| Maja by Francisco de Goya |
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1999/10/2 Saturday
The plane from Detroit to Chicago was on time, bumpy. The gate I disembarked from was pretty far from the Iberia gate of my connecting flight to Spain, and I didn’t have much time to get there. I practically had to sprint to make it on time. My mother was there, and she asked why I was checking in already. “What do you mean checking in already, the flight leaves in 10 minutes?” “No, it’s only 3:40 PM” Oh, yeah, time change. <smack> duh.
Would-be comedians frequently refer to how lousy airline food is, which I’ve never understood. It’s better than the crap I typically make for myself. Or so I thought before I had had dinner on Iberia. The main course had a sauce on it that I assume was chunky red water, for all the taste it imparted on the chicken and pasta it covered. I had two mini bottles of red wine to drown my culinary sorrows.
1999/10/3 Sunday
As we stepped off the plane, the music piped in to the airport was the George Harrison song "My Sweet Lord" played on the accordion. Ah, the traditional music of Spain!
Iberia lost my new suitcases, but I still had my big duffel so that was OK. To add to our troubles, Europcar had no record of my reservation and did not recognize my confirmation number as being a possible valid number because it started with a “Z”, which they pointed out was not a number. After 45 minutes of trying to figure it out, the girl behind the counter realized she could give us a car at the same rate anyway, and we were on our way.
The guidebooks say you don’t want to drive in Madrid. The guidebooks don’t go nearly far enough. You don’t even want to drive to Madrid from the airport. The maps we had, including the one from Europcar did not show the airport, only central Madrid. I ran back in the airport and asked where the airport would be if the maps extended out that far, and got a vague idea of where we should head. And so we were on our merry way.
“Movin’ right along,
footloose and fancy free. Getting there
is half the fun, come share it with me.” [The Muppet Movie]
We got on M30, but because the Europeans don’t put cardinal directions on their expressways, we were never sure if we were going north or south. And because the map didn’t extend out to M30 we weren’t sure what exit to get off on. We literally drove up and down M30 the entire length of Madrid six times looking for an exit we could find on our map.
I finally flung the car off the highway at a random exit and tried to find the downtown area through a mass of tiny, twisty roads. At this point, I remember thinking this was the most lost I’ve ever been in my life. It was to get much worse. We asked a non-English-speaking native and got an idea which direction to head and managed to stumble on a major road that was on our map! Saved! Or so we thought. We knew that we were within ten blocks of the hotel but we still could not reach the darned thing. Half the streets in Madrid are unlabeled and if they are labeled they change names every other block! At one stretch we tried to turn left but five consecutive streets were one-way in the other direction. All told, it took 3.5 hours to do what should have been a 20 minute drive
I vowed not to set foot in the car the rest of our stay in Madrid, except to leave. We wandered out on foot to find some food. On foot, Madrid is just as twisty with few street signs, but you also notice all the homeless people. I am very unimpressed with Madrid, and I don’t think it’s just the fact that I haven’t slept in 32 hours.
The mixture of ½ a pitcher of Sangria and no sleep caused me to leave my expensive camera in the restaurant. That would have rounded my day out perfectly. Fortunately, mother asked me to take a picture of the alley outside the restaurant, and I discovered my mistake and recovered the camera.
We noticed immediately that Spanish people dig 2 things:
1. Smoking
2. Ham.
They have 100s of types of ham. There even a restaurant called Museo de Jamon, literally the “Museum of Ham” (which rhymes better in English).
After a bit of sightseeing, we returned to the hotel and I was reunited with my suitcase. It looked like someone had danced on it a bit, but basically no worse for wear.
Warning, scatological references follow:
Dad said he got up early because he was pooping his colon out. He, or my mother, will probably kill me for putting that in here, but that line still cracks me up. Also, my mother thought a bidet functioned as a urinal. I pointed out that it is to clean your crotch. My father then responded, “Well I’m certainly not washing myself after she’s been in there.”
1999/10/4 Monday
Under the best of circumstances (American restaurant, English-language menu) my mom takes forever to order. In foreign restaurants she insists on translating the entire menu, via translation book, before ordering. Plus she keeps pronouncing paella (pie-eh-ya) as “polenta”, which’ll drive you nuts after a while. You could make a fortune if you wrote a translation book that just translated food items. Most of the items on the menu are not in the standard translation books, and many of those that are translate to something weird like “roasted employee” or “fillet of staircase.”
Most museums are closed on Monday, but the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía was open. Most of the art was from the more modern “I could have done that” schools of art. Still, I thought some of it was quite interesting.
“This painting would
have made more sense if he’d called it ‘Two guys with ladders, a bottle of
wine, and Felix the Cat’” [my father]
Father is obsessed with cash machines. He stares at them, mesmerized. We don’t know why. On cash-related note, Visa is not everywhere you want to be. We were told that for the best exchange rate, put everything on your credit card, but it’s hard to find anyplace but hotels that take credit cards.
The Spanish military dudes have ridiculous looking pie-shaped plastic hats and machine guns. I imagine they would spray your body with bullets if you made fun of their ridiculous hats. They won't let you take their picture, so they're obviously self-conscious about it.
1999/10/5 Tuesday
For breakfast the hotel restaurant had six beverages of unnatural hues. One tasted a bit like apricot nectar but even thicker and sweeter; another tasted exactly like an unfrozen freezee-pop. It’s best to stick with coffee.
Saw the Prado museum, the big one. Lots of portraits of royals and NFBs (naked fat babes). Only a couple of Jesus crucifixion paintings. The Louvre must have cornered the market on those.
Food note: Tomato and kiwi are surprisingly good together.
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Salamanca has even fewer street signs than Madrid, but it’s much smaller and thus more manageable. It’s a beautiful city, albeit with a lot of homeless people. We saw a bunch of college students from Granada sitting at a table, drinking beer, playing guitar and singing Spanish folk songs.
It’s tough to find a restaurant willing to serve you at 5:00 PM. Most Spaniards eat dinner at 9:30 PM and lunch from noon to 3:00 PM. I felt like waving a handful of pesetas in the air shouting, “I have money I wish to exchange for food!” In America this would not be a problem. The food is not hot and spicy like Mexican food; it seems very salty and fatty. Granted, if you only ate in American restaurants, you’d think that American food was salty and fatty too, but the Spanish are more blatant about it. In America, for instance, ham is generally a low fat food. In Spain their luncheon meat ham has huge chunks and ribbons of fat in it.
Spanish hotels typically have no soundproofing. Fortunately my mom brought us all earplugs. They are required if you expect to sleep.
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1999/10/6 Wednesday
La Catedral Nueva/La Catedral Vieja seemed to be closed today. As we were about to leave Salamanca, we thought we’d give it one more pass by. Fortunately, we did this at 4:00 PM, and it turns out it reopens at 4. I took about 150 photos of the old and new cathedrals in Salamanca. They are much more impressive than I remember Notre Dame de Paris being. The Spaniards need their own Victor Hugo to immortalize it. Then the Disney people could trivialize the story and turn it into a sappy love/adventure story. It'll be fun!
There are lots of old Spanish tourists here. As my dad pointed out, “It’s not that big a country. Shouldn’t they have seen everything by now?”
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Ok, I’m beginning to see a pattern. The Spanish do not label their streets. And when a street IS labeled, the sign is on the side of a building, and thus difficult to see. The roads in Ávila are twisty and mostly one-way and give new definition to the word “narrow”, what with walls of buildings on both sides of almost every road.
A nice older lady was helping my father figure out the pay for parking machine. In the mean time, my mom and I decided to repark the car at a lot that would not require us to get up at 8 in the morning to put money in the machine. I got in the car and started to drive away, and the lady who was helping my dad waved her arms and tried to prevent me from leaving, saying what I assume was “No! No! You don’t understand! You can park here!” I continued driving as my dad attempted to explain. To get a new parking place I could have spent 45 minutes negotiating the streets of Ávila or I could have made a short jog the wrong way through a one-way archway and gotten to the other lot in two minutes. I chose the latter option, and no sooner had I passed through the arch when two cops popped out of nowhere. Blowing his whistle, one of the cops chased my down on foot. I stopped and with my smooth use of Spanish (“No hablo español”) I talked my way out of the situation and he let me off with what I can only assume was “don’t do that again.”
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1999/10/7 Thursday
Santa Cruz del Valle de los Caídos, a basilica with a 750 feet tall cross, was commissioned by Francisco Franco and completed in 1959. The monument is considered by some to be tasteless because of it’s mixture of religious and military imagery. As my dad said, “We’re Americans. We don’t know the meaning of the word “tasteless”. The cross, and the building carved out of the mountain beneath it, were absolutely amazing. I didn’t realize that enormous buildings/statues with no practical purpose were still being built these days. When I pointed out to my parents “That’s the biggest ‘effing’ cross I’ve ever seen” I received a rebuke from my mother who considered that sacrilegious. On the other hand, she thought it was sacrilegious when I said, “I can’t find the damned church,” so what does she know?
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I’ve seen more impressive Roman aqueducts than the one in Segovia, but this is the first one doesn’t look like a museum piece. It’s in the center of town, with pedestrians passing through it and cars driving by it. It's 96 feet tall, built between the first and second centuries.
Segovia is noted for its roast suckling pig, which looks exactly like what it is. Sure to give any vegetarian heart palpitations, but it was quite good. They also have baby lamb on the menu. My dad said, “Baby lamb, baby pig. All they need is veal and it’s a trifecta of things I don’t like.” Aside from the rare Guiness pub in your major cities, beer in Spain is universally lousy, usually Mahou which tastes even worse than Bud Lite. Sometimes you just NEED a beer, no matter how lousy it is, but I've mostly been sticking with wine, which I don't normally drink. It’s a rare meal that I don’t walk away from slightly buzzed from the house wine.
I have not changed the radio since day one. Spanish radio, or at least the station I am tuned to seems to play a pretty eclectic mix of music: flamenco, classical, dance music, Spanish pop, English rock. I also seem to be able to get this station anywhere in Spain so either they have the strongest FM signal on the planet or they have many transmission towers throughout the country broadcasting on the same frequency.
1999/10/8 Friday
In the Segovia Alcázar (fort) they have a tower. It’s 42 steps to get to the tower, and 108 more before you arrive, tired and dizzy at the top. Frankly, the view was about the same as it was from the bottom.
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Toledo (pronounced toe-lay-d'oh!) has narrow streets, very hilly, tons of traffic. Same ol’, same ol’. At one point I had to back up three blocks on an extremely steep, very narrow street that had unexpectedly turned into a dead end.
Some jerk parking attendant charged us 185 pesetas to turn around in his garage.
1999/10/9 Saturday
Food notes:
· Unlike in the U.S., almost all the restaurant servers are male, often older males.
· They eat hot dogs for breakfast (without buns).
· You see few fast foods restaurants around, but the one McDonald’s we saw in Toledo was packed with kids.
· They have ham flavored Ruffles and paprika flavored Pringles.
· Roquefort cheese is a popular pizza topping. Wacky foreigners. (It’s gross.)
We met a couple from St. Louis with a food translation book. Gotta get us one of them next time!
It’s not unusual to have timed lights in the public bathrooms, hotel hallways and small parking garages. It can be quite annoying to have the lights snap off as you are searching for your car keys, fumbling with your luggage, or whizzing.
I wanted to mail some postcards, but the mailbox I found said “Prohibio hihar carteles”. Daughter posters prohibited? Is that what they call postcards, "daughter posters??" A group of older Spanish tourists were trying to explain to me what the sign meant by slapping their maps against the mailbox. I didn't get it, but I decided to risk it and mail the postcards anyway. Later that day I saw a mailbox where the lettering was clearer: “Prohibio Fijar Carteles”. Aaaahhh! Don't affix posters to the mailbox.
I wasn’t that wild about seeing YAC (yet another cathedral) as I’ve seen a few in my life, including several on this trip, but the one in Toledo was pretty interesting. It is immense, they all are, but it also has lots of interesting paintings and sculptures. I was also inside my first synagogue. Since it was built by Arab craftsman and was later turned into a Christian church, it’s a Mosque-y looking Church-y synagogue which means it’s probably not a representative example.
Toledo is the home of El Greco (Domenikos Theotocopoulos), and his art is featured in many of the museums. I can now recognize an El Greco at 20 paces. I like his style and would have liked to have checked out another of the several museums featuring his paintings, but the ‘rents were being killjoys.
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Today I discovered why the radio station I am on plays such eclectic music and is available throughout Spain. The car radio automatically seeks out a new signal when it loses the old one. D'oh! I guess that should have been obvious.
In Canada and the U.S. daytime running lights are considered a “safety feature.” In Spain if you leave your headlights on in the daytime, people flash their headlights at you and make hand gestures to helpfully inform you, “¡Idioto! Your headlights are on and it’s daylight!”
We drove to Cordoba after an early dinner. Mother didn’t want to leave that night, but she was voted down. Unfortunately she was right. Man, I hate it when that happens. Part of the highway was under construction so we had to take a detour that involved a tortuous serpentine route through the foothills of a mountain range while it was black as pitch out. It took 7 hours to go a mere 128 km.
We arrived in Cordoba at one o'clock in the morning, only to find that there was no room at the inn. Any inn in Cordoba, in fact. Or Sevilla or Granada, the other two big towns in southern Spain we planned on visiting. Note to myself: book a hotel for Saturday night the next time you travel. The desk clerk said that this is the high season, which was not my understanding. The desk clerk at the four star hotel we stopped at called throughout southern Spain and consulted his computer and after 40 minutes he found us a one star hotel in Andujar.
| The Road to Cordoba |
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I’m not a big fan of (paying for) expensive hotels. I’d rather hang out in the lobby of an expensive hotel and then sleep in a two star. My parents, however, are hotel snobs, insisting on staying in 4 star hotels, 3 star in a pinch. Well, when all the 3 and 4 stars wouldn't give us the time of day, there was “Mr. One Star Hotel” riding in to save the day. That'll teach them to be so snooty. At least this hotel is cheap, which is my mark of a good hotel.
1999/10/10 Sunday
Drove back to Cordoba. Unless I say otherwise, it should be assumed that the streets are narrow, twisty and poorly labeled. In Cordoba, to make up for the fact that the streets are not all that narrow, it is crawling with throngs of tourists and tour buses. The city by some accounts had a population of 1 million people under Moorish rule; now it’s at 300 thousand. I suspect that its 1.5 million if you include the tourists. Cordoba is teeming with tourists and kittens. It's possible the kittens are with kitten tour groups, I didn't ask.
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We also saw a cool mosque. It’s a shame they built a cathedral in the middle of it after the Christians took over, but I suppose turnabout is fair play since the mosque was built on a Visigoth Christian church. Anyway, if they hadn’t built a church in the middle of the mosque, they would have knocked it down along with all the other mosques; the church inside it was what saved it. My dad's theory is that they didn't destroy the previous ruler's churches to destroy the heathens, but mostly because they wanted to build what they wanted to build and thought, “Hey, Let’s take the stones from that building there so we don’t have to go dig up more rocks.” Since the Christian rulers first kicked out the Muslim Moors and then even the Moors that converted to Christianity, I think that their motives were a little more malicious.
The Alcázar here is rather plain, but the garden is beautiful.
Cordoba is known for Flamenco but as both my parents on separate occasions heard Flamenco music on the radio and told me to “turn that racket off”, and I’m not a big fan of the music myself, we skipped it.
1999/10/11 Monday
Met an ugly American couple with three brats who were living in Cadiz. The man was claiming that he was not going to pay for the hotel bill because they did not include tax in the quoted price (I have yet to see a Spanish hotel where it was included). Also, he told some Spaniard to put out his cigarette because he didn’t smoke and it offended him. While in Spain, if you’re offended by people smoking, prepare to be continuously offended. Why not be offended that they are speaking Spanish while you’re at it?
Sevilla
All the driving hell that came before was merely a prelude to the cluster eff that is Sevilla. We were about to pass out from stop and stop (sic) traffic and gas fumes. Father had fond memories of Sevilla from when he was here with the navy, but he hated it on this trip.
Mother insists on pronouncing Andalucia as “Andoosala”. Then she denied that she was doing that and minutes later she did it again. Am I being anal retentive? I think not.
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The Alcázar and most of the museums are closed on Mondays. S’allright. I’m starting to get worn out. Also, if I never set foot in another cathedral, that will be OK with me.
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1999/10/12 Tuesday
It took a half an hour for us to find the Carmona Roman Necropolis. Then it turned out the Necropolis was closed for Columbus Day. This vacation is 1 part sightseeing, 2 parts orienteering and no parts relaxing.
The view on the way to Granada is beautiful, with hills covered in olive trees as far as the eye can see. You wouldn’t think the world economy could support that many olive trees. Since the trees are planted with large gaps between them, from some angles it looks like the hills have bad olive-tree hair plugs.
When we got to Granada, the Alhambra was sold out (a lot of people in Spain have Columbus day off), so we got a hotel and toured the city. We met two girls from New Zealand at Telepizza who were having as much trouble attempting to order a pizza as we were (language barrier). They told us about the buses set up for backpackers which arrive at the major cities of Europe every few days. One just arrived in Granada, which explains the plethora of greasy-looking backpackers around the city. Granada is a nice town. Traffic is reasonable. Wide streets. Still twisty and unlabeled, but you can’t have everything.
Mother is pronouncing “Flamenco” as “Flamingo”, while Father insists on pronouncing the town "Almeria" as “Santa Anna”. I’m not being anal retentive now, really. Ha! I need some more wine.
1999/10/13 Wednesday
Mom’s alarm failed to rouse us so we showed up at Alhambra later than we wanted to (9:30). We got a ticket allowing us to get into the main palace at 2:30. They beat you over the head with Washington "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" Irving here, who wrote “Tales of the Alhambra” when it had fallen into ruins. The townspeople of Granada didn’t realize what a tourism gold mine that they were sitting on up until about a hundred years ago. People where always knocking down important ancient buildings and such up until about 100 years ago. I assume the advent of the automobile and thus e-z travel made it worthwhile to keep historical sites up and even rebuild them. The Alhambra is supposed to be the only intact Muslim palace anywhere. Yeah, but they rebuilt it. That's cheating, really. Another building in the Alhambra complex is the Generalife (pronounced henerah-leaf-eh). Dad pointed out that “Generalife” sounds like the name of an insurance company. At one point we were like the United Nations; three Americans packed in a room with Chinese, English, French and Spanish tour groups. Gypsy women will give out lavender or evergreen, and if you take it they will latch on to you and tell your fortune in Spanish until you give them money to go away. We were not so foolish as to get trapped, but we saw it happen to others. If you ignore the fact that most of the ornate sculpture is a reproduction and throngs of tourists, it is pretty impressive, maybe even beautiful.
Narrow twisty steep streets no longer phase me in the slightest. Bring it on, baby! In the Albacín, the Arab quarter of Granada, however, what does phase me is that many of the roads, with no warning whatever, turn into staircases!!! One moment you could be driving down a perfectly ordinary steep, narrow, unlabeled, twisty Spanish road and the next you could be plummeting down a pedestrian staircase. Those crazy Spaniards! I’m giddy with anticipation as to what form of driving hell they’ll throw at us next!
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We took a beautifully scenic road winding along the Sierra Nevada on the Mediterranean to get to Cordisa Grande. Cordisa Grande is a resort town near Alméria, though it is not as near to Alméria as I thought it was when I booked the hotel through “Charming Inns and <something>s in Europe”. The hotel is smack dab in the middle of nowhere. Nobody would come here except on purpose. This wasn't a bad thing as we were able to cram all our vacation relaxation into one day. Everyone staying at the hotel, indeed every one in the town, was from Great Britain. There was a Welsh guy at our hotel who looked and sounded exactly like Burl Ives in the claymation Christmas special, "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer."
Every year the Spanish petition Britain to get Gibraltar back and every year Britain says, “No dice”. We were thinking of visiting there, but a Welsh couple and English guy told us not to go to. They said it’s dirty, long lines, and nothing to see really. Then we talked to an Englishwoman, Jan, and she said Gibraltar used to be quite pretty and was still worth seeing, so we changed our minds again, but when we told the owner of the hotel of our plans, he was insistent: “What would you want to go there for? It’s dirty, there’s nothing to do, etc., etc.” What finally convinced me was when he told me that on a bad day it can take 6 hours to get in and 8 hours to get back out again. Apparently whenever there is a dispute between the British and the Spanish fisherman, the “Spaniels” slow the process of getting in and out of Gibraltar to a crawl.
1999/10/14 Thursday
Cheezemeisters Burt Bacharach and Hal David once asked the world the musical question, “Do you know the way to San Jose whoah whoah woah-woah woah whoah whoah whoah whoah?” We do. In Spain, it’s a sleepy little resort town on the sea. It was overcast and drizzly when we stopped by, so we stayed just long enough for my father to slip on some rocks on the beach, fall, and smack his head real good against some rocks. Fortunately, he recovered fairly quickly.
We left the hotel “Los Angeles” and are now staying at in the “Hotel California”. Such a lovely place.
1999/10/15 Friday
Málaga. Nice city. Pretty parks, some art museums, most of which are free. Lots of traffic noise and honking horns though. The temperature here is perfect and there’s a cool breeze blowing. Unfortunately, the brutal humidity had me sweating like a pig hopped up on goofballs.
Very steep long climb up Castillo de Gibralfaro, but the view was worth it, if you ignore all the trash on the ground. When we reached the top, we found a bus stop. Turned out we could have just taken a city bus to get there.
Picasso left Málaga at age 14, never to return, but apparently the Málagans didn’t take as a slight because they turned his boyhood home into an art museum. We showed up about 20 minutes before it was to reopen for the afternoon. It was NOT worth the wait. The Picasso works were from his “the Emperor has no clothes period”. One of the other artists was named “Corps Perdu”, which brings to mind dead chickens.
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In the supermarket, almost all the wine is from California. And they don’t refrigerate their eggs. The supermarket felt a bit warm to me, but I’ll bet it was nice and cozy for the salmonella. They are big on lemon soda here. There’s an awesome one called Limón Hacendado. It has a very strong sour lemon taste. It probably a good thing it’s not available in Spain, it’s probably loaded with citric acid and I’d drink it all the time and my teeth would dissolve into little stumps.
Strolled by the Cathedral in Málaga without the slightest urge to pop inside, as we all agreed that going in one more cathedral would drive us over the edge.
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1999/10/16 Saturday
There is actual sand, albeit dirty looking, in Málaga beaches, unlike most beaches I've seen in Europe.
I saw “squid in it’s own ink” on the menu of several restaurants. Since this was our last night in Spain, it was my last chance to try it. It looks disgusting (black and inky), but it tastes better than it looks. A bit better.
1999/10/17
Flight into Chicago was 45 minutes late and I had to haul to make my connecting flight. I noticed that my suitcase, normally a darkish brown, becomes a light pea green under the airport fluorescent lights, leading me to suspect that they may have not lost my luggage on the flight to Spain after all. I'll always wonder.
What I learned on this Trip
· "Lingua franca" was a pidgin language that was a mixture of Italian, French, Spanish, Greek, and Arabic and was spoken in Mediterranean ports in the Middle Ages. Today English is the "lingua franca." For example, I saw a Spanish girl ask a German girl to take her picture in broken English. Still, 90% of the people you meet seem to speak as much English as I understand Spanish (very, very little). My theory on the Spanish language: because their words are almost always one or two syllables longer than ours thanks to the fact that they frequently tack an extra vowel on the end, they have to speak a bit faster. Still if they talk slowly I can usually pick out a few words with my two years of High School Spanish, enough to get the gist of what they are trying to say.
· Hotels in Spain always have removable shower heads, which is actually quite irritating because it’s impossible to get the damned things pointing at the right direction.
· The Spanish celebrate Columbus day.
· Too much of a good thing, contrary to Mae West, is not necessarily wonderful. I am thinking specifically of cathedrals.
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