We woke up early to see the Alhambra. It was a chilly morning, but worth it because the site was practically empty. Traveling in the off season definitely has its perks. The main attraction of the Alhambra is the Nasrid palaces- full of fountains, reflecting pools, intensely complicated Escher patterns, elaborate scrollwork, Arabic inscriptions, etc. It’s details are awesome, although I had trouble imagining the use of each room (how did people adminstrate back then anyway?). It was also really cool to see the Arabic inscriptions, because they had survived. The palace was inhabited by some very Catholic monarchs, but the religious Islamic inscriptions survived because the monarchs didn’t recognize it as religious writings!
We wandered through the gardens and the Alcazaba and then got really hungry-tired. We ended up on a sidewalk café wondering how to ask for a menu, just sunning ourselves and getting sleepy. Afterwards, we shopped around for a while, but couldn’t find a pelleteria. We had another cup of tea at the hostel and used the Internet, then caught our train to Madrid.
When we got to Madrid, we decided to walk the 1 kilometer to our unconfirmed hostel. It wasn’t the best idea, because it was all uphill, but it was cheap and easy to navigate. The hostel we wanted was difficult to locate/ring, so we went around the corner to the cat’s hostel. It was loud and more people than we wanted, but it had a women’s dorm, was cheap and we were very tired.
13 january 2011
We hadn’t committed to a specific hostel in Granada yet, so after taking the bus into town, we headed to the closes one, Oasis’ Backpacker’s Hostel. It turned out to be a lucky hit – they gave us breakfst and then we went on an awesome walking tour. We walked through the Muslim quarter, the Jewish quarter, the gypsy caves and a good chunk of the Old city, with semi-historical narration by our stoner guide. Afterwards, Caroline took a nap and I went to pick up our tickets for the Alhambra. It was a warm, sunny afternoon – hard to believe it was January.
When I got back, caroline and I went to a flamenco gig. It was a little hard to find, but well worth the search and the 6 euros each (plus drinks and tapas). It was a 3 man band – one singer, one guitarist and one clapper/dancer. The singer was really hard to understand, due to the style. But the dancing was really impressive – like tap on crack. It was very enjoyable.
The first thing I noticed about taking the train out of Barcelona was that Spanish trains have more security and are less smooth in their running. Previously, we stopped four times for border control between Montpelier and Barcelona, and when we left Barcelona for Granada, they scanned our bags and checked our tickets twice before we boarded.
We shared our compartment with two sweet old ladies. Caroline managed to help them with their luggage, and I scrabbled together some translating.
We ate our bread and cheese in the train cafeteria. We looked super scrappy next to the swanky bar and the people in business attire – sitting on the floor, eating cheese and nutella on bread with a gelato spoon and swigging from a shared two liter of Fanta Limon.
In general, the train was pretty nice and we got to Granada around 8:30am.
12 january 2011
In the morning, we headed back to San Juan on the metro. After another number, some writing, and some paperwork, they stapled a stamped piece of paper into my passport. It was sadly exhilarating, but gratifying to finally get something after all that work.
Since we were in the north of the city, we walked up to Park Güell, a parked designed by Gaudi for a failed up-scale housing development. The gates looked like the gingerbread house from Hansel and Gretel. The famous Gaudi chameleon, a 3D mosaic, is also there. We wandered sleepily through the paths, admiring the views of the city, the trees, and the random gaudi-ness – columns, gates, aqueducfs, etc.
We took the metero down to La Rambla, and wandered along on the port and the beach for a while. It was cold, but nice. When we got back, we grabbed our bags and headed to the train station for our night train to Granada.
La Sagrada Familia was amazing. Gaudi, the architect, died before it was completed, and they’re constructing it from what remains of his plans (anarchists destroyed his workshop). It’s incredibly complex and very purposefully designed. The outside is heavy, ornately sculped with massive spires and a hint of gingerbread meltiness, but the inside is open, light, like being in a forest and like being an ant looking up at flowers simultaneously. There are twin spiral staircases like the ones in St. Carlo and gorgeous stained glass windows full of symbolism. Gaudi even designed a whole new type of column to support his church. It’s an amazing thing, started in the early 1900’s, and it MIGHT be finished by 2050.
After la Sagrada Familia, we went to the station on c/ Guadalajara to figure out my visa declaration of entry. They sent us to a government office on San Juan, who tried to send us back to Guadalajara, and ultimately told us to come back tomorrow, before noon.
We headed back down Garcia, which had some fab architecture, including Gaudi’s Casa Milo and Casa Batallo and grabbed some food at la Boqueria.
We got to Barcelona with little problem and made our way to Itaca Hostel. At the train station, they told me that I could take care of my visa stamp at a police station, so we asked the woman at the reception and stopped by the local station. They sent us to a station on “Guadalajara”, but we didn’t know where that was and couldn’t find it on the map, so we shopped around and put it off. When the lock-out ended, we returned to the hostel. Caroline napped a bit, while I used the wi-fi to check out the police station/visa situation. After vast amounts of searching, I found the address. We made a plan to stop by after seeing la Sagrada Familia the next day. Caroline decided to nap a little more, so I went and wandered along La Rambla (and got, inevitably, lost). Then we went to dinner at a little café. Caroline got the menu del dia – fish soup and a fried fish. I got the Spanish tortilla – an omelet with potato chunks. It was all VERY salty, but pretty good.
9 january 2011
We slept in a bit in Avignon, then started out to find something to do. We planned to tour Avignon on Sunday the 9th, and Nîmes on Monday, leaving for Barcelona on Monday night.
The museum Lapidaire wasn’t open when we started out, so we wandered off towards the market, which was full of delicious looking foods (and a used book market). Then we headed to the train station, where the train schedules quickly changed our travel plans. We decided to visit Nîmes that afternoon, so we could leave for Barcelona on Monday morning at the ungodly hour of 6 a.m. We raced up to the palais de pape, where we didn’t enter, but did meander through it’s park and admire its view of the countryside. We found a myrtle tree too, with beautiful smelling seeds.
We picked up some bread and cheese at the market on the way back to the train station, and hopped the commuter train to Nîmes. The cheese was very strong, but delicious. In Nîmes, we investigated Maisson Carree, an ancient roman temple that had a modern architectural partner. The buses weren’t running to pont’du gard, the aqueduct Caroline wanted to see, so we wandered around Nîmes until our train left for Avignon.
Being Sunday, the night's sugary search left us crepe-less, and thus I must wait til Paris to fill the crepe-shaped hole in my heart.
We spent all day on trains headed from Milan to Ventimiglia, to Nice, and then to Avignon. The area around Ventimiglia is gorgeous – vast overlooks of blue-green sea on one side, with steep terraced mountains on the other, both sides bespeckled with fishing villages.
We safely arrived in Avignon, and splurged a little on a hotel close to the town. The hotel felt like heaven after the Milan hostel – hot water, clean, sweet-smelling rooms, lavendar body wash (the avignon region is famous for lavendar), and fast, reliable wi-fi.
We went out for a lovely dinner, accidentally ordering an entire bottle of wine, but it ended up being a perfect night out.
The morning we left Venice – we packed up early and headed to the Carlo Scarpa museum, designed by a Venetian architect Caroline admires. This set a new tone for my travels: while in Rome, we had stopped by many random churches, but while traveling with just my sister, we spent our spare wanderings researching architectural wonders. I really enjoyed the structure and detail it gave our tourings.
On our way back to the train, we picked up some delicious chocolate panettone (hey mom!) – rich chocolate-y bread with a hard chocolate shell and nutella-y filling.
We took the train to Milan, which quickly became a letdown. We metro-ed out to our hostel, only to find it to be a hook-up joint on the weekends – not quite clean, run-down, loud, cold. We headed back into the city to see the main square and grab a little dinner, then angrily hunkered down for the night. We had depended on the hostel’s wif-fi to find our next hostel, and when it failed us, we really began to worry about what we’d do when we got to avignon the next night.
ust to be clear, Venice is beautiful. During our stay, it was misty and cloudy, and it seemed as though Venice might disappear into the mist, like the mystical city of Avalon. It was even more beautiful when it started snowing – light flurries that melted just as they hit the water. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
In the morning, we bought a vaporetto pass, allowing us to ride all of venice’s water buses. we toured down the main canal, and stopped at Ponte Rialto, again. There was a celebration for la Befana (6 of January is the epiphany), and the bridge was filled with people. To the side was a small chorus and band, and a small group of old gondolier men dressed up as befana, who were apparently going to race later! We were lucky enough to go underneath the bridge just as they were singing, like something out of a movie.
We wandered around Piazza San Marco for a while, but couldn’t enter the church because of mass. So we hopped on the vaporetto again, and headed to Murano.
Murano is a must-see destination in Venice – its the island of glass making, and its absolutely breathtaking. We watched two men spin and pull globs of molten glass into little gondolas – thick liquid to hard solid glass in minutes. And it was like second nature to them to produce such art, such magic. We wandered through the shops admiring the glass work. At one shop, we watched a man make a glass beetle with a little Bunsen-y flame. He pulled delicate strands of glass and fired them to the perfect hardness, all the while creating perfect balance and symmetry. At another shop, a man was making tiny heart pendants, where I bought a tiny fish in a bowl (more on that later).
We wandered around some more after Murano, and nearly walked off the island we got so lost. Next time, more consultation of maps. But we made it back to the hostel alright and even warmed up in time to go out for gelato.
One thing that was very, very strange about Venice was its hours. So far all of my travels in Europe include very late dinners, in Valencia 9pm is the earliest that locals will eat dinner. But in Venice, shops started closing at 8: there was no nightlife, and no night activities. But perhaps that’s the curse of visiting a tourist town in the off season.
Arriving in Venice:
We got lost finding the hostel. Hidden away on a back street, it is supported by a Catholic school, which we presumed used to take residence in our quarters, which were warm, clean and quiet.
That night, we searched for Piazza San Marco – Venice’s only piazza and the home of its major church. We never found it, but we did pass over Ponte Rialto, a major bridge over a major canal. We found an adorable little pizza spot – Antico Forno. It had strange mismatched décor and a lazy, laid back server who sung along with Italian rock music and took smoke breaks as customers waited.
4 january 2011
Everyone slept in some, to combat the growing sickness stemming from our long days and intensive touring. Paul, Bob and I woke up to go to the market, which was awesome. Stall after stall of fresh food, meat, cheese, cloth, tiny convenience stores, bread, etc. We even saw a whole swordfish, waiting to be chopped up and sold. Breakfast was a crostata and fresh clementines.
After breakfast, we finished a last few churches. Of note: the Cappuchin crypt – decorated with the bones of the Cappuchin monks. It’s pretty amazing. Also of note for architecture: the church of San Carlo. Designed entirely by Boromini, it’s a tiny little church with no corners – all rounded columns with a crazy cool spiral staircase down to the crypt.
For our last night in Rome, we ate out at a Sardinian restaurant. It was all super delicious, and the dinner ended with after dinner liquer. First impression of alcohol is that it all tastes like nail polish remover, acetone. Word is that it will grow on me.
