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I am holding off on creating entries on Worldisround for pictures from my trip until the future status of that site is determined.

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Highlights

On My Way

Thursday April 17 -

This trip began a lot like my last two trips to Europe.  Same nine-hour overnight flight from Seattle to Copenhagen.  SAS Airlines has a nice Economy Extra class.  Extra legroom and nice amenities without all the fuss of First Class, so once again I chose it for my ocean-crossing flights.  And it departs in the evening, so I got a full day of work in before leaving, saving a vacation day for later use.  

Nothing unusual to report.  I did my best to rest, but the only time I got dozy enough that I thought I might actually fall asleep, a trio of nearby passengers decided to ignore the fact that lights were out and everyone around them was trying to sleep and had a rather loud conversation.  I don't get how clueless some people can be.

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Friday April 18 -

Unlike my last two trips to Europe, this was mostly a full travel day.  Well, at least of sorts.  Last year my layover in Copenhagen was so short that my suitcase missed the flight to Berlin.  This year I had a scheduled seven-hour layover in Copenhagen waiting for my flight to Madrid.  Given some posted departures with other airlines, and I think my travel agent may have kept me on a SAS partner for this leg of the flight when I perhaps could have taken another airlines with a shorter layover.  

Early in the evening, a delay of more than an hour was posted for my flight.  As a result, I didn't get into Madrid until just about 1AM.

Taxi to the hotel.  Check in.  I was supposed to be able to pick up some tour information especially regarding tomorrow morning's scheduled departure times at the front desk.  Alas, nothing was waiting for me, and the folks at the front desk didn't have any information.  Up to my room.

I repacked some stuff for tomorrow and then headed for bed at 2AM.  The best information I had suggested that I needed to get up by 7AM, and after all the travel and lack of sleep, I was dead tired.

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Spain - Toledo, Salamanca

Saturday April 19 -

For the first half of my trip, I hooked up with Insight Vacations' "Treasures of Spain, Portugal and Morocco" tour.  It is listed as an 18-day tour starting with Thursday's U.S. departure, so technically today was already Day #3, even though it is the first formal day of our sightseeing.  I have very mixed opinions of guided tours, given my past experiences, but I wanted a guided tour for my Morocco visit on this trip, and this tour covers a number of sites in southern Spain that I wanted to see - and would have had to make a mix of travel arrangements to accommodate - so it seemed like a reasonable choice.  And because it ends in Madrid and skips Barcelona altogether, I figured I could get my desired time in both of those cities on my own.

After a somewhat confused start to the day - I brought my suitcase down to the bus at the designated time only to find out that they pick them up from outside the room - things settled in and our group of 38 plus guide plus driver hit the road.  We worked our way through Madrid's city center, so I got my first look at the area where I'll be touring in a couple weeks.  We finally hit the highway and passed through the countryside south of Madrid.  The "La Mancha" area, where Don Quixote tilted at windmills.  No sign of the windmills today, but we'd see them on our way back into Madrid at the end of the trip.  The countryside along this part of our route was mostly a greenish plain dotted by small towns and compact cities.

Toledo was immediately recognizable - at least from the description of it, since I'd never actually seen it before.  The area gets more rugged as we approached the city, which is located on top of a large outcropping of rock.  Strategically located for its views in every direction and surrounded by the Tagus River on three sides, the hilltop city includes the large Alcázar and some large steeples in its skyline.

We stopped across the Tagus River from the city to get a good postcard view of Toledo.  I even spotted a Roman ruins site near the river.  Then we headed into the city.

Once the capital of Visigothic Spain, at various times it was home to Romans, Visigoths, Arabs, Jews and Christians.  It thrived under Moorish rule as a center of both art and science.  Christian, Jew and Moslem co-existed in the city reasonably well for centuries, until Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews in 1492; the Moslems were expelled a decade later.  

Among its claims to fame are Toledo's production of decorated swords and other bladed weapons, and for its damasquinado (damascene work), where fine threads of gold, silver or other metals are inlaid against a black steel background in elaborate patterns.  Our first stop was at an artisan shop where we watched a man doing damascene work.

I rarely buy souvenirs this early in the trip, but I decided on a sample of damasquinado.  About the same size as the petit-point souvenir I bought in Austria last year, it highlights a local custom.  With the strong association with Toledo, it met my usual criteria for non-Xmas ornament souvenirs - local, representative, small.

Our bus then took us into the heart of the city, where we were dropped off at Plaza Mayor.  It had been raining off and on during our drive down to Toledo, but the skies were merely overcast at this point.  However, the steep cobblestone streets were wet and slick.  I don't walk well on slick roads; one of the older members of the group slipped and fell.  That made for somewhat slow going as we explored the city for awhile on foot.

We took a kind of roundabout route to the cathedral.  Catedral de Toledo is considered to be one of the greatest gothic cathedrals.  Built between 1226 and 1493, a number of historical events took place here, and my guidebook lists a number of things inside that are worth seeing.  Except after we stood in front of the cathedral for several minutes listening to our local guide tell us about them, we found out that our tour did not include actually going in to see any of it.  

We then worked our way over to Iglesia de Santo Tomé, a 14th-century church in the old Jewish quarter famous primarily as home to the El Greco painting The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, which I thought was a quite fascinating painting.  El Greco had lived in Toledo, and there is a museum there about him, and some of his other works are found elsewhere in town, including some paintings inside the cathedral.

We did check out the painting in Santo Tomé and then slowly made our way back to Plaza Mayor.  Although by being at Santo Tomé we were within a couple blocks of a monastery and two historical synagogues, and the city's Alcázar was just a couple blocks from Plaza Mayor - all highlighted in my travel guidebook - none of these were covered in our guided tour, even though one of the synagogues was supposed to be.   We were given 45 minutes on our own for lunch and to spend how we wanted.  I grabbed a quick lunch at McDonalds - no lingering at some sidewalk cafe - and then targeted the Alcázar, although it had been substantially rebuilt after a 70-day siege during the Spanish Civil War.

And that was it for Toledo.  A decidedly underwhelming of a visit after looking forward to it for so long.  I'd learn pretty quickly that Insight's sightseeing would often be this superficial, and that we would routinely skip obvious sites that would normally be on the agenda of most visitors to the cities we stopped in.

Our target for the end of the day was Salamanca, where we were to get an orientation tour, have dinner and spend the night.

Our route to Salamanca took us over the Sierra de Gredos mountains and through Avila, one of my Madrid day trip targets.  We stopped for a few distant photos of the walled city from an overlook but didn't do any other sightseeing there, in spite of the fact that our brochure promised an "orientation tour" in Avila.

With the coolish temperatures and on and off cloudbursts alternating with bright sunshine, our guided decided to postpone our orientation walk of the Salamanca city center until the morning.  So when we settled into the hotel at about 5PM, I took advantage of the break in the rain to go ahead and explore the town on my own.  I managed to time my visit inside the Catedral de Salamanca with a short-cloudburst, too, so I stayed dry.

My first stop was Plaza Mayor, the main town square.  Like the main piazza in Bologna, it functions as a community meeting place.  This one is completely surrounded by buildings featuring baroque architecture.  Quite pretty with the sun out.  My guidebook suggests that it s the most beautiful public plaza in Spain.  I would say that it certainly ranks among the top plazas that I saw.

The city's main highlight is the Catedral de Salamanca, actually two cathedrals in one.  The newer cathedral, begun in 1513AD, mixes Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque, whereas the older one, which dates back to the 12th century, is Romanesque.  

Other sites include Iglesia-Convento San Esteban, Palacio de Anaya, Torre de Claverro, and some buildings associated with the university.  Iglesia de San Martin was interesting for the storks nested in its towers.

There aren't a lot of highlighted sites to see in Salamanca, so my 2 1/2 hour walk covered most of them, and certainly in more detail than I would have if I were with the group.  I got back to the hotel at about 8PM, got cleaned up, and joined the tour group for one of our included dinners.  All well and good - it is a nice group of people, after all - but except for the hotel staff, the only people in the dining room were the people from our group.  I'd really rather go out and dine with the locals when I'm exploring foreign countries, even if it is just McDonalds.

8:30PM is not an unusual dinner time by Spanish custom, but it was late for my stomach.  And the fact that it didn't end until 10PM didn't leave much time for journals and photo cleanup before bedtime.  Tomorrow morning's wakeup call was scheduled for 7AM.

Portugal - Fátima, Lisbon

Sunday April 20 -

Had I been traveling on my own, I would have skipped Portugal on this trip.  After my 28-day Germany trip last year, I had wanted something a bit shorter this year.  But I ended up with two nights in Lisbon on this tour, and I didn't want to trim anything off of my Madrid and Barcelona stays, so I ended up with 28 days again this year.  Of course it does give me one more country that I can now say that I've been to.

We got off to an 8:30AM start, but only as far as the Salamanca city center.  The introductory tour that had been originally scheduled for last night took the first hour of the day, at least for those folks who wanted to take it.  They were going to hit a couple of the stops I made yesterday, and it was raining lightly, so I decided to stay on the bus with a few folks who took a truncated introductory tour last night.  Folks who took the truncated tour last night came back saying that they didn't see anything new this morning, so I didn't miss anything.  Especially since I already got a lot of sunny photos from my excursion yesterday.

Beyond that, today was primarily a driving day as we made our way to Lisbon.  We had one sightseeing stop along the way.  In May 1917, three Portuguese peasant children were tending to their sheep in the parish of Fátima when they claimed to have a vision of "a Lady more brilliant than the sun", who was holding a white rosary.  The apparition reappeared for five consecutive months, the last time reportedly with 70,000 people present.  At the last visit, she claimed to be the "Lady of the Rosary" and that a chapel should be built there in her honor.  Christians have been making pilgrimages to Fátima ever since.  

The site has been developed to accommodate the pilgrims.  The Chapel of Apparitions now stands where Our Lady first appeared, and a basilica and church, several chapels, sculptures and related sites have been built there.  Annual pilgrimages can draw a million people (Portugal's total population is about 10 million) to the village of 8,000 people.

One of the first things visitors encounter is a place to buy candles or wax shapes of children and body parts.  Some candles were several feet long.  I'm used to seeing the candle-lighting in the various cathedrals that I visit, but nothing like the 3-foot candles I saw here.  The wax shapes would be thrown into flames to be melted, presumably with accompanying prayer.  I must admit that as an outsider to these rituals (throwing a wax child into a fire?), it's hard for me to relate to this sacrifice of wax.  But if it gives pilgrims comfort or inspires them to better things, there's certainly no harm in it.  On the other hand, when I saw some folks shove their way through the crowd of pilgrims so that they could light their own candles, I couldn't help but wonder which of their actions that they think God will notice.

We had plenty of time to tour the chapels, the basilica, and other buildings at the site, to explore the grounds, and to head into the nearby city center to get lunch - and souvenirs at any of a number of shops targeting the tourists.

After that, it was off to Lisbon.  We got to the hotel at 4:30PM, just as another cloudburst hit.  It didn't last long, though, and I was in a taxi to the city center shortly after 5PM.  I had a list of sites in the Alfama neighborhood (except for Castelo de São Jorge - the Castle of St. George -, which was listed as part of the itinerary for tomorrow's guided tour), and managed to hit them all - and more - although I was losing daylight towards the end of my explorations.  

Alfama is Lisbon's oldest neighborhood, and it existed under Moorish rule for the first 400 years of its existence.  It is built on a hillside, and like medinas it has a jumbled mix of streets, narrow sidewalks, laundry hanging out the windows.  It has a lot of character, and when the sun is out it is colorful to see.  In fact, among its key features are a number of miradouros, or viewing points, providing some great views of the neighborhood and of the city itself.

I took the taxi to Largo da Graça, site of Igreja da Graça and a miradouro.  I figured (correctly) that this would be the highest elevation point on my planned walk around the city, so that made it as good a starting point as any.  The church itself is pretty but unexceptional, worth a look if you haven't seen many old churches, but the miradouro is its primary attraction for tourists.

My next stop was São Vicente de Fora church and monastery, located just a few blocks from Igreja da Graça.  It was founded in 1147AD outside of what was then the city walls, built on the burial sites of earlier crusaders.  It was reconstructed in the early 1600s, and the main dome had to be rebuilt after it collapsed on worshippers during a 1755 earthquake that destroyed 85% of Lisbon and killed upwards of 90,000 people.  The Bragança Mausoleum contains the marble tombs of the former rulers of Portugal, but my late start didn't give me time to tour it.

A few more blocks to the east, I reached the Panteão Nacional de Santa Engracia.  This church was named the national pantheon in 1916 and thus it contains the tombs of and memorials to a large assortment of Portuguese notables, from presidents to fadistas (fado singers), explorers to artists.  The church was originally commissioned in 1568 but work on it didn't begin until 1683 - apparently it is hard to line up a good contractor in Lisbon.  Work on it continued after the 1712 death of its architect, but there was a setback that resulted from the 1755 earthquake, which partially destroyed the church.  But the dome was completed and the church finished by 1966, only 398 years after it was commissioned.  Unfortunately it was closed by the time I got there, so I only got a look at it from the outside.  Its gleaming white dome stands out in the Lisbon skyline, and it shows up on postcards and in just about everything that touts Lisbon's sightseeing highlights - except of course Insight's "in depth" tour of Lisbon.  

From there I took a walk through the Alfama neighborhood, making my way towards Catedral Sé.  I chose a route that would hit a few of the city's miradouros because the late day sun was catching the hillside buildings, creating a number of postcard views of the city.  Although Lisbon hadn't been in my plans, I was enjoying my walk, and I was interested in what I was seeing, so I was quite glad that we made the swing through the city on this trip.

I checked out the site of the ruins of a Roman theatre that had been unearthed during some urban renewal.  The 5000-seat theatre originally had been built at the time of Caesar Augustus and expanded during Nero's rule, surviving until the empire collapsed.  At that point many of its stones were used in construction elsewhere in the city.  What is left of the ruins are fenced off and a shelter was built over them, but it was possible to pick up a few good shots of the site.  There's a museum that provides more information on the ruins, but it was closed for the day.

My last targeted sightseeing stop in Alfama was the Sé Cathedral.  After King Afonso defeated the Moors after 1147's Siege of Lisbon, he decided to celebrate his victory by building this Romanesque cathedral on the site of the Moors' primary mosque.  It was an interesting if somewhat spartan cathedral, but with a service underway my exploration of the interior was pretty limited.

Time to find some place for dinner.  I began heading west and was walking through the Baixa neighborhood before I realized it.  So I decided to check out the waterfront, where I unexpectedly found the large plaza, Praça do Comércio, which featured its own palaces.  The Portuguese king moved to a palace here from Castelo de Sao Jorge in the 17th century (leading to the decline and ruin of the castelo), but that royal palace was destroyed in the 1755 earthquake.  Praça do Comércio continued to be an unlucky location for Portuguese royalty when anarchists assassinated King Carlos I and his son here in 1908, bringing about the end of the monarchy.

The plaza also fronts the Tagus River.  The small stream that surrounded Toledo on three sides is miles wide this close to the ocean, pretty amazing for a relatively short river, but I suspect that at this point along its path, the Tagus is a lot more ocean than river.  I had some decent views of Cristo Rei, the 90-feet tall statue of Christ the King situated on a hilltop across the river that was paid for by Portuguese women thankful for staying out of World War II.  I also could see the resemblance between Lisbon's Tagus-spanning Ponte 25 de Abril bridge and San Francisco's Golden Gate from this angle.

The Arco da Rua Augusta connects the plaza to Rua Augusta, a pedestrian mall that runs through the heart of Baixa.  Although it was lined with retail outlets, it was late enough on a Sunday evening that most places were closed.  I got a pepper steak dinner at a sidewalk restaurant here.  Good, but nothing special.  By the time I finished, it was dark out.  I noticed that the castelo above the city was illuminated, so I went on a nighttime photo walk as I looked for the best angle from which I could get a photo of it.

Almost immediately I came across the Elevador de Santa Justa, an elevator that reportedly would make it a whole lot easier to get up to Bairro Alto, the old hilltop neighborhood that I would explore tomorrow.  I also found a couple more plazas, one of which gave me the view of Castelo de São Jorge that I was looking for.

After that it was back to the hotel.  We gained an hour crossing into Portugal, but we'd lose it on our way out of the country, so I figured I wouldn't try too hard to get used to the time zone change.

Two days into the trip, and I've already personalized the group tour a lot with my own Salamanca and Lisbon/Alfama sightseeing.

Portugal - Lisbon, Cascais, Sintra

Monday April 21 -

Today provided examples of the best and worst of day trip-type bus tours.  Surprisingly, we had the same local guide for both.  

The only scheduled activity for our bus group today was an "in-depth" city sightseeing tour.  The tour description identified four specific places that our guide would "show" us, including Castelo de São Jorge and three sites in Belém.  The castle was my top Lisbon site to see, but I skipped it yesterday knowing that it was listed in the tour brochure.  

What we did was drive around town for awhile, and our guide mostly pointed out sites to look at while the bus was moving.  And most of them were on the left side of the bus; I was sitting on the right.  At one point we did stop to look at a leftward view of a park.  But instead of letting us get out for five minutes for photos, the guide talked in the bus for about five minutes.  And as with my Budapest day trip last year, what she had to say was little more than the basics found in any typical tourist guidebook.

We finally got off the bus in Alfama - at the bottom of the hill - and spent about 20 minutes taking a walk around a block while she talked.  I didn't mind the overlap with my walk yesterday, as it was a different block than the many blocks where I had walked.  But that turned out to be it for Alfama.  Many of Lisbon's key tourist destinations, including the castle, cathedral and national pantheon, are in that part of town, and we didn't visit any of them.  The castle in fact was the first item listed on the itinerary, but I guess that her pointing it out from a distance (on the left, of course) was all of the castle that she intended to show us.  Spending 20 minutes to see how the locals hang their laundry outside to dry is apparently Insight's idea of a Portuguese treasure.

We did make all three stops in Belém that were advertised, although our local guide made it sound like she was doing us a favor by stopping at one of them.  The rather ornate Torre de Belém (the Belém Tower) was built in 1515 as a watchtower to help protect Lisbon's harbor.  The Padrão dos Descobrimentos (Monument to the Discoveries) was designed in 1960, the 500th anniversary of the death of Prince Henry the Navigator.  It has a boat-like look to it, with a sculpture featuring the prince leading a number of Portuguese navigators and other national heroes.  Nearby is a sculpture of the plane used by the Portuguese aviators who made the first flight across the south Atlantic.  The Mosteiro dos Jerónimos (St. Jerome Monastery) was built on the site of a chapel where explorer Vasco da Gama and his crew prayed before sailing.  Today it is the final resting place of da Gama, although we didn't see it because the site is closed on Mondays (something Insight knows because today's activities always take place on Mondays when they run this tour).

That was the end of our tour.  Given how we covered the main part of the city, and I was glad that I saw what I did last evening.  I also made adjustments to my plans for this evening so that I could  see the castle.

We had an afternoon tour option to visit a couple coastal towns just to the west of Lisbon.  As we were already in the west end of town, and because only a few people in the group were skipping it, they were sent back to the hotel or to the city center in taxis.

The rest of us hit the road for the resort town of Cascais.  Once a coastal fishing village - and the importance that fishing continues to hold was still quite evident - Cascais is now a destination for well-to-do types as well as city beach-goers.  We got a running spiel from our guide during the drive over there, but once we were dropped off we had 1 1/2 hours to spend any way we wanted.  I got a quick lunch and then headed over to the waterfront.  I first headed west to the town's citadel, which once had a strategic position overlooking the mouth of the Tagus River, the main river in Portugal and a key part of the city's harbor activity.  A sign on the side of the structure seemed to suggest that it dated back to 1370, although I don't read Portuguese.

I then followed the waterfront back to the center of town until I reached the commercial center and a nearby residential neighborhood.  I explored the area and hunted down a Diet Coke as I filled out the remaining time of our visit.

Next we drove towards the village of Sintra, taking a back roads route to get there.  One of the great advantages of this route was that we got to stop for a view of Cabo Raso, the westernmost point of continental Europe, and thus the continent's closest point to the Americas.

Sintra was quite the contrast to Cascais.  Located on a hilltop and surrounded by some higher mountains, it is home to a few castles.  In the village itself is the Palácio Nacional de Sintra, which originated in the 13th century.  An unusual feature of this castle is its pair of cone-like chimneys.  The square in front of that palace provides a great view of the ruins of the Castelo dos Mouros, an ancient Moorish castle higher up the mountain.  If that weren't enough, we'd get a glimpse of a third castle, this one featuring the Bavarian excesses of Ludwig II, courtesy of a German who married a Portuguese princess.  We were given an hour in Sintra, long enough for a little photo walk and the chance to pick up a Portuguese souvenir.

Then it was back to Lisbon.  We were due back at the hotel at 4:30PM.  Probably due more to the guide's needs than our tour group.  Several people had signed up for an evening dinner and fado, and thus found themselves with a few hours to kill before leaving for that activity.  

As for me, I hit the bathroom and then caught a taxi to Castelo de São Jorge.  Construction at the castle site dates back to 138BC, and it eventually became part of a Christian settlement.  In 711AD, the Moors took over the place, and remained in control until the Siege of Lisbon in 1147.  King Afonso turned it into a royal residence, although it was left to fall into ruins in the 17th century.  What's left today is the shell of the castle - I'm not sure how much of it is a reconstruction - historical displays, the castle walls, and some outstanding views of the city from the castle grounds and from on top of the castle walls.  I took advantage of the viewpoints to get a number of city photos as I toured the castle ruins.

My original plan for this evening was to visit Bairro Alto, and that was still on my list.  But it was still light out and still early, so I made a stop at Catedral Sé to get the interior photos that I missed yesterday.  Then it was across Baixa and up through Chiado to Bairro Alto.  Which at this time of day was rather underwhelming.  There wasn't enough daylight left to bring out any charm, whatever charm it might have had was buried under massive amounts of graffiti everywhere, and I apparently hit at the cusp between when the shops close and the restaurants open.  

So I kept going.  I wrapped up my Lisbon photos with the views from Miradouro de Alcântera.  Then I checked out some nearby nightlife options but ultimately decided against all of them.  

It was getting dark, so I headed back into Bairro Alto to find a place for dinner.  I wanted a place that offered fado performances.  Fados are Portuguese folk songs.  I found several options and chose the one with the fadista actually performing.  I don't know how good (or bad) it was, but I thought it was entertaining enough (even if I didn't understand a word of it) and it is a Lisbon tradition.

And that was it.  It was pushing 10PM when I found a taxi.  I headed back to the hotel, checked out my day's photos, and readied for tomorrow's early departure.

Spain - Seville

Tuesday April 22 -

We began today with a drive from Lisbon to Seville.  We made only a couple break stops along the way as we were losing an hour when we crossed the border and we had a tour waiting for us in Seville.

Seville is the capital of Andalusia.  It is more than 2000 years old, dating back to Roman times.  It was conquered by the Vandals and then the Visigoths before the Moors captured it in 712AD.  They held onto it until it fell to the Christians in 1248AD.  It was one of the first cities to fall to Franco in the Spanish Civil War.  A key river port town, Seville is where Columbus docked when he returned from the Americas and where the Spanish royals greeted him upon his return.

We met up with a local guide when we got there.  Our guided tour first stopped in the area where there had once been a mint.  Then we made our way over to the Catedral de Sevilla and La Giralda Tower, where we got an extensive narrated tour.  The cathedral is the largest Gothic building in the world and the third largest church in Europe.  Construction began in the 1400s on the site of what had been the city's mosque, and some elements of the mosque were incorporated into the cathedral.  La Giralda, for example, was originally the mosque's minaret, but it was made taller and topped with a sculpture of El Giraldillo when it was converted to the cathedral's bell tower.  Among the many features inside the cathedral is a tomb mounted on four statues that reportedly contains the remains of Christopher Columbus, based on DNA test comparisons with a body known to be his brother.  The altarpiece and choir stalls are among the more impressive sites in the cathedral.

The Alcázar, just across a plaza from the cathedral, was developed from the city's old Moorish palace.  Work began in 1181AD and continued for over 500 years, as the Mudéjar-style palace took shape.  It is the oldest royal palace in Europe that is still in use; the current royals stay here when they're in Seville.  Isabella and Ferdinand welcomed Columbus here after he returned from the Americas.  Its interior walls and ceilings feature elaborate decorations and tile work; I'd be reminded of them later in Granada at the Alhambra.  There are also impressive gardens within the site.

None of which we saw on our tour.  Our Seville tour was identified as a "premium highlight" in the travel brochure, but apparently that just meant that our visit to the Alcázar was limited to merely walking by its outside walls.  I'd return here tomorrow afternoon to tour the Alcázar on my own.  We did take a short walk through the Santa Cruz neighborhood and adjacent Jardines de Murillo before boarding our bus and heading for our hotel.

No sightseeing on my own tonight.  We headed back into town to El Palacio Andaluz for dinner and a flamenco show.  Dinner was good and the show was excellent.  The style of dance actually reminded me of the traditional gaucho dances we saw at Centro Hipico in Ushuaia, Argentina, the day we set off for Antarctica.  Given that Argentina began as a Spanish colony, I suppose there's some relationship between the dance styles, but I don't know for sure.  Except for the table of women who sat behind us and didn't stop talking through the entire show, it was a great evening.

Spain - Seville, Córdoba Day Trip

Wednesday April 23 -

Today began with an optional excursion to Córdoba followed by time on our own to explore Seville, probably the most relaxed day of the trip.

Two thousand years ago, Córdoba was the capital of the Roman province of Hispania Ulterior Baetica.  A thousand years ago, Córdoba was arguably one of the greatest cities in the world, the capital of the Moorish Caliphate and the largest city in Europe.  It was a great cultural, political and economic center for Moorish Spain.  Today, it is a major tourist draw.

The city's main attraction is the Mezquita-Catedral de Córdoba, the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba.  Once the site of an ancient Roman temple, and then under the Visigoths the San Vicente church, after the Islamic invasion of Córdoba the Moslems demolished the San Vicente church and in 785AD began work on what would become the second largest mosque in the Moslem world, and one of more than 1000 in the city of Córdoba itself.   The mosque continued to be expanded and modified over the centuries of Moslem rule; with the many changes and its origins on the foundation of a Christian church, it was somewhat of an architectural oddity.  

The Christians recaptured the city in 1236 and began to transform the mosque into a cathedral.  Chapels were added to the building, as was a cathedral treasury and other components of a traditional cathedral.  What is now the Orange Tree Courtyard was remodeled and the palms replaced with orange trees.  The mosque's minaret was reworked into the present-day bell tower.

Today the building contains many of features from its service to both Moslems and Christians.  Its red and white arches, supported by more than 1000 columns, give it a unique, spectacular and almost surreal appearance.  It is a gorgeous building to explore, an architectural oddity, and a site with an incredible history.  Seeing it was one of the top highlights of the trip.

During the guided portion of our visit, we also checked out one of the local neighborhoods and took a walk through the old Jewish quarter to a synagogue.  Built in 1350, it is one of the few remaining pre-Inquisition synagogue buildings left in Spain, surviving first as a hospital and then as a Catholic chapel.  

We were supposed to have a significant amount of time on our own to explore the city, but a member of our group got separated from us twice, resulting in long periods of searching and waiting, ultimately leaving us with only about 15 minutes for shopping and sightseeing on our own.  I used the time to get a closer look at parts of the Alcázar de los Reyes Cristianos, the fortress from which Isabella and Ferdinand governed Castile as they prepared to reconquer Granada, the last of the Moorish strongholds in Spain.  I also checked out the Puente Romano, what had begun as a Roman bridge across the Guadalquivir River, although so much of it had been replaced since the time of Augustus that it's Roman pretty much in name only.  From this angle I also got a few more photos of the exterior of the Mezquita-Catedral before rejoining the group for our departure.

Along the highway between Seville and Córdoba, our bus passed the town of Carmona.  This is the kind of town I would have made a special stop for.  It dates back to Neolithic times, and thrived under the Moors.  Today it features Roman walls, Moorish fortresses, Christian sites and the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre and necropolis, quite a lot to see in a rather small town.  Alas, I got some photos from the bus window, but it was not part of our tour and the guide made no mention of it.

When we got back to our Seville hotel, I dropped some stuff off in my room and then set off on my walk to the city center.  It proved to be a bit further than I had expected, about a 30-minute walk.  Between Madrid, Lisbon and now Seville, I couldn't say that I was impressed with the tour company's choice of hotel locations.  

I passed the ruins of an ancient Roman aqueduct en route to the old city, and then worked my way towards the city center, checking out Iglesia de San Esteban, Monolito Romano and the Santa Cruz neighborhood along the way.  I made it back to the cathedral and got a few more pictures of it before heading across the plaza to the Alcázar.  I spent about 90 minutes there exploring its various rooms, courtyards and gardens.

From there I plotted a loop around town so that I could see the remaining sites on my list.  I headed west past the Fabrica-Real de Tabacos (the first tobacco factory in Europe; later used as a setting in Carmen) to Parque de Marialuisa and its Plaza de España for some photos.  I then headed back towards the city center, stopping for some photos of Palacio de San Telmo and the city center before making my way over to the river.  Along the riverfront, I checked out the Torre del Oro.  It was built back in the 13th century by the Almohad dynasty to serve as a watch tower and defensive post for the river.  It was originally covered with gold tiles, giving the tower its name, but those tiles are long gone.

I followed the Río Guadalquivir riverfront park for several blocks, stopping for photos of the Teatro de la Maestranza and the Plaza de Toros - the bullring - until I reached Puenta Isabel II.  There I headed back into the city for a different sort of sightseeing.  I hadn't had any time for nightlife since I arrived in Spain, so I thought I'd check out a few places in Seville, which gave me an excuse to explore the Centro neighborhood.  The neighborhood was mildly interesting, but the locations I found didn't look like much in the early evening, certainly not enticing enough to justify all the walking I'd have to do tonight to check them out when they're open.  Oh well.

I found a McDonalds where I got something to drink and made use of their bathroom, and then I began the long walk back to the hotel.  The plan was to find a decent restaurant along the way, but all I came across were tapas bars, which really didn't appeal to be.  I made it all the way back to the hotel without finding a real restaurant.  Not wanting to eat at the hotel restaurant, I ended up at the Pizza Hut next door.  Not exactly what I had in mind for that evening's Spanish cuisine, but it hit the spot.

No nightlife tonight.  Journal and photo work and preparing for tomorrow's crossing over to Morocco filled out the rest of the evening.

Gibraltar, Morocco - Tangier

Thursday April 24 -

We hit the road early and drove straight through to Gibraltar.  Actually to the area just outside Gibraltar, as our bus didn't actually enter the British territory.  We brought our cameras and passports and walked through passport control into the British territory.  There we were greeted by a couple smaller buses that would be used for the tour.  After dropping of a couple people who didn't sign up for the optional tour, we started making our way through the town to the southernmost tip of the peninsula, Great Europa Point, where we were given a few minutes to get out and get some photos.  

Then we headed up to St. Michael's Cave, a large cave system with a number of interesting formations.  A basic trail winds its way around some of the formations, ending in an auditorium that is used for concerts and other presentations.  But the cave system is much more extensive than most casual visitors realize, dropping hundreds of feet to underground lengths (and according to unsubstantiated rumor extending all the way to Africa).

It was near the cave that we saw our first Barbary Macaques, also known as the Gibraltar apes, although we drove up to another area to see a lot more of them.  These are the only wild monkeys in Europe, although they seemed pretty tame to us.  Of course, they've had plenty of time to get used to busloads of tourist pointing cameras at them, to the point that they've figured out how to steal from some tourists (so keep a close eye on your stuff).  

From this area we also got some really good views of the Moroccan coast, our destination for later today.

Skipping the fortification on top of the rock for some unknown reason, our guide took us back down to Gibraltar's commercial district, where we were given time for lunch and shopping.  

My first stop was at a currency exchange.  As a British Overseas Territory, I figured that Gibraltar simply used the same coins that the U.K. does.  They essentially do, but it turns out that there are Gibraltar versions of them, so I asked the clerk to pick out a set for me and exchanged some Euros for them.  I'm not much for most souvenirs, but I do like to get a coin set and mail myself a postcard for each of the countries I visit.

I grabbed a quick sandwich at Burger King and then headed down the main street for a quick look at the shopping area and to find a postcard and a place to mail it back to my Seattle address - completing my Gibraltar souvenir shopping.  Then I cut out of the commercial zone and visited one of the local churches before following some castements back towards our pick-up point.  With about 45 minutes to spare, I continued on, heading back towards the airport runway which we had crossed earlier today.  With land at a premium in Gibraltar, and flat land extremely rare, the airport runway crosses the highway that connects Gibraltar to Spain.  I wanted some photos of that as well as the welcome sign we had passed on our way onto the peninsula.  I got my photos and then headed back to our bus pick-up area, getting there with just a couple minutes to spare.

We took our local busses back to passport control and then walks the rest of the distance to our own bus pickup point and were soon on our way to Morocco.

We followed the rugged coastline west, passing Algeciras, which was our original ferry terminal, ending up at Tarifa.  Change of plans, I guess, but Tarifa has a high-speed ferry.  We picked up our tickets, headed through passport control and soon boarded the ferry.

From our ferry we could see the Castillo Guzmán el Bueno, the castle of Guzmán the Good.  Alonso Pérez de Guzmán was given the title "the Good" when he refused to hand of the castle in 1296 to the Moors in exchange for the life of his son.  (It does make me wonder how "good" Junior thought his dad was.).  We could also see Punta de Tarifa, the southernmost point of continental Europe and the point that marks the boundary between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea.  

The ferry ride was indeed fast, but because Morocco is an hour behind Spain due to time zone differences, and a second hour behind Spain due to daylight savings time differences, we picked up a couple hours of time, although not a couple hours of daylight.

We were now in Morocco, my 25th country, and we were now on the African continent, my sixth continent.

We made preparations to get back on our bus and head into Tangier.  We also picked up a second guide for this part of the trip.  Moroccan law requires that tour groups like ours have a Moroccan guide with us.  That could be a good thing, I suppose.  But except for an interesting discussion on rural customs of courtship (almost non-existent) and marriage (often arranged by the parents with little input from those actually getting married), I never got the impression that he added a lot, a thought that would occur to me several times over the next six days.  And as we left Morocco on the 30th, our Spanish and Moroccan guides got into a heated argument, so my guess is that our Spanish guide wasn't very impressed with him, either.

With a group dinner being our only scheduled activity this evening, I was looking forward to having some time for sightseeing on my own after we got to Tangier.  Unfortunately we managed to kill an extraordinary amount of time before we got our rooms in the hotel.  First we stopped near an ATM machine and a currency exchange shop so people could exchange currency.  This took about a half hour.  Then when we got to our hotel, we found that a group of Italian tourists had arrived just before we did, and their guide simply grabbed a stack of room keys and handed them out to his charges - the stack happened to be for our group, so that messed up everything that the hotel had set up for us.  It took at least another hour to get that mess sorted out.  I got my key, dropped a few things off in my room, and then made my way over towards the medina in the now-fading daylight.

I didn't get a lot of photos, between the fading daylight and cautions from our guide and the guidebooks about taking pictures of the locals.  I did check out the sites surrounding the Grand Socco, the one-time marketplace that is now the central traffic circle in the middle of the city that meets one of the gates into the medina.  It is dominated by the Sidi Bou Abid Mosque, which made for some good photos, and surrounded by some market areas.  I also got a picture of St. Andrews Church, an Anglican church leftover from Tangier's days as an international city.

Then I headed into the medina itself.  I had hoped to find the American Legation, which was given to the United States by the Moroccan sultan back in 1821.  It is a little known fact that when the United States declared its independence, Morocco was the first country to recognize the new nation.  The American Legation was the first American overseas property and ambassador's residence.  I passed a number of fresh food vendor stalls that looked like they were getting ready to call it a day, and I think I got a bit of a look at the outside of the American Legation Building if my map was at all meaningful about its location, but I didn't find the main entrance in the maze-like area.  Even if I had it would have been closed for the day by this time.

I backtracked to the main roadway in the median and followed it to the Grand Mosque, built in 1685 on the site of an old church.  It has an impressive tile entrance, but unlike Europe's cathedrals non-Moslems generally are not permitted in the mosques, and the narrow road didn't allow for me to step back much for a bigger view of the mosque.

I continued on a bit further at which point one local immediately followed by another offered to lead me down an isolated alley towards a viewpoint.  I knew that there was a viewpoint in that direction, but I felt like I was being tag-teamed by them, and my having a map did not deter them.  Our Spanish guide had given us several warnings about interacting with the locals, watching for pickpockets and muggers and so on, frankly to the point of excess.  But as this was my first foray into a medina, his warnings kept playing in the back of my mind, so I repeatedly turned them down, using as my excuse the need to get back to my hotel.  This would bug me the rest of the evening, because in my many international travels I haven't eyed the locals with such suspicion.  I decided to blow off our guide's warnings, and except for the usual precautions against pickpockets, I acted like I was in Berlin or Oslo - other than I wore long pants the entire time I was in Morocco out of respect for local customs.

Dinner at the hotel - folks in the group seemed to be unusually interested in my trip into the medina.  Given that it was only three blocks from the hotel, there was nothing stopping them from going there on their own.  Except of course all the cautions from our leader.

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Morocco - Tangier, Fés

Friday April 25 -

We were told that we could sleep in today, but with the change in time zones and daylight savings time, when I woke up at six it was like waking up at eight in Spain.  It was daylight out, and I had a few hours to kill before breakfast, so I decided to get up and do some more exploring of the medina, this time at the kasbah end.  The medina and kasbah were to be covered in our orientation tour later this morning, but I figured I could get some photos now without having to worry about keeping my 38 fellow travelers out of the shots.

I headed back to the Grand Socco and got some morning shots of the mosque there.  Then I checked out the Mendoubia Gardens before taking Rue de la Kasbah uphill, following the medina wall to Bab el Kasbah, the medina entrance to the kasbah sites in the medina.  A kasbah is basically a fort or fortress, and there were some fortifications visible up here, but I suppose that it has been so long since Tangier was attacked that the residential aspect of the medina actually dominated here.  I wandered through the nearly empty streets, eventually making my way over to the viewpoint that I had missed last night.  I could see the Spanish coastline in the distance, a pretty view, probably better as a sunset shot, though.  

Back in the medina, I headed over to the nearby Dar el Makhzen, the 17th century royal palace of the kasbah, which is now a museum that showcases the palace's mosaics and Moroccan art.  It wouldn't open until 9:30AM, however, so I only viewed it from the outside.  It has its own mosque so I got some pictures of that and then headed back towards Bab el Kasbah.  

The city was coming to life as I made my way back to the hotel.  I did wander around a bit more, finally finding a couple bottles of Diet Coke, one to serve as my alternative to morning coffee and the other one for the bus.  Then I hit the hotel, showered, and joined the gang for breakfast, filling folks in on my morning walk.  

Then it was time to check out - oops, minor glitch as I locked my room key in my room.  Like a lot of places outside of the U.S., room keys are inserted into a slot just inside the door to turn on the room's electricity, including the air conditioning.  It's a good energy saving device, but a bit of a nuisance if you're out late enjoying the nightlife and then come back to a hot room when you want to go to sleep.  I'm so used to having the key in my wallet that it slipped my mind when I headed out for breakfast.  I'd avoid that problem the rest of the trip by hanging something odd on the door handle whenever I entered the room, such as a sock or gym shorts.  Seeing it on the way out would remind me to grab my room key.

We boarded the bus on the opposite side of the hotel than we had entered it on - which explained my initial confusion with my map yesterday, as what I thought was the main entrance really wasn't, it turned out.  We then boarded the bus and set off on our orientation tour of Tangier, in which we were see the medina and kasbah before heading out of town.

We drove over to the Grand Socco, and our guided pointed out a gate into the medina as we rounded the traffic circle, then we headed up Rue Sidi Bou Abid past St. Andrew's Church and....  Well, we headed out of town.  Pointing to the medina gate was apparently all we were going to get out of our orientation tour of Tangier.  After the things we skipped in Toledo and Lisbon, I already was rather unimpressed with the sightseeing aspect of this tour.  Our Tangier experience sealed it - I won't be taking another Insight Vacations tour, and I certainly wouldn't recommend Insight Vacations to anyone else.

Several others would complain about the lack of sightseeing in Tangier.  At least I was prepared to make the most out of our visit to Tangier, spending almost three hours exploring the medina, the kasbah and the Grand Socco area on my own between last night and this morning, and leaving Tangier with about 80 photos from my sightseeing in the city.  For most people in the group, their experience in Tangier pretty much boiled down to the Italians creating a check-in mess for us at the hotel.

We cut through a rugged area and then headed down to the waterfront at Cap Spartel.  Cap Spartel is the northwesternmost point of the African continent, adding my third geographic -most of the trip.  It was a pretty area, and we stopped a few minutes for photos.  And here we got our first real taste of some pushy Moroccan sales people.  At just about anyplace tourist buses come to a stop, a handful of locals routinely would descend on us and offer us presumably great deals on anything from jewelry to hats to scarves to knives.  I'd eventually get the impression that these guys (in Rabat, some women did their best to sell us henna tattoos, but they were men and boys everywhere else) knew just enough English to make their sales pitch, but they simply did not understand any explained rejection - and they simply ignored "Lah!" ("No!").  And just enough tourists would actually buy something to make it worth their whiles, apparently.

We then hit the road, following the coast as we headed towards Larache.  A few miles south of Cap Spartel we passed a set of caves, the Caves of Hercules, which have been inhabited since prehistoric times.  At our first break stop, we watched folks making bread in earthen ovens and roasting chicken in large tajines.  Large ceramic tajines are commonly used for cooking meats and other dishes in Morocco.  Small ones are sold as souvenirs, and used for table seasonings.

As we continued south on what was a modern expressway-type highway, we'd pass small towns, little clusters of buildings with a mosque minaret sticking up where one would have expected a church steeple in similar towns in the American Midwest.  Although the towns seems a bit more rustic than what one might find in, say, rural Iowa, I was struck by the general familiarity of the scene.

We eventually reached the city of Larache, an ordinary city that had been occupied by the Spanish from 1911 to 1956.  As we drove south into the heart of town, we came upon a fortress, but then turned east without explanation (this is the kind of thing that I'd want our guides to explain to us).  

The bus finally pulled to a stop in front of a restaurant, and we were given an hour for lunch, presumably at that restaurant or at a nearby one.  But I figured that Larache was probably going to be the only ordinary Moroccan city that I'd have a chance to see on this trip, so I spent most of the lunch hour on a photo walk, first continuing on to a traffic circle area and then doubling back through the heart of the city, back to the Spanish fort ruins on the waterfront.  From there I had a distant view to the south of a mosque and cemetery.  Ordinary but colorful and somewhat alien to me, but that's how the locals looked at me, too - I don't think that Larache is a major tourist draw.

The small store near where the bus parked that I had mentally targeted for snacks (in lieu of the lunch I skipped) had closed by the time I got back, so I hurried back to the traffic circle where I bought some cookies and crackers from a sidewalk vendor and then headed back to the bus.  My tour companions may have been well-fed, but I had some crackers and a couple dozen photos from my walk around Larache.

We continued on towards Fés, with the scenery being along the lines of what one would find in western Colorado or Montana.  Farms, hay, grazing all in a rolling but not rugged high desert landscape.  Other than the farms were smaller and the livestock herds much smaller, typically a man was tending to no more than a dozen animals.  

We reached our Fés hotel after 5PM.  I took a walk around the neighborhood, and although it took a while, I finally found a shop that sold water and Diet Coke.  I was beginning to feel routinely dehydrated, and they didn't want us drinking the water in the hotel, not even to brush our teeth, so keeping stocked up became a routine goal every day.  Our hotel was far enough away from the highlighted sights of Fés that I didn't include any sightseeing in this evening's walk.

Dinner at the hotel included a "Folklore Show" with drums and belly dancing.  The music was good, but the show was limited to three acts - a man goofed around with a tray of food on his head as he mugged for tourist cameras, a women let out some sort of screechy call, and then another woman did a belly dance for a song.  I think they were members of the same family.  Calling it a "Folklore Show" was arguably more than a bit of an overstatement for all it was, but it was mildly entertaining.

And that wrapped up our first full day in Morocco.  I sorted through some photos and then turned in for the night.

Morocco - Fés, Meknes

Saturday April 26 -

With all the traveling I do and as much as I've seen around the world, it's hard for places to generate a "Wow!" from me.  The Fés medina is a "Wow!" place.

Today's highlight was indeed the highlight of the whole trip, our guided tour of the Fés medina.  The old city, Fés el Bali, is regarded as the world's largest still-functioning medieval city, with its more than 1000 maze-like narrow roads, alleys and dead ends, all lined with stores, food markets, spice shops, handicraft workshops from sewing to metalwork, homes, mosques and other features.  No cars, but donkeys hauling goods and people through the narrow passages were quite common - listen for "Balek!", basically "Get out of the way!" from the donkey drivers.  And they're serious about it - some of the passages were not wide enough for both donkeys and tourists.  It is reportedly quite easy to get lost inside the medina (pay a kid some dirhans to lead you out), although we weren't given a chance for that to happen.  It was truly a different world.  

We made our first stop at Bab Lamar, the elaborately decorated medina gates at the royal palace.  We couldn't go in to see the actual palace - it is closed to the public - but the close up view of the gates with their intricate carvings and mosaics were quite impressive.

Our next stop was the south fortress, up on a hill to the south of the medina.  Although the fortress itself may have been interesting in any other location, here it gave us an outstanding view of much of the medina, including the parts that we would be exploring on foot.  The Fés medina, which dates back to the 9th century, is pretty big, and far too much to thoroughly explore in a couple days.  We'd be spending a half day here, so we'd only be getting a pretty good taste of the place.

One of the features of the medina that was almost laughable was readily apparent from the fortress.  In spite of the medieval nature of the medina, multiple TV satellite dishes were on top of almost every building in the medina, the holy sites of course an exception.  Later on in the medina itself, I passed a Moroccan chatting on his cell phone, which seemed out of place in the medina, too, but cell phone sightings were pretty rare.

We then headed down into the medina itself, where we picked up a pair of local guides - ours in turn hired a local kid to help keep us together.  And then we did something really smart.  We split into two groups, separating the slow walkers and the fast walkers.  The smaller groups would be easier to handle in the narrow passages of the medina, and splitting by conditioning ensured that our group of fast walkers could maximize our sightseeing here.

We spent the first part of our excursion simply walking around some of the passages, stopping periodically for explanations from our guide.  We were more open to picture-taking here, not just because of the larger group, but because I suspect that our guide took us to friendly stops along the way - even if we usually moved too fast for anyone to consider buying anything.

Some of the shops and sights as we worked our way into the heart of the medina included the following:

As we neared the center of the medina, our sightseeing changed a bit.  We were led into the courtyard of a fondouk, a number of rooms or apartments three floors high built around the courtyard.  Fondouks are often private homes, but some function as rooming houses, hostels and hotels.  A bit rustic to say the least, but I would have appreciated the experience of staying in the medina rather than at our fancy hotel three miles away.

We then reached the Kairaouine Mosque.  As with all other mosques, as non-Moslems we could not enter the mosque.  But the door was wide open, and we were allowed to look all we wanted and to take photos.  At more than 10,000 square feet, the Kairaouine Mosque had been the largest mosque in Morocco until the Hassan II Mosque was built in Casablanca in the 1990s.  It was built by the Kairaouine Fatima in 857AD.  The first university in the west opened at the mosque in the 10th century.  Kairaouine University predates even Bologna, where I had attended a conference back in 2005.  Among its graduates was Pope Sylvester II, who took the Arabic concept of zero and introduced it into European mathematics.  The school still operates today, with an enrollment of about 2000 students.

The visible parts of the mosque itself were quite impressive, with its horseshoe-shaped arches, extensive tile mosaics, intricate carvings, fountains, places to wash ones feet, whitewashed walls and green tile roof - I had learned that green is a holy color, which is why it often is used in the decorative detail or tiled roof of a mosque.  (A nearby McDonalds outside the medina had a green tile roof, too, which reportedly had caused some controversy, according to our guide.)  It was quite beautiful, and much different than the kind of art I've come across in Christian cathedrals in my travels.

Our next stop was outside the Zaouia of Moulay Idriss II.  The zaouia is one of the holiest shrines in the medina, and houses the tomb of Moulay Idriss II, the founder of Fés.  It was originally built in the 9th century by the Idriss dynasty, and it was restored in the 13th century.  As with the mosques, entrance is limited to Moslems.  Much more intimate than the mosque, it still featured the horseshoe arches, tile work and carvings.

We then reached a carpet cooperative, where we got some discussion on how Moroccan carpets are handmade, and what the various patterns and colors meant.  We were even provided with some sweetened mint tea, the national drink of Morocco.  But this soon turned into a sales pitch, and a somewhat heavy handed one at that.  A few folk in our group were interested in buying carpets, so we ended up killing 45 minutes there (seemed to me that the hired kid could have escorted the buyers back to the bus when they were done while the rest of us did more sightseeing).

After that we made a similar - but thankfully much shorter - stop at a place where they did weaving and then turned the cloth into brightly colored traditional garments.  

I really wanted to see the tannery, and after our guide asked if we wanted to see it, we were led to the Terrasse des Tanneurs, a leather goods shop with a terrace that overlooked the old tannery, arguably the single most unforgettable view of the trip.  As we approached them, we were given sprigs of mint leaves to help cover the smell of rotting flesh from the skins and of the vats used to tan and dye the leather.

The leather makes its way through a succession of vats, white ones that use a saline solution, lime and pigeon droppings to help tan the leather, and then vats of dye (saffron for yellow, poppies for red, and so on).  Men wearing shorts joined the pile of skins in each vat, pulling skins up from the bottom of the pile and then working the skins to make the leather soft, supple, and ultimately evenly dyed.  It looked like dreadful work, especially given that it was a hot day in April and Morocco gets a lot hotter in the summer, but according to my guidebook, at least it is relatively well-paid work by Moroccan standards.

The shop sold purses, shoes and a few other goods that mostly would appeal to women, so I didn't pick up a leather souvenir.  But I heard a woman saying to her companion that the rather ordinary leather purse she just put down wasn't worth its 20 euros price.  I wanted to say to her, "Have you checked out the view from the terrace?  You don't think that all that effort is worth 20 euros?"  Sheesh.  No doubt the message would have been lost on her.

That was the final stop of our sightseeing tour.  We made our way through the narrow passages and back towards the bus parking area.  In the parking lot we were once again greeted by several men selling jewelry, scarves, trinkets and other things that the women shoppers in our group couldn't resist looking at.  Given how hot it was, I figured some enterprising person would be selling cold beverages or ice cream treats, but I didn't see anyone doing that.  Oh well.

We headed back to the hotel where I got a quick lunch and then joined the group who signed up for our optional excursion to Meknes.  I had had a serious debate with myself about whether to take the optional tour or see more of the Fés medina.  We had skipped the kasbah area and the Museum of Moroccan Arts (I like museums, but bus tours tend to skip them, I've found), but Meknes had its own appeal and ultimately won out.  Unfortunately, our Meknes tour was pretty limited, a far cry from our Fés experience.  

Meknes, which is just under 40 miles west of Fés, also features a medina, but it is smaller than the one we saw in Fés, but it also has a larger palace area.  After a look at the medina from a viewpoint across the river, we were dropped off near a gate and began a fast, rather long walk through the Imperial City/palace area; between the heat, the distance and the speed at which our local guide walked, things moved a bit too quickly for several members of our group.

We finally slowed down so people could catch up, and then we were led into Heri as Souani, the royal granaries.  Sultan Moulay Ismail decided to govern from Meknes in 1673, and that led to the construction of his palace here.  He was quite concerned about possible attacks and very long-term sieges, so the granaries were built to store a 20-year supply of grain.  A related reservoir provided water, and extensive stables for 12,000 horses.  The granary had been cooled by the reservoir, roof-top plantings and circulating water driven by a donkey-pulled water wheel that we saw.

But the Meknes palace area began its long decline after the sultan died, and that was helped along by the 1755 earthquake that had destroyed much of Lisbon, Portugal.  

We then took another long walk to find our bus, and then we were taken to Bab Mansour, which some have described as the most beautiful city gate in North Africa.  According to my guidebook there were a handful of sites within a short walk of this gate, and I figured that we'd see them.  Right after a short break on the plaza across from the gate where we had an ice cream break.  But instead we boarded the bus and began the drive back to Fés.  Had I realized that was the plan, I would have skipped the ice cream and checked out Habs Kara (the prison of the Christian slaves) and the Moulay Ismail Mausoleum, and perhaps Dar Jamai (another palace).  The mausoleum is one of only four sacred sites in Morocco that are open to non-Moslems.  I'm not sure how our tour planner could decide to skip such an opportunity.  

But like I said, we headed back to Fés.  

We didn't head straight back to our hotel, however.  We made a stop at the Famille Fekhari ceramics cooperative, where we got a nice explanation on how various ceramic products were made, with less emphasis on the usual potters wheel and more focus on the mosaics work.

Of course this was followed by the opportunity to buy something.  I ended up buying a small tajine, ceramic with pewter trim, as my first and ultimately my only purchased Moroccan souvenir.

Because we reached the ceramic place after hours, the locals weren't there to greet us.  But by the time we got back to our bus, several kids were already there anxious to try to sell us something.  One guy literally dropped a tile star in my shirt pocket and then held out his hand to be paid for it.  One of my guidebooks noted that a lot of Moroccan parents are not happy that their kids do this.  The charm of these over-aggressive sales efforts is lost on me, too.

Then it was back to the hotel.  I decided to skip the group dinner at the hotel and instead headed out for a walk, enjoying the crowds of people out enjoying the scene along Ave. Hassan II, which led towards the medina.  I didn't bring my camera with me, but wish I had for the evening scenes and the lit up walls of the medina at Bab Lamar.

I needed to find a place for dinner and took the easy way out by heading to the McDonalds near the medina.  I really wasn't all that hungry, but I still wanted to eat out where the locals ate.  And that's what I found at McDonalds.  I think I was the only non-Moroccan in the place.

And still it was fun to observe the locals here, the families, the kids, the teenage boys trying to get the attention of the teenage girls, the teenage girls pretending not to notice.  A couple dropped off an infant and a woman whom I assume was the grandma at the table next to me and then headed for the counter to order their food.  Grandma began playing with the baby, blowing on its belly, and so on, acting like Every Grandma.  She caught me smiling as I was watching her, and smiled back before playing with the baby some more.  As I've traveled more and more, it's become obvious to me that there are some things about people that transcend any borders and cultural differences that might otherwise separate us.  So, yes it was McDonalds, but this was also the real Morocco that I wanted to see.

After dinner, I began the long walk back to my hotel, picking up some beverages for tomorrow's bus ride and some snacks for one of people in our group.  I then stopped in a small park to people watch for awhile as I enjoyed a Diet Coke.  But when some middle aged woman in the park began to go after a teenage boy swinging her walking stick at him, I decided that was some turmoil that I'd best avoid.

Back to the hotel to prepare for tomorrow morning's departure.

Morocco - Marrakech

Sunday April 27 -

Today was primarily a driving day as we repositioned ourselves from Fés to Marrakech.  We left Fés at about 8:30AM and pulled into the parking lot of our Marrakech hotel at about 5PM.  The scenery was interesting albeit less rugged than I had been expecting - those expectations based in part on the Morocco portion of the movie Babel that came out a few years back.

Although it had a few pretty moments, the scenery was more or less ordinary, typical of what I've seen in other mountainous, arid areas, such as in parts of the western U.S.  Even so, I would have appreciated a few "middle of nowhere" stops just to take it in.  But that's just me, I suppose.

More interesting were the small towns and few cities that we passed through during our drive.  Some cities had lined their streets with the country's flag in anticipation of a pending visit from the king.  Many had what seemed to be a lot of unfinished construction projects.  At one point our guide explained that these were being built over time by Moroccans who mostly reside in Italy, and that they don't have to pay taxes on buildings until they are actually finished.  But that really didn't explain why so many of them all had the same idea of building lots of housing stock in small towns in what effectively was the middle of nowhere.

In many cases large parts of these towns looked deserted.  No sign of people, no vehicles parked along the side streets.  Sometimes the highway was lined with a stretch of small businesses, often including at least one cafe with its sidewalk seating filled with men.  Police officers rode scooters.  Most people walked.  Some rode donkeys or had donkeys pulling large wagons.  I snapped the photos that I could from the moving bus.  I would have loved to stop in a couple of these towns for photo walks.  Colorful, different, almost alien to my American sensibilities, and still very familiar.  A lot of folks don't really understand that type of photo stop, though, so they generally don't happen during bus tours.

We reached our hotel, I settled into my room and then I hit the streets.  I figured I'd walk over to the medina and check it out and get some late day photos before sunset and dinner.  I was hoping for another Fés-like experience here tomorrow, but our Tangier experience was in the back of my mind, too.

It was about a 30 minute walk from the hotel to the medina, a route that passed through what could have passed for American suburbia.  It seemed a bit longer because it was unseasonably warm for this time of year, in the low-90s I heard.  I reached the walls of the medina and passed through Bab Nkob and found a large park-like area on the other side of the gate.  It turned out to be Cyber Parc Arsat Moulay Abdeslam, with the "Cyber Parc" part of the title a clue that the park provided complete wireless internet access.  I suppose that's one way of getting people to go out to the park.

I soon came upon the Koutoubia Mosque, the largest in Marrakesh, its minaret more than 220 feet tall and topped by four copper globes.  Dating from the 1100s, it replaced an earlier Almoravid mosque.  Tomorrow our Moroccan guide would tell us that it was the first mosque to feature a minaret, a statement I have not come across in any of the literature I've seen.  However, one source described its minaret as the oldest of three great Almohad minarets remaining in the world.

Its minaret was used as the model for the minaret in Seville (La Giralda, later converted into the bell tower for the Catedral de Sevilla), which in turn influenced church architecture across Europe.  It was also the model for the Hassan Tower in Rabat.  The mosque itself predates the minaret, but it had to be rebuilt in order to correctly align it with Mecca.

From here, in a bit of a roundabout route, I made my way over to the Djemâa el Fna plaza.  The name loosely translates to "meeting place of death", based on its early role as a place where one could view the severed heads of sinners, criminals and Christians.  Today it is the heart of the medina, featuring shopping, dining and an assortment of characters from snake charmers to fortune tellers seeking to help you part with a few dirhans.  Tomorrow I'd find that it is relatively quiet in the daytime, but it was near sunset and the plaza was filling up with tourists and locals, creating a carnival-like atmosphere.  I took a handful of late-day photos until the sun set behind the buildings, and then I took a short walk into the souks, the primary shopping areas of the medina.  I was hoping for one more Morocco souvenir, but nothing really caught my eye.  Still I enjoyed the looking.

I was tempted to get dinner at the medina, but it was a long walk back to hotel, so I got some nighttime shots of Djemâa el Fna and then began my walk back, making a stop at a gas station along the way for water and pop.

Buffet dinner at the hotel, and then up to my room to review photos and to get ready for tomorrow morning's excursion.

Monday April 28 -

We began the day with a trip out to Ourika Valley.  My guidebook had emphasized the beautiful scenery of the area, so I figured that it would be a chance to get into Moroccan nature a bit when I signed up for it.  That was wrong figuring, but what we saw was easily just as interesting.

It was the weekly Berber market day in one of the villages, so we headed there for the opportunity to walk through such a market.  Whereas Seattle's Pike Place Market caters more to tourists than it does to the locals, this market was really for the Berbers.  Piles of vegetables and fruit, house wares, tools and the like dominated the items for sale.  Doctors, dentists and haircutting services were also available, as was metalwork and the shoeing of donkeys.  There was in fact a donkey parking lot - a large area filled with donkeys lined up in about as neat of rows as you could expect for donkeys.

The only downside to the experience was the handful of men who descended on our tour group trying to sell us stuff.  One latched onto me for half of the walk through the market area trying to sell me a pair of knives with polished rock handles, with varying prices that dropped as low as 1 dirhan (14 cents) - which tells me what to think about the quality of the knives.  They were such a distraction that it was really hard to enjoy the sights, sounds and smells of the market.  Picture the most aggressive salesperson you've ever encountered in some store, make that salesperson about 50 times worse, and then try to avoid a dozen of them all at once.  

We finished the market tour (the pests even followed us back to our bus), got some water (or Diet Coke, in my case), and then headed for our next stop, the home of a Berber family, where we toured the grounds and then enjoyed a traditional tea ceremony, complete with freshly baked bread and homemade butter, honey and olive oil.  The older woman who led the ceremony went through all the steps, from rinsing the tea (removes the part of tea that has laxative properties), to adding the mint and hot water, to pouring it from high above the cups (the added churn of the water as it hits the cup brings out more of the flavor, apparently).

Good bread and very tasty tea.  And a temporary haven from the hawkers, some of whom greeted our bus as we pulled in out front of the house, as they don't trespass onto private property.  But they knew when we were leaving, running to catch up to us to make one last sales pitch before we left.

Then it was back to Marrakech to pick up members of the group at the hotel who skipped the Ourika Valley tour and then head on to the scheduled activity, our tour of the Marrakech medina.

Our tour of the medina was not very interesting.  I think that the Marrakech medina is more touristy than the one in Fés is, which was part of it.  But for the most part, we simply walked very quickly from one of gates through some of the narrow streets to Djemâa el Fna.  Even though it was on our list of sights to see, we passed within a block of the Saadian Tombs without stopping, and near a handful of other major attractions in the medina that weren't mentioned in the trip brochure.

One of the women in the group asked if we could be taken to a spice area in the medina, hoping to get some pictures of piles of colorful spice, such as the one used in the Insight brochure for the trip.  That sounded good to me as I had a camera, too.  But our Moroccan guide instead led us to a spice and cream business where everything was in jars and we ended up with what amounted to a 45-minute sales pitch and buying opportunity.  I'm not convinced that he was looking out for us as much as he was his buddies in the medina.

We got a bit of a discussion about the Djemâa el Fna while we were there and then headed over to the Koutoubia Mosque where we got a more detailed talk, but that was about it for our significant sightseeing.

We then headed back to Djemâa el Fna - some chose to return to the hotel at that point, others were promised the chance to shop or look around for about an hour before the bus would take them back.  As for me, well, I knew my way back to the hotel.  I headed off on my own, first stopping at one of the restaurants surrounding the plaza to get some lunch, and then setting off on my own explorations of the medina.

Unfortunately I didn't have my best map with me - it focused primarily on the souks, and as with most of my maps the roads and passageways were unlabeled.  So when I set off on foot down one of the passages, it took me east instead of north.

Not that it was a bad thing, as I did eventually work my way around to the sites I was targeting.  And the guidebook actually encourages getting lost in a medina for the experience.  And it's not like I was truly lost.  After all, the medina is surrounded by a wall, and every hundred yards or so some kid offered to guide me back to Djemâa el Fna - they usually didn't know enough English to understand my explanation that I was actual just out exploring the medina.  I suspect most tourists who stray too far from the plaza really didn't mean to, given how widespread the assumption was that the plaza was where I wanted to go.

The part of the medina I explored had more homes but far fewer shops, and those shops generally did not cater to tourists, with a few exceptions.  Nearly everyone was Moroccan, there were almost no tourists in sight.  The roads I took were also wider than those in the heart of the medina, and I even saw some cars back there, although walking, donkeys and motorbikes were still the primary form of transportation.

I eventually came upon my targets, the Ali ben Youssef Mosque and Ali ben Youssef Medersa.  The mosque is the oldest in Marrakesh, dating back to the 12th century.  It is second in size to the Koutoubia Mosque in Marrakech.  The school, which dates back to the 16th century, is North Africa's largest Koranic school.  

Nearby is the Koubba Almoravid.  Built in the 12th century, it is the oldest monument in Marrakech.  The Almoravids were Berbers, whose dynasty grew to cover much of present-day Spain and Portugal in the north to Senegal in the south.  When the Almohads pushed out the Almoravids, they often wiped out or replaced many of the buildings as well.  As a result of that and nine centuries of time, Koubba Almoravid is now the only intact example of Almoravid architecture left in the entire country.

From there I did finally head back to Djemâa el Fna.  I would have liked to have then covered some sites to the south of the plaza, including the Saadian Tombs, but the maps I had with me stopped just short of that area, except for the map of the Tangier medina that I also had with me, which of course didn't even cover the right medina.  Apparently I brought the wrong map with me.

But it was also getting late.  We had an evening activity planned, and I had a long walk ahead of me, so I started my walk back to the hotel.  I stopped at the same gas station I hit yesterday to stock up on Diet Coke and bottled water for tomorrow's bus ride.

We capped off the day with dinner and a show - Fantasia Chez Ali's Arabian Nights optional excursion of our tour, and the only one of the optional dinners I signed up for.  On our way to the show, we stopped once more at the medina and walked into Djemâa el Fna.  Late in the day they set up extensive outdoor restaurants, the snake charmers and fortune tellers show up, and then the people come out, creating a popular, crowded scene, like what I had also seen last night.  Our guide wanted to show off that side of the medina to the folks who were much less adventurous than me.

Back on the bus and then out to the edge of town where the Arabian Nights show is put on.  Kind of a cross between a theme park and dinner theatre.  We were treated to an authentic multi-course Moroccan dinner and then headed outside to seating surrounding a large area where folks put on a show that featured some horse-riding theatrics, chanting, a bit of music, some fireworks, and apparently a story of some sort, although I couldn't figure out the story.

That ran rather late and wrapped up our day.

Morocco - Casablanca, Rabat

Tuesday April 29 -

We had an easy start to the day, which was nice after the late night.  Then we boarded our bus for the trip to Casablanca and Rabat.

And for some reason to a leather goods shop in Marrakech.  Our guide said he promised this to some folks last night, so we headed to what appeared to me to be a rather ordinary leather goods shop, other than a handful of guys who stalk tourist buses to sell us cheap trinkets and imitation watches apparently knew that tourist buses hit the store.

I figured I'd check it out - no point in just sitting on the bus, after all.  But it provided a rather ordinary selection of purses, belts, wallets and other basic leather goods, stuff that is routinely available in any U.S. department store.  Let alone in the leather souk in the medina with all of its shops that people had the opportunity to visit yesterday.  We ended up wasting an hour here.  Why?  I don't know.  I would have rather used the hour at the end of the day for exploring Rabat.

During the drive to Casablanca, our guide played the movie Casablanca.  I had never actually seen it before, so I was surprised to find out how many lines from the movie had made their way into popular culture.  Except of course for "Play it again, Sam", which came from Woody Allen rather than Humphrey Bogart.

We entered Casablanca from the south and made our way to an area along the waterfront where we stopped for our lunch break.  I had a quick sandwich at McDonalds so that I could use the rest of the time for a photo walk.  To the north I could see the minaret for the Hassan II Mosque, the largest in Morocco and the third largest in the world.  It is open to the public, by guided tour, and the description of it was rather impressive.

According to our trip brochure, we were to have an orientation tour of Casablanca.  Unfortunately, all we got was the bus pulling over to the curb on the highway about a third of a mile southwest of the Hassan II Mosque for a quick photo op.  That was it.  No medina, no palace, no nothing else mentioned in my guidebook.

Then it was on to Rabat, which wasn't much further to the northeast up the coast.  There we were to have an "in-depth" tour.  We did a quick drive-by the royal palace - no photo stop - and then headed for a plaza that is the site of both the Mohammed V Mausoleum and the Hassan Tower, where we did get off the bus for photos and some detailed discussion.

The Mohammed V Mausoleum was built as the final resting place for King Mohammed V in the early 1960s.  His sons, including successor King Hassan II, are also entombed here.  Unlike most Moslem shrines, this one was open to the general public.

Across the plaza was the Hassan Tower.  Construction began in the 12th century on a mosque that was intended to be the largest one in the world.  However, after its sponsor King Yaqoub al Mansour died, work was generally abandoned.  Much of what had been built was then destroyed by the 1755 earthquake that had leveled Lisbon, Portugal.

From there we headed the few blocks over to our hotel for our last night in Morocco.  We had a few hours before dinner, so I grabbed my camera and headed out to check out the medina and kasbah, just a few blocks from the hotel (not that they were ever mentioned in our "in-depth" tour of Rabat).  I happened to run into our Spanish guide on my way out of the hotel, the first time that happened as I went off on one of my solo excursions, and ended up getting quite the "be careful!" speech from him when he found out where I was going.  

Good grief.  Tourists should always exercise reasonable care in their explorations, especially if they're alone, because tourists are often easy targets.  But if you're really going to be that fearful of something bad happening to you when you visit some country, then you really shouldn't go there in the first place.  Medinas and kasbahs are routine parts of city life in Morocco.  I spent several hours on my own in the Tangier, Marrakech and now the Rabat medinas and kasbahs, as well as walking the streets of Larache, Fés and Marrakech, and of course doing similar exploring in various Spanish cities and Lisbon, and except for that bit of guide-induced paranoia during my first visit into the Tangier medina, I never came across anything in my excursions that required such excessive warnings.

I ignored our clash and headed into the medina to walk the kasbah.  In contrast to the others I'd seen, the Rabat medina seemed to have the least to offer tourists.  Well, except for fancy fabrics - several women in our group had expressed an interest in finding a place that offered local fabrics, but they were all back at the hotel killing a couple hours waiting for dinner, oblivious to the existence of the medina just a few blocks away.  Beyond that, I characterized the Rabat medina as the Wal-mart of medinas.  Lots of everyday household and clothing goods, the routine food shops, and only a few tourist souvenir shops.  

It was a short walk through this part of the medina to the kasbah area.  The Kasbah des Oudayas was built on a hilltop where the Bou Regreg River meets the Atlantic.  The late day sun was hitting the fortress walls, the whitewashed walls of Rabat buildings, the Hassan Tower, and the city of Salé across the river.  I was in the middle of getting photos of those when the first of a handful of wannabe guides offered to take me where they thought I wanted to go.  But it is a short distance and easy walk from the kasbah gate to the plaza above the mouth of the river.  Here I had outstanding views of Salé, the Atlantic and a nearby lighthouse.  I stuck around for a few photos, wrapping up my Moroccan sightseeing with some near sunset shots.  And then it was back to through the medina and to my hotel, which I reached just a few minutes before our 7:30 dinner time.

I spent the evening doing some repacking in preparation for our return to Spain tomorrow.

Spain - Costa Del Sol

Wednesday April 30 -

Today was pretty much a get up and drive day.  We woke early and hit the road.  We had to get from Rabat to Tangier to catch the 11AM ferry and then we'd lose a couple hours with the time zone change as we crossed over to Spain.  From there it was a straightforward drive from Tarifa to Torremolinos where we would be spending the night on Costa del Sol.  

There were no significant sightseeing stops along the way.  We did take one of our mandatory driver breaks at a service area north of Rabat.  The highway from Rabat to Tangier is a toll road expressway, as modern as anything you'd find in the United States.  But at the service station, I headed behind the building to get some photos of the rural countryside.  There I found a local road where donkeys pulled carts carrying people and goods.  Moroccans worked the fields by hand.  Locals walked rather than drove for their errands.  A donkey pulling a cart being ridden by two men pulled up behind the service station.  No need for gas, of course, but they picked up their snacks and beverages much like we had.  Two very different worlds met at that service station - the world you saw depended simply on which direction you were looking.

The ride to Tangier was uneventful, we boarded our ferry, and without much fanfare our visit to Morocco was over.  With this ferry we could go outside for photos, so I got some of the Tangier medina and kasbah, now that I knew what I was looking for, having been there a week earlier.  But Morocco quickly slipped into the background and Spain drew closer.

We got off the ferry at Tarifa, boarded our bus and hit the highway for Torremolinos where we would be spending the night.  We didn't make any further stops along the way.

Torremolinos is a beach town, and our hotel was right on the beach.  I'm not a beach person, though, and thus after a quick check of the gravel-covered  (?!) beach, I headed uphill to check out the city center for some possible nightlife options, historical sites and general sightseeing.  I did find the nightlife options almost immediately upon reaching the top of the hill, but little else in terms of historical sites or scenic views.  Torremolinos is seriously a beach town and thus not my kind of place.  So after wandering around a bit not finding much of interest, I took the long way back down to the waterfront area.

I hadn't slept well the last few nights, I was in the early stages of a cold, and our early morning wake-up call didn't help matters at all, so I was pretty tired.  As I continued my walk, I felt less and less interested in finding a nifty place to eat.  I just wanted dinner and a nap.  I ended up at Burger King.  

Back to the room.  I set the alarm for 9:30PM so I'd be up for some nightlife, and then hit the bed.  But when I woke up with the alarm, I discovered that my sniffles had turned into a full-blown head cold, with a touch of fever-like nausea thrown in, too.  With members of our group seeing a doctor for bronchial infections today, I decided no going out tonight.  I took care of the photos, prepped the suitcase for tomorrow's travels, and went back to bed, not realizing that I was in the early stages of a stomach bug that would mess around with me the next few days.

And that was how I marked the half-way point of my trip.

Spain - Granada

Thursday May 1 -

We hit the road, and with just one stop along the way we made it to Granada at about 1PM.  We made our way through the city center towards the Calat Alhambra (Red Castle), the city's top attraction.  It is generally regarded as one of the top examples of Moslem architecture in Spain.  It was here that the Nasrid princes lived along with their harems, a true pleasure palace.

We only toured a fraction of the fortress in our two hour visit, including Palacio Arabe, Sala de las Dos Hermanas, and a unique palace added to the site after the Christian conquests - Palacio de Carlos V was built by the Holy Roman Emperor in the early 1500s; it features a round courtyard inside a nearly square building.  The Court of the Lions is famous for its fountain, the basin of which rests on the backs of several sculpted lions.  However, the fountain was undergoing restoration, so only a couple of the lions were on display in a room we passed near the start of our tour.  The interiors of Moslem-built structures were richly decorated with horseshoe arches, detailed arabesques, columns, tile mosaics and other features, making this outstanding site well-worth seeing simply for its architectural detail.

When the Christians re-took Granada in 1492, they began altering the Alhambra, literally whitewashing it in places, damaging some of the detail, and destroying furniture.  In the 1800s, Napoleon had tried to blow up the whole place; the French did destroy some of its towers. Fortunately much original work has survived.

In addition to the Alhambra, we also toured the Generalife, the summer palace which features gardens that date back to the 13th century.

Our tour lasted about two hours, after which we headed to our hotel for that night.  My stomach was beginning to get my attention, but I figured I was just hungry.  That would have to wait a bit, though, as I had a number of sites in the city center that I wanted to see and apparently our advertised "orientation tour" wasn't going to take place.

I hit the sidewalk and made my way over towards the cathedral, noting once again how far our chosen hotel was from the primary sightseeing areas (it turned out to be a half hour walk).

The Catedral and especially its Capilla Real are significant for those interested in those royals surrounding the travels of Christopher Columbus.  It is in the Capilla Real where the remains of Isabella and Ferdinand lie, following their wishes to be buried in Granada rather than their original Castile or Aragón kingdoms.  The tomb also includes the remains of their daughter, Joanna the Mad, and her husband, Philip the Handsome.  The cathedral was built between 1521 and 1714, and is typical in how ornate it is when compared to other cathedrals I've seen that were built in that era.

Unfortunately, this is where my vacation began to hit a bit of a disruption.  I had noticed some changes in my bathroom patterns yesterday.  The diarrhea hit when I was visiting the cathedral.  

I did manage to do a bit more sightseeing.  I continued west to the Puerta de Elvira.  In 1492, Isabella and Ferdinand had entered Granada through this gate after conquering the city.  At one time it was where they posted the heads of criminals, but none were there today of course.  After passing through the gate, I hit Calle de Elvira, a narrow street reminding me of an updated medina - which probably does describe its history - and followed that back towards Plaza Nueva.  Elvira is lined with a number of shops, restaurants and clubs, growing more touristy the closer it gets to the plaza.

Plaza Nueva, in spite of its name, is actually the old town plaza.  Built to cover a section of the Darro River, today it appears to be Granada's central gathering area.  With the holiday it was full of a mix of both locals and tourists.  

The road heading north out of the plaza passes the last couple sites on my list, including the Baños Arabes and Casa de Castril.  But it was hot and by now I was feeling more than a little queasy.  Not trusting the availability of bathrooms along my sightseeing route, I finally gave up on the sightseeing and headed back to the hotel, making one last stop at a sculpture of Christopher Columbus meeting with Queen Isabella.  I had hoped to find at least a kiosk selling bottled water, but there wasn't anything along the way back.

I headed straight to my room and alternated between sleeping and dealing with the effects of a stomach bug for the next several hours.  Things seemed to settle down by 2AM, so I headed downstairs to find out when our wake up call was - 6:30AM - and then raided the minibar for some cold water and some fruit juice.  I held that down, so I took some Imodium AD in preparation for tomorrow's bus ride to Madrid and went back to bed.

I usually lose a bit of weight on trips like this one.  But this isn't the way I prefer to lose it.

Madrid - Arrival

Friday May 2 -

I didn't get the wake up call for some reason, but fortunately I had set my alarm as a backup.  I was tired, my head cold was a bit worse, and I was still feeling the aftereffects of the stomach bug.  I did have a very small breakfast, and it didn't seem to cause any problems.

The bus ride to Madrid passed through some spectacular scenery - rugged mountains, vast olive orchards, rural scenery, and old cathedrals and ruins in just about every town we passed by.  We also saw some of the windmills that Don Quixote tilted at, although I didn't get a good photo shot at any of them.

We left Granada early, and except for a couple breaks, we didn't stop to do any sightseeing along the way, which was a bit disappointing.  But we did end up in Madrid by 2PM, at which point I said my goodbyes to my traveling companions and separated from the Insight tour.

I took a taxi to my city center hotel, the Best Western Hotel Arosa, located right on Gran Vía, a great location.  I had a single room, smaller and less fancy than anything I had on the tour, but just fine for me.  The building had one of the oddest shaped elevators I think I've ever seen in a hotel - trapezoid and just big enough to hold me and my suitcase.  

It was early, sunny, nice temperatures, and a great location.  As good a way to start a visit to a European capital as I could have hoped for.  But I was feeling sick, tired and run down, so I did little more than put down my suitcase and go to bed.  I napped for about four hours.

I then took a walk, a little triangle route around the neighborhood.  I found a pedestrian mall about a block from my hotel that featured the Iowa Cafe - I figured I'd have to give that a try, sometime - some kiosks for beverages and snacks, several tattoo parlors and a large number of prostitutes, in spite of the fact that there was also a police substation on the street.  This wasn't some dark alley or late-night walk.  It was a sunny early Friday evening, and lots of people were out and about.  But a few of the women were pretty explicit about their goals when they tried to get my attention.  One had parked herself in front of a McDonalds.  I would have liked to have gotten a picture of her with the "I'm lovin' it!" sign.

I walked past some anti-meat eating picketers, picked up some dinner at the McDonalds and brought it back to my room.  I had picked the hotel for its location near daytime activities and nightlife, but there'd be no nightlife for me tonight.  Instead, I ate most of my dinner - and more importantly I kept it down - and spent the evening really unpacking and settling into my room.  After bouncing through several hotels, I'd be in this one for six nights.  I finished off the evening catching up on my photos and writing up a couple journal entries.

So... What did I think of the bus tour now that it is over with?

"Treasures of Spain, Portugal and Morocco" was my first tour with Insight Vacations, and I have to say that I was quite underwhelmed by the official tour sightseeing portion of it, especially in Portugal and Morocco.  But I'll start with the good comments.  Our guide, Javier, was great - personable, hard-working and he really looked out for his charges well.  The travel group was a lot of fun.  I enjoyed spending the time with most of them - a couple of routine complainers (I don't think they had realistic expectations for services we'd find in Morocco), but this group was by far a lot more fun than the one I traveled with on the Australia trip.  The bus was quite comfortable - although it helped that one couple failed to show so I had a seat to myself.

But if I had stuck only with the advertised itinerary, then except for an outstanding tour of the Fés medina I would have gotten only the most superficial of visits to Lisbon and Morocco.  We skipped a lot of the sites and city tours listed in the brochure (see the end of this page).  Our guide pointed out a medina gate in Tangier only as we began our drive out of town, our walking tour of the Marrakech medina skipped all but one of the important sites, as did our optional excursion to Meknes.  Furthermore, there was the whole thing about optional excursions - the brochure made only a few references to these, so I was surprised by the extent of what Insight considered optional - and subject to additional payment after I got to Spain.  I skipped the dinner-related ones and the trip to Segovia from Madrid as I knew I'd get a better Segovia trip on my own by train, and yet the bill for my extras came to about $300 above and beyond the original cost of the tour.  For some couples, the amounts on their receipts added up to more than $1000.  That's a lot to add on to such a trip - there was nothing at all like this during my previous group tours - especially when most of the optional excursion sightseeing (except for the dinners) struck me as something one would reasonable expect to have included in the core trip.

The hotel choices didn't help much.  Although the hotels themselves were fine in spite of a few minor glitches, they often were not conveniently located to any major sightseeing areas, and they were often isolated from much in the way of shopping and restaurants.  I ran up $50 in taxi fares in Lisbon and took long walks in other cities so that I could make full use of available sightseeing time.  With a number of older people in the group, the longer walks were a deterrent, and that also made it difficult for people to make good use of their time when others in the group had the bus and were off on some optional excursion.  Its poor location was why I didn't stay at the tour hotel when we returned to Madrid even though I paid for a couple nights there - when I made my hotel switch, I found that a taxi from the tour hotel to my location in Madrid's city center on Gran Vía cost about $20, which really adds up if you make the trip a couple times a day.

Fortunately I have low expectations when it comes to bus tours.  As much as anything, I really wanted this tour for its transportation convenience and coverage of cities, especially in Morocco.  I was prepared with city maps and sightseeing details, so I was able to make the most out of each place with the time available, making solo visits to the medinas in Tangier, Marrakech and Rabat, hitting the real treasures of central Lisbon, enjoying the nightlife of Fés, exploring Lisbon's Alto Bairro, and getting more complete sightseeing coverage of Salamanca, Seville and Granada than did the other folks on the tour.  

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Madrid - City Center Explorations

Saturday May 3 -

The problem with recovering from a stomach bug is that for that first day afterwards, it's hard to tell if that feeling in your stomach is nausea or hunger.  I suppose that it's a bit of both.  I had a slow, easy start to the day as I really wanted to confirm that it was more of the latter before I got too carried away with my plans.  But I seemed to survive a sandwich and Diet Coke for breakfast, so I set off on my sightseeing.

I've toured a number of European capitals now, and have found plenty to keep me busy for at least a few days.  Even longer in London and Berlin.  Madrid is different.  It is a relatively young city, created as the centralized capital of Spain, so it doesn't have the historical buildings that survive in a number of other cities.  Excluding museums, my guidebook lists only a handful of interesting sites to check out.  If I had been in full health, I would have covered all of them in just one day.  I chose to spend six nights in Madrid not for Madrid sightseeing but for the daytrip options that it provided.  But today I focused on Madrid.

My first stop was the Plaza de San Martín, site of the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales.  Beginning in the 16th century aristocratic women who gave up on men showed up here with big dowries, making this one of the wealthiest convents in Spain.  Today parts of the convent are open to visitors who want to check out that wealth.  The building itself is interesting, and the plaza is rather pretty.

I then took an indirect route over to Plaza de España, passing the Asembion de Madrid along the way.  Plaza de España is basically a nice city park whose primary feature is a very large monument to writer Miguel de Cervantes that includes a statue of Don Quixote.  It's an interesting sculpture, but folks like to get their photos taken with the Quixote statue, making it all but impossible to get a picture of it without some stranger mugging for someone else's camera.  (And it provides another opportunity to see how many people have cameras that they do not know how to operate.)

From there I headed over towards the Palacio Real, the Royal Palace that was built in the 1700s on the site of the Madrid Alcázar.   It hasn't been used as a royal residence since the 1930s, but several of the royal apartments have been maintained and are open for tours.  I decided to skip the tour today as I was concerned about a growing chance of rain - it would make a rainy day option for me.  Besides, I still have a lot of German and Austrian palace tours fresh in my mind from last fall's trip.

I then headed next door to the Catedral Nuestra Señora de la Almudena, the Cathedral of Madrid.  Although plans for the cathedral date back to the 1500s, construction did not begin until 1879, and the cathedral was finally consecrated in 1993.  That gave the cathedral a decidedly modern feel, much different from the typical cathedrals that I have visited across Europe in my travels.

I took a break across the street in Plaza de Oriente, a small park in front of the palace and the Teatro Real.  With the cough and the way it made my throat feel, I was always on the lookout for popsicle-like snacks, and I had one here.  Then it was on to Plaza Mayor, the main public square in Madrid.  Once a site of bullfights, knight tournaments, the burning of heretics, and festivals, today it features a number of tourist-targeting sidewalk cafes and souvenir shops.  Mostly surrounded by similar red buildings, one standout is the Casa de la Panaderia, a municipal and cultural building whose facade is covered with engaging murals, well worth a look and a great backdrop for photos of the Phillip III sculpture in the middle of the plaza.

I picked up a sandwich for a late lunch and then headed over to the nearby Plaza Puerta del Sol, central Madrid's other great plaza (and for subway riders, one of Madrid's primary train transfer stations).  This plaza could also be regarded as the center of Spain.  It is Km 0 for marking the roads that radiate out of Madrid across Spain.  The plaza features the clock tower highlighted in annual New Years countdowns, a sculpture of a bear and madrone tree that represent the heraldic symbol of Madrid, and the large lighted billboard of Tio Pepe, symbol of Spain's famous brandy.

By now it was well after 4PM, and after yesterday's illness and today's long walk, I was getting tired.  So I headed back to my room to rest for a couple hours.  That makes me sound like an old man, but the illness really took it out of me.

After seven, I headed out for another Gran Vía photo walk, hoping to get the pictures I missed yesterday when my battery unexpectedly died.  I ended up running into one of the couples from the bus tour and gave them directions to the Prado art museum.  Once again my maps came in handy.  Never leave home without them.

I worked my way back towards the hotel, stopping at a pharmacy for some cold medication followed by a stop at KFC for dinner.  I know, I know.  McDonalds.  Burger King.  KFC.  I'm hardly experiencing Spanish cuisine.  But with the cold and still settling stomach, anything more exotic would probably have been wasted on me.

While rehydrating myself after dinner, I spent the evening going through some of the information I've picked up on the trip.  It was amazing how much water I could put away without having to go to the bathroom.  However, it seemed to have opened the nasal faucet for my head cold.  

In spite of all that I decided to venture out for my first taste of Spanish nightlife.  I ended up at the Bear Bar, and stuck around for about an hour.  But between my cold and the heavy smoke (something I'm no longer used to in bars since Washington State banned it a few years ago), I was back at the hotel before 12:30AM.

Sunday May 4 -

Last night I kept dreaming that I was trapped in some sort of Moroccan bureaucracy, odd since I didn't encounter anything of the sort on the trip.  I woke up several times.  And with each awakening, I realized that I was feeling more and more nauseous.  I hoped that it was tied to too much cold medication and a bit of beer on a sensitive stomach, but by the time I got up in the morning, I was wondering if I had taken a big step backwards during the night.  And that led to a very slow start to today's sightseeing, which I suppose didn't much matter as my plans weren't all that ambitious anyway.

My first target for the day was the Museo Archeológico Nacional, the national archeological museum.  First I checked out the sculptures on the plaza across the street that were dedicated to Christopher Columbus and other Spanish explorers.  Then on to the museum.  The museum was alright, although a bit less focused on Spain than I had hoped for.  Unfortunately, a large part of it was closed off for renovation, so I only got to see a fraction of the typical displays.

From there I headed for Parque Buen Retiro, a huge city park to the east of the city center.  There's nothing there that really targets tourists as the park mainly functions as a playground for locals.  But the walk was a nice contrast to the heavily urbanized city center.  

My next stop was at the Iglesia San Jerónimo del Real, historically the royal church, site of coronations, marriages and the swearing in of the Spanish parliament.  Spanish King Juan Carlos I was coronated here in 1975.  I got there just as mass was ending, but my sightseeing didn't last long - visitors were ushered out of the church so that they could lock it up for the day.

I walked past the Prado art museum at this point.  I was feeling pretty run down by now, but I still had to hit the Atocha train station to figure out how to make my planned day trips.  I've done a fair amount of European rail travel these last couple years - heck, last year I bounced all over Germany, Austria and their neighbors by train - so I'm not intimidated in the least by train travel in foreign countries.  I have boarded trains at about three dozen stations in about a dozen foreign countries.  It can be a bit confusing as every city is different, but there are some basics that they all seem to share.  

So I was a bit surprised at how messed up I found Madrid's Atocha station, as I couldn't find anything resembling schedules for my targeted cities.  I finally talked to the person at information who informed me that for a couple of the trains, I'd have to use the Chamartín station, which wasn't what my guidebook had said.  Certainly not a show-stopper, but given how I felt, I wasn't adventurous enough today to go check it out.  Instead I headed back to the hotel and took a nap.

I woke up and spent a few hours prepping for my hoped for trip to Segovia tomorrow, took care of the day's photos and then went back to bed.  If I felt well enough to go, it would be an early morning.

Segovia Day Trip

Monday May 5 -

I finally had a day that made me feel like my normal travel self.  Not that it started all that well, but all was well by 8:01AM, and I had a wonderful day exploring Segovia.  And that's what really matters.

I spent the first few hours after I turned in last night in a coughing fit.  That and some noisy soccer game celebrants chopped off a few hours of my sleep, so when the alarm went off at 6:30AM, I was tempted to turn it off and go back to sleep.  But I pulled myself out of bed, and I was at Madrid's Atocha train station before 7:30, and I was on the train to Segovia at 8:01.  As was half of Madrid, it seemed - it was a local train, so in the city it functions basically as just another subway train, but it emptied out at the Chamartín station just before we left Madrid.

I got to Segovia, but my map wasn't very helpful and there wasn't anyplace near the train station offering better maps.  But there was a city gate visible just a block north of the train station, and so I figured the road that passed through that would probably lead me towards the city center.  After a while, I still hadn't seen anything that looked like what I might be looking for, so I headed into a shop to ask.  The clerk couldn't help me, but there happened to be an English-speaking tourist there who indicated I was almost there.  Indeed, after one more block one of Segovia's highlights came into view.

The Roman aqueduct at Segovia was built back in the 1st century AD.  It is about 10 miles long, with about one kilometer of that supported by stone arches that are up to about 90 feet tall.  The arches pass through the heart of Segovia, bringing water to the old city and Segovia's Alcázar.  As impressive and graceful as the arches are, what is even more amazing is that these were built with granite blocks without the use of mortar.  It is incredible to think of how they built something like this but also that it has stood for 2000 years.

From the base of the aqueduct the old city on the hilltop was in plain view.  No need for a map at this point, but the local tourist office provides excellent tourist-oriented maps, so I picked one up.

I took the less popular route up to the old city, figuring it would give me the best views of the aqueduct.  After passing through the city gate, I followed the city walls back to the point where the aqueduct reaches the old city and then began my old city sightseeing.  

Casa de los Picos, once known as the House of the Jew, is recognizable by its diamond point-like decorations (picos) on its facade.  It sits near the site of San Martín's Gate, once the main entrance into the city.  The Alhóndiga once housed the city granary.  Today this 16th century building is home to the city's historic archives.

The old Judería was once the Jewish quarter, and the Corpus Christi convent located there once was the city's old main synagogue until 1419.  It had been the most important of the five synagogues in Segovia prior to Spain's expulsion of the Jews.

The biggest building in the old city center is the Catedral de la Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, the last Gothic cathedral built in Spain.  Tradition holds that it was built on the spot where Isabella I was proclaimed the queen of Castile.  Construction began in the early 1500s after an earlier cathedral was destroyed in the War of the Communeros (the cloisters from the older cathedral were relocated and used with this cathedral).  It was consecrated in 1768.  It includes the usual set of impressive chapels, church art and treasures, but nothing really stood out.

From the cathedral I made my way towards El Alcázar, located at the northwestern edge of the city, atop a rocky outcropping above the confluence of the Clamores and Eresma Rivers.  From the plaza just in front of the Alcázar I got some great views of the Monasterio Jerónimo de Santa Maria del Parral and the Iglesia de la Vera Cruz.  The Vera Cruz church, built in the 13th century by the Knights of the Templar, is a 12-sided church built around a small structure with three apses.  A tower and fourth apse were added later.  Its design was based on the Holy Sepulchre Church in Jerusalem.

As for the Alcázar itself, well, it turned out that there was some sort of government meeting taking place there today and tomorrow, so it was closed to the public those days.  As a result I wasn't able to tour the Alcázar or its grounds.

The Alcázar was originally built on top of the ruins of a Roman fortress and began as an Arab fort.  Segovia returned to Christian control in the late 1000s.  The current structure really began to take shape in the 1100s, and it became the primary residence of Alfonso VIII.  It would continue to be a favored residence of the Castilian monarchs throughout the Middle Ages.  In 1474, when news of the death of King Henry IV reached Segovia, his sister Isabella took refuge in the Alcázar's walls.  The next day she was coronated as Queen of Castile and Leon.  She would eventually marry Aragón's Fernando II here, unifying their kingdoms into what would become modern-day Spain.  This history and its storybook castle-like looks make the Alcázar a popular sightseeing stop.

The best views of the Alcázar come from a trail below the castle.  I found the trailhead and began my downhill walk.  I eventually came across a viewing area and took several pictures of the Alcázar from there.  I should have continued a bit further along the trail given some of the photos of the Alcázar that I saw after coming home, but I was pleased with the pictures I did get.  Even without being able to tour the inside, the Alcázar is well worth seeing.

I headed back up into the old city and found a restaurant on Plaza Mayor to get some lunch.  After lunch I checked out some minor sites located to the north of Plaza Mayor, including the Santo Domingo de Guzmán monastery and the Iglesia de la Santísima Trinidad, as I made my way over to the city wall.  From the city wall I took in the views of the Real Monasterio de la Santa Cruz and different views of the Monasterio Jerónimo de Santa Maria del Parral and the Iglesia de la Vera Cruz.

That pretty much wrapped up my sightseeing.  I headed back towards the modern city center, getting a last look at the Roman Aqueduct along the way, and then made the 30 minute walk to the train station.  I noted that the town was now pretty quiet and many of the stores were closed.  Afternoon siesta?  Holiday?  I wasn't sure which was the case, but as lively as the city center was this morning, I was surprised at how quiet it was now.

I took the train back to Madrid, enjoying the rugged scenery along the way.  I wasn't terribly hungry given my late lunch, so I picked up a sandwich on my way back to the hotel.  

No nightlife tonight.  I spent a quiet evening in the hotel room, and went to bed early as I had another early start planned for tomorrow morning.

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San Lorenzo de El Escorial Day Trip

Tuesday May 6 -

My second day trip out of Madrid was to the village of El Escorial and the San Lorenzo de El Escorial monastery there.  

After moving the capital of Spain to Madrid, King Philip II ordered the construction of a monastery on a mountain slope above the village of El Escorial back in 1563.  The Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial is a massive grey granite monastery and cathedral surrounded by gardens and with killer views of the mountains above and valley below.

Today the monastery is part mausoleum and part museum.  Its crypt, the Royal Pantheon, is where most of Spain's monarchs and related royals going back to Charles I are buried.  The crypts seem to be more organized than other royal crypts that I've toured - it just occurred to me that I've toured quite a few royal crypts in recent years.  One room featured what looked like a large marble cake - a wedding cake, according to some descriptions I've seen - which contains the remains of royals who've died before reaching puberty.

My tour also covered several rooms filled with paintings by such Spanish masters as El Greco, Titian and especially José de Ribera, whose name seemed to be on most of the paintings that caught my eye.  Another set of rooms focused on architecture, including the design and construction of the monastery and basilica with its 90-foot high dome.  When I've seen the grand cathedrals all over Europe, yesterday's aqueduct and a floor/ceiling in the basilica consisting of concentric blocks of granite that seemed to defy gravity, I've marveled at how these could have been built without the kind of equipment that currently dots downtown Seattle.  The architecture displays provided some insight into the construction techniques.  In some ways, it wasn't all that different - scaffolding needs to reach the heights needed, and hoists need to be even taller.  The equipment back then was just a lot more crude and required a lot more man-power than today's cranes and other equipment.

The tour also included the royal apartments of Philip II.  He was a Hapsburg (the Austrian royal family), but his chambers were pretty simple by any measure, let alone by the standards set at Vienna's Hofburg Palace.

Chapter rooms, with colorful fresco ceilings (although not as impressive as what I saw at the Vatican, and yes I realize how annoying a statement like that can be to folks who can't travel as much), an impressive main staircase, and finally the basilica itself, with its huge marble high altarpiece and marble crucifix by Cellini.  

After touring the monastery, I took a walk around parts of it to get different views of the place.  Then I checked out its gardens, noteworthy for their views of the surrounding area as they are for their views of the monastery itself.  

The village just outside the monastery is attractive but unexceptional, given what I saw of it.  The closeness of the buildings made it hard to take in the setting of the town, which is one of its claims to fame.

The monastery is the primary attraction of the town.  Not far from town - but too far to walk - is El Valle de los Caidos, the Valley of the Fallen.  Built by Franco, it is dedicated to those who died in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.  Although I would have liked to have seen it, it wasn't on my agenda for today.

I caught the 3:15PM train to Madrid.  I was back at the hotel by 5PM, so I read the paper, got the laundry done and worked at getting caught up on some of my notes before heading out for a more typically-timed Madrid dinner, although I was still early by local standards.  Even so, it was the first time I've eaten a more typical Spanish dinner out on this whole trip, after bus tour dinners, fast food and illness covered the others.  If nothing else, I was saving a lot of money, and my clothes were looser, but those aren't necessarily top priorities when immersing yourself in another country while on vacation.

The downtown sidewalks were packed with people of all ages after 9PM when my dinner had ended.  For many of these folks, dinner was yet to begin.

At about 11 I headed out.  Which turned out to be too early, so I picked up a Diet Coke and people watched in some plaza for about an hour.  I finally headed over to a place called LL's.  Turned out to be a fun place, even though I can't say that I appreciate the charms of bad drag in Spanish any more than I do in English.  And yet the the crowd cheers when the performer nails the high notes - even though it is just lip-syncing.  

I was even flirted with a couple times, although I suspect that the second guy - a Venezuelan whose English was limited to "Hugo Chavez" - was just trying to make his friend (who was doing the translating for us) a bit jealous.  It worked.

It was after 2AM when I finally made it back to the hotel room.  An early night by Madrid standards, I suppose, but I was up at 6:30AM this morning.

My head cold notwithstanding, today finally felt like one of my more typical vacation days.

Madrid - Wrap Up

Wednesday May 7 -

I had originally planned on taking up to three day trips out of Madrid:  Segovia, El Escorial and Avila.  But after showing up in Madrid with a cold and a stomach bug, and making a couple day trips just as I started to feel better, and I couldn't say that I had much of a Madrid experience.  Avila's big claim to fame is that it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, recognized for its well-preserved complete city walls and a number of old churches, palaces and a cathedral.  We got a look at its walls from an overlook en route from Toledo to Salamanca back on April 19 (ages ago, it seems).  Although built as part of Christian effort to retake Spain from the Moors, the guidebook doesn't say much else about it that is historically interesting.  And it's not like I haven't been to a lot of old churches in my European travels.  It would have taken another early bedtime, early rising, 4-hours of train travel (round trip) to go see Avila in more detail, and on top of all of that yesterday's weather forecast for today called for rain.

And, no, I didn't decide to skip it because of the problems I've had at the Atocha station.

With last night's late night, I made an easy start today.  Slept late.  Read the paper over breakfast.  After all, I only had a couple real sightseeing plans, both museums.

My first sightseeing stop was the Prado, Madrid's world-famous art museum.  Although I'm not usually a big art museum visitor, I figured I'd better check out the Prado, given its world-class status.  And there are a handful of Spanish masters whose works I'd like to see.

However, that didn't go quite as planned.  They were hosting a temporary exhibit on the works of Francisco Goya.  That took over the floor that normally features painters like El Greco, Ribera and others, so I didn't get as much out of the visit as I had hoped.  Even so, I did take in a number of works that I liked during my abbreviated visit to the Prado.

Then it was off to lunch.  Early by Madrid standards, late by mine, but I had another museum targeted.  I had a Spanish omelet, basically an omelet filled with potatoes.

Then it was time to master Madrid's subway system.  Which took less than a minute to figure out.  I took one line to the Sol station and then connected to another, ending up northwest of the city center where I targeted the Museo de América, which houses a collection of pre-Columbian, Spanish-American and Native American artifacts.  Unfortunately I should have read the details in my guidebook more closely.  I showed up at the front door right at the museum's 3:00PM closing time.

Well, that was a bummer.  Especially on top of the archeology museum and Prado experiences with lots of missing displays.  I headed back to the city center, and with no further plans and nothing really pressing to see at that point I went back to my room where I began preparing for tomorrow's departure for Barcelona.  

I decided to have dinner at one of the restaurants on Plaza Mayor.  They cater to tourists, but I figured that it's expected that someone like me might eat there at least once.  I was on the lookout for paella, a rice dish popular in Spain (but not like the "Spanish rice" that my mom used to make when we were growing up; not that her "Hungarian goulash" even closely resembled the goulash I had in Budapest last year, either), but at 15-20 euros for a bowl of rice with bits of meat in it I decided to take a pass.  The tapas are another popular option, but if you don't drink, you don't like seafood and you're dining on your own, it doesn't work out so well.  But I did settle on pork loin, and even threw in stuffed olives as an appetizer.

I took my time dining and lingered over my beverage as I waited for dusk.  I figured Plaza Mayor and Plaza Puerta del Sol would be good places for some "Madrid at night" photos.  The promised rain finally began falling at about 10:30PM, so I headed back to the hotel.

No nightlife tonight.  Even if it hadn't started raining, I had already decided against it as I still didn't feel fully up to speed.

And now I'm off to Barcelona, as the trip ends its third week and begins its final week.

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Barcelona - Arrival

Thursday May 8 -

Up reasonably early.  I cleaned up, checked out, and headed for the airport.  Madrid was now behind me.  

I never really got into Madrid.  Part of that was no doubt due to how bad I felt those first few days, and the annoyances I experienced at the train station didn't help.  But it is really just a rather ordinary city.  A nice enough city, to be sure, but there were no "wow" experiences, and not enough truly interesting sightseeing targets.  Pick it for its museums, shopping and central location for interesting day trips.  But beyond that, a day for Madrid sightseeing's sake is probably plenty.

I had an 11:30AM flight that was delayed by half an hour, but even with the delay I was at the front desk of my Barcelona hotel shortly after 2PM.  I'm at Hotel Cram, a "trendy" new place hidden behind the preserved facade of a much older building.  In most respects, it is one of the nicest hotel rooms I've had in Europe - even the bathroom makes sense, with legroom in front of the toilet and a shower door that actually runs the length of the shower.  The TV operates from what looks like a laptop keyboard, which the bellhop felt obligated to turn on for me.  But after he left, I couldn't figure out how to turn it off.  The mouse controls seemed to work, but nothing happened when I clicked anything.  But then all of the sudden a movie started up.

I called the front desk - I didn't know if it was pay per view, but I certainly didn't want to pay to view some movie I didn't order.  They promised to send someone up, but he didn't show up in the next 45 minutes.  I eventually just unplugged the thing.  And that's probably the design flaw of this room.  There are four buttons that control each light by the bed.  That's about three too many.  The little round stool sitting under the desk?  Its mod shape may fit the look of the room, but I'll take a regular chair.  With a back to it.  And a place to put my clothes when I unpack them.

But it was a nice room, and the location seemed to be quite good.

After figuring out how to put an end to Transformers, the movie playing on the TV, I set out for some later afternoon sightseeing.  It had been pouring when I left Madrid, but the clouds were just taking over the skies over Barcelona, so I stuck with some architectural sites in the neighborhood, capped off with a visit to Gaudí's La Sagrada Família.

I first heard of Antoni Gaudí because the Alan Parsons Project named one of its albums Gaudí.  The album included the song La Sagrada Família, and the jacket art featured photos of Gaudí's masterpiece.  Gaudí was  a leading modernismo architect, who experimented with form that drew inspiration from the Art Nouveau movement.  My walk took me past some interesting buildings by Gaudí and others - Casa Amatller, Casa Batlló, Casa Lleó Morera and La Padrera.  Some of these are open to the public - I must admit that I was surprised to find crowds of people in front of some of these buildings lined up for the tours or taking photos.  

The big draw of course was La Sagrada Familia, or more formally, Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família.  This Church of the Holy Family is a cathedral-scale church begun under Gaudí's modernismo architectural direction in 1882.  It was not close to being completed in 1926 when Gaudí was killed in a tram accident.  Further complicating the completion of the church was the ransacking of his office and destruction of his notes a decade later in the early days of the Spanish Civil War.  But work is progressing, especially in recent years, and it's clear from the build up of dirt which parts of the church are 100 years old and which are much more recent.  It may even be completed this century.  For a fee that helps fund the construction, visitors get to check out the construction site from the inside, read displays and tour a lower-level museum.

It was after 6PM when I finished up there, so I made my way back to the hotel.  I checked out my first Barcelona photos and settled a bit more into my room (and dealt with another unexpected blip from the TV).

Near the start of my walk I noted the presence of an Argentinean restaurant near my hotel.  I made a point of passing it on my way back in order to check out its menu.  It looked pretty good, so when I went out for dinner (after 9PM this time, approaching traditional Spanish time), that was my target.  Great food.  I'd go back there two more times while I was in town.

As for nightlife, I checked out a couple bars just around the corner from the hotel.  Dietrich, the one said to be popular in my travel guide book, was nearly deserted - and stayed that way for an hour, so I headed next door to Átame where it turns out the people were.  But it was all I could do to keep my eyes open, so I was back at the hotel by 1:30AM.

Barcelona - City Center Explorations

Friday May 9 -

Today I awoke to rain.  And I awoke with a headache.  The headache felt like a caffeine withdrawal headache, which I could do something about.  As for the rain, I figured I'd pick up some groceries and use the time to get caught up on some R&R this morning, and then see what the afternoon would bring.

Well, the afternoon continued to bring more rain.  But I decided to head out for some sightseeing anyway, figuring I could spend the afternoon in a museum and a cathedral, saving outside photos for another day.

The museum I targeted was the Museu D'història de la Ciutat (note the Catalán spellings here vs. more traditional Spanish, something that is routinely apparent in Barcelona), which covers about 2000 years of Barcelona history.  People will ooh and aah over art museums like the Prado, and that's fine with me.  But give me a good history museum, and I'm in my kind of museum heaven.  And that's what I found with Barcelona's City History Museum.  

The museum tour begins with an elevator ride down.  But instead of counting down floors, it counts down years, about 2000 in all.  And when the door opened, I found myself surrounded by the actual archeological dig into the ruins of the Roman city of Barcino, founded by Augustus in around 10BC.  The dig is extensive, covering about 4000 square meters, and includes city walls, homes, workshops, factories for cloth and garment cleaning and dyeing, a fish food preparation factory and a wine-making facility, which came and went over about 7-8 centuries leading up to the first Christian constructions.

As we worked our way up towards ground-level, we got more information on Barcelona in the High Middle Ages, including its history in the battle between Moslems and Christians for control of the Iberian Peninsula (mostly Christian in Barcelona's case).  Of course, the site's more recently history is well-represented just outside the museum's door in the Barri Gòtic neighborhood, which I planned to explore in more detail with drier weather.

My only complaint about the museum was that it ended rather abruptly with a visit to the Capilla de Santa Agata and a display on urban archeology in the Saló del Tinell, as if they ran out of room before they ran out of history.  But the archeological site set such high expectations that it would have been hard for any museum to sustain that level throughout.  Well, one other complaint - no photos permitted, and the selection of postcards featuring the ruins was pretty limited.

The tour exits into the Plaça del Rei, the Royal Plaza.  And indeed it is surrounded by the Palau Reial, the old royal palace of the counts of Barcelona, and after them the kings of Aragón.  Rooms included Saló del Tinell and Capilla de Santa Agata.  According to tradition, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand received Columbus here after he returned from the New World for the first time.  The palace features the Torre del Reí Martí, five-stories of porticoed galleries.  The rain had let up, so I got some pictures of that.

I then headed for the nearby Catedral de Barcelona.  Construction of this Catalonian Gothic cathedral began in the late 1200s and continued for about 150 years.  Unfortunately, evening mass was just getting underway, which severely limited my visit.

So I decided to return to my room, getting back to the hotel just before 7PM.  With about two hours to kill before heading out for an "early" dinner, I did some Barcelona sightseeing planning.  The forecast was for more rain tomorrow.  There seems to be a lot more to see in Barcelona than there was in Madrid, so more rain would be a disruption at this point.

I still wasn't hungry when dinner time finally rolled around, but I headed out anyway, taking an 8-block walk to check out the restaurant offerings nearby.  Plenty to choose from, but nothing really grabbed me.  I ended up picking up some ham and crackers at a nearby convenience store and called that dinner.  

Someone reading this is bound to wonder why I don't indulge in the whole tapas scene, a Spain standard.  Tapas are bar appetizers, from something as basic as small bowl of olives to some rather fancy fare.  Some people will settle into one bar and sample a variety of tapas.  Others will graze from bar to bar.  Indulging in such a tapeo is one of the top culinary reasons people come to Spain.  

But as an overweight diabetic who doesn't much drink, and as someone traveling alone, this is a Spanish tradition that doesn't work out all that for me.  Tapas and other appetizers can really mess up my dinner options, not that ham and crackers was much of a dinner.

It was still raining when it was time to make my bar choice for the Friday night.  I stuck with Átame as it is just around the corner from the hotel.  Not as busy as last night, but the crowd didn't fade away.  Still, I had the same problem last night in that I began to feel really dozy, so I left at about 1:30AM.  

I used to be able to stay out until 3, 4 and sometimes even 5AM.  Heck, just three years ago, it was already light out when I headed back to my hotel room at 6AM from a Buenos Aires bar.  I'm beginning to think that I really am getting old.

Saturday May 10 -

The rain in Spain is a pain when it leaves the plain.

I awoke to another day of steady rain with wind, and a newspaper weather report that forecasts thunderstorms for the next two days.  For a region reportedly experiencing drought conditions, this probably made the locals a lot happier than it made me.  Not only did it continue all day, but it actually got heavier and windier as the day progressed.

I've had rain on these vacations before, most notably the mess in Vienna last year.  But I think this was the first time I so completely gave up on a vacation day.  I spent most of the day in my room working on the computer, sorting and labeling photos and getting some of the daily summaries polished up.  Given how long it usually takes me to get my trip information in order once I get home, I figured that it would be nice to have the head start.  

As for wasting a vacation day?  Well, no one will be going to Sitges this weekend, so I figured I could cancel that day trip plan.  And this was Day 24 of my 28-day trip.  Even on the day I arrived in Madrid at the end of the bus trip, sick with both a cold and the aftereffects of a stomach bug, I got out and did some sightseeing.  I don't think I can be faulted for taking a day off at this point.  I did get laundry done, and I got a nap in, too.

For dinner I headed back to Gaucho's, the Argentinean restaurant I had dinner at the other night.  This time just a more traditional steak and potatoes meal, but like last time it was quite good.  It may not be very adventurous, but steak and potatoes was what I was in the mood for, and I knew they had it.  

A group of young adults sat down next to me at dinner - a group of Germans and one local, with English as their common language.  So I listened in, giving me something to do during dinner.  Of course, the rain dominated their early conversation.  It seems to be the consensus opinion that it's not supposed to rain like this in Barcelona this time of year.

For nightlife I originally had considered going to some dance bar.  But the walk is a bit longer, the crowds get going later, and with me dozing off on my feet at 1:30AM the last couple nights, and I figured I'd stick with a more traditional bar.  But I did venture out a bit further than I had the last couple nights, checking out the crowd at Bacon Bear Bar, a bear bar a couple blocks from my hotel.  More flirting.  With as good looking as the average Spanish male is, I don't get why I get so much flirting attention here.

I should note for the record that the rain had indeed stopped at the time I headed out to the bar.  However, three hours later when I returned to the hotel, it was raining lightly, and lightning flashes lit up the sky every several seconds.

Sunday May 11 -

When I first planned this trip, I figured that I'd take a day trip to Sitges today.  It's mostly a beach resort town, very popular among Europe's gay population, so I've heard about it in the gay press.  But with more rain and thunderstorms in the forecast, I figured that Sitges was probably the most expendable day trip on the agenda at this point.

But it turned out that the weather forecast was wrong.  It was sunny when I got up, with only clear skies visible from my hotel room.  That wasn't the complete picture, though, as once I got out and about I could see plenty of clouds around the area, with some looking like rainmakers.  Fortunately the rainmakers stayed away.  Although high clouds sometimes took over the afternoon skies, things stayed dry.  And that gave me the kind of day I needed at this point in my Barcelona stay.  I think I would have gone nuts with another rain-filled day.

I headed over to Plaça de Catalunya for some photos and breakfast and then headed back into Barri Gòtic.  I wanted to try my luck again with photos inside the cathedral (nope, another service was underway) and then get some sunny day photos of the sites I saw the other day.  Then I explored the neighborhood more thoroughly as Barri Gòtic is the top sightseeing destination in the city.  In addition to the cathedral and Plaça del Rei areas, I checked out the cathedral cloisters, Casa del Canonge, Palau de la Generalitat (provincial offices) and Casa de la Ciutat (city hall).  I capped of this part of my walk by checking a large section of exposed city walls that dated back to the Roman era, 4th century AD.

That covered the historical core of the city.  From there I headed over to Parc de la Ciutadella, once the site of a fortress but today it is home to the Parliament de Catalunya.  I checked that out and explore the park some, eventually finding a place for a light lunch.  The park struck me as downtown Barcelona's backyard, a place where the locals come to hang out, as there were indeed a number of locals hanging out there.

I followed this with a visit to Barcelona's waterfront, although I didn't actually tour sites like the city's aquarium.  As with the park, this area was full of people, most of whom looked to be locals.  By now the high clouds had moved in, so my photos ended up looking as if more rain was pending.  However, it stayed dry all afternoon.

After picking up a crepe snack to enjoy while watching the harbor and the Mediterranean Sea, I then checked out the Monument a Colom, a monument with a statue of Christopher Columbus on top and various scenes featuring Spanish explorations featured at its base, including a scene of a Native American kissing a cross while kneeling at the foot of a priest.  I'm curious if the Native Americans of the time would have agreed with that portrayal.

From there I follows La Rambla, one of a handful of "ramblas", or pedestrian malls, back towards Plaça de Catalunya.  It was filled with people and temporary shops.  Like many European cities, and unlike many U.S. cities, the locals seem to make a lot of use of their city center in Barcelona, as most places I visited today had a lot of people around, and most of those people did not appear to be tourists.

This wrapped up my sightseeing for the day.  The sky was now overcast enough that I was concerned that it would indeed start raining again, so I headed back to the hotel.

After returning to my room, I washed out the jeans I was wearing.  I'd be wearing them on the plane home, and while they haven't picked up any bar/smoke smell, I do think that they had developed some character of their own.  I figured that anyone sitting near me on the plane Wednesday would probably appreciate it.  And this will give the jeans a couple days to dry.  I followed this with an evening of photo labeling as I filled time before dinner.  Tomorrow is pretty well planned out, at least if it's not raining.  If it rains, who knows what I'll do.  Most museums are closed on Mondays.

For nightlife I went back to the Bacon Bear Bar, but I got bored with it and ended up back at Átame.  Both were pretty busy, a lot busier than I expected for a Sunday  night.  But I think tomorrow may be a holiday.  Either that or Spaniards don't have any problem with staying out late on a work night.  As for me, I headed back to the hotel at about 1:30AM.  Plenty late for this non-Spaniard.

Barcelona - Montjuïc

Monday May 12 -

In the idealized planning for this trip, today was the day that I wanted to go to Andorra, a tiny country in the Pyrenees.  Near as I could tell, the only way for me to get there would be by bus, and I just didn't do the planning for it.  And then Barcelona in general didn't go as planned.  So Andorra joined Sitges on the "not on this trip" list.

Fortunately the weather forecast was mostly wrong again.  Except for one very brief period, a matter of just a few minutes actually, I didn't need the umbrella at all.  And although the day was mostly overcast, the sun did pop out now and then.

I spent today exploring Barcelona's Montjuïc Park, a mountain to the southwest of the city center right on the water's edge.  It is home to a national palace (now an art museum), a citadel and the Olympic Stadium from the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.

After a late breakfast - made later by the fact that today indeed was a holiday of some sort, so it took me a while to even find a suitable breakfast - I set off for the Plaça d'Espanya.  There I checked out an arena (with Moorish stylings) undergoing some sort of urban renewal, a large monument, and a cluster of palaces dominated by the Palau Nacional, on the Montjuïc hillside above them all.  Today the Palau Nacional housed the Museu d'Art de Catalunya.  The plaza in front of the palace offers excellent views of the other palaces, Praça d'Espanya and the neighborhoods and mountains to the northwest of the city.

From there I took a loop road up and around to Castell de Montjuïc, a classic citadel whose mountaintop position gives it outstanding views of the city, the mountains and the Mediterranean.  Built in the 17th and 18th centuries, the castell served to keep an eye on Barcelona itself.  I got a number of view photos along this stretch of my visit, including some of the distant La Sagrada Família site.  From this perspective, it was readily apparently the impact that Gaudí's cathedral has on the Barcelona skyline.  Of course, like a lot of major European cities, most buildings aren't all that tall and skyscrapers are almost non-existent, so there wasn't much to compete with La Sagrada Família, let alone to hide it.  I toured the fortress, and then had a late lunch there.

I took a different route down Montjuïc so that I could check out the Olympic Stadium.  From there it was back to Palau Nacional and downhill to Plaça d'Espanya.  Then I headed a few blocks north to pay a visit to the train station, stopping to check out some very good street art along the way.  At the train station I wanted to find out what times there were for trips to Girona, one of the day trips I had considered for my Barcelona stay.  It took me five days because of all the rain, but with today's walk I finished up my primary sightseeing goals for Barcelona.

Dinner and prepping for tomorrow.  No nightlife tonight given the Girona plans.

Girona Day Trip

Tuesday May 13 -

For my last day of sightseeing on this trip I headed for the town of Girona, about 60 miles northeast of Barcelona.  The train was packed as we made our way through Barcelona's train stops.  I figured it would empty out as Barcelona commuters hit their stops, but instead the train remained full all the way to Girona.  That would be an indicator of what I'd find in Girona.  I don't know if it is always packed with tourists or if it was because of some flower arrangements festival underway, but Girona's old city was overrun with tourists.  That would hide a lot of the city's charm, especially when I compared the day to my visits to Segovia and El Escorial.

I bought a good map of the city at the train station and then walked the few blocks to the old city center.  Most folks seemed to be heading off towards the cathedral.  It was a sunny day, and with the morning sun coming from the east I decided to head to the east wall of the city and get some sunny day pictures of the old city wall.  Once I got home and did some more reading, I found out that the original defensive walls had been knocked down to allow the city to expand.  The walls I saw turned out to actually be fairly recent reconstructions.  However, from atop the walls I did get some great views into the city.

I headed down into the city and visited the cathedral, which dates back to the 1300s.  Its nave is the widest gothic nave in the world, although other parts of the cathedral feature Romanesque and Catalán baroque architecture.  The adjacent museum features a number of related church artifacts, the most noteworthy of which is the Tapestry of the Creation, a large 1000-year-old embroidery that features the people and animals of the Garden of Eden.  The associated cloisters preserve related church art.

From there I headed for the Banys Árabs, the Arab baths.  These date back about 900 years, although they were heavily restored in the 1920s.  The baths feature a caldarium (hot baths) and frigidarium (cold baths), although it was hard to get much of a sense of either as the place was filled with assorted flower arrangements, tied to the flower festival that was underway in the city.

My fourth targeted sightseeing highlight was the Església de Sant Feliu, a church built between the 14th and 17th centuries over what is believed to be the tomb of Feliu of Africa, a Christian martyr who was killed at the beginning of the 4th century.  Unfortunately the church was closed, so my tour was limited to views of its outside.  Its tower along with that of the cathedral dominate the Girona skyline.

I did a bit more looking around and then found some place to get some lunch.  And then I slowly made my way back towards the train station, doing some final sightseeing along the way.  Unfortunately, because of the way I had folded the city map, I forgot to check out the nearby Castell de Montjuïc.  So I concluded my sightseeing a bit early, somewhat underwhelmed by Girona because of the tourist mobs.

I got back to the train station almost 45 minutes before the 3:15PM departure that I was targeting.  When a local started talking to me in the bathroom about cancelled trains, I was suspicious - why single out the obvious tourist, and in the bathroom of all places?  But he was just trying to be helpful.  They had just announced in Catalán that trains to Barcelona would be suspended for awhile by police order.  

Huh?  What the heck does that mean?  And how would that impact my return to Barcelona, especially given that I fly out tomorrow morning?  So I went to the travel assistance office and  in limited English the person there suggested that we look into bus tickets, available across the street.  The next bus was scheduled for 5:15PM and the office wouldn't open until 4:30PM, but I planted myself there to ensure my place in line as others came up to check out the bus schedule.  But after about a half hour, the others checking out the bus scheduled dried up.  And I got to the train platform just as the 3:15PM train to Barcelona was pulling out.  Fortunately there was another one 10 minutes later, and I got on that one.  

I wasn't sure what prompted the announcement or why it cleared up as fast as it did, at least not until we got to be about a half mile out of the Girona station.  A group of police officers was standing next to the tracks near what was clearly a tarp-covered body.  By now we were moving fast enough that it disappeared from view almost as fast as it had come into view.  The rest of the ride back to Barcelona was uneventful.

I was back to my room at the hotel shortly before six.  After talking it easy for about an hour I decided that it was time to pack.  Which was pretty easy given how little I picked up on this trip.  Four small souvenirs, some postcards and some brochures.  And because I'm heading home, there were no extra points for neatness - after all, most of the clothes will just get dumped into the laundry.

I went back to my favorite Argentine restaurant for dinner again, figuring that it would probably be awhile before I have Argentinean food that good for awhile.  I decided to skip any nightlife.  

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Heading Home

Wednesday May 14 -

An early start to the day for my 3-hour flight to Copenhagen.  A couple hours to kill there.  Then an uneventful 10-hour flight to Seattle.  The seat in front of me, the seats next to me and the seat behind me were all empty, so plenty of legroom and room to work on photo labeling.  But my late afternoon arrival in Seattle was comparable to 1AM Spain time, so it was still a long day.  And by the time I got home, my never-ending cough had turned into a full-fledged cold.

After four weeks of travel, I was ready to get home and get back to normal life.  At least for a few weeks.

Souvenirs

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