S/V Tavarua

This time around, Madrid is much cooler, European and American travelers are everywhere and the tapas are the same. We found Hotel Moderno that was super quiet, has free WiFi and located just off Plaza Sol. The only weirdness about the place was that two seperate groups of American highschool students were on tour and suffering from jet lag and the realization that pizza in Spain is not really an edible substance.

We did a few tapas crawls and ended up with some extremely challenging servings. The oddest item placed in front of us was: potato chips with smoked oysters on top with oyster oil poured over the chips. Who came up with that?! Beyond the standard cholesterol clogging sausages and chorizos everywhere, the item ordered by the men next to us was just heart stopping: a dinner plate of french fries, fully covered in mayonaise, covered in chopped (runny) fried eggs, covered in slices of sausage and all the oil that a hot sausage can leak. We figure they were examples of future ‘low-end of the life expectancy scale’ in Spain. We did get a few good items that actually made it into the edible category, smoked salmon on freshly toasted bread with olive oil, garlicky potato salad, marinated olives, shrimp cooked in olive oil and red pepper, chorizo sliced on french bread, liver pate on french bread (um, well, not quite good, but very mysterious), fried almonds, sauted mushrooms on french bread, and finally, one fat-free item, a mini-fruit plate of fresh watermelon and kiwis. We decided that between the night hours (10pm to morning), the smokers (everyone, everywhere, all the time), the bar food (see above), and well, of course, the bar drinks… Madrid was shortening our life-expectancy.

Did you know you can buy a particular type of smoked Jamon Iberico for around $190/lbs? No, we didn’t either…

As for daytime events, we only had one rather disturbing and extremely unexpected moment. Sitting ever so relaxed at a breezy cafe along a cobblestoned side street, sipping a lovely cup of espresso, gaily talking about nothing in particutlar as the sun dappled the trees… We noticed a dead pigeon in the middle of the street. This turned us to pondering why we don’t really see more dead pigeons, but we soon returned to our aimless conversation. We then noticed two finches taking notice of the dead pigeon. We ignored them poking at the bird, since that doesn’t go well with coffee. The next thing we hear is a Mercedes rolling ever so slowly down the road, a balloon popping and the girl at the next table gasping and bouncing in her chair with disgust. We turned to the cobblestone street and sure enough, one of the finches had been flattened turning the cobblestone street into a bloody crime scene. That was it for the cafe and us. Two dead birds is our limit.

We had an evening at a YES concert in Barcelona. Never have you seen such an old audience doing the head-banging move in Polo shirts. “Rock on, Dude!!” and “Far out, Man!!” were phrases that kept popping into my psyche as the music (played at a reasonable level) raged out into the dark club. We were privvy to the Soccer opening and closing chants to get the band initially on and, of course, back-on stage, and, of course, back-on-yet-again, and, of course, back-on-just-for-that-one-final-song.

[For the record, this time round features: Anderson, Wakeman, White, Squire, and Howe -- the lineup from "Fragile", "The Yes Album," and "Yessongs" days...]

About 1/3 of the concert was good. The band was playing a bit slow and as Derrell commented, “I think they need new batteries.” Every once in awhile they hit a song really well (”Niiiiiiice, Duuuude!”) and the music just flew off the stage, but neither of us was sure that it made up for the 100+ degree, smoky, dusty, cram packed venue. We weren’t sure if we were in a Finnish sauna with chain smokers or in just pure non-smoker’s hell, we finally decided that it probably was the latter. Also, Barceloneses haven’t discovered pot, but they have discovered cigars, so the smoke was putrid to top it all off.

After a 3+ hour concert, heading out of the sweat soaked pack of 50 year olds, some toting the 48 Euro tie-dye Yes 2003 concert t-shirts that were for sale… (okay, there were a number of younger converts of Yes music present.. about 1/4 of the crowd.. many toting the 20 Euro non-tie-dye shirts)… anyhow, the Metro system was up, functioning and full of traffic at 1 am. Just the time as the party crowd of Barcelona gets ramped up to go out in the evening.
The weather still felt 90 degrees out when we hit the streets. Seems Europe is having a long heat wave this summer. The Matterhorn cracked due to the heat, Italy is considering a national emergency due to not having high enough water in the northern rivers to cool their power plants, Germany has a half full river making the barges travel with half full loads… and well, we are just sweating. You sort of get used to it, but changing from dry to humid to dry regions throws a kink into your climastat. Sounds like we have another week of extremely hot weather to look forward to…

Hmm…. Where is that bottle of Perrier? By the way, Spain bottled water sucks. The mineral water has 1000 mg of salt per liter. Dang, you should be aiming for only 1500 mg of salt per day. Okay, so we try water without gas… now we have a huge amount of bicarbonates in the water. It sort of gives you the impression of gargling with baking soda. We finally searched out the Evian and Perrier labels in the grocery stores and started checking all the mineral contents on the bottles. And you would have thought water was just water? Italy and France - yea, sure; Spain - nope, it is an herbal medicine. Go figure.

We took a time warp back to the late 1800´s today and viewed Antonio Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia Church and Casa Mila Apartments after strolling along the grid of octagonal intersection streets full of original 1800’s facades. Derrell should have pulled out a top hat, buttoned jacket and cane for the stroll.

Gaudi had one wavy, curvy set of architectural plans in his head. The half of the cathedral that was finished has wonderful branching pillars, the other half is a complex Legos set. It spooked me to look up considering the amount of stone that was overhead, although it definitely evoked the tree canopy reaching into heaven feeling he had as a goal. They figure they’ll have the church complete in about 50 years. So finally after seeing so many churches and being in awe of the construction required to build such beasts, we were able to walk through an intimidatingly complex work-in-progress and see the advancement from hand drawings with calculations to computer generated CAD drawings that recheck the original weight bearing estimates. Cool.

The apartment complex that we wandered through was an organic structure with no straight lines. It sort of rolls, grows and boils out and around you. Art Nouveau in all its sumptuous glory. It really must have been an optimistic time those decades. Electricity, phones, hot running water, gas stoves, typewriters, refrigerators, photography, cinema, automobiles, trams, street lighting… all being invented, announced and rolled out into your own neighborhood.

Okay, so they didn’t have air conditioning yet. We’ll stick with this decade. We are finally returning to normal operating temperatures. The weather heated up a bit. So, when we missed finding a spot to stroll in the shade, we turned into a puddle. To just think… having to live in an era without a proliferation of Haagen-Das, Ben & Jerry’s and gelato cafes along the prominades… it actually must have been rather primitive time… optimism, bah!… gelato, woo-hoo!

The weather is cooler, skies are completely clear. The Las Ramblas is shady under the trees with thousands of tourists strolling around aimlessly looking at the street shows and shopping.

We checked out the Picasso Museum today. It has art from when Picasso was 11 years old and into realism to the end when he invented Cubism and played with Pointilism and some other ism-y things. Seems he really could draw, and one point in his life he actually could arrange facial features in the correct order. His art is still rather bizarre, even with the insight into the progression he made over the years. I think he must have been inspired by a flounder. That goes to show they eat way too much fish in Spain.

Barcelona is seeming very mellow after Ibiza. And that is a pleasant thing. We are just wandering and checking out the old Roman alleyways. Watched an hour of a Spanish soap opera on tv during siesta today. The show came complete with wacky slapstick, overacting, tears, kisses and domestic commercials (multiple floor cleaner, dish detergent, yogurt, soda, suntan lotion, Oscar Meyer chicken and cheese patties, and clothes detergent ads).

Thinking of ads, brings to mind one huge 15′ banner we walked by today.. a full frontal nude of a man and a woman advertising discounted clothes. You really don’t get the full monty on billboards in America. It sort of makes you do a double-take each time you walk by it. Well, especially with everything positioned at eye level.

The EasyInternet cafe is packed with people. It is getting hard to find a terminal in Barcelona. This was our third try. They have another cafe with 600 terminals, this one only 150. Think there may be something to this Internet idea of Gore’s, eh?

Okay, you can only go out 5 nights and see sunrise on 4 of them until you wear out. Well, that’s getting old for you.

We both had our fill of thump-thump-thump by the time we left. The fill included a good night at Space, a dreary leave early (3 am) evening at the overly bright and gaudy Es Paradisio (very unclubby), a second visit to Pachas (this time Darren Emerson thumped), and finally a loud evening at Priviledge’s Manumission Show complete with jewel theft theatrics, trapeze, 50 show girls, and fire (their claim to fame, World’s Largest Club… and it did look big including a swimming pool in the center).

Somehow at the end of all this you sort of start dreaming thump-thump-thump and you know deep in your musical soul that it is definitely time to clear off the island. Derrell figured that he probably would be ready for more beats at some point and scoured the shops for a good set of CDs.

Ibiza does rotate your sleep hours around. We suffered greatly while trying to wake up at 10 am to get to the airport. It felt like the middle of the night. We had another ‘mistake of the trip’ in this dazed state. Looking slightly crankily at the Air Europa check-in counter, we were informed that our tickets were for the next afternoon, not today. Bah! Over to the Air Europa ticket office.. and for the wonderful change fee and seat availability difference cost (which equaled the same original price of the tickets), the disgustingly cheerful girl was glad to inform us that we were really very lucky (smile, smile) and we could pay the fees and take the flight. With the Spanish efficiency in full swing, we headed back over to the check-in counter which was now closed and stood there for 15 minutes while the check-in clerk chatted on the phone about how to process our tickets. We were suprised they held the plane for us. The poor saps who arrived late at the exact same time in that closed counter as we did (and looking much worse for wear) didn’t make it on the plane. Spain moves at its own pace.

Out on the island of Ibiza for a week. It goes something like this:

Thump-thump-thump
Beach-beach-beach
Thump-thump-thump
Beach-beach-beach

The weather is good. The beaches okay. The crowd all over the age charts. High heels are in abundance. The gay crowd in force, only a few in heels. Thin is in. Tan is in. MTV fashion is in. I stand out a bit, as usual. Adds some texture to the crowd, I say. Nothing like a bit of people contrast to help show off those tans.

So far the highlight has been Nick Warren at the 30th anniversary party at Pacha’s. Thump-thump-thump. Great people, good fun.

The clubs don’t fill up until 3 am and then they let out around 6 am, but if you still have stamina, you can continue onto the morning clubs from 8 am to 5 pm. We haven’t lasted that long yet, but we have caught a fine sunrise. Shops, restaurants and kiosks were closing down at 3 am last night. They seem to stay closed until about 5 pm or later. This is a night owl’s paradise. Well, for those night owls that like sleeping on the beach, that is.

It sort of has a jet lag feel to it for us. This would be a perfect party spot coming directly from the States, though. You’d be on the correct sleep schedule. Thump-thump-thump. (Sort of comes out of every shop, restaurant, bar and internet cafe in this town.) Thump-thump-thump.

We are in museum heaven. We did the triad of Madrid museums yesterday and today. We stood in awe for a full 6 1/2 hours in the Prado looking over 1400-1600’s paintings. The audioguide gave fantastic coverage of major paintings. The museum is the best presentation of art that we’ve ever seen. We absolutely loved this museum. I suppose we must have to stay standing for over 6 hours? The Rubens were immense. The Bosch painting of heaven, earth and hell was completely out of place for the century and stunning to contemplate. He had hot pink castles, Dr. Suess creatures and his signature people riding flying fish, a far cry from the serious portraits that were the fashion of the time. (Okay, so he did live in Amsterdam.) The temporary specialty exhibit was Titian (Tiazano). We spent an hour and a half just covering those paintings. Throughout the museum we saw how the masters developed and exchanged techniques, sounded like Italy was a hoppin’ art school. You could see lines of perspective change, texture effects develop, classical features turn into realism and lighting moving from ambient to directional to natural outdoor lighting. Dang! This museum alone makes Madrid a worthy destination.
The other two museums we checked out today:
The Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.. an exercise in understanding why modern art gets a bad rap. The place held many paintings of they style “Black Square on White Background”. The fame of the place goes to the collection of Picasso, Miro and a minor handful of Dali paintings. Yawn. With those you really need to be a fan of squiggles and white canvas. The big attraction is more a political historic center for the museum, Guernica by Picasso. This was Picasso’s rendition of the Nazi bombing on the Basque town agreed to by the evil Franco that sat in the NY Museum of Modern Art until Spain became a democracy, all per Picasso’s request. 5 years after Franco bit the big one, the painting was returned to Spain. You can just feel the Spanish patriotism in the room when you look at the Spainards looking at the black outlined cross-eyed horse looking upside down back at them. It is a cool piece of symbolism. Although, the black squares in the museum are still a big crock of Bauhaus if you ask me. Derrell says that the problem might be that we just didn’t have the word, “compositionally” in our working vocabularies…
The Museo Thytssen-Bornemisza made up for the modern art museum. It has a fanstastic room of 20th century art, including Kandinsky, Leger and Klee. Squiggles that I can appreciate. It had spare glowing Rubens, and a fanstastic overly dramatic Caravaggio. We got more educated with seeing Monet, Van Gough and Renoir… all good when you stand back and squint heavily. And I still don’t like El Greco, no matter how many of his paintings I see.
We are on an art high, but if you offered us tickets to the Louvre tomorrow, we’d probably turn you down… well… maybe.
We are left with the standard modern art reaction. Derrell is convinced he could make a dime selling random street items to the Reina Sofia museum. Hopefully, that idea will quickly pass. I’d have to wax philosophical about the merits of a rusty steel bar leaning against a white wall. I wonder if we will ever get an appreciation for that damn Bauhaus influence?

Just a quick note, since the spacebar on this keyboard is about as responsive as a tapas bartender when you want your bill. We’ve wandered through the 3rd grandest palace in Europe, and our summary is that the royals had absolutely no ability to put color schemes together. Bright yellow and red curtains, paired with mauve painted ceilings, over marble brown, beige and maroon flooring. Throw in a few ornate pieces of furniture and clocks that don’t match, and you get the thought “Wow! Were the royals color blind, or too inbred to retain any aesthetics?!” The palace was grand in a huge architectural sense, the Middle East peace treaty from 1991 and the joining of the EU in the 1980’s was signed here, and they did have very expensive historical pieces of furniture, table settings and musical instruments… but, somehow it was a relief to get back outside and away from the rocco-maniac clashing interiors. Yeech.
Today we hit the Museum of Americas and saw an odd layout of Mayan and Inca artifacts. The museum was newly redesigned and for some weird reason they believed organizing the pieces due to religion, culture, marriage and some other abstract nonsense was a good idea. This means we just viewed in the most confusing manner possible a mix of pieces from Venezuela, Columbia, Peru, Costa Rica, Pacific Northwest, Arizona and Mexico under each of the pretold headings throughly mixed across mish-mash of centuries. It sort of was like a pop quiz when you walked up to a display: 1) Can you identify the culture? 2) Is it an AD or BC piece? 3) Why do you think it belongs in the ‘muerto’ case, since there is no placard explaining such?
The temperature is a toasty 98 degrees today, so we headed over to a second museum, an Academy of Art to hang out in the air conditioning. They had a number of paintings and statues that were fascinating. I particularly liked a painting of lemons in the 16th century that looked like a photograph when you stood 10 feet back from it. Just think… to make a study of lemons for the length of time that it must have taken to paint that picture. That guy must have been a world class meditation expert, and a had a fine appreciation of fruit. I was very impressed. Now, Goya on the otherhand, also had a number of paintings in the museum. His claim to fame is being a court hired portrait artist. His other claim is that he was able to portray the patriarchy in quite an unflattering way and still get commissions from the court. They would fit well in the palace we saw yesterday, though.
Derrell managed to get too much smoke from too many Spaniards during the late cafe hours and turned it into a cold. He has a nice long rant about too much smoking in Spain. It includes handing out free packs of cigarettes at the bars by the equivalent of the Budweiser girls. And a nice rant including the habit of lighting up while waiting for your food, including the finale of cigarettes at the end of your meal.. all expressly exhaled in his direction. It isn’t good to have smoke allergies in Spain.
All is good otherwise, we landed a good room at the Hotel Regente. The food is taking some effort to avoid the tourist traps. Although a highlight (which also made us swear off meat for a bit) was a tapas bar called the Museum of Jamon, sausages abound here.. and the chorizo grilled sandwich is fantasitic and way too rich… good, but one bite over the sausage line. It’s back to some low fat vegetarian fare for a few days.

A new mode of transportation today… we decided we needed more mobility and rented a car in Salamanca. It is a nice change from buses and trains. Controling the radio is a true joy in life, as is controling the the ambient temperature.
We drove through Avila and saw a finely restored wall surrounding the city from around 1200 AD. Made it through an intersection that had signs pointing down each road stating that Segovia was in every direction. Okay, we had to pause the car for a bit to contemplate the absurdity of such an intersection, but we finally figured it out… something equivalent to the U.S. business route versus rural route versus secondary rural route versus highway route (back the way we had just come).
With perfect climate control at our fingertips, we contemplated the horizon and how peaceful the countryside looks. Derrell pointed out that Spain has a ‘no billboards’ law. Well, with the exception of some big black cutout bulls that measure half as high as a radio tower (and hail from the days of the cement Sinclair dinasaurs), the horizons are clear.
We dropped into Segovia to stay for the night and just returned from checking out the restored Alcazar castle. It has a Disney palace quality and local rumor has it that it was the basis for the Disney castle. Not a true rumor mind you, but you get the idea of what the place looks like from the outside. (Bavaria does a better Disney castle, though… and I’d say that has a better basis for the Disney palace model rumor.) Inside, the Alcazar has a full mix of Moorish-Moroccan decoration interspersed with additions from later mideval times, and is littered with suits of armor (very short people back then).
The real Kodak Photo Op of the town is the Roman aqueduct built around 50 BC that was in use until the 1940’s. It has 160+ arches and is over 90 feet tall, all built without any mortar and looks to be in great shape. We are thoroughly impressed. If you weren’t a slave, it would be a good thing to live in Ceasar’s time. You’d get fresh running water, entertainment centers and fine statuary, quite the town upgrades: “The Sims would be happy.”
Segovia has stages set up all over town and musicians were tuning up just before we hit the Internet cafe, so it looks like it will be a fine Spanish evening. During our wanders through the town, we ran across a couple getting rice thrown at them, but couldn’t decide what the moment was. There were not enough people around to conclude it was a wedding ceremony… maybe an engagement? It was gaining much attention from the musicians and passerbys though, and she was in a white dress… hmm. In fine contemplation of this event and also of seeing how we could possibly survive until a 9 PM dinner, we found a good pastry shop and had a unique sweet consisting of a layer of thin crisp pastry with a thin layer of toasted pine nuts and carmalized sugar. Didn’t think pine nuts could be involved in pastry masterpieces, but we can now authoritatively say that “Yes, your common garden squirrel has an angle on the pastry business.”