Travels in Spain

Some pictures from our first day in Spain. We arrived in Madrid 5 hours before our hotel was ready, and spent four hours waiting in the hotel lobby. Serious jet lag. We later took a walking tour of old Madrid with our tour group. It was hard to get pictures because our group was very large and the guide really rushed us.

Our second day in Spain we took a bus trip from Madrid to the town of Segovia, and visited the ancient aquaducts and the palace where the marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand united two kingdoms. The castle was the inspiration for Walt Disney's logo. We ate lunch there. Our tour guides urged us to try the suckling pig, which I did, and regretted. The restaurant was a tourist trap. It was like greasy fried piglet chunks. I took two bites and left it on my plate. The tour was beautiful, however. Later and I went to Madrid on our own and and a good dinner with grilled octopus and paella.

Today, our third day in Spain, Dan and I left our hotel in Madrid, and took a long bus ride, stopping in Toledo, considered the religious capital of Spain. This is where the saying "Holy Toledo!" comes from. We took a walking tour through hilly and narrow streets and saw what was once the Jewish Quarter before the Spanish Inquisition drove the Jews, and most of the arts and culture out of the city. There were many beautiful shop windows, though we couldn't shop, we had a very tight schedule, and it is too easy to get lost in Toledo. We continued on our bus ride stopping in La Mancha, home of Cervantes and Don Quixote for lunch, which was simple and pretty good, but we had to keep swatting away the flies. I saw a cute black stray cat at one rest stop. We rode a total of 200 miles, arriving at our new hotel in Seville. I'm adding pictures Dan took of us on his phone yesterday in Segovia and Toledo.

Seville is the most beautiful city in Spain I've seen so far. There were so many stunning views, of architecture from all different eras. I finally had to put away my camera and just take it all in. Between cities our tour director, Lydia, gives us a lecture about the region we are about to visit on the bus. She is like a motherly drill sergeant professor. We have travelling companions from Australia, the United States, and some Asian countries, and we have become very friendly with some of them. Our first tour of the day was a visit to the buildings of the Seville Expo of 1929, and Parque Maria Luisa, named after a princess who donated her gardens as a park. We ate a very good lunch of ceviche, oxtails, jamon iberica, and Octopus after a tour of the Alcazar de Seville, built by Arab artisans for a Christian king. I was exhausted most of the day. I didn't sleep well the night before. I rested a little before we went out to see a local flamenco show, and a view of the futuristic buildings of Seville Expo '92 on the way.

We are up at dawn every day. Today we are leaving Granada and are on the road to Valencia. Granada was the seat of the Moslem empire in Spain before the sultan surrendered peacefully to Isabella and Ferdinand in their campaign to unify Spain under Catholicism. In Granada is where the Arabic influence is most prominent. Granada means pomegranate and was the symbol of the Moslem empire. We took a walking tour of the neighborhood of Albaicín, which has houses that were typical of the moslems or gypsies with floral gardens with Jasmine and beautiful flowering vines overflowing the courtyard walls. From the lookout point we could see the Alhambra palaces and fortress from which the sultan was exiled moslems were forced to leave Spain or convert to Catholicism, much like the Jews in Segovia and Toledo. The streets of the Albaicín are very narrow and hilly, but the pavement, 500 years old, is an artistic and intricate design to allow for traction, and the retention of water. We later toured the cathedral that houses the tombs of Isabella and Ferdinand. We were very hungry after the walking tour and found a small restaurant nearby and had a delicious meal of oxtails and a large platter of typical Spanish food. After resting a little at our hotel we enjoyed some free time to explore the city, and got churros and chocolate, and delicious gelado. I had the pomegranate flavor which was tart and sweet with pomegranate seeds. Dan bought Polverones cookies, which are considered a specialty here for holidays. They fall apart like dust. "Polvo" means dust in Spanish. We left them in our hotel room.

Every city we have visited so far has something unique and special about it. In Valencia it is the blend of baroque and futuristic architecture. Valencia was built on a river instead by the nearby Mediterranean sea to protect the inhabitants from invasion by sea. Valencia means "valliance," in honor of the warriors who retired there. After the flood of 1957 where 81 people died, the river was routed out of the city. Valencia is famous for its oranges. Two popular beverages there are "Agua de Valencia", which is like a screwdriver with orange juice, vodka, and prosecco. I tried one and I really wasn't impressed. In our walking tour in the old city we tried horchata, which is a vegan blend of tiger nut milk, water and sugar. It is supposed to be very healthy. It is different from the Mexican kind made with rice water. I really liked this horchata and would drink it again. Our tour in Valencia began in an architectural complex called the City of Arts and Science designed by the architect Santiago Calatrava. The seagulls in the water are bright white, and the turquoise water reflected off of their white bellies as they flitted around, giving them a surreal quality. You can see one of the turquoise birds in the corner of one of my photos. After stopping here we took a tour of the old city. In one of the photos Dan took you can see a statue of a wanton woman grasping her breasts projecting from the side of the cathedral. This statue was to warn visitors not to tread into the red light district that existed on that side of the town in medieval times. Valencia was once a walled city. Two of the gates are still standing, but the walls were torn down in the 19th century to allow the city to expand. Over a thousand buildings were destroyed in World War II, but the buildings that still exist are extraordinary. After a dinner of paella at the hotel, we walked back to the City of Arts and Sciences to see it lit up at night.

Our last two days we ate lunch at the beach town of Peniscola. Dan had a hotdog, and I ate some questionable octopus. Then we continued on to Barcelona where we had a city tour and viewed Gaudi's famous church, the Sagrada Familia. That night the group went out to a fabulous dinner on the water front, where we had garlic shrimp fried calamari, salad, and a choice of paella, fish, or beef for the main course. I chose fish, and Dan chose beef. A man went around playing the accordion and urged us to dance. I did the macarena with Willie, who was always entertaining us with his commentaries. After dinner we took a drive to see the lighted fountains. The day next was a drive to the cathedral of Monserrat to view the Black Madonna and a mountain view, which remained almost completely enshrouded in mist. After a brief rest we were driven downtown to the center of Barcelona to a marketplace called Las Ramblas, which reminded me of Quincy Market, except much longer and much more crowded. There were street performers dressed as statues, little places to eat, and off to one side a gigantic indoor market with stalls for ham, smoothies, fruit, fresh fish, almost anything you could imagine.
Our last dinner at the hotel, covered by the tour was a bit of a disappointment for everyone It started with a bowl of flavorless lukewarm pumpkin soup. The meat was like fried reconstituted shoe leather, with a side of lukewarm greasy potatoes, and a ball of tough looking stringy spinach. People were saying they would have gone out to buy their own dinner. It seemed more like a "don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out", than a "farewell dinner." Gordon Ramsay would have made their ears burn if he reviewed this meal. Dan said no wonder our tour director was in such hurry to get those evaluations back before dinner.
All good things must come to an end, and this week had me clicking my heels three times and saying "There's no place like home, there's no place like home!". The past 3 nights we were arriving at a new hotel at 6, and then getting up at six to start an optional activity. My body really started to rebel. I felt like sleeping all the time in the day time, then our last night there I got really sick to my stomach. I was so sick at the airport, when I saw how long the line was to the women's room, I busted into the men's room in the Barcelona airport, and said, "I'm sick, I'm sick!" But I was able to push through and now we are home, where I was able to get American medical care today.
Lessons learned, don't overschedule, get enough rest, and drink bottled water. Still, our trip to Spain was a beautiful life experience.