Thursday, January 31, 2013

My Brain in Spain, 6




Fun With Trains and Beer

I’m starting to write this at the Puerta de Atocha station in Madrid on the morning of the 29th.

It isn’t quite 10:30. Joanna should be in Lisbon now waiting for her plane to Newark Liberty. 

So I’m sitting at a table near the palms trees in the arboretum on a foggy, cold morning in the capital of Spain, enjoying my first beer of the morning, and waiting for my train to Barcelona. 

But let me bring you up to date.

We took another great walk through Valencia the night before we left and another yesterday morning.

All the walks are great there. Night before last, we were on the Plaça de Ajuntament, which is more or less the Catalan name for City Hall Square. The demonstration from the other day was out with horns, whistles, and yellow coats.

 
This time we wound up back at the Central Market. We didn’t see anybody kill an eel, but it was exciting nonetheless. We bought a local orange with the stem and leaves still on it.



The market is full of very earthy things: ranks of hams, bright piles of vegetables everywhere, white corn with kernels bigger than navy beans, unmolested eels, cooked and live shellfish, skinned rabbits with their eyes still in, mesh bags of snails. One had gotten out of the bag and was trying to escape, but unfortunate for his chances, he was moving at a snail’s pace.

The train ride between Madrid and Valencia is OK. It hits 300 kilometers an hour and travels through rolling country with hills in the distance. Then the hills get closer. There are orchards, vineyards, and plowed fields. The biggest town we saw on the way rests in a small valley and up a hillside, in the distance looking very Renaissance-like. 

There are orchards, and vineyards, and hills.



We came into Atocha a little before dark, took a cab to the hotel, and stayed there because there is not a lot to do outside the hotel, which is in a residential neighborhood near the airport. 

We were checking menus at the bars off the lobby, and the bartender at one place came out and tried to persuade us to come in for a drink and some ham and cheese. His prices seemed a little high, so we said, maybe, but we’re just looking right now. 

It wasn’t eight in the evening yet, so most of the places were still closed. So we did go back there for a glass of red.

He didn’t pour from a bottle. Instead he sold me a split, the equivalent of about 8 ounces. It was a Rioja Crianza and, like all the Riojas, very good.

He served it with a plate of the best olives I have tasted and a dish of potato chips, which are very popular wherever we have gone in Spain.

We had one of his tapas plates, pollo Provencale. It consisted of eight chicken wings, a small plate of cracklins, and a basket of bread. His prices weren’t high for tapas. He was serving meals.

After that and another bottle of red, we moved on to the Mediterranean restaurant, which had opened in the meantime. We had cod in a honey ali-oli sauce. (Don’t know what that is. I add this detail only so I’ll remember to look it up when I have an Internet connection.) 

[Editor’s note: Harry learned later that it is a sauce of garlic and olive oil. He should have guessed as much, but we surmise that he had been drinking too much wine to be that lucid.]

Fish and honey sounded too weird to pass up. The sweet was a little strange, but it worked.

Four o’clock came early this morning. But we got out to the airport on the 5:30 hotel shuttle. 

When we were sitting in the lobby waiting for the ride to show up, we heard the distant thump of dance music, muffled a bit but distinct, like the sound track of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," a few minutes after five in the morning.

I followed the vibration, down a hall and then down a flight of stairs, to another area with doors. I opened the one labeled "Ghost," because it was the one pulsating. Inside I glimpsed a startled doorman and several people—could be dozens—up and bouncing at 5 in the morning.  Amazing what a few uppers can do for you. 

This was probably my most energetic experience of Spanish time. The the circadian rhythms run different over here.

Joanna checked in with the airline without incident. I tried to take a photo of her heading toward security, but was stopped by a guard. He told me to go around the corner to take a photo. 

Here is a photo of Joanna being deported from Spain.


When it came time to head for the railroad station, I was tired of being soaked by Madrid cab rates. It was 30 euro, including tip, from the rail station to the airport hotel. A 10-minute ride from the air terminal back to the hotel was 15 euros, or about 20 bucks, because there’s an 8.50 euro airport surcharge. 

To hell with that. I decided to take the Metro. I have a reserved seat on a 12:30 train, so I allowed three hours for lots of stops, getting lost, and choosing wrong trains and platforms. As it turned out, the trip took less than an hour, including the walk from the hotel to the subway station.

It was so easy that the only excitement was carrying 30 pounds of luggage up two flight of steps to change lines at Gran Via station, and a moment of uncertainty. I followed the signs to the No. 1 line toward Valdecarros, which would take me to the Atocha Renfe, the stop at the rail station.

I stepped onto a train with confidence feeling after all very worldly. I looked at the station list posted on the carriage wall—just like the ones on the New York Subway that list the stations in order. I wanted to see how many stops until the railroad station.

The list was for the No. 5 train, and Atocha Renfe wasn’t on it. OK, here we go, and on only about four hours’ sleep.

So I pick a random passenger and ask, “Esta tren stop at Atocha Renfe?” Which got me a nice blank stare. Three other people simultaneously said yes and pointed to another station list over the door behind me. Don’t know why there are two lists in the same car. Maybe the train doubles as a No. 1 and a No. 5, and is set up for both.

When I got to Atocha station, I was early. The only way I could get onto an earlier train for Barcelona was if I upgraded to first class. No, not to pick up an hour or two. That gave me three hours to kill.

So I watched the turtles for a time. A rather small one was chasing another for a while by trying to bite its hind feet. Then (I think the same one) it used it forelegs to drum on the nose of a guy who was about twice as big. I expected the big guy to chew the little one’s arms off, but no, he said fuck it and left.

Then it was time to sit down and try to be creative. I found La Barrila, which may mean the Barrel, but I’m not sure because the translating dictionary on my Kindle doesn’t have an entry for that exact word. 

I have discovered that pidgin Spanish, though woefully short of conversational, is helpful. I have a hard time catching the language spoken, but can read a bit. When I think no one’s looking, I check words on my Kindle.

For instance, I have no exact idea of what “realicen” means in the sentence “Se ruega por favor realicen sus pedidos en la barra.” It wasn’t in my vocabulario or the Kindle’s.

But Kindle told me “pedido” means “order.” So I guess the table is self service.

So I knew how to get beer. It is a Pilsener, I believe, and is called Cruzcampo. So far, so good, and nobody can ask for better than that.

Peace and good times to all.

Harry




Tuesday, January 29, 2013

My Brain in Spain, parte cinco



 Grail Legends
December 27

I don’t know which was the bigger event, photographing St. Vincent’s arm or the Holy Grail. I got to do both on Thursday.

Four and a half euros get you a recorded tour of the Valencia cathedral in your favorite language. Each chapel and other architectural highlight has its number and you key that into your player. Since I chose English, I heard a man with a very pleasant Brit accent pointing out details.

The original parts of the church building date back to the 13th century to a dedication, I believe, by Jaime I el Conquistador. Like all big structures, the cathedral added parts as time went by. Now it is a sprawling amoeba even attached by a bridge to the neighboring church, Our Lady of the Forsaken.

There was a major restoration a few years ago, and as always happens with these ancient monuments, they rediscovered stuff. For instance, the restorers uncovered some brilliant early frescoes in the ceiling of the sanctuary. Nobody remembered they were there, and they had been covered by baroque decorations added in the 18th century. I don’t know why, but I find that kind of story fascinating.


It reminds me of the tours you can take through the foundations of the York and Geneva cathedrals. 

Some of the side chapels were restored to their original Gothic bones, others not.

There is a lot of cool stuff in the cathedral.

I knew there were Borgia popes and have been watching the TV mini series about the family on Netflix. That’s how I learned, for instance, that the Borgias were actually Spanish, not Italian. What I didn’t know until my tour is that there is a Borgia saint. Really. 

Francisco Borja (the original Spanish form of the name) was a duke who left home to become a Jesuit. There is a chapel dedicated to him in the cathedral, and it contains two Goyas.

I had read that the St. Vincent’s arm was “behind the altar” at the cathedral, but being an American, I wondered if it was considered an invasion or privacy or otherwise politically incorrect to let people see it. 

Not to worry. It’s in a glass reliquary in front of an altar called the Chapel of the Resurrection, which is in the rotunda directly behind the sanctuary. Number 12 on the tour.


His are not the only body parts. One of the side chapels off the nave is dedicated to St. Thomas of Villanueva, a sainted former archbishop of Valencia. His effigy has a window in the chest where his skull is preserved. A glass box below him has his bones on display.


According to my narrator, what is now the Chapel of the Holy Grail was built as a place to hold the tombs of bishops. It wasn’t attached to the main church until a corridor was built later.

Everything goes by two names here. The Valencian for Holy Grail, I believe, is Sant Calze. Santo Caliz is Spanish. I know this only because there is a street outside the cathedral named for it in Valencian on the map and in Spanish on the road sign.

The tradition of the Grail says that St. Peter brought the chalice to Rome, where it was venerated until a later Pope sent it west to protect it during the persecutions of Valerian in the third century. 

Everything after the Holy Grail is kind of anticlimactic to relate. Still wonderful, of course, because this is Valencia, but hey, it’s not the Holy Grail.

We rested over some squid and Rioja and then climbed the 201 steps (Joanna counted; I didn’t even try.) to the top of the Micalet, the Little Michael bell tower of the church. We were surprised at how many of the buildings we could recognize after only a few days in town. 


 Hey, there’s the market. That was great. Let’s go there next. And so we did, but it was closed. They were through killing eels for the day.

Later on, we ran into the demonstrators again, but this time they were blocking the streets in front of City Hall. 

The Grail is hard to see, even though it’s in a lighted glass case. It is high to your left in the altar niche, but there is a large silver screen on the altar. When we were there, two priests were in prayer venerating the transubstantiated Host. At first, I mistook the monstrance for a possible container of the chalice.

I moved to the right side of the chapel and sat on the old stone bench to see what the monks felt. Joanna came over to me and pointed. There, you can see it now.

Photos are permitted in the Chapel of the Holy Grail, and that actually surprised me. 

I rested the camera on the back of a wooden choir bench and used no flash. The fathers, after all, were still praying.

On reflection, I have to say the Holy Grail tops everything else. Grainy though it is, here is the photo of the day.



King Arthur, eat your heart out. I’ve seen the Holy Grail.

Harry


Dec. 28

That can't be the real grail.  Everyone knows it was lost forever when Elsa took it past the seal.

Matt


Saturday, January 26, 2013

My Brain in Spain, Cont'd




Where is El Cid?
26 diciembre

Joanna was remarking yesterday how great these little streets are. They are like alleys and they just ask you to come in. They twist and turn, and you never know what you’re going to see. 

Like a clothing and costume jewelry boutique called Madame Bugalu y su caniche asesino. I had to look up “caniche.” The name translates, “Madam Boogaloo and her killer poodle.” 

We were on the track of El Cid today. He died here in 1099. Many of us will remember Charlton Heston getting hit by the arrow and then having his mounted corpse chase Herbert Lom back to Africa. From what I can tell, that didn’t happen, although there is a ballad that tells the story.

The Poema del Cid doesn’t say how he died. He just died, as many people did in the 11th century, possibly from tuberculosis, diphtheria, dysentery, or complications of a cold or a hangnail.

We were in the south end of the old city, sharing a beer and a sandwich for late breakfast, around 1:30 in the afternoon. We had to have some place to go or else we could wind up circling the same line of alleys all afternoon. The map shows the Jardí Botanic. OK. Botanical gardens are always great. We get to see the Quart Gate, too. That’s left from the old medieval city wall.

One of the first landmarks we passed was the city’s bull ring, where Joanna stopped to say hi to a local matador.


 We didn’t see any bull fights. You know, why bother? The bull always loses. The place had been taken over for the Christmas circus, anyway.

As it turns out, there aren’t many artifacts left from the Cid’s days. The towers of the Quart Gate date to the 15th century. They are sitting by a thoroughfare and surrounded by the city.


There was also a plaque on the wall for the heroes who defended the city during the War of Independence in 1808. I think this is when the Spanish threw out Napoleon.

The Calle de Quart runs through the gates and this is the street where the Jardí Botanic is.


 We saw banana trees, one with a cluster of green bananas and attached to it by a long tendril, a huge, moist purple blossom. There was a parliament of doves. They were cooing everywhere, and became especially outspoken when one of the many stray cats in the place started to meow.


 The cat population in the garden looks exceptionally clean and well fed for strays. Maybe they belong to people in the neighborhood and just come her to hang out all day. They were asleep in the trees, grooming themselves on the benches, hiding in the shrubbery, and one was inside the tropical greenhouse stretched out along a pipe.

The garden has specimens of plants from all over the world. Many looked familiar but were not. One hothouse had a pitcher plant. This is a very cool carnivorous creature that grows flowers, things (I don’t know what they are properly called) that look like fancy vases. The insects are drawn by the color and the aroma of the sticky liquids inside the pitchers, and they drown, to be digested and absorbed by the plant.

Some deciduous trees were bare of leaves; others were in full fall. At the same time, varieties of flowers were in bloom. A yellow hibiscus was about to open. It was strange to be in every season all at once.

Strolling slowly with frequent stops is fatiguing. The funny thing is that when we left the garden and started to go at a regular city walking pace, we weren’t tired anymore.

It also turns out that when you come back up Quart Street, you really get a great view of the gate, which is open so you can see the street behind it.


The walls had a few inscriptions on them, including one cryptic abbreviation that looked very old, but for all I know could have been advertising (Who knows? Maybe for Madame Bugalu.) If you blow up the picture, you may make them out, DBDV. If anybody has a guess what they might mean, please let me know.

So having enjoyed that gate, we went to see another. The Serranos Towers are at the north end of the old city, protecting the neighborhood of Carmen from those guys across the dry riverbed.

Here we got to climb the steps and prowl around inside. The Serranos Gate is older than the Quart, by a century or so. But still younger than El Cid. So this is as close as we could get in terms of military relics. The cathedral is older. It was dedicated in 1238 after Jaime I Conquistador chased out the Moors for the last time.

The Serranos gate is a Gothic structure with groin vaults and crenellations, gargoyles and arrow slits. The murder holes—the little holes in the floor of the overhanging battlements, through which you could drop rocks or boiling oil on attackers—were covered with transparent glass or maybe cellophane. I didn’t step on them. 

Over the entrance is a large hole, for dropping very big rocks or entire cauldrons of oil.

In the distance, I could hear people blowing horns. I hoped it was merely a traffic jam or a political protest. I was in no position to defend the city. I had left my bow home.





We strolled some more narrow, twisting streets. The political protest caught up to us outside a regional administration building. It may have been the president’s offices, but security seemed to be very light for that, only a couple a police cars. 

The protestors were saying no the “FGV.” I don’t know what that is, but suspect it has to do with part of Spain’s austerity measures. They simply call it the “crisis” here.

People had police whistles and party noisemakers. One guy had a plastic airhorn in his hand, and that’s what you could hear from a great distance.

A lady was throwing flyers into the air. This is the only act of littering that I have witnessed here. This is no place like New York. Here the streets are very clean.

We let them go by and headed in the general direction of the cathedral. I had expected a bit of a hike, but after a turn or two we had a hit of deja vu. Here was the Generalife, where we had dinner Christmas Eve. The pink wall ahead was Our Lady of the Forsaken.

Damn, I didn’t get us lost once all day.

We had dinner at Ocho y Media, very good shade-fish (don’t ask: I don’t know) and braised beef. Also very good Rioja. The menu was decorated with stills from Fellini’s movie.

We went back to Sagardi, the Euskal place where we met Bob and Meg on Christmas night, for a couple of short beers before turning in.

The wake-up call came early, 8:30 this morning. I am very proud of my flexibility. No more sleeping till 10:30 for me.

Love to all.
Harry

Dec. 27
El Cid: On the one hand, “Don’t mess with my myths,” and on the other, the dead Cid strapped to his horse, Babieca, causing the Moors to flee, is not in the opera. Curious.

The Inquisition: 1203-1908, except for the Napoleonic years. Where Napoleon’s armies went, Inquisition prisoners were freed and prisons were destroyed; ghettos were torn down and the denizens fully enfranchised.

Spain didn’t reach that level of civilization again until the Republic, in the 1930s, and Franco, alas, made short work of that.

“Threw Napoleon out” to their own detriment!

Much love,

Beatrice

Dec. 27
I liked the part about El Cid, since I loved that movie and saw it with a girl who resisted my putting my arm around her all night. Glad you're having fun.

Peter

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

My Brain in Spain, tres



Feliz Navidad
Christmas Day
Still running on New Jersey time, I got up and made a quick run for coffee around 10:30 Christmas morning. Then I sent the previous e-mail.

We are continuing to celebrate Joanna’s birthday, and now we get to add Jesus’s birthday too. The bells rang all morning to say “feliz cumpleaños” to both of them.

It was one in the afternoon before we were on the street, so we took a short stroll to see a curious bridge. It has a semicircular array on one side that gives it a kind of post-modern feel. I assume this feature is entirely decorative. We had passed a store selling kitchen ware, and when we first saw the bridge down the street, Joanna said it looked like a paella pan.



The bridge spans a wide gully that used to be the Turia River. Apparently there was a bad flood in the 1950s and the city decided to divert the river. Now the old riverbed is filled with parks and a museum complex.

From the far side of the bridge, we took a cab to the restaurant where we had Christmas dinner reservations. It is one in an avenue of restaurants set side by side, and they were all busy. And they all had views of the Mediterranean.

At one window, kids were opening their Christmas gifts at a table.

This was the first time I had seen the Mediterranean. We went in and asked our restaurant to change our reservation from 3 to 4, and then we went onto the beach. 

We passed a man spraying water on a sand castle with towers that had to be 6 feet high or more. It included an effigy in sand of Spongebob Squarepants.



The sea was calm and dark blue, with very small waves, like a bay rather than an ocean. I’m not sure, but this arm of the Mediterranean may be called the Balearic Sea. Mallorca is out there somewhere.


We strolled along the beach for a while. Joanna was surprised (and so was I) to see ladybugs in the sand. Also a naked man sunning himself.

Dinner was a salad followed by paella Valenciana El Coso (the name of the restaurant). It had chicken, rabbit, artichoke, and snails. It was terrific. So was the house wine. When you walk in, you pass a wall of it in a glass case. The label is a wax (or maybe plastic) seal.

This was not a Rioja but, according to the label, a wine of Castille and Leon. It was sharper than Rioja, but then, it comes from a colder climate. 

We went back to the beach for another look after dinner, then cabbed back to the Plaza de la Reina, where all the shops and most of the restaurants were open. The streets were packed. 

I guess everybody gets tired of being inside all day, so they have to come out in the evening. 

We walked to City Hall Square and around some side streets. On the way back, just across from the top of our street, was a tapas bar that had a word like “euskali” on the door. I think that’s what the Basques call themselves, so we went in there.

I don’t know if we saw any Basques, but we did meet Bob and Meg from Appleton, Wis. She studied in Madrid years ago, and they travel to Spain every year. 

He owns a deli that among other things, serves tapas and only Wisconsin cheeses.

She teaches kids in the local lockup. They are doing time for anything from breaking and entering to truancy.

It rained for a while when we were inside. When it let up, we went to the hotel where I believe I passed out. I am not sure.

A feliz Navidad indeed.

Harry




Dec. 30


A little more wine knowledge tutoring. You mentioned in a previous e-mail you drank a wine from Castilla y Leon and you noticed how it had less body and "stuffing" than the Riojas you were enjoying so much.


You postulated that the weather was probably warmer in Rioja, making for riper, more intense wines.

Well, Riojas are generally much better than wines from Castilla y Leon, but it's not because of the weather. Indeed, Castilla y Leon is one of the hottest growing areas for wine in Spain—lots of flat land and high yields. Rioja is cooler with more hills (and even mountains, if I'm not mistaken). Yields are kept lower, and the struggle of the vines in harsher conditions—cool nights, rockier soils, etc. —make for more interesting, more complete wines.

Even if the grapes can actually get riper in Castilla y Leon, they don't have the complexity and other characteristics you'll find in Riojas. It's why Rioja is one of the premium wine producing areas in Spain, not far from the Basque country in Northwest to north central Spain. 

You are actually closer to another important area for red wine that some say is even better than Rioja, if not smaller and less well known, but the wines are generally even more expensive. It's also made from the tempranillo grape, which is known by other regional names in some parts of Spain.
The wine to look for is called Ribero de Duero. Might be tough to get by the glass, and best to find a bottle with a little age on it. I bit "stiffer" than Rioja—more tannin and acidity; less use of American oak to soften it during aging. You'll enjoy it.
Larry