Posts

Posted on

Meandering on the Way — March 13 to 24, 2023

Monday March 13

We spent the morning finalizing our itinerary for the next ten days: France, Switzerland, Germany, then back to Madrid. We have friends in Switzerland and Germany. We have no good reason to stop in France, but we’re doing that anyway.

Tuesday March 14

In order to travel a bit lighter, we’ve leaving one of our suitcases behind in Madrid, where L has kindly agreed to keep it for us. So today, we packed it full of this and that and made the trip out to Rivas to drop it off. Turns out we also got a wonderful lunch: a kind of Catalan paella made with pasta called Fideuá.

Then it was back to Calle del Trinquete (Topmast Street) to spend our last night in the rental apartment. Six weeks it’s been. We had a very light supper because after the sumptuous banquet at L’s, we didn’t need a big one. The menu was green salad with tuna dressed with oil from the can. As always, we could look out from the dining nook to see a small slice of city.

Wednesday March 15

Up at 7:00 for a bit of breakfast, then out the door for the last time. We rolled our suitcases down the familiar 12–minute walk to the Manoteras metro stop. Then it was four stops to Mar de Cristal and a transfer to Línea 8 for the ride out to the airport. By 10:30 we were settled into our seats for our flight to Lyon. Compared to the seats on the intercity trains, the ones on the Airbus 320 looked like folded postage stamps…but they sufficed. The worst thing is that we were seated in row 31 of a 31 row aircraft. Thanks, travel agency, great work.

We landed at the Lyon airport at around 12:40. We were in no hurry, so we decided to have lunch there. The weather was a bit cooler than in Madrid, but still mostly sunny. After lunch we took the airport train into the city center. Once there, as soon as we walked out of the main railway station, we could see a rank of waiting taxis just across the street. It’s true that everyone was speaking French instead of Spanish and E kept wondering if we had somehow gotten to Quebec, but other than that, what an easy life.

As we approached the taxi rank, we saw that the driver of the first taxi in line was out of his car and was engaged in conversation with a potential customer, one who did not look pleased about how the conversation was going. We looked at the driver of the second cab in the rank, who looked back at us but then got out of his car and said something to the other driver before looking at us again. E told him where we wanted to go and he shook his head and got back in his car. Just then, the other customer walked away and first driver turned to us to explain that it was not possible to take us anywhere near where we wanted to go due to the manifestation.

We had already heard that French president Macron had proposed raising the French retirement age from 62 to 64 by 2030. France has the lowest retirement age of any developed country and a lot of French people think that that is an excellent state of affairs and shouldn’t be messed with. Hence, strikes and demonstrations have been ongoing. So..how could we get to our hotel? Possibly by Metro, was the answer.

Being modern people, we next asked our phones how to get to the hotel. Siri suggested a combination of tram and bus. And just up the street was a tram hub. Off we went to find our tram line. Once there, we found a small difficulty: an electronic sign at the stop was showing the message Service Interdite. We may not know too much French, but we could guess what that meant. It meant that the tram couldn’t get through either. So, back to the Metro idea. But how to do it? E phoned the hotel. The receptionist kindly gave us instructions in English and off we went, down into a nearby metro station. Our motto? Onward!

Four stops and one transfer later we emerged. We were still a ways from our hotel, but it was walkable. Just as we were getting our bearings, however, we noticed something else—the imminent arrival of a large and rather noisy manifestation at exactly our location!

Well, that was exciting. After taking in the sights for a bit, we edged around the fringe of the crowd and set off toward our destination, the Hotel Citadines (on the) Presqu’ile. This was near the oldest part of Lyon, which dates from the Roman era when a camp and later a city were established at the confluence of the Saône and Rhône rivers. For a short distance, just before they meet, the two rivers run parallel to one another, less than half a mile apart. The land between isn’t really an island, but it kind of seems like one. Hence the name in French, Presqu’ile, which means “almost island, or peninsula.” But whatever its meaning, what we’re wondering—after all the effort it took to get here—is whether this is a good location for a hotel in 2023? Well, as we discover, yes it is. For one thing it’s close to the extensive Roman ruins and their associated museum and for another it’s right at one end of restaurant row: a dozen or more interesting restaurants just a few steps away. Thanks, travel agency, all is forgiven.

Lyon cooking is famous all over France; some consider it to be the country’s culinary center. And indeed we had a fantastic dinner. We don’t have the expertise or the vocabulary to describe it all, but we do remember this much. They have a thing called quenelle, which is sort of like a large croquette. But it is cooked in broth like a dumpling rather than fried. It is then served in a sauce. They make it with various fillings and various sauces. E’s was made with pike and was delicious. Even better was her first course: a poached egg floating in a sauce made with a special cheese. The name of this dish is Oeufs Cocotte au Saint-Marcellin.

Thursday March 16

We spent the next day exhausting ourselves by walking across the Saône and trudging up the thousand foot hill on the other side. Our goal was to see the Roman ruins and the newly rebuilt museum. We also thought we should take a look at this basilica that we could see from down below.

We took this picture from just halfway up a long, long hill.
On the way up we stopped to see the ruins. There is also a large museum at the site, but the museum is built into the hillside and camouflaged in such a way as to be invisible.
Here’s the view we got from the basilica. Our hotel is somewhere in there, just to the right of the bridge and one street away from the river. Those snow covered things in the far background are the Alps.

Once we got back to our hotel, we wondered what was going on with the political situation. It was bad, but how bad no one really knew. Lyon seemed calm, but there were riots and burning vehicles in Paris and there were calls for a nationwide rail strike. Yikes. Might we be marooned on this almost island for days or weeks or years? Well, maybe not years. Still, we are scheduled to leave Lyon by train tomorrow. We hope that works out…

Friday March 17

And in fact all went well. A taxi(!) took us to the train station. A French train took us to Geneva; a Swiss train took us to Bern; our friend Urs picked us up and drove us to the suburb of Belp, at which point we had a delicious fondue dinner. Urs and Ursula (The Bears) are old friends of E’s, also from her time in Chicago when Roberto was in graduate school there.

Here’s a view out the train window. At this point, we’re in Switzerland near Geneva.
The last ice breaking up on Lake Geneva.
Here’s a view from inside the Geneva main train station. This restaurant offers a Whiskey Burger made with “beef carefully selected from our own Swiss farms.”

Our dinner was extra special because our hosts’ daughter Eva found time to join us. In fact it was she who brought the fondue. Eva is a heart surgeon these days and the mother of twin ten-year-olds. Way back in 1993, though, she was a high school student spending a year living with E in Corvallis, Oregon. During that year, Eva convinced E that humans were meant to eat butter and that margarine was not a good thing. Another example of the benefits of intercultural exchange.

Saturday March 18

We went train touring today. We had a one day pass to ride free on any form of public transport anywhere in Switzerland and a little bit of Italy. We went all over the place, including a few places in the mountains where whoever built the tracks must have been both very competent and a little crazy.

The pastures are just turning green while snow lingers on the Alps. Good time to visit.
Just for a bit we dipped down into northern Italy. This is the town of Domodossola, where pretty much everything is cheaper than it is in Switzerland.
Up on the side of one mountain, looking over a few more.

We got back to Bern around 10:00 that night, having definitely used our train passes to advantage. Since we’d had a lot of pizza in Domodossola, dinner was a light repast of ham, cheese, bread and beer. Okay, maybe not super light, but it was awesome.

Sunday March 19

Today we visited Gruyère. We went by car this time; it was about an hour’s drive. The town of Gruyère is on a hill overlooking a broad valley of green pasture land dotted with farms and villages. It’s such a pretty view that it would be a shame to spoil it by building a highway through it. Yes, but what about the thousands of visitors who want to visit? A high capacity road is needed. What to do? How about putting some of the highway into a tunnel that goes under the farmers’ fields? Would that work? Well, apparently it would.

Today’s excursion was to the town of Gruyère, traditional home of the eponymous cheese. Did we get on yet another train? No. We went by car. It was about an hour’s drive away. As we neared the town, we came into a valley of green pastureland dotted with farm houses and small villages. The whole place is so pretty looking that it would be a shame to build a busy highway through the middle of it. But what about the thousands and thousands of people who want to visit Gruyère every year? Well, why not build a couple of tunnels to take the road underground and leave the pastures undisturbed? Which seems to be what they’ve done. The old fortress town of Gruyère is on a hill overlooking the farmland.

The old city is more a monument than a town at this point and is definitely a tourist magnet.
Here’s what the main drag looks like looking down the street from the castle.
A view from the old castle fortress at the top of Gruyère city. This newish church is outside the city walls and down the hill a ways.

Below the town of Gruyère there is a demonstration cheese factory. Naturally, we had to check it out. Here’s a photo of the maturing room. The cheese is aged for six, nine or twelve months. At this factory there are around 7,000 wheels being aged at any one time.

These wheels weigh 80 pounds and have a retail value of about $2,000 each.

Monday March 20

Time to say goodbye to our friends and hit the road for another day of traveling. We went from Bern to Zurich by train, Zurich to Hamburg by air, and then got another train to get downtown. Here’s the Hamburg main train station, from which we finally emerged.

Northern Germany was gray and damp, but it was nice to be outside for a while as we took a short walk from the station to our hotel.

Tuesday March 21

We had chosen the Senator Hotel ourselves, sight unseen. It turned out we were pretty good travel agents because it was to a wonderful place. It gives a modest first impression and yet it has all that one could ask, including a delightful breakfast room on an enclosed terrace overlooking the street. We would like to have stayed in Hamburg another night or two, but we had places to go and promises to keep. We only had time for a couple of hours to take an unguided walking tour of nearby sights.

The old city hall, (the Rathaus in German) was wonderfully ornate.
St. Nikolai church was mostly destroyed by bombing in 1943 and 1944. The spire remains intact along with a small part of one wall. The entire site remains as a reminder of the impact of war.
Pretty ornate toward the top there.

In the afternoon we took another train, this time to Rostock, Germany, about two hours away. We stayed at a cheap, new, and trendy hotel called Motel One. It wasn’t too bad.

Wednesday March 22

Our friend Umut picked us up this morning and after dropping off our luggage at his place, we set off on an expedition to Lübeck, our goal being the marzipan museum. Yes, another food related project. Do we detect a theme here? Of course there is much more to Lübeck than marzipan.

For one thing, they have Easter decorations (made of marzipan).
And they appreciate literary figures like Thomas Mann (also made of marzipan).
And of course they have a lot of history. It’s just a coincidence that all of these things involve marzipan.

We also visited the St. Petri’s, a place with quite a history. Originally a large Catholic Church dating from the 13th century, it was taken over by Lutherans a few centuries later. At that time, all the ornate carvings and metal work were removed. The gold was melted down and used to fund whatever war was going on at the time. As per Lutheran principles, the interior walls, ceilings and supporting pillars were all painted plain white. The building survived until 1942 when it was mostly destroyed during a British bombing raid. The raid came in response to an earlier German raid on the British city of Coventry. After the war, the ruins of St. Petri’s were partially covered to preserve them. Then, in the 1980’s, a campaign was launched to rebuild the church. To mark the project’s completion in 1987, a choir from Coventry came to the church and joined a Lübeck choir for a performance of Benjamin Britten’s Requiem for War.

We rode the elevator to the top of the St. Petri’s spire. The space up there was memorable for two reasons: great views of the city and a biting cold wind.

The thing with the twin spires was one of the main gates into town in medieval times.
There was another big church nearby. These Lübeck people do love their spires.

Thursday March 23

We’re staying a couple of nights with our friends Umut and Jacqueline in the town of Kröpelin, which is just a few miles from Rostock. This area is in the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. To the north is the Baltic Sea; to the east lies Poland. We kept closer to home today, spending much of the day exploring the coast. We passed one place where you can buy yourself a four-story beachside chalet if you like. Prices start at around 10 million dollars. The weather was cool and windy, not totally different from the Oregon coast at this time of year. The great difference, though, is that the Oregon coast is mountainous. But here, on the Baltic coast, the land in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is flat as a board.

In the afternoon we had a look around the town of Kröpelin. The town name has the same Germanic root as the English word ‘cripple.’ And, in fact, the town was named after a differently abled person. The story goes that a man who couldn’t walk made a bet with the king that he could get himself from one end of the county to the other before sundown. The king took the bet and lost. The name Kröpelin commemorates the events.

This is the town symbol as preserved in the small Kröpelin Museum.

The town museum is in an old building with three stories. A public library occupies the first floor; a museum of town history is on the second floor; and on the third floor we found something unexpected: a shrine to East German rock bands of the sixties and seventies. It was called the Ostrockmuseum Kröpelin. There were dozens and dozens of photographs, posters, album covers, and articles of clothing, plus quite a collection of period guitars, drums and audio equipment. Had we ever heard of the bands? No. In that era East Germany—whose official name was the German Democratic Republic—was behind the iron curtain. The band members couldn’t travel to Western Europe and we doubt that many bands from the West ever toured the GDR. But rock and roll itself was alive and well, and here was the evidence to prove it. If you’re ever in Kröpelin, you need to drop in. Admission costs 1.50 Euros.

Soon it was time to head home and start thinking about packing up for an early departure the next morning. It was a short but quite wonderful visit.

Friday March 24

Up at 5:00 AM to begin another long travel day: Rostock to Hamburg to Brussels to Madrid. By 5:30 PM we were in Madrid, having completed our great European tour.

Posted on

Meandering on the Way — March 6 to 12, 2023

Monday March 6

We took the train south to Córdoba today. Our train was an Avant, which are high speed trains that make more stops than the intercity expresses. But even with a few stops, the 190 miles to Córdoba went by in less than two hours. So comfortable, so much leg room, and so much elbow room—just three seats across: two seats, a wide aisle, then one more seat on the other side.

The Romans founded Córdoba sometime around the year 150 BC. The oldest part of town is on the north bank of the Guadalquiver River and eventually, in around 75 BC, the Romans got around to building a bridge to the south bank. Eight centuries later, the bridge remained but the Romans had gone and the Muslim Umayyads ruled southern Spain. Somewhere around the year 750 the Umayyads did a major renovation of the bridge. After that, the bridge remained in continuous use until the middle of the 20th Century. Until 1940, it was the only bridge in town. These days it’s still in use, but it’s pedestrian only.

The building in the background above is the Great Mosque of Córdoba. But, you may object, if it’s a mosque, what’s that Christian-looking bell tower and cross and stuff.? Well, that’s because since 1356 the place has had a new owner. Like many new owners, they’ve been doing some remodeling. And they’ve turned it into a cathedral.

It’s still very mosquelike inside, light and airy like most mosques, even though it was built 1200 years ago.
It’s a huge space. The building is a rectangle a block long and most of a block wide. Presumably all the interior walls at one time looked like this….
…or this.

Only a few of these original Umayyad style interior panels still exist. Dozens of others have been replaced by elaborate Christian-type niches. There’s also a huge organ, an elaborately carved wooden choir box and a beautiful basilica.

The lower part of the basilica

Much of the Christian stuff is beautiful in its way, but the overall effect is as if someone planted groups of showy exotic flowers at random places in a tranquil natural landscape. But never mind, much of the original effect is still there, especially in the Patio of the Orange Trees shown below.

In the afternoon we took a tour of the city. Here’s our tour bus. It was called a tuk-tuk, but being electric, it didn’t do a lot of tukking.

One stop on the tour was the 13th Centrury Santa Marina church, which was built soon after the Muslims were forced out of the city by King Ferdinand III. The site previously was occupied by a mosque.

Tuesday March 7

Responding to a reader request, we also visited the old Córdoba Synagogue. It was a ten minute walk from our hotel through a maze of medieval era streets.

The upper floor is the women’s section..
Here’s the menorah…
…and here is an inscription just above it.

The inscription reads: “Provisional sanctuary and abode for the Testimony completed by Yishaq Moheb, son of Mr. Efraím Wadawa, in the year of seventy-five. So return, Oh God hasten to return to Jerusalem!”

On the way back from the synagogue E stopped to talk with Maimonides, the great 12th Century philosopher, scholar and physician. Maimonides was born in Córdoba, but alas, he was born a hundred years too soon to have worshipped in the synagogue we had just seen.

Amazingly, while E was there the Maimonides statue actually bent down and spoke to her! M quickly snapped a photo but found later that it had disappeared from his phone! E has not revealed what it was that Maimonides said.

After visiting the synagogue and doing a little shopping in the morning, we got back onto a train in the early afternoon. Before long we were in Granada and safely into the Hotel Grisol de Guadalupe, up on a hill, just across the road from the Alhambra. That evening we took a walk down the hill for a ways and got this view of the oldest part of the city.

Wednesday March 8

Granada is a city of about 225,000 people and, to be honest, most of it doesn’t look at all like the old part shown in the last photo. Granada is home to a number of universities and, of course, to one of the most popular tourist attractions in Europe. One of our taxi drivers said that education and tourism are the only two things that keep the city alive. He claimed that the Alhambra gets an average of 8,000 visitors per day.

The Alhambra is a large complex of palaces and gardens on a hill overlooking the city. It consists of three main areas. The Alcazaba is a fortress dating from the 11th Century. The Nasrid palaces were built later and were home to the rulers of Muslim Spain for about 300 years. The Generalife is a garden complex on a hill above the palaces. The Nasrid palaces are the star attraction and access is by appointment only. Our appointed time was 2:00 PM, so we went into the complex at a little after 12:00 and went to the Generalife first.

One of the nice things about these Muslim era gardens is how much water there is: in pools, in fountains, and best of all, flowing in small stone runnels along one’s path or across the courtyards.
A view from the Generalife down into other parts of the complex.

Here are a few photos from inside the Nasrid palace. They hardly do it justice.

Thursday March 9

We managed to get back to Madrid today, despite an unexpected two hour layover at a new high speed rail station in the middle of nowhere.

Was it lunchtime? Yes. Was there a cafe at the station? No, there was a vending machine. Did the cellophane wrapped sandwiches all have a little blurb that said Improved Recipe? Yes! What exactly had the recipe been improved from? Very hard to say. And who, you might ask, is to blame for this scheduling catastrophe? Well, you might ask, but we might not say…

Sunday. March 12

Nice spring weather these days with highs of around 70. We are pausing to rest up and plan our next phase. It’s almost time to say goodbye to our little apartment. We’re visiting some of our local shops for the last time. While M was busy working on the blog, E took an excursion to visit her former neighborhood downtown. She walked through the Retiro Park and found that Avenida Menéndez Pelayo #37 was still intact. Roberto’s family owned three apartments in the building. E lived on the second floor in the back. E remembers that most buildings in Madrid were dingy looking back in the day. Pollution levels are much lower now and everything seems spiffier.

Later, as she returned to her current Madrid neighborhood and emerged from the dark caverns of the metro, she was greeted by this sure sign of spring.

Posted on

Meandering on the Way — Feb. 27 to Mar. 5, 2023

Monday, February 27

On E’s birthday, we had one overriding objective: a visit to the Chocolatería San Ginés to have chocolate con churros. Here’s what that might look like:

The idea is to dip the long fried things into the thick chocolate.

First, though, we had to take care of a few other details, such as shopping for a birthday present. We took the Metro down to the heart of Madrid, where there are lots of stores, all quite convenient to the Chocolatería San Ginés. First we shopped for a purse. E is very particular about purses, so naturally we took a look at Hermes, Gucci, and Valentino. But E didn’t see anything she liked. For one thing, their purses didn’t have enough zipper pockets. So we went to the Corte Ingles, a well-known Spanish department store. And eventually she found the perfect thing. It didn’t cost $6,000, not even $600, more like $60. M was sort of disappointed, but he got over it. Then we went to the Apple Store and got E a new phone case. Here’s the loot:

Then it was time for lunch. We met our friends L and M as agreed, but the restaurant where we had planned on going had a huge line, so we set off for the Coffee Central de Jazz, which was more accessible.

No jazz going on in the afternoon, but a group called the Bobby Martínez Band were scheduled to play later that evening.

Finally it was time for the main event. We went to San Ginés Street, stood in line for 25 minutes or so, and finally were ushered down to a tiny table in the basement.

The San Ginés has a number of different serving rooms, which are all jammed with patrons, pretty much all the time. It’s insane.

Tuesday, February 28

(Before we continue, readers should be warned that another person whose name begins with M is about to appear. Which is ridiculous, but there you are and something must be done. We have been forced to amend our style book to allow the use of last name initials as well as first name initials. And Spanish women usually have two last names and hence three total initials, which is something to keep in mind. Ready? Okay, here we go.)

We’ve already mentioned one friend of Eve’s from her days in Chicago. She was the M who took us up to Leon for the day. In our new style, she will be referred to as MTC. Today we got to meet another old Chicago friend when MB drove over from Paris and stopped in to Madrid. MTC and MB have kept up their connection over the years, but E had not seen MB for 51 years. She was pleased to find that his sense of humor remained unchanged, and issued him an invitation to make a special appearance in the Laughter Yoga class in the future.

It was decided that the four of us would go together to the the town of Ávila for the day. We left at ten in the morning, traveling in MB’s hybrid SUV, a fine vehicle for such an expedition. The drive up took a little over an hour. Like most medieval cities, Ávila was a walled town. Unlike most similar cities, Ávila’s walls are intact and still surround the oldest part of the city. When we arrived, our first stop was the cathedral, which is of course inside the old city walls.

The sandstone from which the building was constructed has a lot of iron content, which creates a striking effect.
The cathedral also has its own line of yoyos.

We had our midday meal at a restaurant called Almacén, that had been recommended to MTC by a friend who has a house in Ávila. Almacén was a ways out of town on the highway leading to Salamanca and was barely noticeable if you were just driving by. But we found it.

At Almacén we had a view of the south walls of Ávila and also a long, slow, and very excellent meal. MB chose a rosé champagne to go with our starters and a twenty-one year old Tempranillo to go with our main course. Both were delicious.

On the way home from Ávila we stopped to see El Escorial, the largest renaissance building in the world. It was built by order of King Phillip the Second in the mid 16th Century, partly because he wanted a summer place where he could escape the intense heat of Madrid summers. Besides being a royal residence, the building also contains a monastery, a library, a museum, a basilica, a university, a school, and a hospital.

You can see a little bit of the Escorial behind these people…
….and here’s what distant Madrid looks like from there.

Wednesday, March 1

Among the presents that E got for her birthday were a couple of tickets to a special art exhibition at the Royal Palace of Madrid, and today was the day. Off we went, down into the Metro, emerging 40 minutes later at a stop just in front of the Madrid Opera House. The Royal Palace was just a short walk away. It’s a huge place and our first problem was to figure out where the heck the entrance was. Eventually we spied a large mass of people off in the distance and that, of course, was the place.

There were hundreds of people waiting to enter. Some were there for the art exhibition like us, but there were also many, many others who merely wished to tour the palace. Besides the building and the decor, visitors can see paintings by Caravaggio, Goya and Velasquez as well as frescos and museum collections of porcelain, watches, furniture, and weapons. Also on hand is a complete Stradivarius string quartet—two violins, cello and viola. Stradivarius gave the set to King Felipe V in 1702. E once took a tour of the Royal Palace and remembers that it was amazing.

As mentioned before, the Royal Palace is a big place, big enough to have its own cathedral at one end of the courtyard. Here’s a picture of that.

But we were there to see the art of Joaquin Sorolla, a Spanish painter who was born in Valencia in on 1863, on February 27, the same day as someone else we know. In addition to several dozen paintings, the special exhibit had three more parts: a detailed timeline of Sorolla’s life, a special projection room where his paintings were enhanced with animation and projected giant sized onto all four walls at once, and finally a virtual reality portion where we had to don a special headset with heavy binocular-like glasses. That part was unlike any experience we had had before. We were told that we could touch anything we saw except for green statues, because the green statues were actual people. E proceeded to try to grab several butterflies which eluded capture by turning into soap bubbles and floating away. Then she collided with a green statue which spoke with M’s voice. At that point we walked off a bridge and came back to reality. What would Sorolla have thought of all this?

A Walk on the Beach (1909) is perhaps Sorolla’s most famous painting and it was among the ones we saw.
We also saw Sewing the Sail, 1896

Sorolla is especially noted for beautifully luminous colors. He liked to paint by the seaside and some of his most powerful works are of fishermen and their boats on the beach in Valencia. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Sorolla was extremely successful during his lifetime. One of Sorolla’s admirers was Archer Huntington of New York, who commissioned him to produce a series of large scale paintings to be installed at the Hispanic Society of America in New York. This series, called Visions of Spain, has become part of the permanent collection at the Society’s Library and Museum. To mark the 100th anniversary of Sorolla’s death, the Hispanic Society is just now collaborating with the National Arts Club to mount an exhibition about the creation of the Visions series. That exhibition will run until April 25th at the NAC.

Thursday, March 2

Were we ready for more high culture today? Nope. Had to do laundry and other household chores. Then at noon E went off to have a delicious lunch with MTC followed by a visit to MTC’s hairdresser. The results are quite attractive, but E needs to get used to the look before we publish a photo. M, meanwhile, took the subway four stops down to Mar de Cristal in search of allergy medicine. The stuff he likes is available in Spain under the brand name Alercina, but it seems that not every pharmacy stocks it. Mar de Cristal is a big shopping area and M was hoping to find it there. And even if he couldn’t find the medicine, he could have lunch at the kebab place.

Friday, March 3

Our first order of business today was to make train and hotel arrangements for a trip to Cordoba and Granada. That took three excruciating hours. Our first mistake was to try to buy train tickets online using the RENFE website. Aargh! So much data entry, so many choices among unfamiliar options. So many mysterious roadblocks. We could have rented a car! We could have flown! Why are we doing this at all? But we got there in the end, mostly because we abandoned the Renfe website and used Trainline instead. The train is considerably faster than driving and considerably cheaper than flying. The only flaw in our reservations is that we ended up with one leg of the journey where we won’t be sitting together—close, but not together. And what was our reward for all this work? We got to go grocery shopping.

Later in the day, around 4:30, we went down to our little shopping area on Añastra Street. E was in search of a pedicure. She had her eye on a nail shop that we had passed before and now she was ready to walk in and ask for an appointment. Such things can be really daunting in a foreign country, whether you speak the language or not. So in she went, while M loitered outside. She was able to get an appointment for 5:30 that very day. So we sat down to wait at a cafe, outside in the sun, and had tea. In the end all was well with the toenails.

Saturday, March 4

Today we went to look at more pictures, this time at the Reina Sofia Museum. The Reina Sofia specializes in 20th century art and has a large number of Surrealist and Cubist paintings and sculpture. They have a number of Picasso paintings and sculptures, quite a few Dalis, and bunch of other things including photos by Man Ray and this nice Yves Tanguy.

Belomancie 1, 1927

The most famous painting at the Reina Sofia is Picasso’s Guernica. It’s amazing. For one thing, it’s huge—12 feet high and 25 and half feet long. The subject is grim—the bombing of a Spanish town by German bombers during the Spanish Civil War—and execution is pure Picasso. People just stand there and stare at it till their feet get tired.

When our feet got tired we went into a small theater that was playing Luis Buñuel’s film The Golden Age. It’s a silent film in black and white and it’s really odd. The two of us were laughing, but everyone else in the room was meh. Guess you have to be old.

Of course there was more in the Reina Sofia than we had the strength to see, so at 2:00 we decided to head home and get some lunch at a place in our neighborhood. That sounded easy enough. We got onto the Metro, our trusty Line 1, which should have taken us almost all the way home. But instead, our journey came to a stop when the train reached a place called Cuatro Caminos. As the doors opened, we heard an announcement. Our train would not be going further and all passengers had to get off. No mention was made of what passengers might do once they got off. We decided to part ways with the Metro and headed for the surface. Once there, we were glad we did. Cuatro Caminos is an area of Madrid that Eve used to frequent and even after 40 years she recognized the area well enough. Though much had changed, it was nice to relive some memories. After a short stroll down a boulevard called Raimundo Fernandez Villaverde, we got a taxi, which took us to the restaurant that we had intended to go to in our own neighborhood.

It was 2:45 by then and El Rincón de Carlos was really hopping. The atmosphere was lively with lots of banter between the waiter/manager and the customers. One older woman told the waiter—in a voice loud enough to be heard by most of the customers—that she wanted the eggs stuffed with tuna for her first course and to make sure she got lots of tuna. The waiter replied, quick as a flash, that the stuffed eggs were already made and she would get them the way they were. This got a laugh from the crowd. After a moment, the waiter continued, saying “This is not a gas station, you can’t just fill it up as far as you want.” This got another laugh and throughout the exchange the old woman was grinning as if that was exactly the response she had hoped to get. And then of course E had to join in the banter. So it was a fun time, and the meal, though slowish, was very good. It seems to us that this would be a great neighborhood to live in for a year or two. We could get a real apartment and little car of some kind…

It was a beautiful springlike day at that point and walking home was a pleasure. One the way M finally got some pictures of our resident parrots. They are quite beautifully green, but they are also an invasive species whose numbers are growing rapidly all over Madrid.

The city government has a plan to deal with the problem, a plan which does not involve trapping them all and relocating them to some parrot paradise outside of town. No.

Sunday, March 5

Went out for Sunday breakfast to a bakery restaurant that we hadn’t tried before. They had tons of tempting stuff, more than we’ll ever get around to trying. E did fulfill her wish to have a palmera de mermelada de melocotón, a palm tree shaped pastry with peach jam. It lived up to her fond memory of it.

We can see that the weather is turning. Warmer and wetter, says the forecast. We felt a few drops on our way home from the bakery. Tomorrow we head south.

Posted on

Meandering on the Way — February 20-26

Monday, February 20, 2023

Today it seemed as though we had travelled back through time. Were we looking at the prehistoric cave paintings at Altamira? No, no, not that far back. Did we visit the castle where Columbus made his pitch to Isabella and Ferdinand? No, not that either. We traveled back to a time that for many of us is within living memory. We visited a travel agency.

And you know what? It was really busy. There were six agents working and several more customers waiting for a turn. When you walked in, you had to take a number. Our number was R74. After a minute or two, we noticed that there was a big board that showed which numbers were being currently served. Oh good, now maybe we could get some idea of how long we might have to wait. Or could we? The number that had just been called was K42. Hmm. The next customers called had number M60. Hmm. But wait, those particular people had come in right before we had! Our spirits rose. We had to be getting close. But when the next number was called, it was J03. Our spirits fell. But, as it happened, J03 was a no show. And the next number was ours.

Our agent was Alejandra, a young Spanish-Venezuelan woman whose family lives in Florida. She was great, although her computer system was really slow. But it was good enough so that we could make all the basic arrangements for our late March travels to France, Switzerland and Germany. Good!

By the way, if you’re thinking that most of the customers in the travel agency were older people…you’d be right.

Tuesday, February 21, 2023

Today we took the train north and had another nice day with M and M. First we did a walk along the river and then had a nice meal at their place. M made merluza (hake) and it was delicious. (We don’t get hake in Corvallis, which is a shame.) M’s merluza recipe involves a sauce which consists of tomato sauce, sweet red pepper and mayonnaise. We could have just dipped fresh bread into the sauce and even without the fish we would have eaten pretty darn well.

Wednesday, February 22, 2023

Today we made a visit to the Gran Cafe de Gijón. It’s a Madrid landmark and as one writer puts it, es uno de los Cafés más prestigiosos del mundo. It was established in 1888 by a man named Gumersindo Garcia. He was from the northern coast of Spain and he named his new cafe after his hometown of Gijón. Over the years it developed a reputation as a literary and cultural gathering place and was frequented by several generations of celebrated Spanish writers and artists. In her day, Mata Hari came to the Cafe Gijón, as did Hemingway during his time in Spain. But we did not visit the cafe to imbibe the exalted literary atmosphere. No. We visited because of another, even more important figure who was also connected with the Cafe Gijón. In the early seventies E herself taught classes in a building two doors down. Every day, at around 11:00, she would take her coffee break in the nearest cafe. She doesn’t remember meeting any geniuses there, but she does remember the pastries. They were good.

In the early 2020’s E went back to the Gijón. Here she is at lunchtime with her wine and bread, waiting for her primer plato.

E recognized the Gijón interior right away. After a bit M noticed that the Gijón still had a cigarette vending machine. When he pointed it out, E said, “Oh, that’s what’s really different, this room used to be full of smoke.”

The announcement says that the management is not responsible for any malfunction of the machine and gives you a number you can call if you have an complaint. No mention of possible lung malfunction.

When M zoomed way in on this picture, he could make out the names of the cigarette brands currently on offer. As a former smoker he found them interesting. He saw Fortuna, a brand that he smoked when he lived in Barcelona, and a few unfamiliar brands such as Nobel and West. But the great majority were old American brands: Lucky Strikes, Marlboro, Chesterfield, L&M, Winston, and Camel. Chesterfield? Seriously? Back in the day, Chesterfields were the original coffin nails—long, fat and unfiltered.

Thursday, February 23

We got up really early today, had a quick bite for breakfast, then got a taxi to the train station at 6:15. E’s friend, another of the M’s, was taking us on a day trip to see the city of Leon, which is in the northwest of Spain. Leon is three hours from Madrid by car, but just two hours by high speed train. In our case, the train got us to the outskirts of Leon real fast, but then came to a halt. There were some issues to resolve before we could actually get into the station, 45 minutes worth.

Eventually we got off the train and began walking into the center of town. It turns out that Leon is a really lovely city. It was quite cold, so once we got to the center we were happy to drop into a cafe for cafe con leche and some little do-nuts called buñuelos. Then we were off to see the Leon Cathedral—which is awesome.

Another place we visited was the Casa Botines, which was designed and built by Antonio Gaudi between 1891 and 1894. Gaudi is most famous for the design of the Sagrada Familia and other buildings in Barcelona. Casa Botines is one of only three of his creations that were built outside his home region. Now a museum, it was originally designed as a mixed use building. The ground floor housed the family’s textile business while the Botines family lived on the top four floors.

Work downstairs, live upstairs. Just your basic mom and pop operation.

A little after 1:00 we stopped for lunch at a cafe/restaurant where a member of M’s family worked as a cook in times gone by. The dining room didn’t open till 1:30; we had a glass of wine while we waited. The barman also helped us warm up with some little cups of hot fish broth on the house.

We also had a tour of the Basilica of San Isidoro, a religious building whose history dates back to the early tenth century when a Christian church was built over the ruins an ancient Roman temple to the god Mercury. That church was destroyed in the middle of the tenth century by invading Arabs. A new Christian church was built just a few decades later at the beginning of the 11th century. Parts of this church still exist and our tour guide helped us to see the difference between those oldest parts and the many later additions.

In the book room of the basilica we saw hundreds of medieval era books, the oldest dating back to the 7th century. Another room, called the Pantheon of Kings, shows wall art from the 12th century. And, yes, the Holy Grail is also here, the very cup that Jesus drank from at the last supper, more than two thousand years ago. Wow. But how do they know for sure that this is the one? And aren’t there also more than a hundred other places in Europe that claim to have the Holy Grail? Well, yes. But hey, maybe more than one cup was used during that meal. Anyway, the one here is technically known as the Chalice of Doña Urraca. It has definitely been in Leon for a thousand years; but during the thousand years before that, the story is a little sketchy.

Here’s what we saw, but this photo is from the internet. No photography was allowed in the museum parts of the Basilica.

We stopped briefly in another religious museum so that M could say hello to an artifact from her personal history: the old wooden confessional from the parish church of her childhood.

After the museums, we spent some time having hot chocolate and churros at the Parador, the Hostal San Marcos. Then we walked back to the train station and caught another fast train home. It was late by then, so there we were rolling along at 150 miles an hour through the darkness, letting someone else drive, wearing no seatbelts, and facing backwards.

Friday, February 24

Fresh raspberries for breakfast today. From Morocco. Awesome. And then a nice restful day. Some grocery shopping in the morning. Later E went to the papelería and got us an actual paper map of Madrid. She’s busy working back and forth between what she sees now and the host of places and memories that rise up out of the past.

Saturday, February 25

Two days in a row with nothing major on the schedule. Nice. We did take a walk down to the nearest plaza to get a few essentials: pastry treats for our traditional Sunday breakfast and a bottle of champagne for some occasion TBA. It was about 1:00 PM on a cold, sunny day and it seemed like everybody was out and about. Despite the temperature, the cafes had all their outdoor tables out and just about all of them were full. Twelve o’clock to 1:00ish is the time for the aperitivo, a pre-dinner drink usually served with a little snack. We found a table outside a place called Bar 29 and ordered two small beers. They came with a complementary dish of green olives. By around 1:30 the tables started emptying out as people returned home to get ready for their midday meal. We headed home for the same reason.

There weren’t many children having aperitivo al fresco, but we did see a couple of little boys at a table near us. Mom was not there. E speculates that some time earlier Mom had said to Dad, “You know, maybe, while I’m getting this big dinner ready, you could get the boys out of here for a while.”

Sunday, February 26

Today, we went to a birthday celebration at M and M’s place up north. There were two birthday honorees: M and M’s daughter E and our very own E. Dinner featured two rice dishes: a yellow one called arroz a banda and another that they call black rice. Here’s a photo of the latter.

This has shrimp and squid and gets it color from squid ink.

After dinner there were cupcakes made by L and C, with help from their grandma, and also grandma’s wonderful pineapple upside down cake. There was candle lighting and Happy Birthday singing—in English.

Here are a couple of the cupcake makers at their own table.
Posted on

Meandering on the Way — February 13-19, 2023

Monday, February 13

7:30: Breakfast and final packing. 8:30: Metro to Chamartin Station. 9:00-9:45: Locate car rental place, sign out VW Golf, find our way back to our neighborhood, find parking place. Whew! 10:00: Have small second breakfast. 10:20: Wheel luggage down the block to parking place, depart for the Basque Country, M driving, Siri giving directions, E reminding M to stop at stoplights. 10:38: Notice that we are finally out of Madrid and on the freeway north. Whew!

By 1:00 PM we were more than half way to our destination, but our energy was flagging. We decided to stop in the next little town, which happened to be Lerma. Couldn’t find a parking place at first, had to go down a side street.

We went to small cafe and had coffee and bizcocho, a kind of pound cake. They said it was de la casa and it was good. We also went into a little supermarket, where E found some face cream that she’d been looking for.

After our coffee break we found our orange Golf right where we’d left it. And then it was adios Lerma.

Fifty miles later we stopped for gas near the town of Mondragón. By this time we were officially in the Basque country, much of which seems to be quite mountainous. We didn’t go over or around any mountains, though, we went straight through them. We’ve never seen so many tunnels, at least a dozen.

Here’s a view of Mondragón. Filling up with gasolina cost us 60 euros, about 64 dollars.

It’s close to 3:00 by the time we reach our destination, the town of Hondarribia in the extreme northeast corner of Spain, just a few miles from the French border. The border makes a political separation between the French and Spanish parts of the Basque Country; as far as language and culture are concerned, the two parts are much the same.

Our hotel is the Parador Hondarribia, which has been created within the walls of a castle fortress whose history goes back to the 12th Century. The castle was built at the top of a hill overlooking the harbor. We could see two or three (hundred) sailboats moored just across from us.

Tuesday, February 14


Early in the morning we woke up and looked out the east facing window of our room. Some lights were still on in the town, but things were definitely happening in the east. And speaking of things to the east of us, we’re pretty sure that mountain is in France.

The castle walls are pretty thick, close to three feet, so the windows in our room look like this:

We spent the morning exploring the area around the castle, which seems to be the oldest part of the city.

In the afternoon, we got back in the Golf and drove to San Sebastián, a much larger Basque city just twenty miles away. En route we took a small detour up to the top of another hill to see the Fuerte Guadalupe, an early 20th Century fortress. It turned out to be pretty strange looking. It appears to have been mostly underground and is now long abandoned, so it just looks like a bunch of grassy mounds.

But you can see what appear to be artillery firing ports…
….and what seems like it was the main entrance.

We found that downtown San Sebastián is lovely, but a challenge to drive around in if you’re a stranger. As recommended by our friend M, we had coffee at the Hotel Maria Cristina, a lovely palace-like building in the central area of the city. The coffees were five euros apiece, but the setting was pretty nice.

Wednesday, February 15

Breakfast is served in shifts here at the Parador, sort of like on the train. Our scheduled time was 8:15. Did we make it on time? You bet we did. And what a breakfast—fruits, fresh juice, cheeses, baked goods and cold cuts of all descriptions, eggs or omelets if you want them. It was a challenge, but we did our best.

So that was one major goal accomplished. Next we had to get ready to check out and move on to the next segment of our journey. Since the next leg was only 70 or 80 miles, it promised to be a pretty easy day. We had time to take a few photos of the hotel before we left.

One wall of the breakfast room had lots of big windows. This was the view into the castle courtyard..
That’s the main entrance to the hotel there in the middle. On the morning we left, there were a bunch of kids in the plaza on a field trip.
That’s the coffee shop….
….and this was taken in the old stairway to the upper floors. The canon, presumably, is to keep the riffraff out.

We left Hondarribia around 11:00 and headed southwest toward a different part of the Basque Country. On the way, we took a side trip to what the map said was a nature park. It turned out to be way up high in the mountains, and the narrow road up to it had some of the sharpest hairpin curves that we could remember. There was snow up there, but fortunately not too much.

The nature park was way up high…
…and kind of wild.

We didn’t stay long, though it would have been a really nice place to hike had we been prepared for it. But we were trying to take it easy, so we made our way down the mountain and back onto the main road. By 2:00, we were checking into our next hotel, the Parador Argomaniz, which is in the southern part of the Basque Country near the city of Vitoria-Gastiez.

Thursday, February 16

Clearly, we’ve come out of the mountains and away from the ocean. The weather here is cooler than on the coast, but still lovely—in a late winter/early spring kind of way.

After breakfast, we set off on another ridiculously complicated project, a visit to Bilbao. Bilbao is the capital of the Basque Country and by all accounts it is a city worth seeing. And since it is only about an hour’s drive north of Vitoria, we thought we’d run up there to see the Guggenheim and maybe have some lunch. Easy as pie.

(But what exactly does that expression mean? Easy as eating a pie? Easy as making a pie? Easy as picking the berries to make the pie? Easy as planting some wheat and harvesting the grain to grind some flour to make the crust? We’re not sure.)

Anyway, we made it into the center of Bilbao, the famous and very beautiful Plaza de Euskadi, and found ourselves a parking place not too many levels underground. Back above ground, we went into the Museo de Bellas Artes. Entrance was free and the art was arranged so that in each exhibition room there was a mixture of old art and new. We found several things of both sorts that we liked. Then we went down the street to the see the Guggenheim—Frank Gehry’s mishmash architectural masterpiece.

What a building.

The featured artist was Joan Miro. That seemed worth a look, so we paid our seven euros each and went inside.

The lobby was largish, maybe a bit too large.
They had plenty of beautiful Miros. We especially liked this one, called The Hare….
….and this one called Soirée snob chez la princesse. (Snob party at the princess’s)

Eventually, enough was enough. We went out through the gift shop—where M bought a Kandinsky mousepad and E got some socks—and then went to a cafe for a snack. It was warm in Bilbao, perfect weather for sitting outside, especially if you were wearing sun block, which of course M was not…

Next we located our car, extricated it from the underworld, and made the drive back to Argomaniz. We ended the day with dinner in the hotel cafe and a walk around the grounds to look at the stars.

Friday, February 17

Today was travel day and also use the car while you can day. We left Argomaniz around 10:00 and got back to Madrid at 2:00. At that point, instead of going straight to our apartment, we stopped at a shopping center called Gran Vía. There we ate lunch. One floor of the mall was a little bit like a food court, so E went to Rodilla and got a tuna salad that came with a crustless sandwich and M went to Bosforos and got a chicken kebab plate. Then we met up and shared a table. It was pretty nice.

Then we did our grocery shopping in the big supermarket, trying to focus on heavy items that are harder to carry on our walks to and from our local market. It seemed like it would be a lot easier to just load everything into the car. Of course when we got home, we still had the major job of hauling both food and luggage from parking place to apartment. (We will spare you the details of how all that works. Suffice to say that the process involves four different keys.) Once we had everything inside, we breathed a sigh of relief and sat down for a short break. Then it was time to go out again and return the rental car at the train station. That done, we took the Metro home.

So there we were sitting on our couch with lots of food on hand but both too tired to make dinner. But actually that didn’t matter. After a Parador breakfast and a mall lunch, neither of us was too hungry. So we sat down in our dining nook with wine, a banana, peanuts, and a cookie or two. We then watched an old James Garner movie on TV. It was in Spanish and—for those who might have trouble understanding spoken Spanish—it also had Spanish subtitles. It was fine.

Saturday, February 18, 2023

A quiet day today, but we did make a nice discovery in our local shopping area. We went into the Herbolaria—a small place packed full of organic, eco-friendly items, mostly personal care things. E was delighted to find a couple of things that she was running out of. From there we went to the paper store because E was looking for ribbon to wrap some gifts. It turns out they didn’t carry ribbon, but they offered to just give us some from their own roll that they kept at the counter. E happily accepted about 12 inches. We didn’t think of paying anything. Should we have? Too late now.

Back at home we decided to try and adapt to local rhythms by having a fairly big lunch around 2:00 and planning only a light supper later. E made a green salad dressed with some of our newly purchased vinegar and olive oil. M heated up some Barilla bottled spaghetti sauce and boiled some fresh spinach and cheese ravioli. We also had bread and wine plus a small flan for dessert. In other domestic news, we did laundry, which involves throwing stuff into the washing machine located in a little unheated room off the kitchen, and then setting up the drying rack next to the radiator in the living room.

Sunday, February 19, 2023

Today we had dinner with the C family at Taberna de la Daniella, a restaurant that specializes in something called Cocido Madrileño. MC is a Spanish friend of E’s from the days when they both lived in Chicago. When MC had a baby, who is now a distinguished architect, E became a godmother. She’s been a rather distant godmother over the years, but they’ve always kept in touch. Today we got to see the godson as well as the many of the rest of MC’s extended family, including the youngest generation. It was wonderful for us to get to meet them all. E, playing Santa, had brought enough gifts for everybody.

We’ve had Cocido Madrileño twice now, so maybe we know enough to describe it. First comes a soup course, thin little noodles in a yellowish broth that looks like chicken broth but tastes much more complicated. Then comes a plate of chickpeas served with boiled potatoes, carrots, and cabbage. After that, they bring out a giant platter full of all sorts of meatish things including chicken, ham, sausage, beef, tocino, morcilla and whatever else they have on hand. (Tocino is a kind of salt pork—pretty much all fat—and morcilla is a kind of blood sausage made with rice.) E, of course, skipped all the meat, except for the morcilla, which she has always loved. M liked it too, though he hadn’t expected to.

When we got home, M took a nap while E went out for a stroll in the beautiful weather. She found a sidewalk cafe and ordered an orange soda. Oops! She had forgotten that beverages often come accompanied by a free tidbit of food. This time it was a very small open faced sandwich of Serrano ham. E was still full from lunch and doesn’t usually eat ham, but she couldn’t let it go to waste. It was very good.

Posted on

Meandering on the Way — February 7-12, 2023

Tuesday, February 7

Today’s excursions were all on foot. We needed a few things to make our lives more complete and it was time to see if we could find them. In the morning we walked to a little shopping area about a half mile west of us. The weather was coldish, 40 degrees and windy, but the area we walked through was nice. Much of our route was along the street shown below, with its park-like center and widely separated lanes of traffic.

Tree lined street.

When we arrived, we found a pharmacy, a tobacconist, a couple of boutiques, three different bakeries, a nail shop, an herbalist, and an interesting looking little book store, which we did not go into for fear of losing our focus for the day. Instead, we went into the pharmacy and got some allergy medicine and sundry other things.

In the same area, there are also three different cafe/bar/restaurants. We decided that we should try one of them for lunch. At this point, however, it was only 11:45, which is way too early for lunch around these parts. So we took our purchases back home, rested a bit, and then went out again.

Of the three, we decided to try El Rincón de Carlos (Carlos’s Corner) for our first attempt at a local restaurant. We got there at 1:45, just in time to get a table before the rush. That was good because we saw as we entered that the place was quite small, with space for just six or seven tables. The daily lunch special, called the Menu del Día, consisted of two main courses, dessert and a drink: plato primero, plato segundo, postre, y bebida. There were four choices for the first course, four choices for the second and four choices for dessert. For us, just ordering was a laborious process. One difficulty was that the day’s options were written on a chalkboard in some kind of crazy all caps script that we found almost impossible to read. There was only one waiter, Carlos himself, and he was patient with us. The food was very good and was accompanied by a couple of crusty bread rolls and a bowl of awesome green olives. We had flan for dessert and that was awesome too. Besides the fact that the food was delicious and reasonably priced, E was super impressed that there was a table cloth, something hard to find in USA these days.

From outside, El Rincón de Carlos wasn’t all that attractive…
…but the lunch was good. E’s second course is in the foreground; M’s is behind.

Wednesday, February 8

Today we visited M and M, more of Eve’s dear friends whom she has known since the era when she lived in Spain during the seventies. The trip involved another train ride into the area northwest of the city. We’re getting better at this train business and this trip was a little more relaxed. M and M met us at the station and we immediately set off on a walk around the little town where they live. The Guardarrama River runs through the town and the site has a long history of settlement. We crossed the river on a modern foot bridge that was built immediately above the crumbling stone arches of a much older bridge.

The desire to see M and M was one of the main reasons we came to Spain at this time. It was quite wonderful to see them again.

Thursday, February 9

Today we went down to the oldest part of Madrid. There we met up with our friend M, who took us on a lunchtime tour of the area. We walked around through the narrow streets, sometimes treading on pavement first laid down centuries ago. Madrid was occupied by the Romans at one time, and later by the Arabs. We saw a section of wall dating from the twelfth century and passed through a place once known as La Puerta Cerrada, the main entrance to the city during the Muslim times that was shut tight each evening and not opened till morning. We also passed by an eatery called El Botín, which first opened in 1725 and which holds the Guinness world record as the oldest continuously operating restaurant in the world.

Our peregrinations were punctuated, of course, by stops at four different cafes featuring different sorts of treats. The first was a place called Alabardero; we don’t remember the rest exactly. This was partly due to the fact that each of the first three stops included a drink of some kind: first a small vermouth, then a small beer, and then a glass of wine.

Here’s the front part of Alabardero. If you go there, ask for the Vermut de Grifo, Vermouth on tap.
The food was all good, but by the third stop we were getting full, so we decided to share just one serving of this over the top Spanish tortilla.

Friday, February 10

We went downtown again to day and had lunch with E’s friend Marga, who took us to a place called LasTortillas de Gabino. This was a definitely a higher class of food that we got from El Rincón. And they were pretty serious about tablecloths. Whenever a table was reset with a clean one, a waiter had to come out with an hot iron and smooth it down. Nice big iron, too. Anyway, our long, relaxed meal was amazing.

On a much more serious note, our walk from the Metro to the restaurant took us past the Turkish Embassy, where relief supplies were being collected to be sent to the areas affected by the earthquake.

That’s the Turkish flag in the upper left.
M took this picture the second time we passed by. At this point the boxes and bags were being loaded into a van, which presumably would deliver them to the airport.

Teams from Spain are in Turkey helping with rescue efforts. Spanish TV has some heartrending video.

Saturday, February 11

Lots of activity today, maybe too much. E has been on a quest for slippers and warmer pajamas. Spain has gone into energy conservation mode due to the effects of the Ukraine war and our building is heated no higher than 67 or 68. So off we went to a shopping center in the Mar de Cristal neighborhood, which is just four Metro stops away. It turned out to be just what we needed. There was a huge Carrefour hipermercado and a bunch of smaller stores. And of course there was a cafe where we could stop for a snack. This being Saturday, the Carrefour was jammed with shoppers. But the lines moved pretty quickly—we were in one of the quick checkout lanes—and it was amazing to see such a huge operation going full throttle.

Later on we did some food shopping closer to home and tried to rest up for our big evening adventure, which was going out to a movie in the downtown area. We met our friend M (there are lots of M’s in this story) who lives downtown and who had already gotten the tickets. We went to a large movie theatre called Verdi and saw The Fablemans. It was in English with Spanish subtitles and we all liked it a lot.

When we came out of the theatre at 9:30 pm, Madrid Saturday night was in full swing. There were lots of people on the streets and the cafes were crowded—both inside and outside, where people young and old were drinking, eating and talking all bundled up against the cold. We finally found a cafe with a free table indoors and did our share of the appropriate activities. M really wanted to take a video of the place, to catch the noise level, the very Spanish faces, all of the animation and the gesturing, the clothes and the hats, the serious expressions of the hardworking waiters. But that would have been a little too weird, even for M.

Sunday, February 12

We got home at 11:30 Saturday night, at which point our health apps had recorded more than 15,000 steps for the day. Sunday needed to involve a little less walking! Our biggest accomplishment for the day was doing a load of laundry, which is an all day affair. Although our apartment has a washing machine, drying is another story. It involves hanging things in the living room on a rack in front of the radiator, and then rotating them from time to time to hasten the process.

Aside from that, we ate three meals in and did our packing for our next outing. The plan is to pick up a rental car in the morning and drive north to the Pais Vasco, the Basque part of Spain. More on that next week, assuming we actually manage to do it.

Until then, we have this report on the canine situation, which has improved vastly since E’s times here in the 1970s. According to one of our local sources, there are more dogs than children in Madrid.

E found joy in the company of Buddy, a rescue dog adopted by friend L.
Posted on

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. 

Looking down from our living room window.

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.

We may have gotten carried away. In our defense, two of these items were gifts that we did not expect.

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.

We tried to get a big red pepper, but we had to settle for this little tiny one.

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.

Part of the Jarama valley. The river is in the far background. The ponds in the foreground are old gravel quarries now flooded.
Recent housing developments extend right to the border of the reserve.

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.

Posted on

Meandering on the Way — January 12 to 21, 2023

Thursday, January 12, 2023

We have a slow leak in the left front tire of the Mazda. We took it to the tire shop, but they couldn’t find anything. That was weeks ago. So it’s still leaking and we keep on filling it back up. At least we have one of those new-fangled inflators right in our own garage. Not that we’re going to be driving much. We’re off to Cancun tomorrow, traveling by Uber, airport shuttle and Delta.

Friday, January 13, 2023

Our flight was at 7:00 PM, so we dutifully checked in at the Portland Airport around 5:00. The security check was our first opportunity to try out our newly purchased TSAPre status. Which did not work. We were rejected from the line of privilege despite what it said on our boarding passes. Plus M was selected for a random check even after he got through. Sigh. Is this what we get for traveling on Friday the 13th? But after that everything went well. We flew to LAX, then got onto the long flight to Cancun. M couldn’t sleep during the flight and ended up watching Triangle of Sadness, the Palme d’Or winning movie about a group of super rich folks on a luxury cruise. Was that a good thing to see while on one’s way to a full-service tropical resort? Maybe. Maybe not.

Saturday, January 14, 2023

We arrived in Cancun early in the morning. It took a little while, but eventually a hotel shuttle arrived and soon we found ourselves in a lovely room in the Solaris Grand Caribe. 

The Caribe wing of the Solaris has space for 200 guests. The Royal wing beside it holds 300 and has much less interesting architecture.

The hotel strip in Cancun extends along 14 miles of a sand dune peninsula shaped like the number seven.

The blue colors on the right side are the Caribbean; the greens to the left are wetlands and lagoons that separate the hotel strip from the mainland. The hotels are all on the strip in the middle.
Here’s the view from the top of our hotel, which is located near the bottom of the seven. Cancun has strikingly beautiful colors.

Along with the Andees, our friends K and J had also come down. One of the nicest things about the trip was having a chance to visit with all of them. 

Sunday, January 15, 2023

Wonderful day at the beach. Some areas of the beach were closed due to ocean conditions; others were open. Where we went the surf was just rough enough to be entertaining.

Monday, January 16, 2023

The Andees hired a car and took us all to Tulum, about an hour and a half away. Tulum is a Mayan city that was built around the year 900. The Mayans abandoned it soon after the Spaniards arrived in the 1500’s.

We had a wonderful guide, a Mayan himself, who had lots to tell us about Mayan history and culture. Along with much else, he taught us the Mayan number system and also told us a dramatic story about how the Mayan written language was deciphered. This last may be have been apocryphal. 

Tuesday, January 16, 2023

We took a bus today up along the strip to a shopping area. We got some tee-shirts and some Mexican vanilla, the latter costing about the same price as it would in Corvallis, but never mind. Along the way we passed lots and lots of hotels. There were a few ugly square towers, but most of the architecture was impressive. And the sheer scale was awesome. There are more than 80 hotels along the 7-shaped strip, enough to accommodate many thousands of guests and to provide some thousands of jobs. 

This was our first experience with an all-inclusive resort and it was pretty nice. It’s true that the free drinks weren’t very strong, but that’s actually a good thing because it means you can have many drinks with little ill effect. (And real drinks are also available, at the so-called Premium Bar.) The food was mostly good, which is to say, rarely great but very rarely bad. Day-long free food sounds dangerous; but when a buffet is free, there’s really less motivation to heap up your plate. There were also sit down dinner options, which were awesome because the portions were small! What a welcome change that was. Also, we never had to deal with a bill at the end of the meal. Very nice.

On our last evening there was a members only ‘gala dinner’ with live entertainment. Just before we went down to dinner, we took at last glance at the sunset.

Wednesday, January 17, 2023

Up at 4:30 to get an airport shuttle at 5:00. A long travel day, but all went well. All planes on time or early. Even our Portland to Corvallis shuttle found light traffic all the way.

Thursday, January 19, 2023

So now we’re home. The Mazda tire was way low again. We took it back to the tire shop and this time they fixed it. Okay! But wait, now we have to get Roto-Rooter to unplug the sewer lines. Geez! Shoulda stayed in Cancun.

Saturday, January 21, 2023

Okay, so maybe we can relax today. Not too much though because we have another, bigger trip coming up in a week or so…

Posted on

Meandering on the Way — January 5-11, 2023

Thursday, January 5, 2023

The day has arrived for the belated birthday party for A and N. E’s plan was to start the proceedings with dinner at Kim Hoa’s Vietnamese, followed by a pavlova dessert at our place. She made the meringue early in the afternoon. A arrived from Vancouver at 5:00 and at around six we set off for the restaurant, picking up H on the way. N joined us there. By 7:00 or so we were back at our place and E started whipping cream and spreading berries. N opened a bottle of champagne and M found sparkling cider for H and some suitably fluted glasses. After candles and song, the pavlova was served. Vay, vay vay, as the Turks might say. It was good. There wasn’t much left at the end.

E had also gotten each honoree a confetti popper. They were spectacular, firing out masses of shiny, sliced up ribbon. Made almost entirely of hard plastic, they were about as environmentally unfriendly as you can get. Fun though.

The pink and green cylinder is a used party toy. The shiny debris on the floor is some of what flew out.

Friday, January 6, 2023

January 6 is a special day in Spain, the day the Wise Men arrive bearing gifts. Here there was a special event of another kind. There was a small gathering by the river to celebrate the birthday of Morris Walker, a recently deceased acquaintance. There was flute playing by a native American, memorial remarks and finally the tossing of a little bottle of ashes into the river. The amazing part about the bottle is that it was made of some sort of dissolvable salt that would not hurt the river.

Monday, January 9, 2023

M has been reading The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan, which is basically just an annotated list of sixty-six American popular songs from various eras and musical genres. Each entry shows the song’s title, the songwriter, the performer, and the date of release along with a number of photos that are related to the song’s time period or genre. And of course each song gets a few pages of text wherein Dylan shares some of his thoughts about it. Some of the songs are quite old–the oldest are from the 1920’s–and a few are from the early 21st century. The great majority, though, are from the years between 1945 and 1980. 

Many of the songs are very well-known or at least somewhat familiar to people of a certain age, e.g., Blue Suede Shoes, On The Road Again, Strangers in the Night, Mack the Knife, On the Street Where You Live; but quite a few are decidedly lesser known. For M this latter group would include such titles as Nelly Was a Lady, The Little Cloud That Cried, Take Me from the Garden of Evil, and Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy. Part of the fun is to see how many of the songs you recognize. And then you’re curious to see what Bob Dylan has to say about them. What you find is that his response to each song–famous or not–will go off in all kinds of (mostly) interesting directions.  

Inevitably, you’ll want to listen to each song when you read about it. Once Dylan lets you know, for example, that the harmonica part in a certain song was played by Stevie Wonder, how can you not want to hear that song? In the old days, finding and playing it might have been difficult. Now it’s just hey Siri, play Ball of Confusion by the Temptations…

Tuesday, January 10, 2023

We made a return visit to the Herbert Farm Natural Area. Went a little farther this time.

Just like last time, the route was a tad waterlogged right at the start.
But this is different. When we were here two weeks ago, this area looked like… 
…this.
The three legs of the triangle are big logs, but the top of the triangle is resting on the remains of a much larger one. How long have these pieces been here? How’d they get like this? We don’t think nature would do it. Most likely it was a Herbert with a Cat.

In the evening we had dinner with J, B and C at J and B’s house. A fine meal followed by peppermint pig smashing and a shortbread crust lemon tart. Hard to beat.

Wednesday, January 11

Today it’s back to work for E, who is trying desperately to finish sewing a beach cover-up for our upcoming mini-trip to Mexico with the ANDEES and friends. Oh boy!

Of course after yesterday’s indulgences, E is thinking she may have to enlarge the waistband on the beach skirt.

Posted on

Meandering on the Way — Dec 25, 2022 to Jan 3, 2023

Sunday, December 25, 2022

A Christmas miracle: the temperature rose and along with it came rain and a great thawing. Suddenly the roads were passable, and the ANDEES were able to come for Christmas. A good time was had by all, we hope. We had a lovely Christmas Eve dinner of salmon and trimmings enclosed in the Dock Box that we ordered from Local Ocean, a seafood restaurant at the coast. Santa came overnight and we opened our presents the next morning.

Wednesday, December 28, 2022

Here’s a quick summary of the last three days. Rain. Cold rain. Steady rain. Lots of rain. And sometimes, gusty winds to go with it. 

Thursday, December 29, 2022

We met R and J for coffee this morning. We went to Tried and True down in the south part of town and breakfasted on great coffee and so-so croissants. Thus fortified, the four of us headed farther south for a mile or two to Herbert Avenue, intending to do some walking. There’s a place down there, past the edge of town, called the Herbert Farm Natural Area, which we had never heard of till Joe the builder told us about it. It wasn’t a bad day for a hike–rainy, windy and cold, but not seriously so. Bad weather in a jovial mood, you might say.

The chief feature of the natural area is Muddy Creek. The headwaters of Muddy Creek are only 18 miles away as the crow flies, but the creek wanders a lot and its total length might be twice that. Muddy Creek flows into the Mary’s river just half a mile north of where we went walking. Usually the creek is a lazy thing only a few feet wide. Trees and brush grow thick on either side of it, so you usually don’t see any actual water as it winds its way through farm fields and across a part of the Finley Refuge. But if it rains enough and you get close enough…

It’s hard to tell where the main channel is exactly. This may be just a side channel, one which seems to be getting a lot of use today. 

The satellite map below shows what the area looks like in the summer. We walked in from the east along the road that you can see in the upper right of the map. On the way we found that a short section of the road was flooded, but we were able to detour around it. But then, when we came to the place where the road curves to the left, we found it completely submerged under rapidly flowing water. We were able to continue our walk, but we had to go along the edge of an old field to do it. R pointed out that the higher ground at the edge of the field didn’t seem natural. Past farmers had probably moved earth to the area to create a berm to keep Muddy Creek out.

We walked all the way down to the lower left corner of the map. See the big oval broccoli floret down there? It’s a single oak tree. That, of course, was in the summertime. Here’s what it looks like from ground level in the winter.

At the place where the road was just about to dip down and disappear into the creek, we found something interesting. Here’s what it looked and sounded like. (Turn up your sound for the full effect.)

The bubbles, we think, come from air that is being forced out of the soil as water begins to saturate it. As the water pushes in, the air is compressed. What we were hearing was the sound of the air escaping from the ground under the water of this puddle. As we stood watching the bubbles rise in the water, we also noticed something else. At our feet we saw tiny spurts of water popping up out of openings in the soil. These were silent, appearing and disappearing in an instant. It was like the ground was spitting at us.  

These phenomena suggested the possibility that the floodwaters were spreading as the creek continued to rise. That was an unsettling thought. The whole area, including the parking lot and the road back to the highway, is just a foot or so higher than the water. In the end, though, if it was rising, it wasn’t rising very fast and we were fine.

Later, as we were driving back toward the main highway, we saw more evidence of earthmoving activities sometime in the past.

Saturday December 31, 2022

The forecast for today called for rain of the intermittent sort. We decided to take our chances and go for a hike in another place we’d never been before. It’s a place about an hour north of us called Miller Woods. Frieda Miller donated the area to the Yamhill County Soil and Water Conservation District in 2004. The drive up was pretty rainy, but our luck was good and things had improved greatly by the time we arrived. Our walk through the Woods covered about three and a half miles.

We saw some wonderful trees, including this big old fir growing in the embrace of an even more impressive oak. 
We also ran across a fawn standing motionless in the middle of the trail, while mom stood motionless a few yards away. 
Just past the fawn statue, we paused for lunch on a bench at K.T. Summit, so named for Frieda’s husband K.T. Miller.

Later in the day, this being New Year’s Eve and all, we had to deal with three long-standing traditions: fondue, champagne and jigsaw.

By 7:30 the fondue was done and the puzzle was started, but we’d made no progress at all on the champagne.
By 9:00 there had been progress on both remaining fronts.
By 12:30, the puzzle still had a long way to go. But we were running low on champagne, so we went to bed.

Sunday, January 1, 2023

Serious puzzle work.

Monday, January 2, 2023

Monday morning
Monday evening. Now the new year can begin for real.

Tuesday, January 3, 2023

Nice weather in the morning today. The dark clouds have given way to some white ones, which makes a big difference. After spending a couple of days obsessing over the puzzle, we now turn to more real life concerns such as taking down the Christmas tree, tending to appointments, and planning a dessert gathering for two December birthday girls. We also need to do something about all of these horrible Christmas sweets. We’ve eaten enough to make us woozy and fat. The rest we need to freeze, give away, or maybe just toss out the window of the car next time we take a joy ride. (Except for the Frigor and the Christopher Elbow. We’re not done with those.)