hudebnik

Snow has been melting rapidly for the past few days, although today's temperature isn't expected to get above freezing. The car is basically free of snow, I think, although I haven't actually tried moving it. The front yard and the sub-lawns are still snow-covered, but only a foot or less deep in most places. A week from now it's supposed to be in the 60's °F. I haven't seen any crocuses or snowdrops yet, but I think it's actually happening.

We had a substantial snowfall on Jan. 25. I shoveled the front walk and steps four times, and the back sidewalk twice, in 24 hours.

Around the 28th (or was it the 1st?), I shoveled a path from the back door to the garage, and from the garage to the back sidewalk, in order to take out the trash, recyclables, and compostables and leave them on top of a snowdrift adjacent to the street behind the house. They didn't get picked up that day, but by the next week my next-door neighbor (whose stuff had also not been picked up) had shoveled out a section of said snowdrift so he could put his trash, recycling, and composting bins on pavement adjecent to the street behind the house, and I put mine in the same bare patch.

On various occasions in the first ten days of February, I did some shoveling around the car, hoping to have it freed by the time we needed to use it. So by Saturday the 14th, when we needed the car to drive to a Recorder Society meeting, the car was not embedded in snow, and indeed the pavement around it was dry. We moved the car for the first time in three weeks. Naturally, by the time we got home, my carefully-shoveled parking space had been occupied by another car, but I found an empty space only two or three spaces away, and grabbed it.

On Sunday the 15th, I finally shoveled out the rest of the path between our house and the next-door neighbor's, so we could walk from the back sidewalk to the front steps without climbing over snowdrifts.

On Sunday night into Monday morning, we got another inch or two of snow. By the time I got up, the front and back sidewalks had both been cleared by neighbors with snow-blowers, so I only had to deal with the front walk, steps, and the path between the houses, which didn't take long. And I was able to move the car back to the space in front of our house.

It's supposed to be relatively warm this week, with highs in the 40's Fahrenheit and a rainfall or two to melt the snow. Then more snow next weekend; it remains to be seen how much will fall, how much will stick.

Woke this morning to snow on the ground, and still falling. Around 8:45, put my breakfast on to simmer and went out to shovel. There was about 3" of fine, powdery snow on the ground, easy to shovel, so I did the front steps, the walk to the sidewalk, and our sections of front and back sidewalks, then came inside to eat.

Steel-cut oats, with a dribble of maple syrup in the cooking water, "allayed up with yolkes of eyroun", and a nice red grapefruit half. Yum.

Update, 1:00 PM: there was another 6" of fine, powdery snow everywhere I had shoveled before. Shoveled again.

Update, 2:15 PM: it's no longer snowing, but raining and/or sleeting. Yuck.

Update 5 PM: shoveled another 4-5" of heavier, wetter snow.

Update midnight: there's another two inches or so on the ground; haven't shoveled it yet except for a path from the back door to the back sidewalk, which I hadn't shoveled at all yet. This was annoying because I was sleepy, because I was shoveling the full depth all at once, and because of the slight crust on top.

For the first time this year. (Technically, I saw a dusting of snow on the ground two days ago, on Thursday's bedtime dog-walk, but neither of us had seen it fall, and it was gone by morning.) There appears to be an inch or two on the ground now. Not much more is forecast to fall, so it's just enough to be pretty without posing a major heart-attack or navigation danger.

Yesterday afternoon I retrieved the snow shovel, ice-breaker, ice-melting-salt, and solar-powered Xmas-tree-looking sidewalk-lights from the garage, exchanging them for the leaf-rake, the soil-tilling morningstar, and the spade, none of which I think we'll need for a few months. The sidewalk-lights have been shoved into the ground, and all but one of them lit up successfully last night. Between those, the cone of white lights on the climbing-vine trellis in the front yard, and the fresh coat of snow, it actually looks like a proper Christmastime.

On the schedule for today: wrap Christmas presents, cook, eat, play some music, watch something seasonally appropriate on the tube.

Technically, today is a work day, although it's Monday so I'm WFH by default, and not many other people are in the office this week anyway.

Yesterday afternoon we agreed on menus for part of the next week -- at least Christmas Eve dinner, Christmas Day brunch, Christmas Day/Hanukkah dinner, New Year's Eve dinner, New Year's Day brunch, and New Year's Day dinner -- and I compared them with current supplies to generate a lengthy shopping list. Perhaps shalmestere will go on a shopping expedition today while I'm working-for-pay.

There's still snow on the ground, still mostly white. The weather forecast says it won't get above freezing today, and we'll get another maybe-an-inch tomorrow morning. Any of it that hasn't melted by Sunday (the 29th) will melt in the rain that day, as temperatures rise into the 50's. Still, a white Christmas of sorts.

Walked the dogs in the park yesterday mid-day, and every time we got to a decision point, Miss B. insisted on the direction away from the house, so it was somewhat over a mile before we got home. Beautiful weather, snow on the ground and the trees, but when we got to a moderately-busy street the sidewalks were salted, and the dogs didn't like that.

Yesterday we made two more batches of Christmas cookies, four so far (magic cookie bars, dried-cherry-and-white-chocolate-chip drop cookies, peanut-butter-chocolate-kiss cookies, and Mexican-hot-chocolate-marshmallow cookies). One or two more to go; we're skipping some of the fiddlier kinds because we have fewer places to give them away this year.

Last Friday night we had tickets to go to a Ceremony of Lessons and Carols at a church in the Village, with music performed by a local medieval group we've heard before. We didn't actually leave the house Friday night -- shalmestere was too tired -- but we heard and watched the ceremony on-line last night. It was a real church service, with real clergy, with the priest giving all the lessons (the Temptation in the Garden of Eden, the Slaughter of the Innocents, the Annunciation, the shepherds guarding their flocks by night, and one or two other episodes) in Middle English. shalmestere had some complaints about his pronunciation, but she's studied Middle English in school and he probably hadn't. Anyway, I could make out most of what he was saying, and I imagine many in the live audience could too. There were the usual audience-response components, some in Latin and the "Our Father" in Middle English (the live audience had a printed script). The music was good, mostly medieval, with one somewhat under-rehearsed piece written by our acquaintance David Yardley in "medieval style". I might have opted for fewer verses of some of the songs, but if they're trying to convey the idea of a less-hurried, less-clock-driven world, doing six to ten verses of a familiar Christmas song is a reasonable approach.

It being only 9 PM by that point, we then watched another of our library of Christmas-special DVD's: "The Year Without a Santa Claus", from 1974, which I'm not sure either of us had watched more than excerpts of before. It's no "Rudolph": animation technology had advanced somewhat in the ten years in between, but it feels as though the studio had suffered budget cuts and was just phoning in the music and writing.

In case Thanksgiving wasn't a sufficient season-marker, we have another sign that winter is coming. First frost was Friday night, and it's forecast to get below freezing every night for at least the next week.

So I drained the rain-barrel, and drained the garden-hoses, and picked the last raspberry and the last few dozen Thai chili peppers, and denuded the basil plants of leaves (on the assumption that they'll die off in the next week anyway). Probably should have done all these things the day before first frost, rather than the day after, but that's life.

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 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.

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: 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.

Checked out of room near Málaga airport and drove north towards Córdoba. By the time 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. 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 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 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 shalmestere that everything was (finally!) resolved.

I returned to the car (still illegally parked with the blinkers on), gave 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.

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.

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).