazing array of produce, pork, fish, pork, beef, pork and pork. There are hams hanging everywhere and cold cases filled with pig heads, feet and everything in between. The special Iberic hams from the acorn-fed black pigs are, of course, the stars of the show, but there has been a recent scandal in that there were twice as many Iberic hams on the market as there are black pigs. The math doesn’t work.

It is late afternoon when we get back to the Catalonya square where we pull up a stool at QueQue for a quick tapas and glass of wine before going back to our room. We think we have logged about five miles so have put in our work for today. We much prefer clear skies and sunshine.


We work up the energy to go back out for something to eat at about 7:30 and try the highly recommended “Tapas 24.” Crabby slow service, mediocre tapas and high prices. We get out quickly and move down the street (about 6 blocks from the hotel) to “Divinus” where everything looks good, the bartenders are smiling and pleasant and the food is terrific. Again we repeat our observation that it would seem to be more fun to work when everybody is happy than when there is constant conflict. Perhaps the crabby ones think that gives them the power. The concept simply doesn’t sit well in our brains.

We stop for a quick beer at our Irish pub on the way back but the big-thinkers are all puffing on their cigars so we don’t last long. Forty-four days until Spain goes smoke free and the suicide/murder rate quadruples.

Today's Picture: Odds and ends at the Barcelona Market

Tuesday 11.16.2010

Adios Monique, Hola Barcelona!

Garrison Keillor once described learning a language at an advanced age as a “leaky boat.” While that sounds colorful in a Wobegone sort of way, it is misused in that things leak into a boat. The truth is that in the language learning business, things leak out as with a leaky bucket. We have been trying our best to keep up with the changes in our languages as we change geography, but it is a losing proposition at best. We probably know less now than we did a couple months ago.


The issue arose last night as our host Nick explained that the people in this area speak Valencian and the children are taught in Valencian in school. This, of course, makes them unable to communicate in 99.9% of the known world, but local pride wins out and the EU’s stance on preserving local idiosyncrasies does not really help. Tonight we will be in Barcelona where the lingua franca is Catalonian, which is more like the Euskara of the Basque than the Spanish of Madrid. We are finding that there is no Spain (but we haven’t been to Madrid) but rather a collection of regional egos that flies the Spanish flag at soccer games, the Olympics and Rafael Nadal matches.

No problem as Nick and Judy are on their way to Jolly Old England and our host this morning is neighbor Sheila, an expat Brit as well. In fact everyone in the restaurant last night was a Brit except the poor father-in-law waiter and us. In reading the reviews of this B&B, the most frequent compliment was that this was the “real Spain.” Right. Anyway, Sheila does a nice job of filling in, explaining that all the church bells this morning were for the funeral of the poor fellow who kicked off yesterday. No time wasted here, but all of the family members are probably in town except those who are off working in a factory in Connecticut. Sheila knows her job as she gives us cheek-cheek kisses and we’re underway.

We ask GPS Monique to look at options with and without toll roads today for our drive to Barcelona. Toll roads get us in at 2:35 and non-toll roads at 6:18. We’re going to have to bite the bullet and pay. It is a sleepy and very expensive drive with tolls totaling over $50 so about $12 for each hour saved, but with a stop for lunch at a plaza we still are dropping the car at a little after three. The drive was fast (about 75-80 mph) with mountain and Mediterranean views all the way so not as unpleasant as driving through Kansas or Iowa. The car agent on this end is a little slippery. He has told us to drop the car at a hotel a couple kilometers from the airport, won’t come to the desk to take the paperwork and won’t give us a receipt that shows everything intact. We feel better when we see a lineup of Peugeots in the lot and the front desk lady signs for the keys, registration and insurance. We kiss GPS Mademoiselle Monique Deneuve adieu and thank her for her service. She lost us a few times, but we would have been lost a lot more without her, and one of us would have had a face in a map at all times instead of sight-seeing.

The hotel lady calls us a taxi, which whisks us into town in less than a half-hour. The driver is coughing and sneezing all the way which will add to the germs we are carrying from Manuel in Granada. Our hotel for tonight is the Praktik, a budget option with a great location in the center of the action. We originally booked it for seventy-five euros per night but saw it on line a couple days ago for sixty-four so we canceled and rebooked, the difference paying for our taxi ride.

Barcelona is a big city on the eastern coast of Spain with a 2000-year history of fame, fortune and failure. These days it is bustling with activity and there is no obvious sign of the Spanish economic troubles. Our room is surprisingly nice at half the price of the hotels around us with a king bed, a little terrace on our active street (we have ear plugs), free wi-fi and a few English speaking TV channels.

We don’t sit long, but get right out on the town. It is about a ten-minute walk to the Placa Catalonya, the center of the universe for the folks in these parts, and another five across the square to La Rambla. Rick Steves describes La Rambla as the best people-watching street in Europe. It is one-way traffic on one side and the other way on the other side with a fifty-foot wide treed pedestrian area in the center. There are people selling touristy stuff from small stands, others peddling birds, fish and turtles, and where we usually see one or two of the “human statues,” here there are a dozen or more. We are dazzled, acting like a couple of tourists from Middle America.

We stick our heads in the market packed with people, produce and pig parts and decide to leave it for tomorrow. At about 7:00 we pull up a stool at Eukara Tapas bar for a couple tapas (two hot, two cold) and a red wine and make a plan for our next few days. We finish the mile-long Rambla walk at the statue of Christopher Columbus, reverse course and walk back up. On the way back there is a dance group of a couple dozen young ladies (ages 15-25) performing for a reasonable crowd. There are four or five featured dancers and the rest are rapping out the beat on tall drums while showing off their own moves. Everything is choreographed well and it is a very entertaining stop. There was a film crew there from Channel Six in case any of you saw us.

There is a two-thirds moon shining clearly on us as we continue our walk back. We find another Irish pub across the street from our hotel, and while we complain about the Brits stealing the Spanish ambience, we sure like a nice cold pint in a pub. We finish our beers and lose about six-months of our lives to second-hand smoke, and tuck ourselves in after hanging our jackets on the terrace to air out.

Today's Picture: A Ramblin' woman on La Rambla