5/29 – Beach Bums

5/29 - For some reason I didn't have to go to work today. It's Memorial Day, but not in Spain. However, I saw no reason to look a gift horse in the mouth! It seemed like a perfect day to go to the beach and fortunately, we had a lovely beach right next to our apartment! So we were beach bums today, visiting both the public beach on the left, and the more private beach on the left. It was just one of those perfect days.

5/28 – Beautiful Madrid

5/28 – The trip to Madrid is a 4 hour drive from Bilbao, and half of it is on 2-lane mountain roads. But it is certainly worth the trip. 

Most Spanish towns have a central plaza. Madrid's Plaza de Mayor is an enormous open courtyard, where we had coffee and tea, and I bought a painting.

I was so glad to get the opportunity to visit the Prado Museum. 

Diego Velazquez sits outside the museum. 

There are so many wonderful artists are represented here: El Greco, Diego Velazquez, Bosch, Fra Angelico, Raphael, Rembrandt, Rubens and the amazing Goya. Seriously beautiful work here. And Picasso. I had never cared for Picasso's work. Not saying he's not talented, but he just wasn't my style. The Prado has a lot of his work, which I found interesting, and then I saw Guernica, which changed everything. It's huge, covering a whole wall, and I cannot explain the dramatic impact it has. Simply amazing! The museum even has the preliminary sketches and layouts of the painting.

There are a lot of fountains in Madrid. Fuente de la Cibeles, the symbol of Madrid, is a lady in a chariot drawn by 2 lions. It's not the largest or the fanciest, but it's my favorite. 

My other favorite (I am allowed to have several favorites) is this equestrian statue.

The Puerta de Toledo stands close to one of the metro stations. Like so many monuments, I am not sure what it represents, but what ever that is, it does so beautifully. 

The architecture around here is just amazing. This beauty with the fancy top is the City Hall.

Palace de Real (royal palace) is gorgeous; it's still used on some state occasions. Randy, Rita and I were able to take a tour.

Along a walkway is a row of beautifully sculpted statues. These are the "Gothic Kings", a series of Visigoth and Christian rulers. 

The gardens behind the palace are laid out in hedge mazes and tall evergreens, which are sculpted into round columns.

Rita had explained to us that gas stations in Spain are not service stations. They don't sell soda and they don't have public restrooms. But usually they are bigger than this! This was the most economically small gas station I've ever seen. 

We stayed at was the Hotel Convention while we were in Madrid. Usually we ate local food, but once while we here we had Kentucky Fried Chicken, and on another visit we even went to McDonalds. Goodness knows there was no place else to get fried chicken or a hamburger, plus sometimes we wanted something very quick so we could keep exploring. But that was the exception; we loved the excellent Spanish food here. In one of these restaurants was where Rita first told us the joke about "Criadillas", which is a dish made with bull testicales. A guy ordered this one day after a bullfight, got a big meaty serving, and loved it. The next time he ordered it, he got a little tiny serving. When he asked why, the waiter said "Well, sometimes the bull doesn't lose".

El Rastro is a swap-met/flea market of enormous proportions; it operates every Sunday and covered miles. Love this.

5/26 & 27 - Segovia and the surrounding area

On 5/26 Rita, Randy and I stopped at Segovia on our way to Madrid. We wouldn't stop for dinner until we got to Segovia, despite Randy's state of near starvation. And then when we arrived after 11 pm, we found that most of the restaurants were closed! We finally found a nice restaurant, which had a whole cooked/dried pig displayed in it's front window. We got the fastest service we ever had in Spain and wondered why until we realized we were the last customers and everyone wanted to go home. 

That night we stayed at the Hotel Aqueduct. The next day we walked up the hill to the edge of the aqueduct. This thing was built in the 1st or 2nd century. It's fantastic!

It runs through the center of the town,and traffic drives through the ancient arches. 

I could not get enough of this thing!

Eventually Randy and Rita got me off it, and we went to see the gorgeous cathedral. No pictures allowed inside, of course. And the cathedral was nestled in between the buildings so close that I couldn't get a good picture of the outside, either. But it was lovely.

We walked around town, looking at the building facades. At one time it was important to a family's status to have a unique design pattern on their outside walls and to have their family crest displayed. So there are some very interesting buildings here.

This is where we saw storks building their big nests on the high rooftops. And there is a statue that celebrates the town's Roman roots. It's a statue of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf, and the inscription translates roughly to "Rome in the two thousandth anniversary of the Segovia aqueduct 1974".

Next we went through the Castle Alcazar of Isabel and Ferdinand. This is a story-book pretty castle on the outside, in the clear Spanish sunshine.

Inside the rooms were well kept, but with surprisingly few pieces of furniture. The Throne Room holds two thrones - tall wooden chairs, beautifully carved, although they do not look comfortable. The opulence of Windsor or Buckingham palace is missing here, but that is in keeping with Queen Isabel's personality. She spent most of her queen years in battle and had little time or money for extravagances. Still, there is beauty everywhere, even in the lamp posts.

There is a very narrow, steep stairway to the roof of the castle, but the view was absolutely worth the walk. This is one of my favorite views in Spain.

Later in the afternoon we drove out of Segovia to see some of the surrounding area, and found a little town called Sepulveda. It seemed like a nice place, perhaps a little tired and old. But picturesque, like so much of Spain.

One area gave a fine view of the valley below.

We got back in the car and kept driving, and discovered an old but very beautiful manor. It was huge and grand, and much later I learned it was an 18th century palace, the Royal Palace of La Granja de San Ildefonso, and it used to be the summer residence of several Spanish kings. The front view was breath-taking,

the magnificent back view looked totally different,

while the graceful side view looked like an entirely different building.

If it is ever open to the public, this wasn't the day. It actually seemed like it could be abandoned, except for the lovely gardens behind the building, which were still perfectly maintained.

On the back terrace was a pretty little sphinx, the only one I saw in Spain.

The garden area was huge (later I learned it was about 1,500 acres). Every time we turned a corner, there was another fountain or statue in a pond. They ranged from large

to enormous.

More about our apartment and beach

Rita and I shared a nice 3-bedroom apartment on the 3rd floor of an apartment building, one of several buildings, near the shore in Sopalana. The kitchen was so small that we used the tiny back porch for storing soda and milk. We bought our milk in quart cartons, and it didn’t need to be refrigerated. We had a maid who did dishes but very little else that we could see. The apartment complex had tennis courts, a pool and a snack bar. We were supposed to have access to the garage, but nobody had a key to open it. Our apartment had a washing machine; Spanish and Belgium washers work alike - they do a little bit of work, then rest awhile. I got Chris Tichner to buy us a dryer and Rita paid an Ercosa worker to run the wire and conduit for it, up the kitchen wall, across the ceiling and out to the porch, where we set the dryer. Concorde was subletting the apartment from a Spanish couple; I met them once when they came over because the electricity kept going off (Rita was in the States at that time). I was concerned they would be upset about the conduit, but they admired the job, so we got the same guy to fix the bathroom wiring, which fixed the electrical problem we were having. 

On one side of the apartments was a good public beach, always popular. Looking down from outside of our apartment, we could see all along the shoreline.

This beach was always beautiful.

Everyone littered all over it, but it was cleaned up every night. It was not a clothing-optional beach, but guys would come onto the beach in their street clothes, strip off, and put on their swim trunks. In high summer the traffic on the road to the beach, which was also the road to our apartment, was so awful that sometimes the police would route traffic away. When I wanted to drive through to our apartment, I had to convince the police that I lived there so they would let me through; my Spanish wasn’t very good, but my ability to find another way to our apartment was worse, so I made it work. 

There were 2 roads between Sopalana to Asua, where my job was. One went through town, through a couple of big roundabouts and past Eroski. The shorter way was the mountain road. This was a rough two-land road, very curvy, no road visibility, no shoulder, almost nothing to keep a car from going off the road on the cliff side, and only two places where passing is even remotely possible. According to American standards this would be a road of death, but here motorists and bicyclists used it regularly, and often at the same time. And in the early morning, when a heavy mist settled over the forest in the valley, the view was fantastic. But as much as I wanted to take a picture of that beauty, even I knew I couldn't take the risk of taking a picture while driving on that road.

From the hill above our beach, we could look back at the hill where our apartment building sat. At the foot of the hill is where the coast started getting rocky

On the other side of the apartments was a small rocky cove. It was rough and rocky and it didn't occur to me that it might be used as a beach. 

But Randy discovered it was. And it was not clothing-optional either; it was a full-on nude beach. 

When Randy arrived in Spain at the end of May, he replaced our housekeeper for awhile. He was a much better housekeeper and made some improvements, too. He moved the kitchen table to the covered patio outside the living room, and we would have tea out there. But he didn’t like the pay scale; the company would pay the maid for doing almost nothing, but wouldn't pay him anything.  

One Friday night we had guests over for dinner: Tapia and Anna, Mercedes, Santi, Edwardo, Tony, and Inyaki. We had bought a small BBQ grill at Eroski and set it up on the patio with the awning down. Tapia and Randy grilled chuletas (little lamb chops) with no sauce, just a little seasoning. We also served baked potatoes, crackers with peanut butter, and sliced melon. The food was very good, but Rita had to show our guests how to eat baked potatoes, and they thought the chuletas were too spicy! We had dinner in the living room, then went out on the patio to drink wine and tell jokes. Rita kept busy translating the jokes for Randy and me, since everyone else spoke Spanish. 

We finished all the wine we had bought, then started pulling out bottles that had been left in the apartment by previous tenants. About 4 o’clock in the morning we ran out of wine and Randy and I were getting tired. So we invented a new joke: “These people must want to leave, let’s go to bed!”. We turned in for a couple hours of sleep, while Rita and the rest of the gang went out to find an open bar.

Blackheath, Harrods, and Tower Bridge

One weekend Randy and I stayed at the Brown Motel in Blackheath, near London. We got a taxi downtown to take us to London, and our taxi driver told us that Blackheath was build over mass graves of plague victims. Not comforting, but interesting. We met up with Mike and Martina; by this time Randy was quite blond from sunbathing every day.  

Our first stop was Harrods. It's a grand old store where you really can get almost everything, but what made it stick in my memory is that you have to pay a pound to use the toilet here. 

Next we went to Tower Bridge and walked through the museum downstairs, where they keep the Crown Jewels. No matter how many times we went to Tower Bridge, I always loved it. Wish they would let me take pictures of the Crown Jewels, but somehow they didn't think that was a good idea. 

We went to Coventry Gardens to do a little more shopping, 

and then had dinner at London's Hard Rock Cafe, where they serve good burger and fries and reasonable prices.

Bruges

When the company jet was going to Belgium and there were three seats available, Ria, Randy and I would hop on board. One time Ria took us to her Aunt Kris and Uncle Rick's house. They were charming, wonderful people who made us feel at home. 

Kris didn't speak much English, but Rick spoke enough to for us to converse. Ria, of course, spoke English well. She was the one who told us that Kris was embarrassed about their bathroom. It was in a small lean-to outside; it was tidy and worked just fine, but Kris was sure no house in the US had an outside bathroom. We assured her that many rural houses did, and we didn't care either way.

We stayed at their place overnight. In the middle of the night the electricity went out; everyone came out into the hall trying to figure out what was going on, but then we all just went back to bed. Sometime before we got up, the electricity came back on. In the morning we went downstairs and found Kris had laid out a big spread for breakfast - lots of meats, cheese, breads, jam. She even borrowed some teas from neighbors for us so we could have an array to choose from! 

Ria drove us around Belgium. Bruges is a lovely, historic town. The Market Square is famous for its colorful building facades, all framed by the lovely Corbie Step roofline.

Nearby is a big market, where Randy bought a full set of antique wood planers.

Some other streets mimic the Market look.

There are canals through part of Bruges, and older houses are built right up to the waterline. 

This archway, called the entrance to the Beguine, is topped with a statue of St. Elisabeth. In this case, Beguine refers to a Christian lay order of women, who  did not take religious vows but voluntarily lived religious-based lives. 

Beside the entrance is a beautiful old grey building, part of the Beguine structure. I like buildings that show their age, so I thought this was beautiful.

Bilbao, Spain

Several of the guys I worked with in the US referred to Bilbao as the "armpit of the world" and refused to go there. My thought was that it might be a fun adventure, and even if it was not, I could stand anything for awhile. I found I enjoyed Bilbao and the surrounding area, and ended up staying for seven months.

Bilbao was a working town, with nothing very touristic about it. It had its fair share of tenement buildings, like most big cities at the time.

It had an industrial port on one of the rivers leading into Biscay Bay, which was probably the reason for the city being started here.

Like most big cities in Spain, it has a sizable old-town area. Rita would drive us there so we could walk around and see the sights. We found an old train station which had been converted into a nice fresh market. The bottom level sold fresh fish and meats, and the other 2 levels sold vegetables and flowers. Nearby is San Anton Church, showing its age but still a thing of beauty.

The center of town was nondescript but attractive enough.

There was one really big department store, El Cortes Ingles (the English courts). It had several levels and sold just about everything. People would bring their German Shepherds into the store and nobody minded because they were the most well-behaved dogs we ever saw. Even without a leash, they stayed right by their owner and never strayed. On the top level of the department store were a few small restaurants, good for a quick meal. However, we found so many other restaurants that were excellent that we seldom ate there.

Most other shops in Bilbao were very small, just one narrow room. In Spain the best shops are the small ones. I found a photo shop and was a regular visitor there, turning in about 10 rolls of film each week to be developed. My Spanish was poor but these folks knew their business and I never had any problems. These small shops close for 2-3 hours every afternoon, and close for the day around 5. Even the big shops like El Cortes Ingles close by 8, at the very latest.  

The road we usually used went through one of the main districts and ended at the Statue of Christ The Sacred Heart.

Rita took us everywhere in her little red car. And it was a good thing the car was small because parking was a challenge  It was the same old story about not enough parking spaces for the businesses. Rita's solution was to do something we called “braille’ parking - go forward until she gently bumped the car in front, and backwards until she gently bumped the car behind her. 

It was common to share the road with bicyclists. In the Bilbo region we often saw bicyclists; they were always biking for sport. People did not use bikes to go to work or shopping, as they did in Belgium.