Dear Readers:
I have spent the last two-and-a-half weeks on a tour of Spain with my wife, Katie. At times, the trip was exciting and fun and, at other times, somewhat of an ordeal. The last time a traveler covered this much territory in Spain, Cervantes wrote an 800 page novel about it. Compared to his efforts, my explanations, experiences and observations are not profound, literary, meaningful or worthy of being translated into 120 languages. However, they do offer something that he lacks, namely: brevity.
Much of what appears below was shared with several readers by e-mail. That content is reprinted here, with some editing and additional content, with permission from the author. The process of obtaining permission was extremely simple.
PART ONE: October 31, 2012, “Hello Mutha, Hello Fatha, We Will Eventually, be in Granada”
Congratulations to those of you on the East Coast of the US for surviving Hurricane Sandy. We have followed
your travails on BBC World and I have to say that they show an impressive degree of concern for the old colonies.
We are hurtling through Spain at an alarming rate. Chevy Chase surely did a movie on this experience. My first observation is that one should buy more stock in Philip Morris. Doubtless related to the first observation is that cough drops and sinus medicines also sell well over here.
Our guide is a character. He uses the word “well” like a teenager uses “like,” as in: “Well, Barcelona is a city, well, that is what can you say, well, it is well, Barcelona.” He has also shared with us that Portugal is the longest standing nation in Europe and that Portugal is the greatest exploring nation in the world and Portugal has the best wine and Portugal has the most soulful people, etc. This may have something to do with, well, he is a proud Portuguese who somehow drew the Spain assignment this fortnight, and he is not that thrilled about it.
Nonetheless, we have seen a bit of Madrid on our own, and several days worth of Valencia and Barcelona, respectively, with the group. The group consists of 35 people from seven nations, including: England, Australia, Austria, Canada, Malaysia, Singapore and the US. Several who now live in the US are derived from Iraq. Since these people, collectively and individually, certainly (when the memories have fully sunk in) warrant entire writings dedicated to them, I will focus here on the travelogue.
As to Valencia, to the extent I ever thought about it, I thought it was in Italy. But I was happy to find it in Spain with all its great oranges and fish. And what architecture! We enjoyed the stunning beauty of Valencia… A very livable sort of place and we enjoyed the hubbub of Barcelona with its Gaudi and parks and walking areas and shopping, etc. Basically, as one who would rather live in Philadelphia than New York, if I had to choose, it should not surprise that I preferred Valencia. But, well, this has been too small a sample to well, make a real, well, comparison. And to the credit of Barcelona, it is likely the only place a hotel could be in the shape of a large mushroom. Well. So you see, well, that the guide is very, well, imitatable and I must stop doing so if, well, I wish to remain married, and if I wish any of you to continue reading.
The highlight, so far, was a sunset boat ride around a fishing and rice-growing village outside Valencia. We were fed paella accompanied by ample portions of sangria. Note that wine is less expensive than water at most restaurants. We travel towards Pamplona tomorrow where I hope the bulls are on siesta. More reporting from the paella tour in a couple of days.
PART TWO: November 2, 2012 “Pamplona is a Lot of Bull”
From Valencia, we traveled first to Zaragosa, with its massive town plaza featuring a double header, both cathedral AND basilica. Zaragosa also has a central market (as does nearly every town) featuring fresh fruits, pastries, and seemingly hundreds of pig-related foodstuffs. Our favorite part of Zaragosa features their native son, the Goya Museum (paintings, not beans, for all you Goya fans). From there, we traveled to Pamplona, which is a three-trick town: bull running street, holy walk destination and Hemingway hangout. We drank wine where Ernest did (every establishment in town claims him as a customer) and we ate tapas, which is a Basque term that may mean: “strange food served strangely.” I did enjoy the bread and local olive oil. Did you know that the world’s leading grower of olives is not Greece or Italy, but Spain? Apparently, most of the gazillion acres of olive trees in Spain are owned by Italian companies. They harvest the olives in Spain and transport them to Italy for processing, and then declare them products of Italy.
We marched gamely around Pamplona in a chilling rain and made such sage conjectures as this: no two ways of flushing a toilet in a Spanish town are ever the same. There are chains, buttons, handles, knobs, wall-based levers, two-sided contraptions to allow for choice of … Well, enough of that.
From Pamplona, we traveled further north to San Sebastián, a snazzy place nestled in the Pyrenees. Yes, it was nice to see a prosperous -looking town, as the so called “economical crisis” has not hit there. The Basques, like the Catalans in Barcelona, speak their own dialect and wish to secede from Spain entirely, so that they can be free of what they consider an unfair tax burden. Basques also have, we are told, a very Germanic, NON-Spanish sort of efficiency. The city, on the coast of the Bay of Biscayne, is clean and bustling and in close proximity to the French ski resort of Biarritz. We visited two or three more cathedrals there and in a town called Burgos over the course of several days, and saw a tower for the Knights Templar (powerful back in 1207, or so) in a town unfortunately named Peniscola. I dovened appropriately in each chapel with whatever I could remember from my long ago bar mitzvah.
Onward then to Bilbao where we visited the Guggenheim and admired Frank Gehry’s architecture. Tourism in Bilbao has increased several thousand-fold since the mid-1990’s construction of the museum and it, too, is a prosperous place. We noted windmills and solar panels all along the highways; nearly all of northern Spain is powered by wind and solar and it was stunning to see. It is amazing/sad to see how much farther along this relatively impoverished country is than we are… But I am trying hard to avoid political issues these days.
PART THREE: November 2, 2012. “The Rain in Spain Falls, Basically, Everywhere”
We managed to solve the drought in Spain. This is not the same magnitude of accomplishment as bringing a week of rain to Phoenix or sleet to San Francisco, as we achieved on previous vacations, but it is still worthy of a simple basilica or two in our honor. Nonetheless, we continued the transition from palaces and cathedrals to palaces, cathedrals, basilicas and castles.
From Bilbao, we moved south to Salamanca, a university town. There we saw the “new” cathedral (16th century) and the old original (11th century). I imagine the building fund is about to rev up again. All lit up, the town was magical to see. However, if one did look up, the discharge from a gargoyle might drown one, since it was raining gatos and perros. We also saw the walled city of Avila (El Cid, a/k/a/ Charlton Heston) played a large role in killing Muslims there.
Each town has a Jewish Quarter, which the tour guide makes an astonishingly big deal about, considering that there have been no Jews practicing openly in Spain since about 1492. He is under the impression that everyone got along swimmingly back in 1320 or so, but I remain skeptical. No one ever loved the tax collector and that was often the only job made available by the local royalty. In any event, the Jewish quarter now implies tiny shops in tiny streets with many souvenirs.
Last evening, we alighted upon Seville, a major metropolis. Dinner on our own was successful at a seafood restaurant. Ham is otherwise a constant at every meal. Katie’s suitcase is taking its own vacation, having been loaded onto the wrong bus at Salamanca, so we also had some shopping to do. We are told it will catch up to us later today or tomorrow. So far, she is coping admirably (and buying necessities on the tour company’s Euro) but if it does not show up by tomorrow, the sleepy province of Andalucia may see her inner-New Jersey.
We visited a major-league cathedral this morning, biggest in the world, and a palace constructed in commemoration of the Seville exposition of 1929. Tile was in style, at least for a while. The Jewish quarter is a massive shopping area where, potentially, I should open up a stand and sign autographs. We are happy to be missing the final throes of the US election. The 2016 race will not begin until about February, I imagine, during which time we may be writing from our new home in Panama.
PART FOUR: November 9, 2012
Perhaps some of our prayers in all these cathedrals were answered. America may yet go off the “fiscal cliff,” but at least it is not yet ready to go off the intolerance cliff. For what it is worth, (and it may not be worth one iota) nearly every non-American was delighted with the election result. It is nice not to feel a need to answer “Canada” as our home country, as we occasionally did when we traveled back in the Bush years.
Since the last installment, we have finished our stay in Seville and visited Granada and Cordoba, as well as various truck stops along the way that do not make the guide books. We have seen several towns where the Man of La Mancha failed to actually exist. We have also gotten lost in more Jewish quarters than they have in Israel. “A business with no street signs,” to quote what my father would surely have said. In the south of Spain, one adds mosques to the triumvirate of cathedrals, castles, palaces and gift shops. (I realize that is a quartet; just making sure you are reading carefully).
Our tour guide created some unusual expectations on our ride to Grenada when he assured us over and over that, well, we would discover there “the porpoise of life.” This made me wonder if there was an aquarium. By this stage of the trip, some of our fellow-travelers were audibly mocking him when he spoke. We actually cringed when we heard him activate the microphone. But, well, I digress…
The mosques initially left us underwhelmed. Even the Alhambra, an official wonder of the world, was a little dour. Pouring rain did not help, along with loud, polyglot crowds. Also, Grenada was somewhat grimy, its walls defaced with nasty-looking graffiti. There were clusters of swarthy young men in leather jackets hanging around the street corners, indicative of the sour state of the economy in southern Spain. Fortunately, lest my slightly skeptical view of Arab culture be confirmed, we ended our main travels at the Mezquite Cathedral in Cordoba. Along with the fact that the town of Cordoba is prettier and cleaner than Grenada, and the obligatory Jewish quarter is well-marked and interesting, the combo mosque/cathedral is stunning! Really, the architectural highlight of the trip. It seems that the Christians let the Muslims do much of the heavy lifting (literally) back in the eleventh century and then took over in the thirteenth century to complete an amazing cathedral over the top of a flamboyantly elaborate mosque foundation. While we saw some SERIOUSLY impressive edifices on this trip, this one topped them all. A tour has advantages and disadvantages, but I must admit that if we were not part of a tour, by this stage of the trip, I might not have visited “one more cathedral.” And that would have been unfortunate.
We broke up the so-so tour group meals in Cordoba by going out for Chinese food. The whole kitchen staff came out to stare at Katie, a Mandarin-speaking gringo. Random observation: Spain utilizes the same wealth redistribution strategy as most American states– from the lower class back to the government– via the lottery. There are kiosks on every other street that are humming with business from a deluded population, no matter how downcast the other businesses appear to be.
PART FIVE: November 11. The End of the Road
After two weeks of plying the highways and byways of Spain, it was nice to see our old, original hotel, however humble, back in Madrid. The tour ended today and some brain cells are coming available again as I delete the precariously remembered names (though not the peculiarities) of my fellow-travelers. Observation, after two weeks of travel: You know you have relied too much on BBC World when you know the daily average temperature in Rangoon and the name of the opposition party in Upper Mongolia.
We had two more days in Madrid, on our own. The highlight of the first day was the Thyssen Museum. We chose it over the Prado for its emphasis on modern art instead of the old religious stuff. Very nice museum.
The next day, our last, we walked the most, from the Plaza Mayor, to downtown, to the Prado where we listened to a wonderful classical guitar performer, to the huge Retiro Gardens, and back to the Plaza again from whence we returned to the hotel. The highlights were several serendipitous occurrences in the Gardens, which are like Central Park. There was an a capella choir practicing, a huge outdoor photography exhibit on wildlife with English explanations (not always present in museums/cites outside major cities). We saw the “silver palace,” a destination in the middle of the park, that is neither a palace nor silver. It is best-described as a huge glass greenhouse decorated with tiles around its foundation. Anyway, it has particularly beautiful flowers around it and a duck pond that is a favorite photograph destination for brides and tourists. Perhaps, park strollers are a self-selected healthier population, but it struck us that 90% of the Spanish population was NOT smoking there, a much better ratio than usual.
On the way back to our hotel, we had an experience that certainly will not happen in Chapel Hill, NC. We found ourselves overtaken by a demonstration in favor of independence for Western Sahara. It seems that Spain held it as a colony and then abandoned it in the 1990’s in the face of terrorist bombings. Instead of setting up an independent nation, Spain simply walked out, allowing neighboring Morocco to annex it. So… to make a VERY long story short, the Western Saharan emigrants (I’d like to have the deodorant concession) and friends of the cause are demonstrating for independence from Morocco in Spain, since, presumably, the Spanish government is less likely to shoot and imprison them. Got it? The 1,000 or so demonstrators were dressed in outfits typical of the Western Sahara, I presume. It was more a party atmosphere than an angry one, with drums and horns and ululating women (that has nothing to do with sex, I think). It was not scary, but it was chaotic and memorable; our faces are now probably somewhere in a security database in Casablanca. We’re the ones without facial hair (that goes for male and female participants).
What else can I say? We had one more so-so meal in what we began to think of as “our neighborhood,” and went back to our room to pack. We are ready for our comparatively dull existences again. We never thought we would CRAVE oatmeal, or ANY meal without twelve varieties of sausage, but we do.
Hasta la vista, Your Correspondent
stuartsandersblog 