Spain Part Seven: Madrid and The End

Ah, Madrid. Home of overpriced touristy crap, subway stations that were used as shelters as little as fifty years ago during the Spanish civil war, good food, great art museums, and the airplane that would convey us home.

Having four days in Madrid rather than the planned two was absolutely the right thing to do. We took it slow and basked in Madrid's cosmopolitanism, enjoying the fine weather the first day and spending the second out of the rain in one of the greatest art museums I've ever had the pleasure of touring.

Madrid is very similar to the image in my mind of a "European capital" (which, I must add, London isn't.) Buildings, traffic, tourists, museums - and a sense of the modern and chic. You may wonder why I don't put London in that category: it is because, I've come to believe, London is in a category all its own. Philadelphia and Boston are American cities; New York is the ultimate American city. So to is London to the European capitals. Of course, I haven't been to Paris, so I'm sure some of my readers are composing angry emails right now.

But Madrid is also very much a large city, and doesn't take care of itself quite the way Barcelona does. It's definitely a little rougher around the edges - we saw more homeless people in the area around our hotel than we did in the rest of Spain combined - but it's also got a spirit and a life like no other place. The Spanish stereotype of breakfast at 10, lunch at 3, dinner at 10 and party until dawn is very much alive in Madrid. And the food - there are millions of ways to cook ham, and Madridians know every one. Hell, the "Museum of Ham" isn't a museum at all - it's a chain restaurant.

Madrid does have art museums, however. It's got all the other typical European city capital things too: a cathedral (the first one we skipped), the Royal Palace, an open-air market (where Liz's bag was almost swiped), and killer food. But the art museums became the centerpiece of our stay, especially since we skipped Malaga and Picasso country.

The first stop was the Centre de Arte Reina Sofia, which has an impressive collection of paintings by Salvador Dali and, of course, Pablo Picasso. The museum starts at impressionism and works its way into abstract art and cubism, and does an excellent job at demonstrating the progression from the eras and how artists studied and learned from other artists at the time. The museum's centerpiece is Picasso's Guernica, considered by many to be his masterpiece. The painting captures the agony of the aftermath of the bombing of the town of the same name by the Luftwaffe (working in concert with Franco) during the Spanish Civil War. Astute geeky readers may also recognize it from its guest appearance in the recent film Children of Men. The rooms leading to it are lined with studies for the painting and other things Picasso was working on around the same time; all told, I would guess I saw no less than 100 separate Picasso works in one day.

The interesting thing about art to me - especially modern paintings in the abstract and cubist style - is that I do not often understand them. I feel, when I walk into those rooms in the art galleries, that around me someone's speaking a language I don't understand. Obviously the art is trying to communicate something to me - but what? It's not unlike the feeling of spending two weeks in another country where you don't speak the language.

But the other side of that is when you're in a country where you don't speak the language, you begin to pick things up damn quickly. If you keep half of an open mind, you begin to recognize patterns in language and eventually you can start to string words together to communicate with people, even if on a rudimentary level. You're not going to be writing any best-sellers, but you can certainly find the bathroom, order your dinner, get a room, and so forth. That's how I felt after coming through those hundred Picassos and arriving at the Guernica - I wasn't exactly sure how to speak the language, but coming from something I could somewhat understand (impressionism) and being immersed into cubism gradually, it clicked in a way it never had before, and the end result was that looking at the painting was a powerful experience. The only time I've felt anything like it was in London, the first time I turned around and came face-to-face with Waterhouses' Lady of Shallot.

The other major Museum in Madrid we hit (there was a third where we did the "gift shop run" and decided to skip) was the Prado. The Prado is a collection on par with the Louvre. It begins with Medieval art (something in another language that I do understand, because I had an excellent guide once), and launches you through the Renaissance into Spanish art. At one point, I was in a room surrounded on all sides by paintings by Raphael. It was masterpiece sensory overload. Unlike the Reine Sofia, the Prado doesn't have one showcase painting (although I saw several very famous paintings there) - it's a journey through art that can be as tiring as climbing a mountain, but just as rewarding. Every nook and cranny has a painting in it (or a statue - I'd never seen so many classical statues in one place.) Not a shred of space is wasted, and everything has a story to tell.

Wandering the city and taking in the museums was two full days, and on the third we daytripped to Toledo. Toledo is still as much a medieval town as it ever was, with extremely narrow streets, awesome old bars and restaurants, and buildings pushed together by time and intuition. You can't go to Europe without riding the train, so we took the train from Madrid south for a half-hour (a bullet train, whee!) and explored the entire city on foot.

Before I talk about Toledo, I want to make a special mention of Madrid's train station. In the summer, Madrid is not a cool place. It's far from the ocean and the sun really bakes it - it gets quite warm. The train station is enclosed and even hotter, because some genius thought the train station should also be a greenhouse for tropical plants (I'm not making this up.) The line to buy tickets is in a tiny enclosure in said station, where you have to stand for a half-hour with other people who are just as warm as you - and there's no air conditioning. Truly a marvel of modern architecture.

Before we even left, we had a couple of hours to kill so we wandered through the Parque de Retiro. I mention this because the park has one of the only (if not the only) public sculptures devoted to Satan - El Diablo. Lucifer. The evil one. Called "El Angel Caido" (The Fallen Angel), there is, in the middle of the part, a statue of the devil. You wouldn't see something like that in the US, I'd reckon.

After the train ride, we toured Toledo - including their awesome Cathedral, a Synagogue built by Moors and later converted into a church and back into a synagogue - and then attempted to tour a Mosque, but it was closed. We could have hit the three Abrahamatic religions in one day, but it wasn't to be. Which kind of pissed me off, since that was my last chance to tour a Mosque in Spain.

Toledo turned out to be exactly a day trip to get through the entire town, including an awesome museum display devoted to Visigothic Spain - the part of history between the Roman Empire and the Medieval period most classes kind of skip over. The museum laid out the artifacts logically, showing the breakdown from the late Roman empire to the early Medieval age - how something as simple as inscriptions on buildings demonstrated the knowledge gained, lost, and regained in that time.

Toledo was our last full day in Spain. The next morning, we finished packing, headed to the airport, and a few in-flight movies and a novel later we were back in Seattle. And that was almost a little more than a month ago today. I waited too long to write these last chapters; even now, I can feel the memories slipping away from something concrete to the more abstract memories that record things in "the past." You'll note that I've been a little lax on the details in these last two posts; it's because the details are starting to become unimportant compared to the impressions and the feelings and the memories I'll treasure. But damn if it wasn't a great trip and a great vacation; when we landed, we were both tan and relaxed and happy and in love. If that isn't what a vacation is all about - if that isn't what travel is all about - I don't know what is.

Until next trip.

Spain Part Six: Cervantes Country and Nearing the End

After leaving Gibraltar and finally finding a hotel, we made our way north to Ciudad Real, covering a large part of the central portion of Spain in a day. The drive was unremarkable except for when we got robbed: one of the best stories of the trip.

Spain's roads are great, even by American standards - four-lane, limited-access highways take you pretty much anywhere you want to go. These highways have facilities every few miles, so you're never far from gas, a restaurant or even a hotel. There are only a few places where you have to get off those highways, and the drive north was one of them.

On the way to Ciudad Real, the gas dropped below half a tank on one of these little jaunts off the major highway. We pulled into a gas station twenty miles from nothing in every direction. Aside from being in Spain, it might as well have been from rural Oklahoma: tractors, trucks, the smell of dust and fertilizer. An attendant came up to fill the tank (it's full-service in Spain when you're not on the highway) and started pumping. We told her to fill it up.

And we watched the liters roll, and the Euros along with them. We had no idea how many liters our car held (and, we learned later, such information is not included in the manual) but I figured a liter is close to a quart. So when 40 liters rolled by, I wasn't worried, even though it was more than we'd yet put in the car. When 80 liters rolled by, I started getting concerned. I looked under the car to see if there was a leak. I looked at Liz, and the seemingly nice gas-station attendant. She just grinned. At 100 Euros ($130), we told her to shut it off. That was the most we'd ever paid for a tank of gas and the most I ever hope to pay. It seemed odd, but whatever.

Only later did we learn our car didn't even hold that much gas. They must have had a way to keep the pump rolling even though the tank was full. It wasn't exactly someone pulling a knife on us and demanding our wallet, but it was robbery, plain and simple. I guess some lessons you learn the hard way.

Ciudad Real is your basic non-touristy city in the middle of a rural plain (where the rain, incidentally, does not mainly fall.) At one time, it was the location of the Spanish court (thus the name "royal city,") but now it's just kind of dirty. We'd learned by now to ditch our car near the outside of town, find a map, and find a place to park - we had the driving down to an artform. Eventually we found our hotel, checked in, bought groceries, and kicked back and relaxed and planned the next day.

Ciudad Real is to Spain as Startford-On-Avon is to England: the home of its literary hero. Cervantes penned what is widely considered the first novel: Don Quixote, a fascinating literary metaphor that has become for many a symbol of hope and optimism in the face of sometimes crippling reality. Windmills become giants, and prostitutes become beautiful maidens. In the morning, we found the Quixote Museum, where we were treated to a personal audio-visual presentation about the story of Don Quixote and the life of Cervantes. Even though it was entirely in Spanish, I managed to follow along - language immersion is a funny thing. The sad thing was, it was a personal presentation because we were the only ones there, despite it being a beautiful literary destination. It was nice that the crowds so common to Stratford weren't thronged all over the place, but on the other had I wanted more people to experience something created to celebrate one of the greatest literary works ever penned.

We tried to find another hotel room in Ciudad Real, but couldn't because of "weddings," which apparently happen on one day in the entirely of Spain. We managed to find a room in Madrid, so we took advantage of the car and went places where the trains and buses don't - to Consuegra, a tiny town with a dozen restored windmills and a castle a la Quixote. Driving there was certainly unique, and it was nice to get off the beaten path. The town reminded me more of what I've always imagined Mexico to be like: dirty buildings, blankets draped in doorways, narrow streets, no one around. The windmills and castle were pretty standard "restored old building" fare, but offered an amazing view of the town and surrounding plains. There were several giant windmills from windfarms as well (these were all over the place in Spain - much of their power comes from both a massive solar plant and windmills all over the countryside), and the juxtaposition between the two kinds of windmills added to the surreal nature of everything. We took some pictures, ignored the smell of the landfill on the other side of the hill, and continued our jaunt up to Madrid. Because of our upped schedule, we would now have four days in the capital instead of two - one of which we planned on spending in Toledo by train. On the way out of town, a shepherd crossed on an overpass ahead of us - on foot, leading a herd of sheep, with a donkey carrying his belongings. It completed the feel of rural Spain.

The closer we got to Madrid, the more that feeling diminished. Madrid, from the outside, struck me as very similar to Dallas - ringed by soulless suburbs and outer-belt highways. We found the airport and managed to avoid traffic more through serendipity than anything else, rid ourselves of the car, got ripped off by about 10 Euros on the taxi ride into town, and found our two-star Hostale where we'd spend the first night. The room was tiny and noisy but clean. We stashed our stuff, got our bearings, and set off to explore Spain's capital - the last real stop on our journey.

Spain Pix: Done!

All of the pictures from Spain fit for the Internet are now available on my Flickr stream!

More travelogues coming soon!

Spain Part Five: Gibraltar and Driving North

Gibraltar is hard to find on Spanish roads. That's because Spain really wants Gibraltar back, so there are no signs for it until you get right on top of it. Literally. So if you're looking for Gibraltar, drive towards the giant rock or go to the town of La Liena.

Gibraltar, one of the two "pillars of Hercules," stands at the "mouth" of the Mediterranean. As its name suggests, it's a giant goddamned rock, and there's an almost-identical giant goddamned rock across the sea on Africa - and I have to admit, it's pretty impressive.

Gibraltar has been owned in the past by Greeks, Iberians, Romans, Pirates, Moors, and most recently the British, who came under the pretenses of stopping Napoleon and decided to make it a colony. As such, it's one of the last British colonies on the planet. It also makes a dandy place to stock up on English-language reading material when you're in a country that is a little low on Barnes & Noble outlets.

We planned a stop by Gibraltar as a break from the monotony of cured ham, Spanish tortillas, and people who don't speak English. This was about the midpoint of the trip, so we were looking forward to hearing English again (at least, I was.) And eating fish and chips. All the good things about British life. Or at least two of them.

So we drove down to La Liena and promptly got lost, which is quite a feat considering the town is pretty small, even for a European town. We ended up in a roundabout going in circles around the bullring while I was reading a map, and ended up asking for directions several times. Eventually we parked our car in an underground parking garage and traversed a good portion of the city before we located our hotel, which (like some of the other places we stayed) was above a restaurant. Imagine, Seattleites, if Beth's cafe had four floors of rooms above it, and you have what these Hostales are like. Cigarette smoke and all.

La Liena was founded by the Spanish as a response to British occupation of Gibraltar, and it's possibly the most un-interesting place we ended up in Spain. The road there is littered with resorts and signs in English, because the southern part of Spain - the Costa del Sol - is full of Brits and Germans who go there to retire. In other words, it's Europe's answer to Florida.

After ditching our bags in our room, we walked into Gibraltar. It's the only time, aside from a trip to Niagra falls, that I've walked into another country, and I suspect it's one of the last places you can do that. Gibraltar itself is really small, and you can walk from one end to the other in a couple of hours. Customs glanced at our passports and waved us through; we actually had to request the stamp, and the guard just looked amused. The next step was running across the airport's runway; the street and sidewalk goes right over it, which is a bit of a trip.

And then we were in Gibraltar, where prices were in pounds and the swears were in good old English. We took some money out of the bank and did what any good American would do in a British colony: honed in on the nearest pub, ordered Guinness and fish and chips. And boy was it good.

Gibraltar is also a tax haven, so a lot of Spanish people go down there to shop. Gibraltar Town crams as many stores into a half-kilometer that you can, so our time there consisted primarily of wandering from shop to shop (and pub to pub.) We bought some touristy things, pints of beer, some pie, and postcards to send home. Yes, they had red mailboxes. And we stocked up on books for the plane ride home.

Gibraltar's funny because it really has no place in the modern world. I don't mean that in a negative way, just that it's a remnant of colonialism that just won't die. You still have to walk through a massive wall to get into town. It's so different from Spain not a kilometer away it's uncanny. But somehow, it survives. It's like an English town with tropical temperatures. The whole thing is remarkable.

We managed to "do" Gibraltar and be back for a late-night snack and sleep, ready to head out the day after. Our plan was to see Cordoba, home of the Mezquita mosque, and we started calling hotels before we left La Liena. Oddly, none of them had rooms. We drove north, and called more hotels. No vacancies. About noon, we panicked: we had no place to stay that night. We looked at the map and assessed other options. We had planned to go to La Mancha and see Quixote country before heading to Madrid. Maybe we should do that early, turn the car in early, and stay longer in Madrid?

It turns out that's exactly what we did. And it was one of the best decisions we made.

Spain Part Four: A Vacation from Vacations and Granada

There's an old adage that when you come back from a vacation you need a vacation. We were starting to feel that way after Tarragona: we'd been going pretty much nonstop, driving was extremely stressful, and we just wanted to relax for a night. So we opened the Rough Guide and found a quiet little town called Vinaros. The guide said:

The beaches of the scruffy port-cum-resort Vinaros, next along the coast, are small but rarely packed.

Beaches? Port? Scruffy? Rarely packed? Perfect. We drove into town, ready to put on our bathing suits and hit the beach, when wonder of wonders it began to rain. Not on the plain, but in Spain, it rained. At the beach.

We instead contented ourselves with cheap but delicious small-town food and a walk along the docks, where fishermen were literally loading catches onto carts bound for restaurants across the street. It was relaxing. There was no pressure. Liz tried anchovies (you read it here first folks!) and just what the doctor ordered.

The next morning we looked at our map and realized we were due at the Alhambra in two days time and we were still a long way from Granada. Like, a whole day's travel from Granada. Spain doesn't look all that large on a map, but it's bigger than you might think, so we packed it in and spent most of the day driving. But first, we made a hotel reservation. And here's where things start to get funny.

Part of the adventure of traveling without an itinerary is that you are booking hotels the day you stay there. Inevitably, that means rooms can be hard to find. Or you can find a room for one day, but not both. Which is what happened in Granada: we had a room for two nights, but not the third. This was to become a recurring theme in our travels - plodding across a city with our suitcases in tow, relocating from one hotel to the next. Not that I'm complaining, but it's damned inconvenient, especially when check-out times (noon) and check-in times (4 pm) don't always mesh.

But we made it to our first hotel after a hair-pulling adventure through Granada at rush hour, and the bellboy parked the car for us (I have no idea where the car went, and frankly I don't want to know.) And we set off to explore Granada.

Granada used to be the seat of the Nasrid sultanate, and after Ferdinand and Isabella conquered it, they were so taken with its beauty and the majesty of its palace, the Alhambra, that they relocated their court there. Rumor has it Granada is where Columbus received the go-ahead to set off in search of a western passage to China. The town reflects this history, with a Moorish quarter (the Albaicin) and - even more interesting - a gypsy quarter (Sacromonte) where gypsies still continue to live in caves, although by all reports the cave-houses are quite comfortable.

We spent the next day touring around and, if you can believe it, hauling our laundry halfway across the city and back to have it washed. We hit two main tourist attractions: the Cathedral and the tomb of Ferdinand and Isabella, neither of which were terribly remarkable but were interesting in contrast to the Moorish architecture around town - an excellent point-counterpoint to the styles of Europe and the Muslim world at around the same time. The gothic and early Baroque styles of the Cathedral and tomb reached upwards, towards heaven, while the Alhambra was a sprawling complex firmly rooted in earth, with natural additions like gardens courtyards and fountains everywhere. It's almost a perfect symbol for the Platonic influences on Christianity and the Aristotelean influences on Islam.

After touring Granada, we spent an entire day in the Alhambra - not difficult to do considering its size, immensity, and beauty. I promised myself I wouldn't make value judgments, but in retrospect the Alhambra was probably my favorite sight in Spain. Built over a few hundred years first as a fort, then a palace, then a building of sublime beauty, the Alhambra was my first real exposure to middle eastern style architecture and is fascinating in ways completely different than European architecture. When I walked into Canterbury Cathedral, I felt as I'd always expected to feel in the presence of God. When I walked into the Royal Palace of the Alhambra, I felt I was in a peaceful place that amplified the presence of nature. Again, I'm returning to Plato and Aristotle, but there you go - it's remarkable really.

I could describe in intimate detail every part of the Alhambra we visited, but somehow I doubt that's necessary. Check out the pictures on my Flickr stream; unfortunately, it's one of those places that's hard to capture on film. And it wrapped up our adventure in Granada, which was fine because we were ready to head to our next destination - down to Andalucia and the British colony of Gibraltar. It was time to stock up on English-language reading material.

Spain Part Three: Stepping Into History

The next day, we woke up, checked out, and hit the road (after buying a stack of maps at a bookstore - anyone who tells you "oh, you can drive through Spain with one general highway map" is a fucking liar.) Our first stop was the Mountain of Montserrat, not in the Caribbean but a little to the west of Barcelona. Montserrat is home to a mountaintop monastery - I looked for the ninja master who would teach me skills, but he was absent - and has been a pilgrimage destination for residents for more than a thousand years. And looking at the pictures, it's not hard to see why. The countryside is amazing, the views are spectacular, and the monks make a mean homemade cheese.

You can get to the top of the mountain in one of three ways: by a tour bus (we didn't have one), a train (the option we took), or something called a "funicular," which is basically like the Skyride at Cedar Point except at times you're dangling thousands of feet above the ground. I argue that "funicular" doesn't sound very fun at all. Now imagine that in a Lewis Black voice, and you have one of the recurring jokes from our trip. Ah, memories.

So once you're up there, it's a great spot to go hiking, which we did. There are all kinds of little shrines around the mountains for pilgrims to go to, so we chose the easiest and pooped out halfway through. We'd make pretty shitty pilgrims: we rode to the top of the mountain, and while we were wheezing (keep in mind, this was the top of a mountain and we're not exactly used to thin air here in Seattle) and resting, two old women passed us on their trip back from the shrine. It made us look bad.

We still didn't finish the walk.

But we did drive on to the city of Tarragona, originally inhabited by Iberians (the peninsula's "original" inhabitants kind of), and then a Roman capital. And then a medieval town, and then a site of a battle against Napoleon. A historical place, so to speak. The center of town is still very medieval and surrounded by Iberian then Roman then Medieval-era walls (basically the same wall rebuilt several times.) We ditched the car, got a hostel room, and walked around and enjoyed ourselves. Most of the town turned out for a Saturday dinner in the central square (no cars allowed), and it was certainly memorable just sitting and relaxing and taking it all in. And noisy, as we found out the party pretty much went until the wee hours of the morning.

Next day, up and at 'em to check out the ruins. Tarragona still has a fair amount of Roman ruins left (see the pictures) and is unique among cities I've visited: buildings literally "grow" out of the walls and ruins. At one point, the Roman wall ends at a house, and then continues beyond it. If we'd kept walking, we'd be in someone's backyard. It's hard to get that kind of history in the US, and it's one of my favorite things about Europe: simply being surrounded by something so ancient. To be able to touch a stone and know that it was placed by a builder thousands of years ago.

I've also been reading a lot of Roman history lately, and while it's one thing to read a book about a site, it's something totally different to stand there and see it for yourself. Simply visualizing how a town looked based on a book description isn't the same as looking at it for yourself; sure you can see it, but you can smell the stones and taste the dust on your teeth. I almost wanted to find the bathroom and break out the shit-sponge.

Almost.

But it was time to head for the coast, for a restful evening in small-town Spain before heading to Granada - home of the mighty Alhambra. It can be wonder of the world! Until next time!

Spain Part Two: Barcelona and Language

The Sagrada Familia is far enough away from the rest of Barcelona's sites that it's a pretty long walk - or a very short cab or bus ride away. Normally I'd be all in favor of walking, especially in Europe where cities are typically compact enough to make it worthwhile, but because we were so pressed for time we decided to take a cab. At least we got to see how someone who wasn't lost got through the city.

Cabs in Spain were fantastically cheap compared to nearly every other city I've been to. They're all sanctioned by the government, and they work exactly the same no matter where you are - the fares can vary slightly, but the "Libre/Occupido" indicator is always in the same place, so you never have to guess what combination of lights means a cab is empty or full. It's a kind of consistency I can appreciate. And they're also, as I mentioned, really cheap. Fares ran about 4-5 Euros. Certainly worth saving a couple of hours when you don't have much time.

The Sagrada Familia is technically a temple. Right now, it's not a functioning religious building because it hasn't been finished yet. Conceived by Barcelona architect Antoni Gaudí as a symbol of the power of Christianity ("the last great sanctuary of Christendom" according to Wikipedia), when completed it will be taller than many cathedrals if not necessarily larger on the inside. As you can see in our pictures, work continues to this day - there were construction teams there when we toured the building.

The Sagrada Familia ("Sacred Family") will eventually have 12 towers, one for each apostle (it has 8 at the moment), 4 towers for each Evangelist, a tower for Mary, a tower for Joseph, and a massive center tower topped with a cross representing Jesus (here's a model of the final church.) The inside is currently pretty bare and many parts of the roof are still open, as the current construction projects are centered around strengthening the building to support the weight of the towers. Gaudí designed the building without the use of computers (obviously), but his original plans were destroyed in the 20s by anti-religious anarchists, so current architects have resorted to using computer-aided drafting to try to reconstruct Gaudí's plans.

The entire building, even unfinished, is one of the oddest and most beautiful religious structures I've ever seen. Its majesty is different from the medieval gothic cathedrals like Canterbury or renaissance cathedrals like St. Paul's. Gaudí used a unique architectural style that has been described as organic, and that's as good a word as any to encompass how the building feels. The curves on the facades and the towers remind me of stalagmites in a cave, or a giant building constructed by a race far less concerned with right angles than humans. The more I think about it, the more it reminds me of what I imagine some kind of odd Lovecraftian race might design if it suddenly got the notion to create a monument to Christianity.

Incidentally, if you ever find yourself in Barcelona with only a few hours to kill, I recommend the Sagrada Familia as the one thing you should certainly see.

After being awed by this unusual structure, we caught another (cheaper) cab to the top of Barcelona's main street, the Rambla. You don't necessarily have to speak Spanish to understand that a street called the Rambla is designed for, well, rambling - and that's exactly what it is. A wide pedestrian thoroughfare lined with booths (some selling the most unusual things I've ever seen in an outdoor market - rows of cages of pigeons being sold as pets. Pigeons: the winged garbage rats of the sky. That's just one example.) We introduced ourselves to the delights of sitting outside at 2 in the afternoon and eating a late lunch - every meal in Spain is late really - and then slowly rambling along afterwards.

It was somewhere around this time that I really began to be aware of being in a country where I understood very little of what was going on around me. Liz did an excellent job acting as an interpreter, but even when I was in Germany I at least had some kind of clue. Here, without Liz to tell me what was going on, I was utterly lost.

It's funny how much language is something that's taken for granted. It's how I imagine someone who's illiterate would feel in a library - surrounded by things that most certainly mean something and are trying to communicate, but unable to understand the message. It's how I feel when I'm in a modern art museum - I recognize that there is indeed an order to what's going on around me, there is something being communicated, but I'll be goddamned if I know what it is. I can honestly say that I never really freaked out about it, and Liz really tried to help when I felt especially lost. It's a hell of a thing being in a place where you can't understand what's going on. There's always pantomiming of course, and the old "point and grunt" interface, but you still feel lost and sometimes a little scared. How do you know you're not being taken advantage of, being the Gringo Turismo? It's enough to make or break a case of paranoia or OCD.

After our ramble down the Rambla, we hit Barcelona's gothic cathedral, which was everything the Sagrada Familia wasn't - traditional, big, open, and a bit of a disappointment. I love cathedrals - religious structures of all kinds hold a fascination for me, but the medieval structures that people built to create earthly sanctuaries for their faith are unique in many ways - the design of them in a time when most people were living in tiny hovels, the epic scale so much larger than anything else around them, the investment of time where those who began a project knew it would be finished by their grandchildren's grandchildren. It takes a certain degree of faith to even dream of such a thing, and it's even more compelling when you see how many of these structures there are all over Western Europe.

But this one still felt bland. It was something I'd seen before. In fact, I felt that about most of the cathedrals we saw on our trip - large gothic churches. None of them held the magic or awe of my first trip to Canterbury in 1999, when I walked in and the organ was going and the boy's choir was singing and I was literally reduced in size and stature by a building and its activities (OK, I ended up getting teary-eyed and had to kneel. Maybe it's a Catholic response.) But that never happened here.

In fact, the archaeological museum right behind the Cathedral was more interesting. After touring some Roman-era artifacts, it takes you into the basement where you quite literally walk through the excavation of several blocks of the old Roman town, from the walls to a fish oil factory (yum!) to a winery to houses, and a Visigothic-era church and palace. It was my first tangible experience with the vast ancient history of Spain, and it was the perfect setup for the next stage of our trip: driving into the countryside, stopping at Tarragona (an old Roman capital and port city), and seeing the kinds of ruins I'd only read about in books.

How's that for a setup for next time?

Spain Part One: Overview and Arrival

Spain was Liz's idea. I don't mean that in a "well, this was your idea!" kind of way, but in a "huh, I never thought about going there but that sounds cool" kind of way. Understand that our vacations tend to be a few days long at best, and we tend to either go camping, go visit friends or family, or some combination of those two things, so two weeks to ourselves was a novel idea. OK - it sounded like Paradise. She could have said "let's go to Rwanda" and it still would have been cool.

But Spain as a country really hasn't ever been on my radar. The extent of my knowledge of the language include counting to ten (thank you, Sesame Street), asking for the bathroom (thank you, Refreshments) and asking for a beer (thank you again, Refreshments.) I vaguely knew its history and role in the Roman empire, and I read some of Hemingway's books set there, but otherwise I didn't really even know the country's geography. Barcelona? Madrid? Without a map, I was helpless. But that's the kind of travel experience I like - going to an unexpected place and finding something unexpectedly awesome. And if there's one phrase that sums up the entire trip, it's that - unexpectedly awesome.

Spain also has the distinction of being Europe's last fascist dictatorship. I knew of Barcelona from the 1992 Olympics of course, but a scant 17 years before that - three years before I was born, in 1975 - Spain was as fascist as Nazi Germany (or, perhaps a little more appropriately, as fascist as Mussolini's Italy.) Spain sat out of World War II because it was in the middle of its own Civil War, an extremely bloody conflict where entire villages were being slaughtered by both sides, Republicans (the democratic current government) and the Nationalists (the fascists under Franco.) Franco eventually won, with Madrid the last city to fall, around 1936 or so, although pockets of resistance both democratic and Communist continued to hold out into the 40s (and the Basque separatists in the north carried out terror attacks long after.)

After Franco's death, democracy was restored by Spain's King (they have a royal family kind of like Britain, and while the King was ostensibly Franco's puppet he obviously had some liberal democratic ideals) and Spain has since voted in both conservative governments and more liberal, socialist governments, most notably in 2003 to remove the pro-Bush PP party from power and end Spain's involvement in the Iraq war. Oddly enough, while I saw a little anti-Bush graffiti, there was none of the anti-Americanism I saw in both London and Italy during the 1999 Bosnia conflict; I saw more Anarchist and Neo-Nazi graffiti than anything else. Go figure. In fact, with a couple of exceptions, we were largely ignored as Americans - when people realized we spoke English, they tended to assume we were from the UK (likely due to the large number of British retirees in Spain.)

So Liz and I bought some travel books, made arrangements to fly into Barcelona and out of Madrid, and decided to rent a car to see the countryside. Spain is probably as car-friendly as Europe gets (which is to say you'll still die of sheer terror driving there and get lost a lot), so this seemed like a dandy plan. We worked pretty much up to the point where we got on the plane, and flew out on the 9th. A long overnight plane ride, a dozen episodes of "Heroes," and some shitty airline food later, and we were in Barcelona ready to conquer the country.

We packed our stuff into a Dodge rental car I'd never heard of, got some vague directions to our hotel on the opposite side of the city, and promptly got lost. In fact we spend the next several hours lost and trying to find our way around, Liz taking a crash course in "let's remember how to say 'but show me on the map where we are right now' in Spanish" and trying not to cause too much destruction. Liz managed to misplace her glasses (which is why, as you'll see, she's wearing her sunglasses in a lot of the pictures from the trip. Good times.) We eventually found the hotel and checked in, and the jetlag caught up to us. The worst thing we could have done was sleep at two in the afternoon (if only we realized about the Siesta!), so we wandered the neighborhood looking for a supermarket, stocked up on food and bottled water, and wandered some more.

Our hotel was right across from the Mediterranean beach. It was still a little chilly, so we didn't put on the bathing suits, but we walked for a while and just enjoyed the fresh air. Like all European cities, Barcelona is made for walking. It's only in retrospect that I had anything in Spain to compare Barcelona with, but it truly is a beautiful city. It's extremely clean (I noticed this, but didn't know how it compared to other cities of size like Madrid), very well maintained, and there's obviously a good deal of money floating around. It has an air of life about it without the sometimes sinister edge you find in other large cities (say, Madrid where someone almost stole Liz's backpack). It's really modern. It reminded me a lot of, say, Phoenix if Phoenix were on the ocean somewhere.

That night it took very little to put us to sleep. I think dinner was a loaf of bread and a little lunchmeat, and we went down like we'd been double-teamed by Ali and Foreman. The next morning, while Liz slumbered, I pulled out the Rough Guide and started making a plan of the things we would see in our last day in Barcelona (suggestion: spend more than two nights in Barcelona, especially if one of those nights is after you get off a plane and you spend the day wandering around lost.) At Crabby's suggestion, the first place we'd stop was the Sagrada Familia - Gaudi's architectural masterpiece and the most unique church/cathedral (it's actually a temple) I've ever seen.

Where's Jason? Former Roman Empire Edition

So you may have noticed the relative lack of posts in the last couple of weeks, and the sudden glut of them at a very unusual - possibly jetlagged - hour early this morning.

I just returned from a two-week trip to Spain with my wife. A two-week vacation. Who knew such things existed?

There will be pictures and posts galore soon.