hudebnik: (Default)
2025-03-17 07:50 am
Entry tags:

Da weekend

This was the weekend of Military Through the Ages, a large timeline living-history show held at Historic Jamestowne, just outside Williamsburg, VA. Our group, La Belle Compagnie, has participated in it every year for something like thirty years, although we didn't join La Belle ourselves until 1998 (and one or two shows were cancelled due to COVID).

NYC to Williamsburg is a fairly long drive, with unpredictable traffic delays on many segments of the route. So this year I took Friday and Monday as vacation days to make sure we had time to get there and back. We dropped the dogs at the boarding kennel Thursday around 5:30 PM, started packing the car, hit the road at 8:00, and stopped for the night at a hotel in Maryland around 11:30, then drove the rest of the way on Friday to set up our pavilion in the afternoon before driving a few minutes to the hotel where La Belle Compagnie had reserved several adjacent suites of rooms, where we had dinner and long geeky conversation with Labellies.

Up to alarm at 6:00, grabbed breakfast at McDonald's, and got to the site by 7:30 to unload musical instruments, put their modern-looking cases back into the car, and open to the public at 9:00 AM.

This year La Belle Compagnie had over twenty people, running ten different "stations": the fighting field where one of our HEMA experts demonstrated techniques of fighting with various weapons; the arming pavilion where a fully-armored knight showed off armor and weapons; the archers' hovel where several commons-born archers showed off their cheaper and plainer armor and weapons; the musicians' tent where [personal profile] shalmestere and I showed off musical instruments and played and sang a variety of 14th-15th-century music; the hall (the group's biggest pavilion) where the Lady of the house, her exchequer, and one of her attendant women showed off and demonstrated various things (I didn't get in there much so I don't know exactly what); the surgeon's station where a guy in a blood-spattered leather apron showed off surgical tools and urinals and talked about medical technology; the cooks' station where two women displayed a variety of herbs, spices, breads, pies, sausages, etc. that we ate for lunch; the armorer's station where a guy who makes armor acted as a merchant selling it, and invited guests to try on helmets, greaves, vambraces, etc.; and the fripperer's station, where another merchant talked about clothing, acting as a reseller of used clothing, and invited guests to try things on.

Saturday was quite busy: the Historic Jamestowne organizers reported nearly 4000 guests coming through the gates in one day, the second highest daily attendance the show has ever had, and we must have talked to a large fraction of them. [personal profile] shalmestere and I brought our fancy circular pavilion and set up two tables therein to hold musical instruments: various kinds of recorders, tabor-pipes, a tabor, a fydel/vielle, a citole, a harp, a shawm, two bombards (aka "alto shawm"), and a doucaine (aka "still shawm", which I explained as "the shawm's indoor voice"). The fiddle suffered an explosive trauma early Saturday: the gut holding the tailpiece to the button snapped, the tailpiece flew up to the fingerboard, the bridge and the nut went flying, and we were unable to play the instrument all that day. But Saturday evening, back at the hotel, I was able to cut a replacement piece of heavy gut and get things working again. We had a number of visitors who had lots of questions about music and instruments, and almost everybody wanted to see and hear the shawms (the most unusual-looking instruments we have), so we earned our keep for the day.

Sunday dawned warmer and drier, but with rain forecast for the afternoon, and the event organizers agreed to start kicking out the public around 1 PM so the re-enactors could get things packed up before the rain hit. La Belle had completely struck camp by about 2:30, and most of us went to a Chinese buffet for lupper (watching the rain start around 3:00) before hitting the road for home.

There were substantial traffic delays in Virginia and Maryland, and [personal profile] shalmestere and I weren't sure how far we would get before being too sleepy to drive, but when we stopped for a bathroom break, refueling, and driver-switch around 8:00, Google Maps said it was only another 3 hours to home, so we decided to try to push on. And indeed we got home before 11:30, and had the car unpacked by 11:45, so we could sleep in our own bed.

On the schedule for today: clean things, put things away, retrieve the dogs from the boarding kennel, buy groceries, maybe see a movie.

We were reminded of several projects to work on. Finish building a case for the harp: we have a fleece sleeve that more-or-less fits the harp, but it needs a flap that closes over the top, and it needs a more protective outer layer (of leather or heavy fabric). Make some hanging walls, perhaps block-printed with animal-minstrel patterns, so the inside of the tent doesn't look quite so Spartan. And as always, learn and memorize more musical pieces. It would be nice to have some written music in appropriate notation and construction, but I think to be plausible it would have to be at least a small book (not loose sheets), so that sounds like a big project -- and it might need to be somewhat different for a 1418 scenario than for a 1382 scenario (just as the men-at-arms have different armor for different time periods).
hudebnik: (Default)
2025-01-05 09:52 am
Entry tags:

Dream journal

I was at an airport, checking in for my flight. The pleasant young man behind the ticket counter asked for all the usual information, then said "May I see your carry-ons?" I showed him my day-pack, including the laptop case, and he wanted to examine the laptop. It had a separate keyboard, in addition to the charger and charger cord and I don't remember what else, so it made a rather unwieldy package, and he warned me that the security people were not treating such packages well. "I can build you a tower for... 375."

Huh? "Where's the decimal point in that?"

"$3.75"

This didn't sound entirely kosher, but I figured if he could get things into a neater bundle while I watched, it would be worth it to learn how. "Sure, I'll pay for the show. I warn you, though, the guy at the Apple Store wasn't able to get it any neater than this."

But I was getting more and more uncomfortable with what appeared to be a "side hustle", and eventually said "Let's forget it, just give me my boarding pass."

"Boarding passes are very much a... situational thing," he said with that ever-pleasant smile.

"ARE YOU GOING TO GIVE ME A BOARDING PASS OR NOT?" I shouted. Another airline employee, middle-aged female, came up from behind me and said "Is there a problem here?" And I woke up.
hudebnik: (Default)
2024-05-20 07:36 am
Entry tags:

travel

Just spent most of a week at Shawm Camp, aka the Early Double Reed and Sackbut Workshop, at a church retreat center outside Bloomington, Indiana. This entailed flying to Indianapolis and renting a car. The car they gave us was all-electric, which was a novel experience for both of us. It seems to work well, although it doesn't seem to understand the idea of "coasting": when you take your foot off the accelerator, it slows down substantially and immediately.

Anyway, we stopped at Trader Joe's for snacks, then drove to Bloomington, where we visited the "Future Birthplace of Captain Janeway" statue, then went to the IU Music Library, which was inexplicably closed in the middle of the day on a Wednesday. Walked around town for a while, shared a pork-loin sandwich for dinner, and drove to the retreat center. Spent three full days playing shawms, plus a night at each end.

Sunday morning we packed the car, left camp around 10 AM, and spent some time trying to find an EV charging station (Google Maps was convinced that there's one in the middle of a derelict shopping mall). Eventually found one in-use, told the driver I'd never charged an EV before, and asked how long it takes. She was extremely helpful: she had about five minutes to go on her charge, and it would probably take us 20-30 minutes to get up to 80% (much longer to get to 100%, if we chose to do that), and we would need to download the EV Connect app to use this particular charging station. So I searched for EV Connect, found their app named EV Go, downloaded it, and went through their new-account registration process while waiting for the other driver to finish charging. Then it got to the "locate nearest charging station" screen and for some reason couldn't find the charging station I was standing three feet away from, or any other charging station within hundreds of miles. Used the QR code on the charging station, and it started downloading the app again, which seemed silly... until I realized that EV Connect is a different app from EV Go, and apparently a different company. With EV Connect I was able to identify the charging station, and eventually to plug in and start charging (after some difficulty getting the door of the charging port on the car open).

After half an hour charging, we drove to the parking lot near the Music Library, parked, walked to Mother Bear's for lunch (nummy Divine Swine pizza), walked to the Music Library (which was open this time), found several pieces we'd been looking for (the computerized catalogue is frustratingly available only with a University ID, but we knew we wanted the M2's, so we just found that aisle and scanned the shelves), then drove back to the Indianapolis airport. We checked in, a little less than two hours before our 4:00 flight, but it's a fairly small and intimate airport, and wasn't particularly crowded at the time, so we got through security and to our gate in plenty of time.

The flight was full, and at least a third of the passengers were from the "Elite Youth Basketball League", many of them well over six feet tall and trying to fold themselves into economy-class airline seats. But we took off on time without problems, landed on time without problems, and got to baggage claim (through the newly-rebuilt Terminal B, which is remarkably attractive and pleasant, and has won a bunch of international awards like "best new airport terminal in the world") without problems. [personal profile] shalmestere retrieved our suitcases while I found the oversized-luggage area and waited for the heavy-duty, TSA-locked case that contained all our shawms. One golf bag came out in the oversized-luggage area, but nothing else seemed forthcoming, so I checked "Find My" for the tag we had attached to the instrument case. Sure enough, it was still at the Indianapolis airport. We talked to Baggage Services, who had no idea why it hadn't gotten on the same plane we did, but assured us it would be on the next flight to New York, and they would deliver it to the house the next day. [personal profile] shalmestere found that unsatisfactory, and asked whether they would call us as soon as it arrived so we could come and get it. They said "sure", and marked it "Hold For Pickup", while we found the taxi stand and loaded our remaining bags into a taxi. I got in, started telling the driver our address, and he started moving before [personal profile] shalmestere had finished getting into the car (the door was still open!), so she cussed him out for a moment, got into her seat, and we rode the rest of the way home uneventfully.

The house was still standing. Some flowers in the front yard had finished blooming while others had started (with three rose bushes in the latter category), and after we'd spent so much of the previous few weeks pulling up maple seedlings, there were now a number of oak seedlings. So we pulled weeds for a few minutes and collapsed on the couch to watch the last two episodes of "Young Sheldon".

Around 8:30 I checked "Find My", and it said the instrument case was "last seen near Indianapolis Airport", but at 6:30, so I figured it was in transit. Fifteen minutes later "Find My" said it was at La Guardia, so we got into the car to retrieve it. [personal profile] shalmestere went into the baggage claim area while I stayed with the car, jockeying through a dense, viscous mass of other cars waiting to pick people up, she came out with the case before I'd managed to travel fifty feet, and we got back to the house fairly efficiently. The instrument case had been opened for inspection, but nothing seemed missing or damaged, so we put away instruments and dirty laundry and went to bed. Never did get a phone call from the airline to tell us our bag had arrived, but it all turned out in the end.
hudebnik: (Default)
2024-04-14 07:08 am

Da Weekend

Baked a loaf of bread Friday evening. It came out a bit underdone in the middle -- I think I set the timer for 45 minutes, should have been 50 or 55 -- and there's a horizontal-plane split that makes the top quarter of each slice inclined to split from the lower three quarters. Tastes pretty good, but not useful for anything resembling a sandwich. Probably ought to make another batch sooner than next weekend.

We've got almost all the held mail from our three-week trip to Spain: there's one package that the Post Office says is "held at customer request", but I went there yesterday with the tracking number and they couldn't find it. But we retrieved a box of dahlia bulbs from the next door neighbor, and a box of violet-adjacent baby plants arrived (and were planted) Friday afternoon. Gardening yesterday was postponed due to rain and wind, so we went to Trader Joe's and Home Depot instead (getting a bunch of potted plants at the latter). Today looks more promising on the weather front: we need to put in the aforementioned dahlias, and the pansies and violet-adjacents that [personal profile] shalmestere bought yesterday, and the Thai-chili and bush-bean plants that I bought yesterday, and I want to start some basil seeds indoors before moving them to the front lawn. And there are more bean seeds left from last year; might as well put those in too, so they produce a few weeks after the ones I bought yesterday in plant form.

When we returned from Spain, one of the smoke/CO detectors was chirping, not to say "please replace my batteries" but to say "please replace me". So I bought two new detectors (I think the one in the attic has completely given up the ghost, not even chirping) yesterday at Home Depot, and need to install them.

The two large suitcases we took to Spain have been emptied, nested with their smaller siblings, and put away in the attic. There's still a suitcase that [personal profile] shalmestere took to the living history show a month ago; I'm not sure what needs to be done with that stuff. And there are a few items of clothing that I took to the same living history show; I think they're clean enough that they only need to be put away.

This afternoon we're scheduled to attend the "celebration of life" for Richard Pace, a fixture of the NYC and Amherst early-music scenes. He was a decent amateur musician, specializing in voice and dulcian/bassoon, and a prolific fund-raiser, and he had a wonderful, infectious, boyish grin than I'm sure people will bring up repeatedly at the event. Immediately after that is an album-launch concert by local early-music group Alkemie which we may or may not get to depending on our energy levels.

It would be nice to accomplish some house-cleaning and stuff-triaging today, but I don't know how likely that is. There's Too Much Stuff piled up.

And as mentioned before, the weather is nice today, so we should walk the dogs in the park.
hudebnik: (Default)
2024-04-09 01:32 am
Entry tags:

Home again, home again, jiggity jig

Landed at JFK a bit before noon Sunday after three weeks in Spain. Caught a cab home. House still standing; different flowers blooming in front yard than before we left.


Unpacked suitcases. Repacked suitcases. Drove 4+ hours north to friends' house. Slept a lot. With five friends and two other cars, drove north another hour or so into the path of totality, found parking place near a restaurant/resort and gas station, and sat around for a few hours waiting for an eclipse.

We were worried that there would be too much cloud cover, but as it turned out there were only a few high, thin clouds. We viewed the increasing amount of eclipse variously through eclipse glasses, in a camera obscura, by projecting through binoculars onto a white piece of foamcore, and by projecting through a kitchen colander ditto. A breeze sprang up, the air got chilly, the light got weird, and then in a matter of seconds the last sliver of sun projected on the foamcore disappeared, the sky turned midnight-blue, and a cheer went up from the crowd. We could see the eclipsed sun perfectly, with a fair amount of corona and one persistent red flare. We could also see Venus nicely, maybe ten degrees away from the sun and moon; I gather some other planets were supposed to be visible too but I didn't spot them. Anyway, after two minutes or so, several more flares or Bailly's-beads or something appeared next to the first one, then merged into a blaze of white and totality was over.

Within seconds, cars started moving, jockeying to get out of the parking lot and onto the road. We waited for the majority of them to leave before getting in the car ourselves. One of our friends had picked out a restaurant a few miles to the south where we could get dinner, gave us its name, and we all hit the road in our various cars... except that we couldn't get any cell phone service (it's a remote area, and there were suddenly thousands of cell phones trying to use one tower). So after crawling along the interstate for half an hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic, [personal profile] shalmestere and I took the relevant exit and stopped at a gas station to ask where the restaurant was. The lady behind the counter gave clear directions, and we got back on the road. In another heavy traffic jam, presumably people trying to avoid the heavy traffic jam on the interstate. It took another half hour or so to crawl a few miles to the restaurant, where we found we couldn't get a table for seven and started looking for someplace else to eat.

Most restaurants in this part of upstate New York exist to serve weekenders and summer people, so since this was neither a weekend nor summer, they were closed. After a bunch of walking up and down the road, and continuing trouble getting cell signal, we found a place where we could at least sit near one another, and had dinner while waiting for (hopefully) the worst of the traffic to subside.

Left the restaurant just before 7 PM. Traffic was indeed less bad than before, but in the first two hours (mostly on interstate) we travelled 63 miles. Including stops for gas and driver-switching, we got home at the stroke of 1:00 AM, thoroughly fried. Fall down go boom, in own bed for the first time since March 13-14. Both have to work in the morning, but at least we don't have to physically go to our respective offices.
hudebnik: (Default)
2024-04-06 09:21 pm
Entry tags:

Travelogue


Last night when I visited the web site for the Las Huelgas Monastery, which houses the Museo de Telas Medievales among other things, there were tickets available for today at 10:00, 10:30, 11:00, 11:30, 12:00, etc. I wasn't sure when we'd get out of the room or how we'd be getting there (one guidebook says you can get there by any of three different bus lines, but Google Maps doesn't offer any mass-transit directions at all, telling me it's faster to walk), so I decided to buy the tickets once I had more answers to those questions. (You can see where this is going....) This morning when I checked the website, there were no tickets available for any time today. I confirmed by e-mail that no, there really were no tickets available for today, and we crossed Las Huelgas off the list. Which made the day simpler: we didn't need to figure out transportation, and simply visited the Burgos Cathedral and the early-Gothic Iglesia de San Nicolas de Bari next door. Much of the Cathedral is 16th- and 17th-century, but there's some 15th-century art, and the claustro bajo at the end of the tour concentrates more on the pre-14c history of the building.


Stopped at a restaurant for churros y chocolate, waited about half an hour to order, and were told they didn't sell churros y chocolate until 4 PM; at this time they only do the menu del día. So we walked out, found a pan-Asian restaurant that looked faster, and had Chinese food, then got in the car and drove to Madrid (right past Lerma, but I don't know that there's anything to see there so we didn't). Checked into an airport hotel. Returned rental car. Ordered room service for dinner. Repacked suitcases. Up early tomorrow morning to catch a plane to JFK.
hudebnik: (Default)
2024-04-05 07:30 pm
Entry tags:

Travelogue

Checked out of the hotel in Salamanca and drove a bit under an hour to Zamora. The area immediately around the Cathedral is pedestrian-only-except-for-residents, and has increasingly-narrow-and-twisty streets as you get closer, so once I realized this I turned away from the Cathedral, got back to normal and legal streets, and (by a miracle of some saint or other) found a parking spot on the street, straight downhill from the Cathedral.

We walked up the hill and took the audioguide tour of the cathedral (your ticket receipt contains a QR code to download the audioguide, which I'm sure would work better if there were reliable cell reception inside the cathedral).

A good deal of the cathedral's interior decoration is 16th-century or later, but we found a few 15th-century paintings,

and the adjacent museum contains half a dozen large 15th- and 16th-century tapestries in excellent condition.

Then we left the Cathedral to visit the adjacent Castle, which has a mix of medieval, Renaissance, and 18th-century fortifications, with some ruined construction that looks 19th- or 20th-century. But the views are spectacular.

Also briefly visited the Iglesia de San Ildefenso a few minutes' walk away, had a not-very-good menu del día lunch at a local restaurant, and photographed a kite wheeling over the city.

Intended to visit the little Romanesque church in the fields seen above, which was near where we parked the car, but [personal profile] shalmestere was too tired and just wanted to hit the road. So we drove onward, past Valladolid and Palencia, to Burgos. As we approached the hotel, we were once again on twisty narrow streets that are hard to distinguish from sidewalks, but were delighted to find that the hotel has its own underground parking. So we parked, checked in, and collapsed in our room. Whose window faces the facade of the high-Gothic Burgos Cathedral.

Tired and overstimulated. Will probably get dinner at some point; not sure whether it'll be Authentic Local Experience or Asian-noodle-shop comfort food.

For tomorrow, we hope to visit the Cathedral, the Romanesque Iglesia de San Nicolas next door, and the Las Huelgas Monastery (including the Museum of Medieval Textiles). Then drive to Madrid, return our rental car, and re-pack everything for the flight home.
hudebnik: (Default)
2024-04-04 10:33 pm
Entry tags:

Travelogue

A laid-back day in Salamanca. We walked up and down the half-mile main drag(s) a few times, watching the storks that nest at the tops of numerous churches,

stopping for food, returning to the hotel for a nap, looking at more churches,

and other miscellaneous buildings

finding more food, taking the audioguide tour of the cathedrals (Old, i.e. 12-14c, and New, i.e. 16-18c), returning to the hotel for another nap, finding more food, returning to the hotel....
The New Cathedral didn't do much for us: the Gothic arches and ceiling are beautiful, but the decoration closer to floor-level is 17th-19th-century glurge.

But the Old Cathedral is full of 13th-14th-century wall frescoes and carved capitals in pretty good condition



The main altarpiece, made by a couple of Italian painters around 1440, is amazing.



Tomorrow, Zamora (with its several Romanesque churches), possibly Palencia (another Romanesque church), ending up in Burgos. Should still be a reasonably laid-back day, with 3-1/2 hours of driving interspersed with visiting things. Saturday morning we should be able to see the Burgos Textile Museum, then drive to the Madrid airport in the afternoon, check into an airport hotel, and return our rental car before flying out Sunday morning.
hudebnik: (Default)
2024-04-03 09:41 pm
Entry tags:

More travelogue

The city of Seville, according to our tour guide, started as a Phoenician colony, named something like "isbili". The Romans conquered the area and renamed it with a Latin word that sounded like "isbili" and meant "flat" (because Seville, unlike so many Spanish cities, isn't all uphill both ways). The Visigoths conquered the area (about the time St. Isidore of Seville was born, speaking of etymology), and probably kept the Latin name. The Moors conquered the area and renamed the city "Isbiliyya". Then the Spanish Christians conquered the area and renamed it "Sevilla", subsequently famous for barbers and oranges.

We spent the next night in Mérida, which started when Caesar Augustus, in about 25 BCE, wanted to thank his soldiers with gifts of land, somewhere far away that land was cheap and there was a need to mix more Roman citizens into the populace. Ex-soldiers were "emereti", so he founded a retirement community in Spain named "Augusta Emereti", which also served as the capital of the province of Lusitania (most of modern Portugal and west-central Spain). The city started to go downhill in the 5th century with the withdrawal of the Roman empire, and in the 6th century the Visigoths conquered the area. By a miracle of Sta. Eulalia, who was born in the city, the Visigoths didn't sack the city but merely installed themselves as the new owners. A hundred years later, the Moors conquered the area, and apparently didn't do a lot of sacking either; I didn't catch what name they used for the city, but it probably sounded somewhere between "emereti" and "merida". 600 years later, the Spanish Christians conquered the area and renamed the city "Mérida".

I had picked Mérida for this one-night stay because it was halfway between Sevilla and Salamanca, but in retrospect we could easily have spent another full day here (as well as another half day visiting Templar castles on the way from Sevilla to Mérida). This city doesn't have a lot of medieval stuff, but it's FULL of Roman ruins.
Two blocks' walk from our hotel was the mostly-excavated remains of a Roman mansion, with an atrium, three patios, private baths, winter (ground-level) and summer (underground) bedrooms, substantial surviving painted frescoes on the walls, and a number of gorgeous floor mosaics.

Another block to a Roman columbarium, where the residents of Augusta Emereti from 1st-4th centuries CE buried either ashes or whole bodies.




Another three blocks takes you to Mérida's archaeological crown jewels, a 6000-seat Roman theatre and adjacent 14000-seat gladiatorial amphitheatre. These huge sites were unknown until the late 19th century, when archaeologists tripped over more and more signs that there was something big underground. At right is the paved street that curved around the amphitheatre, with speed bumps. The first picture below is the amphitheatre, at least the lower and middle ranks of seats (the cheap, nosebleed seats above are gone); the cross-shaped space in the middle had a wooden floor over it, and that's where the fights took place, with baton-wielding marshals ensuring that the rules were followed. Anyway, the theatre and amphitheatre have both been excavated, with the proscenium of the stage in remarkably good condition, and the theatre has been restored to the point that it can be used for actual theatrical productions (although not at this time of year).


Next door to the theatre and amphitheatre is the large, modern Museo Nacional del Arte Romano, which we didn't even set foot inside; that would have been several more hours. It also has an annex of Visigothic art in a separate building a few blocks away. But we visited the Basilica of Sta. Eulalia, where the altar is allegedly built over the tomb of the Saint herself. Also saw another of the numerous Roman baths in the city, and the portico welcoming people to the town forum (with faces of Jove and Medusa?), and the Temple of Diana.


The Temple of Diana was indeed a Roman pagan temple, but we don't know to whom; it was attributed to Diana by the 17th-century property owner. When the Roman Empire went Christian, it was probably repurposed but not much changed; when the Visigoths took over, they repurposed it again and built a smaller building nearby; when the Moors took over, they repurposed it again but didn't do too much damage to the architecture; when the Spanish Christians took over, they also didn't do too much damage to the architecture, and allowed the city's Jews to set up a synagogue next door; when the Jews were kicked out in 1492, the synagogue became a church, but IIUC the Roman-era temple was still standing. The aforementioned 17th-century property owner, whose family emblem was a crow, built a Renaissance palazzo named "Casa de las Corbas" incorporating much of the temple's remains in situ. 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century architects picked apart this layer cake of influences, dismantled parts of the Renaissance palazzo but left parts of it standing, both for its own historical significance and in thanks that it had preserved much of the temple. The palazzo now houses a bunch of modern displays and dioramas about the history of the site.


Anyway, we were running low on time, so we took only a quick look at the Roman bridge (750m or so long) and the adjacent 9th-century Moorish Alcazaba, the oldest surviving Moorish fortification in Spain. Then returned to the hotel, retrieved our suitcases and car, and drove 3 hours to Salamanca, where we are now.


The window of our hotel room looks out at the back of the Catedral Viejo, started in the 12th century.
hudebnik: (Default)
2024-04-02 01:05 pm
Entry tags:

WhatsApp, and travelogue

Today we were scheduled for a guided tour of the major Seville sights. We were given a meeting place in email, but then they changed the meeting place and informed all the registered guests… by WhatsApp. Which, last I checked, was an optional product that not everybody has — I had certainly never used it until a few days ago. But in Spain, apparently, it’s the universal mode of text communication -- so universal that it didn’t occur to them to try SMS, which AFAIK comes with approximately every cell phone.

In this case, the "registered guest" (the one who made the reservation) was [personal profile] shalmestere, so I didn't get the message, and she didn't and still doesn't have WhatsApp on her phone, so she didn't get the message either. And apparently the sender didn't get a bounce message saying "there's no WhatsApp user with this phone number," so nobody at the tour company knew that we hadn't gotten the message. It was mostly by chance that we saw the tour guide standing on the other side of a rather large plaza.

Anyway, the tour (of the Sevilla Alcázar, Mosque Cathedral, and minaret bell tower) went well after that. And again, the weather was perfect: 20°C high, blue skies, a few puffy white clouds.

The Alcázar in Sevilla and the Nasrid Palace in Granada, which we toured less than 24 hours apart, were built at the same time in the 14th century by a Christian king and a Moslem king who were friendly rivals and shared a lot of artisans. Both buildings have a lot of traditionally-Moslem-looking ornament, but when the money comes from a Christian king, Christian symbolism and the king's heraldry take pride of place. And the Christian king in question, Pedro I el Bajo Cruel Justo, had his artisans use the same textual formulas of praise for him that they would formerly have used for Allah, albeit in Spanish rather than Arabic. Pictures to follow.

The construction of the Seville Cathedral, unlike the one in Córdoba, started by completely flattening the previous mosque. They did re-use as many materials from the mosque as possible, which helped them finish building the then-largest (and today still third-largest) cathedral in the world in only sixty years, so it's in a consistent architectural style throughout. And they kept the minaret, the tower from which the muezzin used to deliver the call to prayer, adding only a cupola on top with about a dozen church bells. It still has the brick ramp all the way up for the muezzin's donkey. They also kept the patio where the Moslem faithful would do their ablutions before entering the mosque; it still works as an entryway to the cathedral.

Like most Christian churches, the Seville cathedral is cross-shaped, with the main altar in the eastern branch of the cross, but the gilded-wood "main altar" is almost never used -- only for high holy days and the Royal Family -- so most ordinary services use the silver "commoners' altar" in the north branch of the cross. The south branch has a sculpture representing the funeral procession for Cristobal Colón. The casket actually contains the partial remains of six different people, of which one finger has been DNA-matched to known descendants of Cristobal Colón, and nobody knows what other five people (men and women) contributed the remaining body parts. According to the tour guide, Colón's remains were originally buried in Valencia, then moved to Cuba, then to Puerto Rico, then to a couple of other places, and finally back to Sevilla, but every custodian along the way seems to have taken a piece of the original remains.

Anyway, as soon as we finished the tour, we returned to the hotel, ransomed our suitcases and rental car, and drove north. We were planning to visit a couple of Templar castles, but estimated that they would close about the time we got there, so we went straight to Mérida instead. Checked into our hotel, parked the car (in a residential neighborhood with very scanty street parking... feels just like NYC!), and had a delicious dinner at a tapas place inside the bullring two blocks away.

Mérida is best known not for medieval but for Roman ruins, and we plan to see some of those tomorrow morning.
hudebnik: (Default)
2024-04-02 11:02 am
Entry tags:

Travelogue, abbreviated

Guided tour of the Alhambra yesterday, on the first non-rainy day in a week. Glorious; pics to follow. Then drove three hours to Sevilla, checked into hotel later at night, went to bed and didn’t get up until breakfast was nearly over. Today, the Seville Cathedral and Alcazar, then drive to Mérida by way of Templar forts.
hudebnik: (Default)
2024-04-01 08:36 am
Entry tags:

Travelogue

After two rainy days in Córdoba, we checked out of our room and walked in the rain to the parking lot, where the car was intact and not flooded (although the lot was, as expected, even muddier than before). Drove in the rain to Antequera, where the stone gate had indeed been rolled aside and we were able to visit the dolmens, variously 4000-6000 years old. The two in town, Viera and Menga, have a slick modern visitor's center, QR codes to download detailed descriptions, etc. while the one a few km outside town, El Romeral (next to a shipping-pallet warehouse) has bathrooms and a couple of tour guides standing around. Viera is oriented, conventionally, so that its inner chamber is illuminated by the rising sun on either the equinoxes or the summer solstice (I forget which). The other two are more unusual: El Romeral, which we visited first, is unique in Europe in that its entry passage points west: specifically, it points at the highest point of a nearby mountain range.

And Menga's entry passage points south-southeast, at the highest point of a lone mountain which, seen from here, has the shape of a human facial profile. Although of course we couldn't actually see it through the rain and fog. Which are also why I don't have a bunch of pictures from yesterday.

Then we drove in the rain to Granada, parked at an underground lot, dragged our suitcases outside in the rain, caught a taxi in the rain, walked a block or two in the rain to the same Granada hotel we were at last week, and checked in. Hung things up to dry, put the room's climate-control system in "dehumidify" mode, and fell down in bed, about 3 PM.

We appear to have left a bag of Easter chocolate and related goodies in the hotel at Málaga, so we needed to replenish the supply before Easter was over. So after an hour or two of resting and drying off, we headed out (in slightly less-driving rain) to the downtown shopping district where the fancy chocolate- and candy-stores are. Then stopped at an Italian restaurant for dinner: [personal profile] shalmestere had gnocchi with some kind of Calabrian-pepper sauce, while I had lasagna bolognese (which seemed appropriately warming and hearty for the weather). By the time we finished, the rain had stopped, and we walked two blocks back to the hotel.

Turned on local TV to see what we could understand. Watched a few minutes of a hunting-and-fishing show, a few more minutes of an action drama involving a lot of people shooting one another and blowing up train cars, then stumbled into the Spanish-dubbed version of one of the "Shrek" movies that we hadn't seen (Shrek is in an alternate universe where none of his friends, nor his wife, recognize him). Which is good visual humor even if you can't make out all the words, so we watched that to the end. Next on the same channel was a show about a couple of teenaged friends who work in a garishly-colored video-game store, and at the end of every scene they metamorphose from live-action to frames in a comic book. Again, largely visual humor (the female protagonist had mistakenly put on a customer's boots, couldn't get them off, ended up borrowing a bucket of Italian dressing from their friend who works at the pizzeria next door and pouring it down the boots to lubricate her feet enough to extricate them... and then they return the boots to the wrong customer and have to retrieve them... and then there's a plot thread about the male protagonist having, then losing, the high score on a particular video game and trying to regain his title).

My scratchy throat of a few days ago has mostly gone away, but the occasional coughing fits continue, and today I added occasional sneezing fits to the mix. Which was a problem while I was driving in the rain; fortunately I didn't actually hit anything. Slept with a bunch of pillows under my head, getting up every few minutes to drink water or blow my nose or pee. Not the most pleasant of nights, but we both eventually got some sleep.

The good news: the long-term forecast for our remaining week in Spain shows no rain whatsoever in the places we'll be, on the days we'll be there. In particular, our Alhambra tour this afternoon and our Sevilla tour tomorrow should both be rain-free.
hudebnik: (Default)
2024-03-31 08:23 am
Entry tags:

Travelogue

Another rainy day.

Got empanadas at the shop a few blocks away, "dining in" this time rather than bringing them back to the hostel room in the rain. Then spent about two hours at the Archaeological Museum of Córdoba, which not only houses a lot of artifacts and displays from the Paleolithic through the Reconquista, but was built on top of a Roman theatre, so its basement level is largely excavations of the theatre: seating, stairs, drainage channels, etc.

We had a bit of time before our 2:00 timed entry to the Mezquita, so we stopped at a cafetería for pastries and hot chocolate (still in the rain). Then walked in the rain to the primary tourist attraction of Córdoba, the 10th-12th-century mosque with a 16th-century cathedral in the middle.

(Before that, there was a 6th-century Visigothic church on the same site, and probably something Roman before that; this city was a Roman provincial capital for 200 years before the Visigoths took over.)

There are mosques-turned-into-Christian-churches all over Spain, but this one is unusual in that the builders of the church destroyed as little as possible of the mosque, incorporating much of its architecture into the cathedral building. The interior is a seemingly infinite forest of red-and-white double arches, most of which are intact (and many of which include recycled Roman or Visigothic columns and capitals). The outermost row of them near the walls became the gates of chapels devoted to particular saints (and presumably sponsored by particular rich families or guilds in town). Sixteen of them in the middle were replaced with Gothic arches for the larger "Villaviciosa Chapel". The 16th-century cathedral altar area doesn't show much trace of the mosque (and really isn't to my taste!), but in other chapels they simply repainted the Moorish arches with 16th-17th-century Christian artwork (which also doesn't particularly ring my bell, but it's non-destructive).


After the Mezquita, we walked (in the rain) to the Royal Baths of the Caliph, which are partly archaeological ruins and partly reconstructed. But underground, so at least we were out of the rain.

Then walked (in the rain) through the Jewish Quarter. We were too close to closing time to see the Casa de Sefarad, which is about the life of pre-1492 Sephardic Jews, but we saw the preserved-and-restored early-14th-century synagogue (small but moving). Since there are so many tourists in the neighborhood, several other buildings have been turned into tourist attractions. The Casa Andalusi tries to present the feel of a 12th-century Al-Andalus urban house with internal courtyard and fountains. The furniture doesn't fit the time period, and there are a lot of obviously-modern books, lights, etc. mixed in with reconstructed stuff, but there's a nice Moorish tile mosaic in the basement. The next-door Al-Iksir Alchemy Museum is even weirder: again attractive courtyards and fountains, and they've gone to a lot of trouble to provide high-tech audioguides in various languages, but all the content seems to be modern woo-woo, nothing historical.

It finally stopped raining in time for us to have dinner (fideuhá, a sort of glorified Rice-a-Roni, with pork loin, chicken, and portabello mushrooms, followed by molten-centered chocolate cake).

Fell asleep last night to Easter-vigil bells, and occasional singing, in the distance.

The plan for today was to check out of the hostel, leave our luggage at the hostel management office, attend Easter services at the Mezquita, retrieve the car and the luggage, and drive back to Granada for tomorrow's Alhambra tour. It turns out that the fastest route to Granada goes by way of Altaquera, so we may get to see those Neolithic dolmens after all. However, on waking up this morning, [personal profile] shalmestere decided that Easter service was too much complexity to add to the schedule, so we'll just check out and drive to Granada by way of Altaquera.
hudebnik: (Default)
2024-03-30 08:34 am
Entry tags:

Travelogue

Checked out of room near Málaga airport and drove north towards Córdoba. By the time [personal profile] shalmestere was awake and functional, the hotel's breakfast buffet was closed, so we planned to find brunch on the way.
There's one town of any size between Málaga and Córdoba: Antequera, which I'd never heard of before starting to research this trip, but it apparently has an impressive Moorish fortress and a couple of Neolithic dolmens. So we headed into the town center to find food. It was pouring rain, and not quite noon, and Good Friday, so not much was open, but here's what appears to be the main church in town:

We eventually found a pastelería crowded with locals, saw somebody getting up to leave, nabbed their table, and had some delicious croissants and thick drinking chocolate. And by the time that was over, the rain had mostly stopped. Walked up

to the hilltop Moorish fortress, the Alcazaba, which was captured by Ferdinand I de Aragón (whose grandson Ferdinand II married Isabella de Castilla) in 1410 after a months-long siege. Entry to the fortress compound (of 62,000 m2) is through an arch that was originally Roman, then Visigothic, then reworked by the Moors, then reworked again by Ferdinand

who, on the day of his victory, not only reconsecrated the mosque inside the fortress as a Christian church, but ordered the construction of a new larger church just outside the walls but still near the top of the hill.

The Alcazaba compound includes remnants of Roman housing, a Visigothic church, and the aforementioned mosque as well as the towers and barbican walls that make it a military stronghold.


Walked back down the hill, retrieved the car, and headed off to see the megalithic dolmens. Two of them are in town, next to a Ford dealership ("Auto Dolmens"), behind a fence and an admission office that was closed for Good Friday. The third is a few km outside town, next to a rock quarry or something, with no admission office but behind a fence and a gate that was closed for Good Friday. So that didn't work. [personal profile] shalmestere suggested we return on the third day to see whether the rock has been rolled aside....

Anyway, in frustration at the rain and the dolmen closures, we stopped at McDonald's (not terribly different from a US McDonald's except for the names of the sandwiches: the Whopper approximation is named the McExtreme), ate a late lunch, and drove towards Córdoba under sunshine and blue skies.

For our two nights in Córdoba, I had reserved a room in a youth hostel -- not so much because it's cheap as because it's well-located in the historic district. However, the hostel has no "front desk staff"; you contact them a day or two in advance to make arrangements for check-in. I had done that, and Friday morning I received an e-mail (forwarded through Orbitz) asking for my e-mail address and phone number, so I sent those. At lunchtime I checked my e-mail and found one with an "online check-in" link where I could provide my phone number (again), e-mail address (again), and scans of passports. So I did that from the McDonald's parking lot, although there was some confusion with the online check-in form.

An hour later, when we reached Córdoba's historic district, I followed Google Maps directions to the hostel (which ended probably 50m away from the hostel, since Google Maps thought incorrectly that the last 50m was pedestrian-only), checked my e-mail again, and found nothing. I parked in a tiny square, not blocking traffic, and left [personal profile] shalmestere to guard the car while I walked to the hostel and tried to negotiate our way in. I e-mailed again, I text-messaged, I phoned, and after several tries I got somebody on the phone who said I needed to provide my phone number (yet again), my e-mail address (yet again), and upload scans of both passports (I had only seen a place to upload one at lunchtime, and that one apparently hadn't gone through). So I did all that. The guy wanted to communicate on WhatsApp, of course, which I didn't have, so we did most of this by e-mail. I got an e-mail saying "OK, I will send you the code to get in the front door." Ten minutes later I e-mailed him again asking where the code was, what room we were in, and how to get a room key; no reply. Another fifteen minutes later I e-mailed him again asking the same questions; no reply. (This whole time [personal profile] shalmestere was sitting in the car 50m away, probably illegally parked, fuming and sending me increasingly aggrieved text messages.) So another ten minutes later I called the guy on the phone to ask the same questions, and he said he'd sent me an e-mail with all that information half an hour ago. He sent the e-mail again, I saw the subject line pop up briefly on my phone screen, but then couldn't find it in either my inbox or my spam folder. So he dictated the information over the phone, I got into the building, got the key, found the room, dropped my suitcase in the room, and told both him and [personal profile] shalmestere that everything was (finally!) resolved.

I returned to the car (still illegally parked with the blinkers on), gave [personal profile] shalmestere the room key and the instructions, and had her take her suitcase to the room while I looked for a place to park the car legally. It took probably ten minutes, a certain amount of scraping, and the assistance of several locals just to get the car turned around and pointed the right direction (the car is classified as "compact", and looks like a small car by US standards, but it's actually fairly large by local standards and has way too large a turning radius to maneuver in a medieval city!) Google Maps told me there were two parking establishments a 5-minute walk away, but when I got there, I saw nothing but a couple of bars. So I followed the hostel manager's recommendation to a place 15 minutes' walk away, on the other side of the river. There were police cars and people setting up barricades to block off the street for a Good Friday procession, but I was the last car across the bridge before they blocked it. The parking turns out to be not a commercial parking garage, but a free public parking lot. And since it had been raining much of the day, it was a very muddy public parking lot.

Anyway, I left the car there and walked back to the youth hostel, across a crowded pedestrian bridge over a rain-swollen Guadalquivir river.

[personal profile] shalmestere didn't want to leave the room for dinner, so I went out looking for take-out, in a crowd of tapas-crawlers; eventually grabbed some empanadas and patatas fritas and brought them back to the room. Fall down go boom.

Today, we see what we can of Córdoba. It's supposed to be raining off and on all day today and tomorrow. Hope the parking lot doesn't flood.
hudebnik: (Default)
2024-03-28 07:56 pm
Entry tags:

Travelogue

Drove an hour and a bit from Málaga to Ronda this morning.

We hadn't had breakfast yet, so our first stop was a restaurant, "Las Meravillas", where we had the best food of the whole trip so far: a spinach salad with fruit, nuts, and goat cheese en croute, a dish of strips of savory pork with black garlic, and a molten-centered chocolate cake.

Ronda starts out looking like an ordinary whitewashed hill town, with perhaps more tourist shops than most, until you get to The Bridge.

See, the town is built on both sides of a really deep river gorge. Downstream, where the walls are much lower, there were a couple of stone bridges built in the Middle Ages, but up here they apparently needed 18th-century technology to do the job (although the Roman aqueduct in Segovia is of comparable size, and has been standing ten times as long). They built a bridge in the early 18th century, it fell down, they tried again, took fifty years to build it, but it works. The bridge and gorge have been a major tourist attraction for over 200 years now.

It was raining on and off for the whole time we were in Ronda, but we walked down the hill in the Old City to find the Arab Baths, a well-preserved archaeological site.


Then we drove along twisty mountain roads (feeling sorta like the Skyline Drive, only with drier soil and more-stunted trees) south from Ronda

to the coastal resort town of Marbella, where we didn't stop before getting onto the coastal highway back to Málaga. Decompressing in the hotel room now.
hudebnik: (Default)
2024-03-27 09:10 pm
Entry tags:

Travelogue

Checked out of our room in Granada. We were scheduled to pick up a rental car this morning for the next phase of the trip, so I asked at the front desk how close I could get to the hotel with a private car, and they said "not at all close". A taxi can legally get within about 10m, but a private car, nowhere near. They recommended that instead we take a taxi, with our luggage, to the car rental office (at the train station), get the car, and leave from there. So we did that. It took a long time to get through all the paperwork, although the two German fräuleine who were there several minutes before us weren't finished by the time we left.

The car is a Nissan "Yuke", a model I've never heard of in the US. It's considered a "compact" by European standards, which is good because anything larger wouldn't fit through some of the city streets we've seen. It has room for two people and two suitcases, but we can't fit both of our suitcases into the trunk simultaneously; we have to either put one in the back seat or lower the back seats to fit them side by side.

Drove south from Granada, with snow-capped mountain peaks to be seen to east and west (although we didn't get nearly that high). Four-lane limited-access highway all the way to Motril, then a different four-lane limited-access highway part of the way west before we switched to a smaller, twistier but more scenic, road that paralleled the highway along the Mediterranean coast.




Stopped at Nerja, which is a touristy resort town but by all accounts one of the less-noxious ones; anyway, we walked out the "Balcón de Europa" to look at the sea, then had a forgettable but slow lunch, then some excellent helado (dark chocolate and orange), then walked down to the beach to observe enormous waves crashing dramatically into enormous rocks, then walked along the coastal footpath for a few hundred meters to observe more enormous waves crashing dramatically into enormous rocks.

Decided we were getting chilled and tired, so we returned to the car (conveniently parked for 2€/hour underneath the main square) and headed for the night's lodgings in Málaga.

I had reserved (and paid for) a double room in a hostel in Málaga, for two nights, planning to use Málaga as a home base for a day-trip to Ronda tomorrow. The instructions from the hostel said "contact us at least 24 hours before arrival to arrange check-in," and I hadn't done that, but I called them on the phone several times and eventually got through. The guy I talked to had English no better than my Spanish, and he suggested we converse by text rather than voice (although he said "Send me a wsp", which is apparently a standard abbreviation in Spanish-language text messages... or is this a thing in English too?). The directions I had to the hostel involved a last few blocks on "restricted travel" roads, which I thought might mean taxi-only or something like that, so I wanted to clarify the directions. He replied "I have moved you to a better grade hotel; here is the address of the hotel, and the address of the nearest parking garage. Call me when you're 10 minutes away." So I put the two addresses into Google Maps and had it feed me turn-by-turn directions. Some of the route looked a little weird, cutting through residential apartment complexes along the way to a hotel in the center city, but Google Maps told me I was less than 10 minutes away, so at a stoplight I texted the guy to say so.

Then Google Maps started telling me to turn onto roads that were blocked by police cars, or blocked by traffic cones, or theoretically-two-way-but-currently-one-way-the-wrong-way, or even permanently blocked off as pedestrian zones. When I passed up these opportunities to interact with local law enforcement, Google Maps directed me down to the docks to turn a sharp left onto another major road, then through another roundabout onto a park road that I was supposed to take for half a mile before taking a U-turn to get back to the same roundabout... except the park road was open to taxis only, so I didn't take that either. And this went on for 45 minutes, and none of us understood a word Google Maps was saying, until I decided to just head towards the hotel and take the first parking garage I saw within a mile of it. We found a parking garage, allegedly 7 minutes' walk from the hotel, found a parking space that I could almost get our compact car into, but not quite, then found another parking space that I could get our compact car into as long as I let [personal profile] shalmestere out first. I texted the guy again to say I had just found parking, and would be there in 7 minutes. We got our suitcases and stuff out of the car and headed out... until a guy from the parking garage staff saw us pulling suitcases and helpfully pointed out that this parking garage didn't allow overnight parking. He said another parking garage, only 100 meters away, did, so we loaded everything back into the car and headed out. Except that I hadn't paid for my five minutes of parking at a kiosk, and one apparently can't pay at the exit gate, so I was stuck at the exit gate with several cars behind me, unable to back up and get to a kiosk, until one of the drivers walked up, pushed the "help" button, and I explained the situation until somebody on the staff opened the gate. The other parking garage, as advertised, was only 100 m away, all right turns... but that entrance was only open to monthly-pass-holders, or something like that. The guy who turned us away from it explained that there was another entrance to the same garage another 100 m ahead, all right turns, so we followed his instructions, and saw the cheery sign "Parking entrada COMPLETA" (i.e. full).

We turned into a surface parking lot where there were no spaces, but at least we were out of traffic long enough to do some Web research. We found another hotel, outside the city center, adjacent to the airport and with its own parking lot, and drove there, giving up on the one in the city center altogether. And that's where we are tonight and tomorrow. It's not picturesque, it's not in a cute neighborhood, but it's got parking and highway access and a bed and that'll do for now.
hudebnik: (Default)
2024-03-27 08:33 am
Entry tags:

Travelogue

Weather yesterday: much cooler than the previous week (high about 10°C), but gorgeous blue skies with puffy white clouds, bright sunshine, with intermittent rain showers.

[personal profile] shalmestere was concerned that she was "coming down with something", and was in all kinds of hurt after a day or two of hill-climbing in Toledo, so we took it easy yesterday, avoiding anything that involved lots of climbing. Fortunately, much of the tourist area in Granada is stretched out along the street along the river, which is about 20 m from our hotel, so not much hill-climbing was necessary. (The river is also about 10m straight down, in a gorge that doesn't invite pedestrian traffic).

In the US, the word "river" implies "navigable": if you couldn't put a cargo or multi-passenger boat into it, you wouldn't call it a "river" but rather a "creek", "brook", "stream", or "branch". And most old cities are built on one or more rivers. In Europe, most old cities are likewise built on rivers, but many of them are only a few meters wide. A "river" serves as a source of fresh water; transportation, if you get it, is a bonus. Toledo is tucked into the sharp bend of a small-but-navigable river; the old part of the much larger Granada is built on two hills on either side of a river that I'm sure I could cross with a running broad jump. Except that the gorge isn't wide enough to make the running approach. And in Madrid, the current capital and the biggest city in the country, I gather there is a Río Manzanares that (according to photos on Google Maps) is at least 10m wide, but we never came across it.

Anyway, we bought some yummy empanadas for breakfast, walked a few hundred meters west to the Alcaicería, the Moorish shopping district (rebuilt in the 19th century for tourists after being destroyed by fire), bought some sweets, bought some souvenirs and 1/12-scale miniatures, didn't stand in line to get into the 16th-century Royal Chapel where Ferdinand, Isabella, Philip, and Juana were buried, bought some more sweets, visited the one remaining Moorish caravanserai in the city (with its 14th-century carved-limestone gate), returned to the hotel and took a siesta (not that it's hot out, but we were tired).

Then got up and walked a few hundred meters east, visited the Museo Arqueológico (which is in mid-renovation, so admission is free), tried to visit two Arabic baths (one is functioning again as a bath/spa, and we decided not to spend the time and money on that, while the one that's just an archaeological site was closed), bought some more sweets, sat on benches overlooking the river and underlooking the Alhambra across the river, and returned to the hotel.

I heard drums and trumpets outside and guessed there was another Semana Santa procession going on, so I ran downstairs to see. A brass band was just finishing up on the front steps of the nearest church, when another brass band marched up the street and stopped. I saw a guy walk by in what looked like a KKK pointy-hooded costume, only purple for Lent, followed by several choirboys also in purple (at least one carrying a pointy hat). There was much milling around as though waiting for something. Then the latter brass band started playing again and marched back down the street towards the downtown business district whence they had come.

By this time [personal profile] shalmestere had come outside to see what was to be seen, and we walked a hundred meters to an Italian restaurant where we had some delicious spaghetti carbonara, then returned to the hotel, read and did DuoLingo Spanish exercises for a while, and went to bed.

Today we're scheduled to pick up a rental car that we'll use to visit the next several cities and towns. Not sure how close I can get to the hotel with a private car: the hotel itself is on a callito with steps, while the cobblestoned riverbank "road" is variously 2-4 m wide and full of pedestrians.
hudebnik: (Default)
2024-03-25 08:16 pm
Entry tags:

Travelogue and weather

Checked out of our hotel in Toledo (in the rain), caught a cab to the train station (in the rain), bought some empanadas and a sandwich at the station cafe (in the rain), and took the high-speed train (in intermittent rain) back to Madrid.

When I originally planned this trip, I had an hour's layover planned in Madrid before leaving for Granada, but by the time I actually bought the tickets, that train to Granada was no longer available and I could only get one three hours later. So I tried to leave Toledo later, but those tickets were immutable. So we sucked it up and spent three hours sitting on a stone benchlike-thing with no back (seats with backs are at an extreme premium in the Madrid-Atocha train station) before boarding our train to Granada. Which was uneventful, and of course raining part of the way. We've probably seen several million olive trees today, and that's not an exaggeration: they're small trees, planted in a rectangular grid probably 3m apart, so a 30m square is 100 trees, a 300m square is 10,000 trees... it adds up quickly. And there were some striking mountains along the way too.


Got to Granada, caught a taxi (in the rain), which was stopped by a police road-block about 200m short of the hotel, so we had to walk that last bit with suitcases in the rain, dodging crowds of other tourists.

The hotel is nice, though: in a 16th-century building, with terracotta tile floors and wood-beam ceilings, and it's very conveniently located to shopping and sights. Got a delicious take-out dinner at an empanadas stand 100m away, brought it back and ate it in the room.

Tomorrow, probably more rain, but it's our one full day in Granada, so we'll see what we can see between weather and our physical stamina.

We won't get to the Alhambra tomorrow: by the time I looked for tickets, none were available for either of the days we're here, but I got tickets for April 1, so I changed the itinerary to come back to Granada for one more night (from Córdoba, where we'll be the night before).
hudebnik: (Default)
2024-03-25 08:58 am
Entry tags:

Travelogue, and weather

We’ve been in Spain for almost six days so far, and for that whole time there’s been a heat wave: temperatures 5-10°C above normal, and “unhealthy” air quality (mostly PM10). I think the latter improved to “fair” yesterday, but is now back to “unhealthy”.

Today’s forecast calls for intermittent rain all day, with temperatures close to normal. Which is OK, because today is the day we’re spending largely in train stations and on trains. But it’ll be cooler still, and still intermittently rainy, for the next week as we visit Granada, the south coast, and Córdoba. On the bright side, perhaps the rain will wash some of the PM10’s out of the air.

Also, an air quality described as “very unhealthy”, dark red on the EU scale shown in the Weather app, is apparently in the yellow “moderate” zone on the US scale shown in Google Maps.
hudebnik: (Default)
2024-03-24 07:44 pm
Entry tags:

Travelogue

Had the hotel's breakfast buffet, which was more substantial than what I think of as "continental breakfast" -- it can't be a meal in Toledo without ham and cheese -- but not as substantial as an English or American restaurant breakfast. Walked uphill (everything in Toledo is uphill, usually both ways!) to the Visigothic Museum, housed in a 13th-century Romanesque church that replaced a 10th-century mosque that replaced a 7th-century Visigothic church. The 13th-century wall paintings are impressive, as are the Visigothic archaeological finds in glass display cases throughout the building.








Then back to the Cathedral for the Palm Sunday (Domingo de las Ramas) service. They weren't letting people into the building in advance, but we eventually found the alley where people were assembling for the procession into the church. And there was a big pile of olive branches, from which people were breaking off smaller branches that they could carry and wave. Eventually some choirboys and clergy came out of the church (the former carrying palm fronds), there was a brief invocation, and the procession around to the main cathedral entrance started. Once we got inside, we found seats with a view of a TV screen (due to the cathedral's weird layout, almost nobody in the nave has line of sight to the altar) and listened to some readings and the Passion Gospel, in Spanish, before deciding we needed to leave. Had a good Chinese meal about 50m from the cathedral. Stopped at the Parroquia Mozarabe de Ss. Justa y Rufina, where there was apparently a service just ending and tables of food being set up in the street; we didn't stick around for that, but got a photo of the sign with the church's name.

Then headed northeast to Plaza Zocodover, where all the tour busses drop their passengers and therefore Ground Zero for tourist shops (even more so than the cathedral neighbordhood where our hotel is).
And northwest (and uphill) to the Mezquita Cristo de la Luz. If the name sounds strange, it was of course a mosque turned into a church in the 12th or 13th century. This one was left largely intact except for the addition of a semicircular apse.







It's adjacent to a lovely and calming garden and two gates through the (inner) medieval city wall, of which the Puerta del Sol is late 14th-century.






Then back to the hotel with a stop at the Iglesia del Salvador, which is still a functioning (fairly Baroque) church but shares space with an archaeological display about the previous mosque and pre-previous Visigothic church on the same site.

Fell asleep at the hotel until 6:30 or so. Went out looking for food, but there wasn't much appealing nearby, and the most-promising place we found had people smoking upwind of the only empty tables. So we went back to the hotel; who needs supper when we have marzipan and chocolate?