Most universities in France traditionally have "vacances de Toussaint", a reading week around November 1 (All Saint's Day, or in old fashioned English, All Hallow's Day). What a great opportunity to explore some more of Europe! (and neighbouring countries). I was planning on meeting up with my friend Jen in Spain, and joining us later in Morocco, Jordan. Both are Queen's Commerce students I met my first day in residence (Jen and I also shared a bathroom as "canmates" for all of first year), who are also on exchange. Lyon is about 9 hours from Barcelona by night bus, which was only about 40€. Night buses are a cheap way to travel (plus you save on a night's accommodation) but they are far from comfortable!
I was feeling really sick the last few days I was in Lyon, and spent the my whole first day in Spain sleeping in Jen's apartment while she was at school. I was sad to have to miss an opportunity to explore the city, but fortunately I was coming back in a few days! The next night we took a night bus to Madrid, about 6 hours away. Unfortunately we both assumed it would be leaving from the same station I had arrived at that morning, and only realized our mistake while on the metro to the wrong station. Fortunately, we managed to get seats on a bus an hour later for no extra charge, thanks to Jen's skill at typing what we wanted to say into the translator on her Blackberry so she could show the conductor in Catalán! The road to Madrid has a lot of twists and turns, so we didn't get much sleep. The fact that we were awake didn't stop the guy sitting in front of Jen from trying to pickpocket my backpack while pretending to stretch / yawn, before we called him out. Pickpocketing is incredibly common in Spain, and Barcelona is known as the "pickpocketing capital of the world" with statistics to back it up. We had all of our zippers closed with padlocks or ridiculously complicated knots, which after our experience on the bus I'm really glad we did!
We got to Madrid early the next morning, and thankfully our hostel let us check in soon after that because we both crashed for most of the day. I've used night buses several times but two back-to-back when you're sick is not fun!
We left the hostel late in the afternoon, and went to the 18th century Paseo del Prado neighbourhood. This is a beautiful district with wide, tree-lined boulevards with lots of museums and galleries. The first one we went to was the Museo del Prado, Spain's equivalent of the Hermitage or the Louvre. It holds the largest collection of 12-18th century Spanish paintings, with several masterpieces by Goya and the courtly painter Velázquez. One of the most remarkable works is the Clothed Maja and the Naked Maja (1800) by Goya, a matching set of paintings that were the first to show a naked woman simply for the sake of art, rather than for allegorical reasons. Goya would be later accused of obscenity for this particular piece of art. There are also notable Flemish and Italian collections, and there are several newly renovated and expanded wings.
Museo del Prado (Prado Museum).
Beautiful church next to the Museo del Prado.
Down the street is the contemporary Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, named after the current Queen of Spain. The museum occupies an 18th century former hospital with tasteful glass additions. The museum is full of works by Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, and artists from the Abstract, Pop and Minimalist movements. The highlight is certainly Guernica, Picasso's enormous painting (it covered an entire wall floor-to-cieling) inspired by the bombing (by Nazi pilots flying for the Nationalist air force) of the eponymous town during the Spanish Civil War.
Reina Sofía museum.
We started the next morning with delicious, thick hot chocolate and churros, courtesy of our hostel. Churros are a common breakfast food, kind of like a crueller without the sugar. I really like the hot chocolate, but not such a fan of churros.
We decided to spend the day exploring Old Madrid, which you can see all in one day. The city was founded by the Moors (North African Muslims) in 852 A.D., but didn't become the capital until 1561. Before about that time, modern Spain was divided into several smaller countries, among them Aragón and Castilla. There are still distinct national identities within Spain today, and significant separatist movements exits in regions like Catalonia and Basque Country (ETA being a particularly violent example, claiming responsibility for several recent bombings and attacks). Our third and final day in the city, we went on a fantastic (and free!) guided walking tour, where the guides work on tips only. Lots of cool historical tidbits!
The Puerta del Sol is considered to be the spiritual and geographical heart of Spain. This is were all highway distances are measured from, and where the biggest celebrations were held when Spain won the Soccer World Cup in 2010.
Puerto del Sol is the tourist centre of the city, which is why these cartoon characters are there. A few days before we were there, Spongbob and Minnie Mouse got into a fight - seriously - cartoon characters wrestling in the fountain, the surfs had to come break them up!
Government building in Puerto del Sol. During the Franco years, human rights abuses of political prisoners took place in the basement. It still surprises me to think that Spain was a fascist dictatorship until 1975.
The bear and the strawberry tree, symbols of the city. I can't remember the whole reason why, but our guide said it had something to do with fermented strawberries and frisky bears...
Typical Old Madrid architecture in Puerto del Sol.
Our last day in Madrid, when we arrived at Puerto del Sol there was some type of horse parade going on, with some people in traditional costumes. It was a lot of fun to watch, and you could tell the riders were having a riot. Some were sitting two to a seat or singing a rowdy tune.
Horse parade in Puerto del Sol.
Nearby is the splendid Plaza Mayor, a beautiful 17th century square that for centuries was the centre of bullfights, executions, witch burnings, pageants and trials by the Inquisition. Today it is lined by outdoor restaurants and cafés and hosts markets on Sundays. At the centre of the square is an equestrian statue of Felipe III. A few years after it was built, the square started to have a terrible stench, and it only got worse as the decades went by. Only after an earthquake destroyed the original statue did they realize it was full of hundreds of pidgeon skeletons! The way the statue was built, the empty stomach was connected by a hollow passage to the open mouth of the horse, so birds would fly in, get trapped in the stomach, die and start to rot!
Plaza Mayor.
The new statue in Plaza Mayor, with a horse with a closed mouth!
There's another statue story, about the equestrian statue in front of the Palacio Real (Royal Palace). This particular statue has the horse on it's hind legs, which caused a bit of a physics problem for the builders. You see, the statue kept falling over or snapping in half, and they couldn't figure out why. So, they called in Galileo, the world's most famous mathematician, and he told them to make the back half heavier by putting copper in the legs of the horse. Guess what, it worked!
Equestrian statue, new and improved with re-enforced hind legs!
Palacio Real is the largest palace in Western Europe - it backs onto a a cliff on two sides, so it is a lot larger than it appears with several stories below what you see in the courtyard. The Royal Family currently lives outside the city, although the palace is still used for state functions. The Baroque architecture of the 1734 construction reflects the tastes of the Bourbon dynasty. Some of the more remarkable rooms are the Porcelain Room, with walls covered in porcelain, the dining room and the billiards room.
Jen and I in front of the Palacio Real.
The back side of the palace, on a cliff overlooking acres of woodlands and gardens.
On the palace balcony.
Directly across from the palace is the enormous Nuestra Señora de la Almudena church. Construction started in the 18th century but mañana, mañana (tomorrow, tomorrow).... it was only finished in the 1990s when the pope was coming to visit! This is why the outside of the church is in clearly a much older style than the interior. Mañana, mañana is a good way to describe the more relaxed pace of life foreigners tend notice here, where work fits in around your social life and shops close for several hours in the middle of the afternoon. We even saw cots in the back of a few shops for a mid-afternoon siesta! To compensate, many shops and museums are open until 8 or 9 p.m., and Spaniards have some of the longest work days on average.
Palacio Real (left) and Nuestra Señora de la Almudena church, photographed from Parque del Oeste.
Nuestra Señora de la Almudena church.
Statue of John Paul II outside the church.
Modern interior (check out the ceiling).
This is one of the few places in the world where you can get Christian, Jewish and Muslim monuments in the same photograph. The church is behind a wall built by the Moors in the early Middle Ages, with a Star of David in the centre of the garden in the foreground. Although the forced conversion or exiles of the Inquisition are well known, for centuries all three religions flourished together in Spain.
Moorish architecture on one of the church's doors.
A short walk away, on the other side of the palace gardens, is the beautiful Parque del Oeste and the Templo de Debod. The temple is an actual ancient Egyptian temple, a thank-you present from Egypt for Spain's assistance with numerous archaeological projects. A bit of a shock, seeing a piece of Ancient Egypt in Old Madrid!
Templo de Debod.
Madrileños enjoying the sunset at Parque del Oeste. It overlooks the huge woodland you can see above in the picture from the palace balcony.
View from Parque del Oeste.
I'm pretty sure Jen and I ate tapas every meal for three days, minus breakfast. This is a great culinary tradition! It started when a bartender covered the king's brandy with a piece of jamón ibérico (dried ham), to keep out flies. The modern tapas is a small dish, on a desert- or tea-saucer sized plate, sometimes on top of a piece of bread (this is called tapas toastas). In some restaurants, if you order a beer, they give you a tapas with it for free! You're supposed to have a drink of sangria or beer and a tapas at one restaurant, then move on to 3 or 4 more restaurants. There are plenty of tapas restaurants, sometimes several on the same street, so it's a lot of fun to wander around and you never get too full! It's great for travellers, as you often find restaurant serving sizes are too big and for 2-5€ you can get a tapas that's just the right amount of food. Plus you can stop for a quick, small meal whenever you're hungry. The most adventurous dish I tried had baby eels in it - they were kind of like small grey noodles and were pretty salty. Spanish mealtimes are a bit different than in France or in Canada - lunch is usually from 2-4 pm, and dinner is at around 10. My Spanish teacher at CPE told me many people go to bed at midnight and wake up at 6 everyday. Since she moved to Lyon and started to going to sleep earlier, she hasn't felt any less tired than when she went to bed later in Spain. I guess it's all a matter of getting used to it.
Tapas toastas for lunch: Jamón and marmalade on the left, and chicken and lettuce on the right.
I'm really liking Spanish class, and as an added bonus we get an extra 5% on our final grade if we visit Spain, so technically I'm doing schoolwork here and not just travelling! The Spaniards I've met call Spanish from Spain "Castellano", which is quite different from Mexicano or Colombiano: Castillian c is pronounced "th", while in Latin America it's "c" or "s", like in English. The letter j is also pronounced differently, although I can't spell it out. I've realized my impression of "Spanish" is really "Mexican", probably from watching American TV.
Beautiful turn of the century taverna in the building on the right.
The glassed-in porches are all over the old city, as are the mini-balconies. I also saw this in the older neighbourhoods in Peru, very old-school Spanish! A traveller's observation: a lot of a city's current architecture in the older neighbourhoods dates from its so-called "Golden Age", when there was lots of money for new glamorous construction projects and the rulers wanted to show off their power and dominance!
This is actually the Telecommunications Palace - pretty old-school fancy for the telecom industry!
This is the oldest restaurant in the world, open every day since 1725! Our guide told us that although Ernest Hemingway eat here and the King is a frequent customer, the prices are actually pretty reasonable (but on a student budget I'll still stick to tapas!)
I love the street signs in Madrid! They are tiles painted with whatever it was named after - this one has a painting of Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote.
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