Victoria

I took a day trip to Victoria with Luc, the Belgium temp working at Asua. We didn't know anything about it, but it was close (about 40 miles south) and neither of us had been there before. Luc wanted to see as much of Spain as he could before returning to Belgium.

In Spanish, the town is known as Vitoria-Gasteiz. It has a beautiful old arch, with a plaque that refers to the 19th century. It also refers to the Municipal Savings Bank.

And a beautiful cathedral, with no mention of the Municipal Savings Bank.

I could not get all the amazing detail into one shot. The door is flanked by full statues. 

And these sculptures probably tell some morality tale. 

Of course Victoria has a plaza in the center of town. It's very pretty and well maintained. 

In fact, all of the town (at least what we saw) was very pretty and well cared for. This was absolutely one of the nicest towns we'd ever seen. 

And then there is this: the Blanca Square of Vitoria-Gasteiz. To me, this one spot is an excellent representation of Spain.

We went into the Virgin Blanco Cafeteria for a soda. It turned out to be more of a bar and neither of us drank alcohol, so we didn't linger. As we were walking about town, we heard a crowd shouting in the distance. Neither of us spoke enough Spanish to understand what was going on, so we started walking towards the noise to investigate. As we walked, we started remembering the riots in Bilbao. Could this be trouble, too? We agreed that whichever one of us got pulled away by the mob, the other one would take a Nobel prize-winning photo of it. Obviously we weren't taking it too seriously, but as we got closer, the shouting got louder and we started having second thoughts. We continued walking, though, and when we turned the last corner, we realized there was a soccer match going on!