No Es Carne!

probably the best photo from this trip

26 November 2011

Jack has taken on the job of being master of the map and guide book, which is fine with me.  I can navigate through the country roads of New Jersey, but put me in a city and I get all turned around.  Unlike Barcelona and Cordoba, and despite what we've been told, finding decent food around here isn't easy.

Yesterday Jack sleuthed out a restaurant outside of the main tourist area.  We took the Metro, and when we surfaced, we were face to face with the most glorious candy store window ever.

Because I've been buying lots of candy all along (Spain has candy shops all over), and because everything in this store had to be asked for and wasn't labeled and I don't know my way around the Spanish candy vocabulary, I didn't buy anything here.  This place was overloaded with marshmallowy thingies anyway, and I'm not fond of marshmallows.

Aside from three locals at the bar, we were the only ones in the restaurant.  2:00 p.m. is early for lunch in Madrid.  On the wall, next to a wine rack that stretched to the ceiling for the length of the bar, hung a row of dried meat.  We weren't sure if any of it was real until the bartender sliced some of it and put it on Jack's tapas.

The plan was to go to another museum.  We headed in the wrong direction by accident and wound up overlooking the western side of the city again, this time south of the palace.  The camera's battery door, taped shut, was holding.  As you can see, the pictures are much better.  This one didn't wash out as it would have on the other camera (no matter the settings).

More grand architecture:

We eventually found the right way to the museum, the Collecciones Thyssen-Bornemisza, which I blogged about yesterday.  After that, we stopped at a street cafe for something Spain is famous for:  chocolate.  Not the candy kind.  The liquid kind.  Think dark chocolate pudding before it sets, so thick that we began eating it with a spoon, so thick that, if left for just a minute, it starts to congeal.  One of the guide books points out that the optimal time to drink one of these is at 8:00 a.m., after one has been out partying all night, before going home for a shower and heading off to work.  Jack and I have been preferring ours around 5:00 p.m. so that we can hold off on dinner til after 9:00 (some restaurants don't even open until 8:30).

I told you this camera was better. 

Our evening plans were to meet one of Jack's former grad students, Dianha, who is in Madrid teaching English.  Spain's high unemployment rate is pushing people to learn English so that they can flee the country for jobs elsewhere.

The Spanish custom of dining at midnight and partying til dawn can't be helping much either.  We'd read about this, been told about this, and even witnessed some of it in Barcelona, where even on a Sunday night the streets filled up around 9 p.m.

But what we witnessed last night takes it to a whole new level.  The plan was to meet Dianha at 9:30 p.m. in the Puerto del Sol, a plaza in the center of the city  from which all the main roads radiate.  It had been plenty crowded there the night before, like Leicester Square in London on a Saturday night.  We decided to walk from the hotel, which we figured would take us about 20 minutes.  We also figured that, it being a Friday night, we'd encounter crowds.  But we weren't prepared for this.

These people weren't walking.  They were strolling, three abreast, arm-in-arm.  If they'd been cars they'd have been cruising.  And they were all headed in the same direction, towards the plaza.  This was worse than Penn Station, NYC, at rush hour.  Already not terribly fond of this city, I became annoyed.  There are too many people on this planet, and half of them are on the Gran Via in Madrid.  I found an opening in the crowd and, despite the traffic jam I might be causing (or even because I might cause one), I held my camera over my head and snapped a picture.

I found some relief when, closer in to the center, in a spot where the crowd was thinner, where street vendors laid out blankets with shady-looking goods, we spotted a woman selling ashtrays.  Beside her was a black kitten, maybe nine weeks old.  We crouched down to get a good dose of kitty, the first we've had since we left home.

Dianha found us in the crowd as we waited by a statue of a bear rearing up to a tree (a symbol we've seen elsewhere in the city, and if I weren't feeling lazy I'd do some research about).  We found a noisy tapas bar.

Spain has been a challenge for me when it comes to food.  Not only am I vegetarian, but I also have a high-protein, low-fat diet.  Since arriving here I've had little choice for protein but scrambled eggs or cheese.  That's more fat than I'm used to, and my stomach has been somewhat upset by it.  In Barcelona, John led us to a tapas bar that made a vegetarian fava bean stew.  It was a welcome change.  In this Madrid tapas bar we saw a fava bean stew on the menu.  When we ordered, Jack made sure to ask, "Sin carne?"  (Without meat?)

"Si," said the waiter.

So we were a little surprised when it arrived with lumps of sausage floating in it.  "No carne," I told the waiter.

"No es carne," he said.

"Es carne!"  I shot back.

"No es carne.  Es chorizo!"

"Es carne!"

He took it away.  The three of us burst out laughing.  Moments later the waiter came back with the dish, having scooped out the sausages.  I stuck my fork in and let the sauce drain out as much as possible before eating it.  My guts being in turmoil already, I figured that I'd either not get any worse or start throwing up in five hours.  I hedged my bets and ate only a few drained forks full.  I didn't get sick.

Today we headed west towards another museum, the Museo Cerralbo, the former home of aristocrats at the end of the nineteenth century.  The goal of these people was to show off their wealth as much as possible, and boy did they.  I liked their Venetian glass chandeliers.  Boiled down to one word, the descriptor for this place would be "overwrought."  But that's what wealthy Europeans were shooting for back then.  Spanish Donald Trumps, maybe?

At lunch in a sidewalk cafe, I had the following conversation with the waiter when I told him, "Sin carne."

"No pescado?"  (No fish?)

"No."

"No pollo?"

"No."

He was walking away when I said, "Si hay ojos, es carne."  Bad grammar, but what I was trying to say was, "If there are eyes, it's meat."  I'm pretty sure he didn't hear me anyway.  As with the rest of this city, it was pretty noisy.  For lunch I had roasted vegetables and bread.

We wandered about in two city parks.  The first was just a little one, backing up to the palace.

Hooray!  I can shoot into the sun!

In the second park, the Casa de Mores, a manicured garden with only one entrance, my tissue-and-tape solution to keeping the battery in its door shut gave out.  I lost two pictures because the door popped open before the photos went onto the memory card.  The worst of the three survived.

We took the metro to one more museum, the Reina Sofia, a former hospital that now houses, modern art, Dali, Miro, and Picasso's Guernica.  Once again we got in for free because it was after 2:30 on a Saturday.

Below are my last two photos from Madrid, taken from inside the museum and looking out on the rooftops as the sun was low in the sky.

I was holding the battery door closed with one hand and controlling the shutter with the other.

We stopped for one last dose of liquid chocolate before taking the Metro back to the hotel. We're going to have our dinner downstairs soon.  It's just about 8:30, when the restaurant opens, so we'll be the early birds.

Then I'll try to get my suitcase closed around all the chocolate and books, and take one more glass-doored-bathroom shower.  If we can use the last of the shampoo I brought from home then there will be more room for everything else. 

Tomorrow I'll purge myself of caffeine, sugar, and fat.  After I find one last hot chocolate at the airport...

It Must Just be a Thing

25 November 2011

We found out who the architect is:  Alvaro Sans, who specializes in hotels.  This whole glass-and-slab thing must be the new architectural black.   Twenty years from now we'll be saying, "That's sooooo turn-of-the-century."

Meanwhile, we went to another museum today (Collecciones Thyssen-Bornemisza), which is from a private collection.  There's  a floor of modern art, a few rooms of Impressionists, and, yes, loads more of Jesus-and-Marys.  Can I get a Flying Spaghetti Monster up in this joint?

Jack finally got his two bottles of Spanish wine to carry home.  I bought a bunch of packets of high-end chocolates to use for Christmas presents.

We still think that, for the most part, Madrid's streets aren't that interesting.  The best we could do was compare one or two of them to Islington, London.

I had some success with the old camera, but I don't want to pull the memory card out to upload just yet, for fear of never getting that tissue shoved back in quite the right way.  I'll upload tomorrow night, as our trip comes to an end.

Madrid

25 November 2011

The first thing I noticed in our hotel room was the pair of nightstands flanking the bed.  Each glowed blue.  A circular switch controlled the color.  Yeah, it looks cool, but it's clearly useless, and far too bright in the dark.

It's all glass and wood in here, with light switches at waist level.  There are switches all over, and they all seem to control everything, with the comic effect of the whole room going dark when one of us aims to turn on a light.

There's a sliding door in the closet that opens into the bathroom.  I can get to my clothes from either side.  That's pretty cool.

Then there's the bathroom.  A glass door separates the two sinks from the rest of the plumbing.  However, the glass is only opaque up to the middle of my nose, and the door doesn't lock.

Wait a minute.  This all seems too familiar.  I think I know who designed this building, or, at least, whose ideas have been taken.

Princeton University is putting up a new building for the neuroscientists and psychologists.  The architect is one Rafael Moneo, an award-winning designer hailing from Madrid.  He did the extension of the Prado, the art museum in the center of the city, as well as buildings at Harvard and Columbia.  Princeton has this thing where they have to get big names to do their buildings, so, enter Moneo.

A few weeks ago I was sent to view the mock-ups.  The faculty office will be done up in light-colored wood and glass, glass, glass.  Each will have a round, glass-top table with wood and metal supports.  The desk, three-sided, is done so that one of the wood slabs appears to be lying off-center on top of the others.  "That's a design element," we are told.  "It can't be changed."  (The desk I'm typing from now, by the way, is a slab of glass that appears to be lying on top of a cube of wooden drawers, with glass fronts that match the doors.  Just saying...)  Someone else in the room asks about the waist-high light switches.  We are told that it's part of the design but they'll see about moving them up.  We're shown the doorways to the student offices.  They're all glass and sliding.  The opacity stops just below my eyes.  I can stand on my toes and peer in.  The doors do not lock.  (In the hotel bathroom, I can stand in the tub and see clear to the outside windows.  A super-hot shower steams up the glass and takes care of that problem.)  In the mock-up lab, the drawers below the benches all have light wood fronts.   I like how they look.  We have a choice of three colors for wall cabinets, but I am told that the below-bench drawer style is "a design element and can't be changed."  The gray floor, apparently, will be a choice of ugly or slightly lighter ugly, but that's it.  Anyway, this hotel room is functional, so let's hope the labs are too.  Meanwhile, I can't find any direct connection on the 'net to this place and Moneo.  Maybe it's a Madrid thing, a Spanish thing.  I'm going to ask the concierge later.  This room doesn't do much to keep me from thinking about my job, but our vacation is over in two days anyway.

We went to the Palacio Real de Madrid, the Royal Palace.  Here's a view from the plaza balcony.  Inside we saw an exhibition of royal clocks (kinda cool, actually), an armory, and the royal pharmacy.  There were rows and rows of shelves with porcelain jars, each labeled with herbs and tinctures.  "Now this is organization," I said.  So much for not thinking about work.  In the area where medicines were made, Jack noticed the sink with glassware piled in it.  He said something like, "Bad technician left glassware in the sink."  I said the tech would have to get after whoever did this, and mentioned the name of the most likely perp where I work.

The streets of Madrid, while lined with imposing buildings, seem to be doing their best to look like somewhere else.  The promenade that the guide books and concierge eagerly point us to is lined with chain stores one can find in London and Manhattan.  Those that aren't chains are tacky souvenir shops selling the same sort of crap one can find in London or Barcelona, but with a different name stamp.

Spain seems to be fond of its licorice in a way that would make Americans proud.   Each of these ropes is about two feet long.

We looked up bead shops and found a couple of places that sell all matter of craft materials.  In the early evening this place was mobbed with people who couldn't possibly have been tourists.  It was like trying to get served at a crowded deli.  I bought some beads then took this picture on my way out, holding the camera above my head.

We went to the Prado museum, the city's collection of Grand Masters' artwork.  We went in at 6:30; the museum is free from 6:00-8:00.  We stayed until closing time.  The highlight for me was seeing Heironymous Bosh's The Garden of Earthly Delights, a tryptich of surreality that predates Salvador Dali by 300 years.  I was less enchanted by the overload of religious paintings.  I can only take so many Jesus-and-Marys.  I have zero tolerance for naked angels.  Zero.

Today we're headed for more museums and maybe a walk in the city's park.  I've ditched my camera for the older one, which I brought with me even though the battery door is broken.  I've stuffed some tissue in it and taped it shut.  Heavier and bigger, it takes better pictures.

Barcelona/Cordoba: Crazy-Ass Architecture and Other Adventures

24-25 November 2011

On our second day in Barcelona, we went into the Frederic Mares museum.  Mares was a rich dude with a penchant for collecting not one of anything, but everything of anything.  The ground floor of the building he lived in is room after room of early Christian statuary.  A row of nearly identical Mary-and-child statues.  Walls full of crucified Jesuses that still have him looking Middle-Eastern.  No Aryan Jesus-and-Marys up in this joint. I'd just about had enough, being a devout atheist, when we headed upstairs.  There was even more of this stuff on the next floor.  But the top two levels were something else.  I forgot all about the Jesus overload.  We entered rooms full of bell jars encasing bouquets of flowers made entirely of shells.  Framed arrangements of cigar wrappers.  Pipes with creepy heads on them.  Walking sticks with creepy heads on them. Eyeglass cases.  What-the-hell-are-these-things.  Raffle tickets.  A machine that prints raffle tickets.  Very, very old bicycles (last night I dreamed Ross Hart lent me one of these to ride, which I did for a while, but I gave it back because nobody'd be able to help me if I had a breakdown).

Jack and I left the place shaking our heads.  Crazy-ass.

The next day we went to visit some architecture.  I could spend a few paragraphs explaining Antonio Gaudi's Sagrada Familia cathedral, but Wikipedia has already done the job.

This is one crazy-ass church.

We only walked around the outside; lines were long to get in and we'd been advised by John and Rosa that the wait wouldn't be worth it.

Speaking of John and Rosa, who we went out to dinner with on our last night in Barcelona, Rosa has the coolest job of anyone either Jack or I know:  she's translating the first season of Scooby-Doo into Catalan.

Jack wanted to know what she's doing about "Zoinks!"  Rosa said that they'd settled on "Iay!"  As in "Eeeeee-eye!"

"What about 'ruh-roh'," Jack asked.

"We're leaving that to the actor."

Anyway, Gaudi:

The words are "sanctus" over and over again:

Um, bowl of fruit?

In the subway station, there's a vending machine for cell phone apparatus:

More Barcelona street scenes:

Wherever there's shopping, there are these wire patterns spanning the street.  Usually it's car-free too.

Another shot of the round whatever that I took the day before, this time at night.

Quirky graffiti:

When shops close for the day, they pull down metal grates.  Many of them are decorated.  Kevin, maybe you'll need a special category for these.

If you look closely at the top third of this picture, you'll see what every group-riding cyclist sees:

We took the train from Barcelona to Cordoba.  The speed was posted constantly on a screen on the inside of the car.  We got up to about 175 mph.  Taking good pictures out the window was pretty much out of the question.  Most of the landscape looks like the desert southwest in the US.   As we approached Cordoba things greened up a little.

Once again we wound up in a deeply-discounted hotel.  For 80 euro, we got a 390 euro room.

The unfortunately-named Conquistador Hotel was across from what we came to see:  La Mezquita mosque/cathedral.  Here's Wikipedia's description.  It's a mosque with a cathedral plunked into the middle.

As water passes up this fountain, it spins the wheel.  Twice per revolution the little bell goes, "tink."  It's very peaceful.

Paintings of Jesus and saints and things hang next to Moorish architecture.

The ceiling:

The view from the bathroom, of all places:

In the cathedral, someone was tuning the pipe organ.  It sounded less like an organ than a sick moose or an MRI about to get going.  By the time I remembered that I could use my phone to record this "blaaaaaaaaat," the tuning stopped.  Oh well.

I tried, and tried, and tried, to hold my hands still enough to get a close-up of the mouths that were the pipe openings, high above my head.  I hate my camera.

Outside, in the courtyard, and throughout the Medieval section of the city, stones are laid, often sideways, in patterns.

Oop!  One more door for you, Kevin, at the mosque/cathedral entrance.  Here, Muslim and Christian designs meet:

This is the view of the mosque from the outside of our hotel:

And down the street:

Clay bulls for sale:

A crack in a wall.  Did I mention that I hate my camera?

We walked over the bridge that crosses the Guadalquivir river.  It looks tidal, but when we searched the web trying to find out, we had no luck.  Cordoba is pretty far from the coast.  But there was a clear tide line, there were egrets, and there was an obviously wet shirt just above the water line on a bridge support far below us.  I don't have a picture because I would have had to shoot into the sun, and the camera that I hate just sucks at shooting into the sun.

Looking from the bridge back into the Medieval part of town:

If this camera could zoom without being a fuzzy blur, you'd see egrets at the water's edge.

Oh, wait.  I did zoom.  See those white blobs on the shore?  Egrets.

Here's the hotel's second floor landing.

And the stairwell:

A view from the lobby into the courtyard:

I know, I know, pictures of a hotel? Really?  Yeah, because we never stay in places like this because we can't afford it.  And if you think this is posh, wait until you see the pictures of the place we're in now, in Madrid, at some minuscule percentage of what the place usually charges.  I'm trying to find out who the architect is.  I have my suspicions.  But you'll have to wait for that.  It's almost 1 a.m. here and if I don't get in bed before Jack starts snoring, I'll never get to sleep.