Meandering on the Way — Jan. 29 to Feb. 7, 2023

Sunday, January 29, 2023

A bright, sunny day. After a long stretch of clouds and fog, suddenly the world is full of light. But we’re busy packing. Our trip starts on Monday and we want to be ready! We’ve been packing for days, which seems ridiculous. Making a list of things to take is not too hard; narrowing it down to what will actually fit in a suitcase is a little harder.

Monday January 30, 2023

Still packing. It’s hard to pack for two months. And it’s not just our clothes and things. There are also all those presents that we need to take. In fact, each day that passes, E finds that she needs one or two more presents. Finally we just give up and leave, whether we have packed correctly or not.

We’re heading up to Portland in a rental car, which turns out to be a Prius with adaptive cruise control, which we have never tried before. M is happy. Once settled in Portland, we have a nice dinner at ParkStone and then go back to the Comfort Inn and set our alarms for 4:00 AM.

Tuesday January 31, 2023

Off we go into the sky, headed for JFK. We’re on Delta again, flying Comfort+ class, which just means more leg room. That’s fine. Our layover in New York is three hours. We depart just as darkness falls. Delta gives us dinner. Not too bad. One dinner option is chicken and one is vegetarian pasta. In the old days, E would have to make a special request for a vegetarian meal and then might or might not have gotten it. We don’t miss that. 

Boarding at JFK was interesting. There were two lines. In one line people had to show a boarding pass for scanning, either a paper one or one on their phone. But in the other line, which we happened to be in, you just showed your face to a scanner and the agent waved you on. Yo! We might have known that it would come to that. But it’s here already?

The flight to Madrid took six and a half hours. M usually can’t sleep on planes, but this time, thanks to chemistry and a kindly supplier, he slept for half the flight. 

Wednesday February 1, 2023

It’s just after 8:00 in the morning and we’re sitting surrounded by our luggage in an airport restaurant breakfasting on cafe cortado and croissants. We’ve landed, shown our passports, and collected our bags. But one thing remains, a formality related to our phones. We must face the dreaded activation of the E-sim. We purchased and installed these a few days ago. M has signed up for a cellular data plan. He won’t be able to make European phone calls, but he’ll have internet. E will have cellular data plus a European phone number, so she can call actual people and talk to them. But not unless we can successfully activate, which can’t be done until you’re in country. A tense moment. Will they work? After a bit of fumbling around…yes!

E then made direct contact with our AirBnb host to set up our arrival time. She also called her friend M who tells us not to take the airport train, but to take the airport Metro line (subway) instead. The Metro took us most of the way to our little apartment. A taxi took us the rest of the way. Soon we were installed and mostly unpacked. Whew. 

That was the end of the easy part.

Thursday February 2, 2023

So our apartment turns out to be in a somewhat weird spot, not weird in a bad way, just a bit different from anywhere we’ve lived before. The immediate area consists mostly of apartment buildings, seven or eight stories high. There is lots of open space, however. The buildings are often arranged around large courtyards with mature trees, most of those now leafless. Our place, for example, is near a fairly busy street, but we are never aware of it because our apartment looks down into the courtyard rather than outward to the larger world. 

Our particular place is on the fourth floor and has three rooms: kitchen, living room, and bedroom. All the rooms are small, but the kitchen is fully functional with oven, cooktop and fridge; the bedroom has a nice large closet; and the living room has…a really tired couch and some interesting artwork. Here’s what our building looks like from the outside. Our place is in the middle of the photo. That air conditioner type thing is just under our living room window. The window to the right, on the rounded part of the building is our kitchen and breakfast nook. The window on the left is the bedroom.

Although most of our view is down into the courtyard, we can also get a glimpse of the outer world. Here’s what that looked like at dawn this morning.

Friday February 3, 2023

Today we went with E’s old friends M and L on a drive up to Salamanca, where their daughter T lives. T is a cloistered nun who is currently serving as the leader of a group of Clarisan Sisters. Her monasterio is located in a small village out on the Salamanca plain. To get there we drove on the autopista for a little over an hour and then turned off into a mostly flat agricultural area with broad fields punctuated occasionally by villages and small towns. Eventually we came to T’s village and found our way to the monastery, a long, two-story, beige-colored building with a mostly blank facade. We parked near the main entrance, which was a heavy door of darkened wood. We pushed a button and after a bit someone buzzed us in. We entered into a wide, high-ceilinged hallway, somewhat dimly lit, which ended in another heavy wood door. On the right hand wall of the hallway, there was a built-in display case showing examples of the various baked goods produced by the order. On the left side there was an open doorway that led to the visiting area. This was a plain but cheerful room with an orange tile floor.

It was really fascinating for us, first just to have a chance to see the setting, and then to see how such a visit took place. E and M sat in the two chairs facing the window, while T’s father sat on the left side of the table and her mother the right. After a few moments T came and pulled back the curtain on her side, which revealed a similar sized room on that side of the dividing wall. T greeted us all and sat facing us through bars. Parents and child all seemed really happy to see each other and we also felt welcome. We sat and talked for a long time. The whole visit lasted several hours and included a nice midday meal served at our table. This included tomato rice soup, lettuce salad with flakes of tuna and olives, baked fish with a layer of mashed potatoes and cheese on top, menestra de verduras (mixed vegetables in a thick sauce,) a fruit selection, and, finally, tiramisu with a selection of cookies from their bakery. After the meal we were joined by about twenty other sisters who sat in rows of chairs in the room behind Teresa. So we had a chance to chat with them as well. We talked about all sorts of things. It was quite an experience. On our way out we decided to buy some cookies, both because we wanted to show our appreciation for feeding us and because the cookies that we had sampled at lunch were so delicious.

Saturday February 4, 2023

We took an early walk this morning and picked up some pan rústica for breakfast along with a few other items we’ve been missing. A mouse tried to get at the bread. And it turns out that it was a mouse that E herself had brought back from the monastery! The things that M has to put up with.

Later in the day we went to visit some more old friends, who had invited us for dinner. P and M live in a town north of Madrid. We went by Metro and train to Las Matas station where P picked us up and took us to their lovely house in the hills. What a nice time. We talked a lot and ate too much.

Sunday February 5, 2023

Today we saw M and L again and had a meal at their house in a suburb to the south of Madrid. It’s not easy dealing with all this public transport, but for the second day in a row we managed to get where were going without getting lost or even being late. Good for us.

M and L—along with Buddy, Ke, and Jaeger—invited us for a dog walk into the nearby hills that overlook the Jarama river valley. The area was the site of a great deal of fighting during the Spanish Civil War, when a Francoist army came up from the south as part of a campaign to capture Madrid from Republican Loyalist forces that included International Brigade volunteers. During the fighting the hills were stripped of vegetation, but since then they have been reforested with Mediterranean pines. The area is now a reserve heavily used by cyclists and dog owners.

After our walk we had appetizers and drinks by the pool. And then, as if that wasn’t enough, L served us up a lavish dinner of Cocido Madrileño, a traditional sort of stew with garbanzos flavored with salt pork and various meats and vegetables. L made a special effort to prepare this so that M could try it for the first time. E had eaten it years ago, but it was a much simpler version.

Monday February 6, 2023

We went the Corte Ingles department store in the Nuevos Ministerios neighborhood. We did a little shopping and then went up to the top floor cafeteria for a midday snack, just as E was wont to do back in the seventies, when she was a Madrileña. We were happy to see that despite the march of time and change, it was still a nice place to be.

Back at home we did some household chores: vacuumed, did laundry, cooked our own dinner. Wow. And then, having purchased a mat at Corte Ingles, E joined her Zoom Yoga class. 10:30 PM here, 1:30 PM back in Corvallis. It’s odd how seamless everything can be if you have a good internet connection. Stream Netflix? Sure. YouTube? Apple+? Banking? All pretty much the same. A little strange.