Obsolete Your Idols

And Upon This Rock, I Shall Build My House

My photo-set of our trip through the Midwest via House on the Rock and the Mustard Museum culminating in WisCon 31 is now complete or at least as complete as it's going to get. Again I lament of the lack of flash, the lack of resolution and, even more so, my lack of skill.

I didn't even upload all the ones I took because some of the images were even crappier than the ones there [which is why there are no images of the Mustard Museum, or any number of other notable sights].

posted at 08:10 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: house on the rock, mustard, travel, wiscon

Now That We're Back

I don't have a lot of observations to make about WisCon 31 since I mostly spent it decompressing in a hotel room or a bar. I've been gradually trickling up the phonecam pictures I took during the trip to my flickr account but those are mostly of House on the Rock, not WisCon.

I did come back with a handful of story and book recommendations (for myself, not for you) and some links to propagate. For example, the [FemSFBookSwap] [fsfbw] which I think stands for Female or Feminist Science Fiction Book Swap. There's also Diet Soap and the August Derleth Society.

We're already registered for next year's WisCon.

posted at 11:26 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: conventions, mlp, travel, wiscon

Greetings from WisCon(Sin)

After nearly a week of travel via car, we've arrived at Madison, WI for WisCon 31. I'm very nearly socially saturated so I'm hiding in the hotel room, laboriously transferring phonecam images to my flickr stream. I did want to take this opportunity to leak a coupon code.

Our friend Deb Taber is Editor and Art Director for Apex Digest and they're running a promotion right now. If you use the code WISCON20 when subscribing online, you get 20% off the price. Which is a pretty good deal for a magazine of spooky stories. This will expire at the end of June and evidently by sharing this with people not here, I can expect to have my head explode.

So, I hope it was worth it to get this valuable information out there.

posted at 10:25 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: people i know, travel, wiscon

Oh, You Mean the Milk of Human Kindness is Literal?

The train back to Madrid took us to the same station we'd departed from days earlier so the strange place was slightly familiar. I managed to get us completely turned around and lost until we went into a hotel lobby and got reoriented and headed for one of the low-budget hotels we were looking to stay in, in the neighborhood with the train station and the museums.

After some confusion with buzzers, door locks and language, we got ourselves a room at the Hostal Cervantes. Where the sink and bath tub had no stopper. On purpose. The shower head was cantankerous, but at least the bed was comfortable. We had a small radiator we could attempt some laundry drying on, so we did a little sink washing and crashed out.

The next day we woke bright and early, left our bags at the hotel, and went museum-delving. We first hit the Prado where we did the clever sneaky thing and went to the unpopular entrance so that we didn't stand in an interminable line and were admitted right quick. Vy gave me a crash course in art history. It's an enormous building with large collections and we spent hours cramming as much of it into our eyes as we could.

A highlight of the museum was the statue of Hermaphrodite. Here's a picture of it from someone else's photo gallery. The thing that really sticks with me, though, is a motif I saw from several artists, in several contexts. That motif is the Virgin Mary lactating. I'm not even kidding a little bit. Several paintings, showing her squeezing her teat to spray milk. She sprays it all over babies in Purgatory, she shoots it right into St. Bernard's mouth, she sprays it out into space and it becomes stars.

Dear Catholic people: WHAT.

Don't believe me? Someone has collected some images of what I saw at thehangedman blog (good blog name, by the way).

We took a sangria break at a pricey little cafe, had some ice cream, and then hit another museum, the Reina Sofia. This place is full of modern art. A lot of the most current stuff seemed either incomprehensible or pointless to me. So opaque as to preclude my understanding the point of it or so simplistic as to not have one. But there was a fun set of video installations where loops of imagery and interactive camera-television pieces gave me something to think about and do. I also saw Guernica in the flesh and some Dali, including some not-very-surreal pieces which I liked for contrast with the portions of his work I am familiar with.

Then we went back to Puerta del Sol, our old stomping grounds from our original pass through Spain, lo those many days before. We did some souvenir shopping, went back to El Corte Ingles and bought some hard candy to take back as co-worker souvenirs. I was looking for something sturdy enough to be squished into a bag, unrestricted enough that there would be no hassle with Customs, and varied enough that most of the people I work with could find something tasty about it. I had given up and we were heading to the checkout line when I spotted the candy aisle.

After our grocery run, we went into the gourmet grocery department and bought cheese and beers. We sat outside on the nearest thing to a bench we could find and enjoyed our repast. Not having an opener, I resorted to the technique of popping the bottle cap on the concrete edge. Worked great for Vy's; mine ended up breaking the neck. I still drank mine, I just did it very carefully. No reason to let possible lacerations stand between me and beer. While we were sitting there snacking, a dishevelled dude with a bigger bottle in a brown paper bag sat down on the other side of me and we all savored the day together.

Then we made a mistake and went to the airport, deciding we'd rather take the 1 Euro Metro than a 40-60 Euro cab at a later hour, and assuming the airport would be functional 24 hours a day. That turned out not to be the case and shortly after we arrived, it started shutting down most things. We found a closed restaurant, a completely vacated restaurant, and a soon to open under construction restaurant. Finally, as we were gnawing our arms off, we found a cafeteria. After 01:00, the place got quiet enough to be peaceful and restful. We grazed on a few snacks from the Cafeteria and waited for it to be late enough in the morning for our airline's counter to be open.

We weren't the only ones in this state, by any means. A line started forming long before the counter opened and we got right into it. We managed to be in the first 20% of the line and enjoyed some schadenfreude as each new person approached, began circling the line to reach the counter which they were sure had nothing to do with this line, stopped, gaped, and slunk back to the end of the line. Our patience was well rewarded as we had a painless check in process, headed to the gate, and found ourselves on the relatively short KLM hop to Amsterdam. The Amsterdam airport was still a dream of clean efficiency, especially appreciated after the lovely but somewhat grime-challenged bathrooms of Spain.

Then we were on a flight home! It exists as a 16 hour smear in my memory but I distinctly remember that the woman to my left was visiting the US for the first time and was adamant that I learn several of her tricks for solving Sudoku. So I did and she was happy and I was pleased and then we were home where we slept for half a day and then spent several more days trying to remember how to do simple things like find food and transport myself to the office.

This concludes my traveblog about Spain. I'm sure I left out many things, important things (like the time I was castigated by a nun). So it goes. I hope you've enjoyed it. We are eager to return to Spain and genuinely appreciate all the hospitality we enjoyed from the people we met and fondly remember the places we went.

posted at 11:31 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: art, art museum, madrid, milk, museum, spain, travel, wtf?

In the Land of the Dry, the Soggy Man is King

We arrived in Granada, had the blurry experience of dashing out of the bus station which had funky ramp escalators to the nearby median island where we caught a local bus going the right direction.I tried to figure out where to get off but the book was incomplete; luckily there were some English-speakers on the bus who recognized my accent and helpfully told me the stop we wanted, since they wanted it, too.

After our earlier pickpocket experiences we were leery of these helpful new friends and so we sort of skulked along behind them to the Plaza Nueva around which everything tourist orbits in Granada. We found a hotel recommended in the book, and got admitted and were able to secure a room from the amazingly helpful Matilde Ortiz de Landazuri. Sadly, she told us that we had come at a bad time and that she was not well.

The room was big and comfortably sized. The toilet was a complicated technology which looked like it had been created through a series of ad hoc re-factorings. We passed out into sleep and woke the next morning having slept away most of our traveling pains.

To fix this in time, this was March 29th, 2007. I know, because that's when we'd bought Alhambra admission tickets for. When I sat down to schedule them, I thought I was doing it well in advance. In practice, there were two time slots available and neither of them as early as we thought we wanted them. We ended up with a late afternoon slot which wasn't what we thought we wanted.

That was before we actually got to Spain, got ourself on Spanish time, and adapted to the Spanish schedule. So now that time slot was just nearly perfect. It gave us plenty of time to wend our way from the hotel we were staying in (the roomy and charming Hostal Landazuri, which was just as nice as described in the travel guide we were using) down the street to the main plaza around which all of our time was spent.

During this day we ate a really delicious paella. We saw the chapel commissioned and built as the final resting place for Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, with their elaborate death mask statues and memorial and, underneath, their actual coffins. Including the one for Prince Michael who could have been king of a united Spain and Portugal because his grandparents were in charge of Spain and his father was king of Portugal. He's sometimes called Miguel de Paz and his mother had the same name as his grandmother, more or less.

Then we caught a bus up the hill to the Alhambra. To the top of a tall hill, with a commanding vantage. Exactly the kind of place one might build a fort. Like this one:

But before we went there, we spent a lot of time in the Generalife Gardens. Which, in a word, are enormous. This image is representative of the experience.

Everything in the garden has been carefully cultivated, arranged, positioned, patterned, placed. It shows a fastidious attention to detail. It's elaborate, ornate, and expressive. I really am ruining it for you with words; you need to see it in person to appreciate it.

Leaving it, we saw something we had not yet seen in Spain. Cats! As hard as it is to believe, we hadn't seen any domestic cats anywhere in Spain and now we saw several feral ones. They were all over Granada once we knew to look for them but the first ones we saw were skulking about the grounds of the Alhambra. This was a big deal for us, to see cats at last.

Then we walked to the fort you saw earlier and walked around it a bit, getting closer in time and space to the main attraction here, the Palacios Nazaries. We stepped into the boring but big palace of Carlos the Fifth.

There is a modern art museum in that palace and we stepped into it, saw a strange video on a screen, stepped back out again. Modern art has that effect on me.

Then it got to be fifteen minutes before our admittance time to the Palacios Nazaries. We walked to it, stopped in across the street to look at some models of the area in different eras, and then we managed to get admitted early to the big palace.

It's vast and amazing. Here's an interior shot.

Here's a shot of what it looks like to look out of the Palacios Nazaries at the rest of Granada.

We spent hours walking and looking and experiencing being inside this ancient enormous archive of history. This was the one fixture we had planned for our visit before coming and it rewarded our attention. So this was great. But eventually our feet hurt and closing time was coming on, so we headed back down to the Plaza Nueva.

The next day we went for a couple walks, one up to the San Nicolas Viewpoint, and back down through the Albayzin neighborhood, another along part of the Paseo de los Tristes, where we saw more cats along a river. We did some souvenir shopping, our first of the trip, as we were starting to anticipate our departure. I spent literally hours looking for a very particular souvenir and here's why.

Once upon a time when Granada was home to Christians, Jews, and Muslims. They all lived there and they, more or less, got along. That's because the Muslims were in charge and they didn't force anyone not a Muslim to convert to their religion. That was novel at the time. They did, however, tax everybody who wasn't a Muslim for being a whatever-else-they-were. That didn't sit too well with the Christians, who are well known for amassing wealth, just like Jesus told them to do.

In any case, during this golden age of relative peace and practical plenty, the leaders of the Jewish community in Granada presented the Muslim king with a gift to put in his palace. It was a fountain with twelve lions facing outward from the basin in the middle. During each hour of the day, a different lion spouted water from its mouth. So it functioned as a show of wealth, because for the Muslim kings, wealth was demonstrated by how much water you could splash around in a dry climate. It functioned as a show of cleverness, because it kept time as a clock. It probably functioned as bragging rights of some sort or another because I doubt just everybody had a piece of interior decoration presented by the leaders of the Jewish community.

So the fountain sat there and ran merrily for some time and then, when the Christian re-conquest of Granada drove the Muslims away, and the fountain was abandoned, the Christian scholars decided they really needed to know how this fountain worked. So they took it apart. They broke it in the process. Not only could they not figure out the functioning, they couldn't even restore it back the way it had been.

So I hunted feverishly for a bottle opener with an image of the Court of Lions fountain on it to give to the person who does QA for the Playfirst website. I thought that story made for a lovely tale of QA and testing. I found tons of other bottle openers and other items with that image on it but I had nearly despaired of ever finding the particular combination when I finally found it.

Then we boarded a slow train to Madrid for our last two nights in Spain.

posted at 23:06 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: gardens, palace, ruins, spain, travel

No Me Molesta Mezquita!

We got back to Cordoba from the Medinat al-Zahara and since the bus dropped us off in such a convenient location, we decided to check out the Mezquita. Do you know what that is? Neither did I. It's a church. At least, that's what it was before it became a tourist attraction. Before it was a church it was a mosque. Before it was a mosque, it was a church. Before it was a church, it was a temple. Confused? Imagine what it would be like to attend a church with this kind of architecture.

As I understand the story, a long time ago, when the Romans lived where Cordoba is, they had a nice friendly cult of Janus. No, not this friendly cult of Janus, this friendly cult of Janus. Who seems to have been part of a polyamorous relationship involving Jupiter. So, a distinguished fellow and the Romans had a house for him at Cordoba, or so I am told.

But then the Christian tide flooded the area and they built themselves a lovely little Gothic church on top of Janus's temple. Well, lovely in a squat, rude and Gothic sense, one presumes. Then the Christian tide waned, the Islamic tide waxed, and the Gothic church was refurbished and became a mosque. It stayed that way for a while until the tide of Islam waned and the Christian tide re-waxed. They cathedralized the hell out of the mosque but weren't able to excise all of it.

So when you see it today, it's a mix of stark Christian, ebullient Christian, colorful and geometrically entrancing Islamic, and, for some reason, there's a hole in the floor so you can look down at the floor of Janus's old bachelor pad. Overall: fairly fucking awesome.

We walked around and oohed and ahhed for a while. I was particularly struck by the transitional points, where one era of architecture blended into another. Good stuff, and I'm not even an architect.

Then we decided to have a meal and went to a place recommended in, yes, the Rick Steves book on Spain. El Caballaro Rojo, which I think means The Red Dude. It was described as being somewhat pricy but worth it. Oh. My. Yes. It was indescribably delicious. I still had no appetite but I managed to eat a decent amount of the food here, it was so delicious. I also enjoyed the experience of a bathroom stall with a timer controlled light. That's one exciting part about bathrooms in Spain, a lot of them have mechanisms to automatically turn off things which would perhaps simply run here in the US if someone wandered off. The faucet, the lights, the toilet. The other exciting part is the variety of intricate mechanisms to engage flushing. The bathroom back at the Hotel Europe in Madrid had a two part button which you could selectively thumb to select the narrow option or the wide. Several other toilets I met had rods or levers or buttons in unexpected places which were to be manipulated in diverse fashion.

But enough potty humor!

After we let the meal settle, we walked around in Cordoba, past the palaces of the Christian Kings which is a tourist attraction which didn't really attract our tourism. We sauntered back up through the gardens we had rushed through earlier until a combination of hunger and curiosity took Vy into a grocery store. I stayed in the entry area with our bags, since we were forbidden to take them in and we didn't feel like dropping the euros on the pair of coin-operated lockers we'd need to hold our bags.

We weren't allowed to take our bags in, a barrier reserved for tourists, as several locals sauntered past me with enormous open backpacks. I guess only tourists shoplift in Spain. Vy had herself some grocery shopping adventures and then just before she emerged from the checkout line, it started to rain.

We raced across the street and ducked into a cafe, part of the same chain as the cafe where we'd gotten directions for the bus to Medinat alZahra. I had a perfectly pleasant espresso and used the women's bathroom by mistake (SoSuMi, their space age decor completely overshadowed the text which told me who the unisex chamber was meant for) and refilled the plastic water bottles I had carried with me the whole trip to stay hydrated. Spain made me very thirsty, all the time. We got a time estimate from the barrista for the distance, in English, as she was unimpressed with my Spanish. Man, even in Spain, the barristas are over-educated and snide. It's awesome.

When the rain stopped coming down, we ambled back up through the gardens which form a block wide path between the neighborhood where the Mezquita is and where the train station is, a sort of Tourist Boulevard, and got to the bus station with plenty of time to catch our bus. This was a new adventure in Spanish transit and probably the one where the differences and similarities to the American equivalent were most stark for me. I've taken a Greyhound from Iowa City, Iowa to Los Angeles, California, and back again. I did this because I was insane.

I would happily travel the same distance on a Spanish bus. The seating is much more comfortable, the driver is much more insane, the other passengers are much more mellow and much less skeezy, and the Spanish countryside was, for me, a novelty. There was no analogue to, say, Nebraska, on this trip. I did see, as Vy mentions, the extremely startling and creepy sight of two cute little girls skipping around in what I could only interpret as Ku Klux Klan robes but which I now know is just what you wear when you're celebrating Easter in Spain.

Here's a picture of a display of knick-knacks resembling the outfits I saw those girls wearing:

Otherwise it was a pretty relaxing trip, speedy, with no real rest stops. Good thing we were both dehydrated!

Then we got into Granada, the cornerstone of our trip planning. We had succeeded in making a day trip of Cordoba and I had fulfilled a secondary goal of sampling a Spanish long haul bus trip.

posted at 22:16 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: spain, travel

What, They Just Forgot It Was Here?

The train was just as efficient and pleasant as the first AVE we'd taken. We highly recommend and advocate taking the AVE if you are traveling in Spain. We had a funny exchange when we went into the RENFE ticket office at Cordoba and asked for schedule information for our future travels. In my slightly befuddled Spanish, I managed to ask when the AVE went to Granada from Cordoba and the station agent grinned widely and told me "Agosto". That's right, August. We weren't that patient so we decided on a bus instead, eventually.

But first we found the TI office. That's the Tourist Information office and it was the second one in Spain we went into. This one was much smaller, more like a mall boutique sized shop and it was right in the train station. We were so happy to have someone who was patient with my Spanish and understood our English and could answer all of our questions. We got confirmation of the bus station location (right across the street from the train station), directions and reassurance that we still had time to get there for the pick up point for the bus to Medinat al-Zahra, tickets for the bus, and a nice walking map of the touristy parts of the city.

We made our way to the bus station, got a schedule for the bus to Granada, decided that the schedule was something we could live with, bought our tickets, and then doubled back past the train station and through some really charming gardens towards the pick up point for our main reason in being here, getting out to the ruins.

Here's why:

• I love ruins
• Vy was curious about the architecture and context of the time it was built and inhabited
• we are attracted to experiences with narrow time windows of availability; most days, there is one bus which takes you out to the place and after a while comes back

It was a little vexing to find the bus pick up point because there was a sign with an arrow, pointing ... nowhere in particular. The actual pick up point was blocked by a truck from which a guy was unloading a pallet of boxes of brownies and when we loitered near him he became quite suspicious. I'm sure he could see that I was just the sort to steal a pallet of brownies and run away with them. We only found the place to be because we went into a cafe where they had one person who could understand English after I completely failed multiple times to explain what we wanted in Spanish. In retrospect, I think the problem was that the word I learned two decades ago for bus is no longer the word used for that vehicle. Oops.

Just as we were getting antsy that we were in the wrong place, or that the bus had driven past us without noticing us in the shadow of the tower of brownies, the bus pulled up and stopped in the lane beyond the parked truck and we boarded and sat in the empty seats up front. We watched an educational video about where we were going, in Spanish, with English subtitles. I don't retain a lot of what we saw but I do remember that the name of the place was something about Flowers and that it was a fortified city palace for a series of local bigwigs which got its start with some guy who was tagged with the epithet of "the Upstart" because he arrived in the area after fleeing from the murderers who killed his whole family, empty handed, with no favors to call upon, but within a few short years, he became a real power in the area. I guess if he did that today, they'd call him "the Entrepreneur" or maybe "the Disruptive Technologist" or maybe they'd just call him "the Upstart 2.0".

The bus took us out into the country, on progressively more narrow highways until we were down to a single lane which we must share with oncoming traffic by having one party pull off onto the grassy shoulder to allow the other to pass by and then we went up some winding hilly roads and, finally, we are there. Or, rather, here:

If you're wondering why I keep spelling it different ways, it's because I kept seeing it spelled different ways. I think it probably came into Spanish phonetically from Arabic at a time before there was much writing down of such things. The picture above is of the twisty set of walls which describe, define, delineate what might have been the interior parts of the city. Even with a lot of it knocked down and missing it feels very civilized. An order imposed upon the space, ground levelled and space shaped.

But there were parts of the palace which were deliberately left open and here's one of those:

When people talk about Islamic architecture, I guess there are a couple distinct features they have in mind. Arches like this is one of them:

There was a lot more to see here but I didn't trust my camera to capture much of it so I went sparingly on the pictures. I did have an opportunity to take a picture with a fancy camera while we were there. A group of Spanish kids asked us in English if we would take a group picture of them and I managed what I think was a pretty good one. It helps to have the instant feedback of the LCD on the digital cameras.

It was completely worth the trip to Cordoba to see these ruins alone. Luckily, we saw much more!

posted at 20:59 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: gardens, ruins, spain, travel

Street Names are for Amateurs

So around the construction and down the street we go and it's at this point that I start to realize that not only are Spanish streets not always labeled at intersections, they're sometimes seemingly not labeled at all anywhere and that furthermore, once a street has intersected with another one, it's possible the name has changed entirely because even though it looks like a straight street, it's got a new identity.

Which is fine because this explains some of the oddities on the map we'd been given by the friendly and helpful RENFE information staffer. Such as the gaps where streets are blank, conceivably nameless, and the reason all the names printed on the map cluster around intersections. We find a street which has an actual sign matching something on the map, get ourselves oriented, and make our way down what I would call an alley but what they call, and treat as if it were for driving purposes, a street. It's narrow, it's overhung by buildings, and it's busy with people.

I'm still twitchy from my sighting of the pickpocket back in Madrid so I'm the first to spot the guy following us. Pale skin, light curly hair, utterly nondescript green sweater and khaki pants. I see him when we turn on to the street we hope will lead us to our hotel. We stop to get our bearings and I see him again. Next time we stop, he's right there again. Every time, he's studiously looking at a building or a store or behind him, back the way we came. I tell Vy I want to step up by an ice cream store to get some perspective. This nicely puts our backs to a wall in front of a place filled with people.

I asked, "Do you see that guy in the green sweater? He's following us."

She looks, says, "No, where?"

I say, "He's coming up past us now. I'll bet he gets where he can see us and goes no further."

That's just what he did. He walked up along the street, elaborately emoting I'm-looking-in-front-of-me until we entered his peripheral vision. He saw us looking at him, took a few more steps, then turned and walked back the way he'd come. Vy leaned out to watch him and she told me that he was stopping in front of windows and looking back to see if she was still watching him. So that was another run in with street crime in Spain.

After our tail faded away we got re-oriented, found one of the hotels which got high praise in the Rick Steves book and got lucky on the first try. They had a room, with a big comfy bed, and private bath, for half the price we'd been paying in Madrid. Granted, the Madrid room was swankier, with a tub and all sorts of amenities but we didn't feel deprived at the Hostal Cordoba. We really liked the decor and felt safe and relaxed here.

While we were in Sevilla, we managed to

• see a Flamenco show, at Los Gallos
• get lost several times during one of which each of us had a jacket pocket opened by person or persons unknown; pickpockets in Spain are slick
• have churros and chocolate and then fried fish in leftover chocolate
• meet some cute little girls, one of whom spoke a word of English and that word was yes
• see the sights

Here is a picture from Giralda's tower

Here is a picture from the Alcazar

Then after two days and two nights, we took an AVE train back to Cordoba. This was going to be a challenge to our logistics; we hoped to hit Cordoba running, see what we came to see, catch a bus out the same day and be in Granada by nightfall. All so we could make the most of our tickets to the Alhambra.

posted at 09:22 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: chocolate, crime, spain, travel

If Food Be the Music of Love

Astonishingly, I had forgotten what we did Sunday night in Spain. Astonishing, that is, because it was so awesome. We ate tapas!

We went on a bar crawl up along Calle Victoria, the recommended route in the tourist book we took with us. That meant visiting Museo del Jamon (The Museum of, yes, HAM) and La Casa del Abuelo and Oreja de Oro and Casa Toni and even a return to La Taurina Cerveceria, where we ate the night before. At every place we went, we had a drink and Vy had a little plate of something and I had a bite of something from it. Throngs of people everywhere and we even stopped off for some ice cream. The Spanish are very serious about their ice cream. Every couple blocks, a place offers it in ever more delicious flavors.

Then wandering back around through the streets, I saw what I now know was my first Spanish pickpocket sighting.

So the scenario is this. Lots of winding streets, dark places, some lit plazas, some people out wandering around but not a lot because it's relatively early on a Sunday night. We come around a corner from a street into a small plaza where several streets intersect. I look across the plaza, and see a group of six people walking together. I notice that a couple of them are wearing backpacks and one of them is zipping up the backpack of the person in front of him. My first thought is that they're walking together and so they're friends and he's putting something back in her bag for her. Then I see him see me and his eyes widen and he and two of the other people in the group start angling toward Vy and I. The other three people, I now see, look completely touristy and all of them have backpacks and it dawns on me, hey, that guy was ransacking her bag and she didn't even notice.

So I pause and tell Vy that I think this guy and his two friends are pickpockets and I just saw them in someone's bag and ask her what we should do. We decide to try to tell the woman in question and so we pick up the pace and veer around the pickpocket and his friends, who are watching us closely. Then the trio of tourists start booking, as if they suddenly feel threatened and I don't want to be in the position of running after them but we're still trailing them, and the pickpocket and associates cut off in another direction down some dark street.

Completely frustrating and in retrospect, I wish I hadn't been so slow on the uptake because I could have maybe made some noise at the very start which would have gotten the attention of the tourists or helped them get back anything which might have been lifted. I don't know whether to be amazed that he was so skillful as to open a backpack on the back of a moving person traveling with company without her noticing or dumbfounded that he was so inept as to do it where I could see him. So that's our first pickpocket story.

Vy didn't see anything of this until I pointed out the two trios involved so it's all my word but I'm sure of what I saw him doing. After that we stuck to brightly lit streets with lots of people and I still felt nervous all the time. So we went back to the hotel, packed up and set an alarm for the next morning, as we had a big day planned. Having decided that we had enough days on this trip to do either Madrid and Barcelona or Madrid and anything else, we opted for the latter. We decided that we wanted to take a train to Sevilla and then sort of meander our way back to Madrid in time for our flight home so that's just what we did.

The next morning we rolled out of bed, checked out, and went in search of El Corte Ingles. They've got a travel agency department and they hire multilingual staff and I was worried about our ability to navigate the Spanish train system without assistance. I bought us two tickets on the AVE train for that afternoon, which is a fast train. A very fast train, as it turns out. We did some more wandering to pass the time, and took the Metro down to the neighborhood of the train station and had a nice lunch at La Mazorca. Everything Vy ordered was very tasty and I enjoyed the bites I was able to eat.

We had gotten to the neighborhood very early so we took the opportunity to wander around and found a public park, the Parque del Retiro. I took a couple pictures of trees because I knew my mom would ask me about them. Then I took this picture for myself:

Then we went to the train station which was enormous and efficient. We had a mild comedy of errors as Vy put her bag on the security scanner but couldn't follow after it because I had the train tickets in my money belt. We managed to get them out and examined and ourselves let in before anyone absconded with her bag because no one really wanted to steal a bag inside a train station with armed guards. I mean, armed with guns. In the airports, the guards had machine guns. Here, they just had emphatic guns.

The train took less than three hours to whisk us across the country. We got an excellent map from the information desk at the train station and attempted to find the hotels we wanted to try to get a room at. That turned out to be another adventure.

posted at 14:30 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: crime, food, spain, travel

The Ham is Compulsory

Before we'd set out for Spain, Vy had made a dinner date for us with a woman she was acquainted with through an online writing community. So after dumping out our bags in the hotel room and sprawling on a double bed (of such magnificent firmness I would miss it forever after) created by shoving two individual beds together which had the side effect of keeping motion on one side of the bed isolated from the other (a perquisite Vy would later lament), we went to dinner with Sue and her husband, Jerry.

We'd asked them to pick someplace close to where we were staying, not too pricey, but with some local flavor. By great good fortune, they chose a place I'd actually read about in the Rick Steves' book, La Taurina where it received justified praise. It's a tourist trap, sure, but a tourist trap with some local patrons. I even saw the pictures of Che and Orson enjoying bullfights. When we asked Sue & Jerry to recommend a local specialty, can you guess what we had? You can if you've ever been to Spain. That's right. We had HAM.

This may come as something of a surprise if you're aware of our usual dietary habits. Namely, we don't eat mammal meat.

The research we had done indicated that we'd have trouble staying away from it in Spain. That vegetables were rarities at meals, and pork a staple. In order to maximize our immersion in the local culture, we broke with our habits of home and went with the local preferences.

As it turns out, baby pigs which have been fed acorns are damned tasty.

Not so much that I'm planning to go back to eating ham on a regular basis, but I wasn't at all sorry to eat some while in Madrid. There was also some wine and some delicious cheese. Sue & Jerry picked up the check which was very sweet of them. Then we went for a walk around the local neighborhoods with Sue providing commentary and pointing out notable sites.

Here's one I took pictures of:

I had a hunch that the night time shots wouldn't turn out well and these pictures bear that out, so I only took one other one that night. It's of Vy standing in the geometrical center of Spain:

When I'd told my co-workers I was going to Spain, one who had spent months living there told me excitedly about this marker and so I had been keeping my eyes open for it. I completely failed to see it. Once Sue pointed it out to me I could see why I'd missed it. It was covered by teenage kids who were just standing around on it. I guess that's what you do when you want to be the center of attention as a Spanish teenager. But they were nice and moved off to let me take the picture once Sue explained to them that, hey, we were tourists.

We also got to see Plaza Mayor, which we were told is a major place to get ones pocket picked. At this point, we were still thinking all the references to pickpockets in Rick Steves' Spain were hyperbole. We were so very wrong. But don't worry, this story has a happy ending. We stopped in the Tourist Information office off of Plaza Mayor and Sue made sure we had a brochure for SATE which, thankfully, we never had cause to use. We also picked up some useful maps of the area and some booklets about cool things to do in Madrid, which we regrettably didn't have time to follow up on. Next time!

Then we went back to our hotel and collapsed into a pair of heaps and slept and slept. When we woke, we got up and went on the self-guided walk for Madrid from Rick Steves' Spain and managed to get lost only a couple times. This was the beginning of a long streak of getting lost on even the shortest of strolls. It's a good thing Vy has a sense of humor! We saw some statues and some stores starting with this one:

That's the king who did a lot to make Madrid the place to be, with lots of construction projects. So he's got a big statue right in Puerta del Sol, which is one of the big hubs for people doing stuff, especially tourist people doing the money spending stuff.

Further along Calle Mayor we saw this statue:

This is the guy who is responsible for the Spanish Armada having been such a power of the seas for such a relatively long time. I like that he's got a flower bed around him. I'm sure it's a meaningful arrangement of colors but I'm too disconnected to understand it. Then we got to the end of Calle Mayor, where the Royal Palace stands. Or, rather, sprawls. It's big. This picture is just the narrow front:

It's enormous. Over 2000 rooms. We went in and took the unguided tour of the public accessible rooms. We saw 1% of the rooms it contains and those were almost overwhelmingly large, diverse, breath-takingly ornate. It made me want to blow the whole place up in an orgy of anarchistic destruction but that's just how I roll. After we finished seeing what we could see [including a statue of a lion with an enormous phallus which caps a stair railing on the grand stairway] we walked out and decided to look for a pharmacy because we hadn't taken any Aleve with us and Vy was feeling the rigors of travel. I spotted a sign for the royal pharmacy and we headed through the door.

We got quite a surprise. It wasn't a modern pharmacy. It was a collection of the medicaments and unguents typical of earlier eras. Times when the pharmaceutical arts were practiced by alchemists. It was mind blowing and I even got a picture of it:

What you can't see clearly in this under-lit photo are the careful labels for what we would call reagents and elixirs but which represented the most sophisticated medical knowledge by the most highly regarded professionals of their time, the ones who served the royal family. What a long strange trip it's been since then. This would be nominee for the highlight of this day, seeing row upon row of accumulated wisdom which we would now be justifiably amused by. Enoch Root, eat your heart out.

Then we hiked back up Calle Aranal, seeing different shops and sights, arriving back at our hotel and eating at the attached cafe, the Cafe Europe. For a place which must make most of its money off of tourists, its food was delicious. Or so I'm told. I had a couple bites but still didn't have a lot of appetite. Or, really, any. But I had fun trying to use my rusty Spanish on the wait staff and watching Vy savor the food. We had the menu of the day, which was a paella and a fish with stuff on it, and then some flan for dessert.

More coming up when I remember what the heck we did with the rest of our day.

posted at 18:23 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: food, spain, travel

Getting There is Half the Fun

Herein I attempt to talk a little bit about our preparations for our Spain trip.

If you haven't seen our packing list you may want to take a gander at it.

Having trial hiked our packs, and adjusted our sleep cycles, and packed our bags, all by Thursday the 22nd of March, we cruised to a relaxing departure. Well. That was the plan. What really happened is that I had a number of small but vital work brouhahas to deal with which made for early mornings, full days and late nights working. So while Vy had her sleep cycle adjusted, mine was off the tracks.

On the 23rd we did have a nice leisurely brunch at Sweet Tomacco and then took BART to SFO. We stretched and read and then we boarded a KLM flight with a subjective duration of forever. Maybe you've flown to Europe before. I hadn't. It's a very long way away. It's long enough to sleep, twice, if I were capable of sleeping on moving vehicles. It's long enough to almost finish a novel if you read as fast as Vy does. It's long enough to have two meals and a multitude of delicious snacks. This is a really big point in favor of flying KLM: they want you to be placid and by that I mean stuffed full of food. It's almost enough for me to forgive them their choice of partners. Northwest Airlines, I'm looking at you.

Vy had the window seat, where she determined that a sleep mask is wasted on her, that earplugs only irritate her, but that if she has been awake for 24 hours or so, she will sleep. I determined that my neighbor with the aisle seat was composed principally of elbows and nervous spasms in his sleep.

Then we landed. Specifically, we landed here:

I was too tired to really understand the geography of this airport so mostly I just staggered around trying to find symbols matching the ones which I believed corresponded to the plane from there to Madrid. We had two hours to find the right gate and we very nearly had a mix up at the end. When we'd done our check-in online, we had been granted boarding passes only to the first flight. So then we had to get the gate people to generate boarding passes for us for the flight to Madrid. Which they did by taking boarding pass blanks, hand writing our names on them, copied off of our passports, along with a seat assignment, handing those to us, and then when we queued up to board, taking them back from us.

It was like an elaborate pantomime demonstrating the verbs 'to give' and 'to take'.

The flight to Madrid was so short by comparison with the trans-Atlantic flight that it seemed to take no time at all. Then we were in the Madrid Barajas International Airport and following the excellent directions in Rick Steves' Spain for taking the Metro from the airport to our hotel. We had the great good fortune that as we stood at the Metro ticket machine attempting to decipher its functioning in our exhausted state, we were approached by a pair of English speaking travelers who were on their way out of Madrid and so gave us their ten-ride ticket which still had eight charges left.

Then we were here:

and failed to collapse into sleep only because we had dinner plans. More on that next time.

Some comments on our packing list.

• we ate almost none of the food en route because KLM fed us so aggressively
• by the time we got to the hotel, Vy had almost finished reading the novel she had packed, I just barely finished the prelude of mine
• we determined that one of the pencils packed had a nonfunctional eraser
• we should have included more medicines, for pain and digestive distress
• we really were the only people in Europe without cell phones, having deliberately left ours at home
• at the last minute, I added a pair of bottom feeder single use cameras in my bag; that was smart
• we hadn't tried the hand wash / dry of our travel clothes before leaving and that was probably a mistake because if we had tried it first we would have noticed that it was a much longer process than ten minutes to wash and that some things needed more than overnight to drip dry

posted at 21:31 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: spain, travel

The Spain Game

Vy and I got back earlier today from our trip to Spain. After a couple hours of nap we're reasonably close to being rested. I'll hopefully have some pictures and some words about the trip a bit later so stay tuned for that. I do want to mention that it was an amazing adventure, a beautiful country full of dizzying experiences we couldn't have had anywhere else.

I'm so very glad we went.

posted at 02:44 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link