Day 20 Madrid

We awoke to pouring rain. That was the forecast so we had planned accordingly. After our usual breakfast we attacked the chore of packing for our return trip. We left the hotel at 11 and told Manuel that we would return for our luggage that night. We took the metro to the Prado museum. It has one of world's finest collections of European art, from the 12th century to the early 19th century. It was still raining when we got there and the ticket line was veerrry long. Luckily it moved pretty fast. We spent the day at the Prado. We left around 6 and walked to Plaza de Oriente stopping at a few places along the way. We spent the next 3 ½ hours at the Opera. We saw Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, an opera written in the late 20s. It is very political and very anti-capitalist so we were not surprised that it is not shown in the U.S. very much. It was quite well done and much more engaging than we expected. Our hotel is right next to the Opera so after a bite to eat we retrieved our luggage and set out for the airport. This was not pleasant. At 3 of the stations the escalators were inoperative. We had to carry our luggage down and up long flights. We arrived at the airport at midnight for a 6 am flight. There were no places to sit in departures; arrivals had some uncomfortable chairs. Many, many people were sleeping on the floor. Surely, the design of this terminal can be vastly improved. The trip home was long, but because we were so tired, we slept through much of it. Now, we are home and have to give some more thoughts to our original plan. Even though we didn’t find a place to buy, we discovered some important things:
1. Romantic and beautiful as it may be, we don’t want to live in the middle of nowhere;
2. We need easy and close access to a big city;
3. We particularly liked two areas: Lugo and Pontevedra;
4. We don’t want to be in a touristy area (like Santiago)
5. We really liked Galicia.

Life in Spain definitely has its positives and negatives. This is a list that our new friend from Pontevedra, Colin, created based on his experience of things that work and don’t work well in Spain:

USUALLY EFFICIENT
Bars
Restaurants. Especially menus del día.
Hotels
Utility companies. Especially in taking money from my account before I’ve got the bill!
Bank cash machines. Lots of these, though it’s important to use the right chain.
Private medicine. I’m not allowed to use the Spanish health service.
Pharmacies. Though very slow at times.
Trains – Local and national
Fiestas. Anything connected with fun is usually well done in Spain.
Concerts. Ditto.
The international wine, olive oil and fish industries (and doubtless several more)
The road construction industry
The prostitution industry, if the numbers involved are anything to go on.
The TV industry. Ruthlessly efficient at showing ads.
The ad industry. Highly regarded internationally, I believe.
The newspaper industry. Not sure there’s any day of the year when there’s no edition.
Street cleaning. Exemplary.
Long distance road travel. Magnificent roads, many of them new.
The traffic police. When it comes to speeding fines.
The national and major city football teams

NOT USUALLY EFFICIENT
Spanish bureaucrats: Whether at the local, regional or national level. Paper mad. Deliberately slow so as to preserve jobs and expand empires. Same as everywhere in the world, only worse than most.
Turismo offices: Sometimes seem to operate more for the benefit of the employees than tourists
Banks. Also wallow in paper. Dealing with a branch of your bank other than where you live can be a calvario.
Shops. Attitudes are almost invariably pleasant but efficiency can be something else.
Notaries. Still in the 19th century. Where, in fact, they belong.
Companies which don’t reply to your letters or emails. Possibly the majority.
Estate agents (Realtors). Take a huge fee for doing very little other than maintaining loose-leaf binders or, if you’re lucky, a disorganised computer database which you can
take a look at if you go to their office. No brochures. No real initiatives based on the listing of your criteria.
The judicial system: I have no personal experience but it’s reputed to be very slow and inefficient.
The property sales statistics industry. No one believes their numbers.
Driving. At least when it comes to the use of indicators.
The education system. If the international ratings are to be believed.
The property construction industry. Seems to take ages to complete projects and, judging by the piles of materials that lie around for a long time, there must be project coordination problems
Public works projects. Ditto.
The post office. Mail doesn’t arrive until around noon and parcels from the UK rarely arrive at all. Though they could go missing in Britain, of course.
The local police. At least when it comes to enforcing parking and noise laws.

Day 19 -- Madrid

Our normal breakfast of Napolitano and coffee. Senor Manuel must have figured something out for the overbooking because he didn’t throw us out of our room. We took the metro to museum Thyssen and met Pepe there at 11. We walked through this museum till 2 pm. Pepe then showed us the exquisite Palace hotel where he stayed while working for Hughes in 1970. We walked till we found an acceptable taverna and had a great lunch. The lunch includes a glass of wine but they give you the whole bottle. We walked back to our hotel and parted for siesta. At 6 pm we went out for a walk and visited a small church called Ermita de San Antonio de Florida, which has its ceiling painted by Goya. It’s called the Sistine chapel of Madrid. Goya’s grave is also in this church. Our return route took us by a mall and we had to go in. It was immense ( a converted train station) and it added to our walking total. We finally got to a pub where we had beer and snacks. Rejuvenated we wondered into a new neighborhood and were amazed at the numbers of cafes and people. At 10 pm at night, all the outdoor cafes were full, the upscale market with many different food stalls was packed to the point that you could hardly get through, there were more people in the streets than during the day. Madrilenos definitely live by night and we decided that in this city nobody eats at home.

Tomorrow is our last day in Madrid. We will probably spend most of the day at the Prado. In the evening we are going to the opera and right after that to the airport. We may not have a chance to post anything unless there is WiFi at the airport.

Day 18 --- Madrid

After our breakfast in Café de Oriente, which was a chocolate Napolitano and café con leche, we embarked to the barrio Salamanca. This is an upscale area of Madrid (Beverly Hills of Madrid). Bo visited many shops and made several purchases. Our plan for the day was to meet Cristina at 2 pm. On the subway back Bo got a call from her asking to reschedule till 4:00 We got off the train at the next stop and retraced our way back. Some more shopping then 3 o’clock comida. We picked an outdoor café at random. When you sit and order 2 beers, you are given a plate of appetizers gratis. We have had sardines and cheese on bread, cheese and sausage on roll, olives and radishes, salads, etc. This place gave us a dish of salad with shrimp, crabmeat, pimientos, tomatoes. The dinner of the day includes a 1st course, 2nd course, bread, beer or wine, and dessert. There are several choices for each. We choose the rice with clams, shrimps and pimientos, then grilled veal with fries, and a chocolate mousse cake. This one portion of meal of the day is sufficient for the 2 of us.
We then went back to our hotel changed and met with Cristina. She is a Spaniard who was educated in LA who has formed a company here for facilitating international student exchange. She described the Spanish higher education system and the work her company does. There may be some ways Bo & Cristina can collaborate.
After a little siesta, we met with Pepe and his wife Celia for our flamenco night. The performance didn’t start until 10:30 pm so we hit two tapas bars on the way. There are several well known flamenco places/clubs in Madrid, and the one we went to -- Casa Patas is one of the best known. It’s a small room tightly packed with small tables so maybe about a hundred people can get in. You have to make a reservation in advance. The audience was mostly Spanish, but there were some foreigners too. The performance was amazing -- six musicians and two dancers performed for 1.5 hours with incredible intensity. It’s really impossible to describe. Here is a link to Casa Patas performance http://www.casapatas.com/videos.asp. When we got home at 1 am, we couldn’t open the apartment door so we had to ring the bell. senor Manuel opened the door fully dressed (He locked the door by mistake) and asked us when we were leaving tomorrow. When we told him we were leaving the day after tomorrow, he was very surprised. Evidently, he overbooked so we’ll see how he solves this little problem.

Day 17 -- Madrid

We sleep in in Madrid. It is also nice not having a car and worrying about parking. Madrid has an extensive underground metro. The Royal palace was closed due to a monthly changing of the guard. so we walked. We visited and Egyptian. worship place moved from Egypt to Spain when the Aswan dam was created. Bo tried to do shopping but was frustrated by the inefficiencies - lots of shoppers but only one register with a a line around the block. In order to not take a chance on food, we ate at the same place as yesterday ordering the same thing -- a pimiento salad, roasted chicken and a fantastic dulce de leche cake for dessert. If you order from the menu del dia, you get a salad or appetizer, an entre, a dessert and a wine or beer for a single very reasonable price (9.5 euro in this case).
We also took a walk along the Gran Via, one of thr main streets of Madrid lined with architectural gems of the city. This week is architecture week in Madrid and many of these buildings have been open to the public so we followed the numbers given in our Madrid guide. We also visited an exhibition that proposed 9 very different future visions of Gran Via, including Gran Via as a public entertainment space (el teatro), free enterprise zone, a social network space, an atmospheric space, etc. It was very interesting and the visions were really creative.
After a brief siesta, we took the Metro to the Reyna Sophia museum of modern art and spent a couple of hours there. They have an great collection of Miro, Dali and Picasso and other mostly Spanish artists of the 20th century. The exhibitions are organized both chronologically and thematically, with very good background information in several languages and they include not just paintings, but also photography and films so it is really well done.

Day 16 -- Madrid

We left our great hotel in Toledo ( Whenever you are in Toledo you should stay at Abazara) and drove to Madrid airport. We dropped off the car and took the Metro into the city. We had to change trains twice, but Madrid metro is so well organized and so clearly marked that it was very easy to get to our destination -- the Opera stop. We got to Plaza de Oriente where our hotel is located but could not find it. We asked at a restaurant but to no avail. I asked a delivery truck driver and he produced a handheld and punched in the name and got us the address (Plaza de Oriente#2). It was 50 ft away but no sign. We entered this beautiful large building and they told us the hotel is on floor 3. This hotel (called Posada Real Manuel) is probably the quirkiest place we have stayed in. It is an enormous, old style converted apartment with 7 rooms. Ours overlooks the plaza with a fantastic view of the Royal Palace and the plaza. The owner, an older gentleman senor Manuel presides over everything. He explained the rules of the house to us and gave us 3 keys -- to the front gate, the apartment and our room and we set out to explore. Madrid is a beautiful city. Lots of parks, wide streets and stunning architecture. We walked and walked and walked -- did half of the historical walk suggested by the guidebook, had a very tasty lunch in an old -style bar/restaurant and then went back to the apartment for a little siesta.
In the afternoon my friend Pepe called and we made arrangements to meet at 9:30 pm.
After meeting Pepe, he took us to his favorite Tapas place called La Trucha located near Teatro Espanol. It is an old traditional tapas bar and it was jam packed. We had a few tapas (fish and tortilla Espanola) + a few drinks at the bar standing up. Pepe said that’s how you eat tapas -- standing up. Then we went to another for more drinks, and then we finished it off in an outdoor place in our plaza with a nightcap. The evening finally ended at 12:30.
Pictures: (1) view from our window on the Palacio Real; (2) the building where our hotel is located; (3) Museo de Jamon --- the Spanish are very serious about their ham.

Day 15 -- Toledo

We retrieved our car from the underground car park and paid the $37 fee. Parking has been expensive everywhere. The drive from Salamanca to Toledo was easy on good highways. One short piece was a toll road which cost $10. We looked on Trip Advisor for a hotel with parking this time so our hotel is not in the city center, but across the river high on a hill overlooking the town. The views are spectacular. Toledo is located on a hill, with the Alcazar and the cathedral close to the top. It is a very popular with tourists because of its history, the incredible cathedral and many other spectacular churches. It’s a town marked by three distinctly different cultures --- Muslim, Catholic and Jewish. It is also the city where El Greco lived and painted so the cathedral has a big collection of his paintings, not to mention the museum dedicated to him and his art. The cathedral is really immense and ornate. We were lucky because it wasn’t totally packed with tourists so we were able to get close to everything, but even on this Monday in October, we saw more tour groups and more tourists than any other place we went to.

Day 13 and 14 Salamanca

Leaving Portugal. We had nice food in Portugal - mussels, shrimp, grilled trout in green sauce, local green soup, and young wine, which is called vinho verde. When we left our hotel we would never have gotten out of the city without the GPS. There are no road signs or indications of where the way out is. The drive to Salamanca Spain was all freeway and easy. When we arrived at Salamanca we parked in an underground parking near where we thought our hotel should be. Bo went into a store to ask. A kindly gentleman in yellow pants walked us down to the corner and pointed the way. We found the hotel and checked in. We then walked back to the car park and got our bags and pondered what was the shortest way back to the hotel. The same man in the yellow pants appeared and asked if we were still lost. He showed us the shortcut back. Hours later, far away we were looking for a grocery store and the man in the yellow pants shows up again. This time, he not only pointed the store out to us, but also read us the poems he wrote. He told Bo that he writes poems every day and then sets them to music and sings. He also confessed that he wants to be a psychologist and get a B.A. degree on line. His name turned out to be Angel, very appropriately because he was our guardian angel.
Salamanca is different than any other city we have been to. It has one of the oldest universities in Europe. Founded in 1218 it is one of the premier schools in Europe. The city is mobbed with young people. The main plaza is immense with hundreds of outdoor tables from cafes and thousands of people. The cathedral and university buildings are spectacular. The whole city is built in sandstone, which gives it a golden glow.
We are staying in an apartment hotel a few steps off Plaza Mayor, the main square. It’s pretty big -- two bedrooms, a kitchen combined with living room + bathroom, enough room to spread out and repack.
We rested a bit and went out again around 9 pm. Plaza Mayor was jammed with people. We had sopa castillana and wine in a restaurant called Meson de Cervantes in the beautifully illuminated plaza, and then walked around until after 11 pm. The place was still hopping when we decided to call it a night.
In the middle of the night we woke up with horrible stomach pain and diarrhea. We are suffering at 2 pm the next day.