Spain

Barri Gotic Barcelona

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In Barcelona we stayed in the Lower Barri Gotic area at Hotel Peninsular at Carrer Sant Pau, 34. Two single beds; sink; window opens into central court; very clean and nice bathroom and shower down the hall; towels, soap, toilet paper even. The hotel was on a narrow side street off the Rhumba or main promenade; full of Middle Eastern and Indian businesses. Down the street away from the Rhumba and couple blocks toward the water was a pretty rough area with prostitutes standing facing the street always with one foot up flat against the wall. Excellent cafe around the corner toward Rhumba; internet about three blocks down the Rhumba toward a statue of Columbus pointing the way West.

Bob came back late to the hotel one night about midnight. Right in front of the
hotel doors three guys walked up by him. One of them asked for the time and as Bob tried to show him his watch the guy tried to trip him. The hotel proprietor, who was on the job and alert, came running out of the hotel with a club. The men run off leaving Bob rather shaken and leery.

Big Deal
The architect Gaudi has left some remarkably wonderful work including the cathedral called the Temple Expiatiori de la Sagrada Familia. It won’t be completed before 2020. I want to come back to see it even if someone has to wheel me in here! The Gaudi Park, originally built as a planned living community, failed and was taken over by the city.

Seven properties built by the architect Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926) in or near Barcelona testify to Gaudí’s exceptional creative contribution to the development of architecture and building technology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Parque Güell, Palacio Büell, Casa Mila, Casa Vicens, Gaudí’s work on the Nativity façade and Crypt of the Sagrada Familia cathedral, Casa Batlló, and the Crypt in Colonia Güell represent an eclectic, as well as a very personal, style which was given free reign in the design of gardens, sculpture and all decorative arts, as well as architecture.

The work of Antoni Gaudí represents an exceptional and outstanding creative contribution to the development of architecture and building technology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Gaudí’s work exhibits an important interchange of values closely associated with the cultural and artistic currents of his time, as represented in el Modernisme of Catalonia. It anticipated and influenced many of the forms and techniques that were relevant to the development of modern construction in the 20th century.

Gaudí’s work represents a series of outstanding examples of the building typology in the architecture of the early 20th century, residential as well as public, to the development of which he made a significant and creative contribution. The area is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Small things
How to feel stupid in another country: buy a Metro Pass and then stand there like a dummy because you cannot figure out how to get it into the intake slot where you walk through the stiles. Finally we both figured it out at once-take the paper pass out of it’s tight clear plastic cover! If you hate feeling out of control and disoriented be sure to travel-it’ll make you flexible and tolerant!

News
The International Herald Tribune co-produces a pull-out section with whatever country it is distributed in, so for example, in Spain, the paper co-produces the pull out with El Pais, the major Spanish daily. The chairmanship of the European Union changes every six months and Spain is taking its turn so the papers are covering the EU and Basque terrorism.

The New Young Brits

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In the train, before crawling into my compartment, I stood out in the hall and had a great conversation with a bright energetic young Brit (Richard) attending Cambridge. He had been traveling by himself on college break all through Morocco. (There were thousands of European students on college break traveling all over Europe during this time.)

He explained, when asked, that in Britain at these schools you pick a subject and then only study that subject-and his subject was Modern History. He was full of questions about my 1965 trip to Europe and about my activities during the Viet Nam War. He was fully aware that in the U. S. more Viet Nam veterans have committed suicide since the war than all the 40,000 men who died during that war.

At first I thought Richard was French because he was speaking so fluently in French with someone else in another compartment but he explained that he grew up bilingual.

My generation in America has grown up with a view of Britain as the great colonialist country but perhaps it’s citizens have learned a great deal from it’s own history and Britain now has one of the most culturally sophisticated generations in the English speaking world. The upcoming generations of Americans would do well to learn from them-indeed it must especially if we are to learn how to get along with the rest of the world. But it won’t happen without exposure to other cultures on a pretty broad scale and at a pretty young age. For example, Richard’s first travel experience was at the age of 15 when he was sent to India alone by his parents for several months. What parents do you know that would allow their 15 year old children the same experience-alone? Richard said that words cannot describe the feeling you have when you step off the plane for the first time in Bombay-and you only have a first experience one time-he noted-and you never forget it.

He left me thinking that if this generation of youngsters will be in charge of the world in the next 20 years we will be ok.

The next morning we took a ferry from Tangiers to Algeciras; ate at a great family run Tapas Bar around the corner from the train station-snails in tomato sauce, Potato Ruso, fried calimari, seafood salad in mayonnaise sauce and beer and then took the train from Algeciras to Madrid. Arrived 10pm in Madrid and picked up another night train to Barcelona. Same kind of sleeping compartments as night before in Morocco but hey-we’re old hands at this now! Even got to sleep in middle beds in the compartment and no one shut the window!

Algeciras

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From Seville we took a bus to Algeciras on the south coast of Spain and saw hundreds of windmills that reminded Bob of Don Quijote. In Algeciras we took the ferry to Tangier. The man next to me on the bus made the sign of the cross as we pulled out of the station (apparently to ensure his safety) which was strangely comforting to me.

There were dozens of black-robed Muslim women with their husbands and children debarking the ferry as we waited our turn to get on…unwelcome migrants to Spain.

Seville Spain

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In Seville, found a charming pension-the Hospedaje Monreal at Calle Rodrigo Caro, in Barria de Santa Cruz-about a block from the cathedral right in the middle of maze-like Barrio Santa Cruz with its hundreds of tapas bars on narrow windy streets. The room was three flights up-no lift.

In European hotels, btw, the first floor starts on the second floor-the first foor being, I guess, the zero floor. The room was huge (relatively) with sink and french doors opening out onto a small patio overlooking the street action below-which was ok until early morning when young giggling girls, the bread delivery man and the cathedral bells all went off at once producing a cacaphony of early morning wake-up. The WC was across the hall and the shower was next to that-an interesting little cubbyhole where it took some maneuvering to figure out where to put your old clothes and your new clothes and the towel relative to your body and the water! All this on top of the fact that once you closed the door to the shower there was no light bulb/electricity.

The next day, I fired the tour guide in Seville and walked off…having a wonderful afternoon by myself…wanted to have my own experiences. (He will undoubedtly have his own version of this story but I am writing it so I get to give you my version!)

The Alcazar and the Cathedral
But we did finally get together the next day for a self guided tour with a cassette tape through the Alcazar. I want to go into some detail because it provides a backdrop for the discovery of America and because of what is happening in the world today. Sevilla was one of the earliest Moorish conquests of the Christians in 712AD. In the eleventh century it was the most powerful of the independent states to emerge and became the capitol of the last real Moorish empire in Spain from 1170 to 1212, according to Lonely Planet guidebook. The Almohads rebuilt the Alcazar, enlarged the principal mosque as an observatory so venerated that they wanted to destroy it before the Christian conquest of the city. Instead, when the Christians kicked the Moors out, the Giralda became the bell tower of what is now the Christian Cathedral. Originally the mosque was reconsecrated as the cathedral but in 1402 the cathedral was rebuilt as a new monument to Christian glory: �a building on so magnificent a scale that posterity will believe we were mad� said Pedro the Cruel. The cathedral was completed in just over a century and is the largest Gothic church in the world by cubic capacity-even the side chapels are tall enough to contain an ordinary church (that showed the Moors didn�t it!)

The Alcazar itself, used as an enormous citadel forming the heart of the town�s fortifications, was rebuilt in the Christian period by Pedro the Cruel in 1350 employing workmen from Granada (where our son Josh lived for a summer when he was in the 7th grade and where you can see other grand Moorish
structures) and utilizing fragments of earlier Moorish buildings! That work forms the nucleus of the Alcazar today-a combination of Moorish and Christian architectural elements (called Mudajar) that takes your breath away when you consider the political tenor of the world today.

A later addition includes a wing in which early expeditions to the Americas were planned. Gives you goose bumps! Seeing all this brought to memory our visit several years to Istanbul where the Blue Mosque and Saint Sophia Mosque were originally cathedrals built by Constantine before the conquest of the Christians by the Muslim Turks-even the stained glass windows with Christian motifs are still in place!

Together these three buildings form a remarkable monumental complex in the heart of Seville. The cathedral and the Alcázar – dating from the Reconquest of 1248 to the 16th century and imbued with Moorish influences – are an exceptional testimony to the civilization of the Almohads as well as that of Christian Andalusia. The Giralda minaret is the masterpiece of Almohad architecture. It stands next to the cathedral with its five naves; the largest Gothic building in Europe, it houses the tomb of Christopher Columbus. The ancient Lonja, which became the Archivo de Indias, contains valuable documents from the archives of the colonies in the Americas. The area is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Today in Spain you can take an about right from the Alcazar and see thousands of the best jambones (hams) in the world hanging defiantly from the ceilings of the meat shops up and down the streets.

We left the city just before the Santa Semana (Holy Week) festivities when the streets become full of thousands of revelers! This phenomenon happens all over Spain but nowhere like Sevilla. Later we saw news reports of concerns about �hippies� (per the Herald Tribune) taking drugs and causing trouble. These kids seem to just roam Europe from one festival to another…hippie wannabes.

Spanish Trains

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Spanish trains have compartments with room for six people. Luckily ours had two young Swiss girls that we recruited, a young guy from Japan that was studying Spanish in Salamanca for a few months but going to Portugal for a break, a guy from France and us.

I remembered that when my friend Barbara and I traveled on a second class train in 1965 in Spain (once was all it took) the train was full of drunk soldiers who kept bothering us so I crawled up into the luggage rack and fell asleep-I guess leaving Barb to fend for herself!

We, in our compartment, had a lengthy discussion about Spanish culture as we had observed it in Salamanca. The Japanese guy was genuinely shocked by the young kids that were running around the streets at 4:30 in the morning-which was funny because I had been thinking just the opposite-that the Spanish loved the young and made a place in society for them…well what do I know anyway!

Salamanca Spain

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I just walked out of the jaw-dropping Cathedral in the beautiful old city of Salamanca a few minutes ago. Made Notre Dame in Paris look pretty tame. And there are several cathedrals in Salamanca! The city, named Cultural City of Europe, feels like you woke up one morning in the medieval age. There is hardly a sign of the 21st century-no neon signs-few cars…mostly foot traffic. Got to remember to eat before 1:00pm in Spain otherwise everything is shut down until 4:00pm and you could starve to death before the restaurants opened again at 8pm.

During the medieval age the University of Salamanca, established in 1218, was grouped with those of Bologne, Paris and Oxford as one of the four “leading lights of the world.” The University, only one of hundreds of medieval buildings lining both sides of narrow winding cobbled streets, dominates the city. The old lecture halls are open to the public. Entering the cool stone foyer where a cough echoes through the building and the outdoor noise disappears, feels like stepping into another era. The 15th century classroom has been left in more or less in its original state;students in medieval times considered the hard benches too luxurious, so most students sat on the floor.

This ancient university town north-west of Madrid was first conquered by the Carthaginians in the 3rd century B.C. It then became a Roman settlement before being ruled by the Moors until the 11th century. The university, one of the oldest in Europe, reached its high point during Salamanca’s golden age. The city’s historic centre has important Romanesque, Gothic, Moorish, Renaissance and Baroque monuments. The Plaza Mayor, with its galleries and arcades, is particularly impressive. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Today, however, Salamanca harbors a modern student scene with over 60 internet cafes… a vibrant environment with a lot happening. I could live here…but our train to Lisbon leaves tomorrow morning at 4:30am.