Archive for September 21st, 2008
They don’t tell you this on the package, but Photoshop is actually made of magic:
Cloister of the Catedral de Nuestra Señora de la Ascencion y Santa Frutos
This is actually a photomosaic stitched together from four freehand digital photos. No tripod, no “stitch assist” setting on the camera, no extra help. Just three button clicks in Photoshop and wham — instant panorama. I am in geek awe.
So, we managed to make it to Segovia on Saturday. We actually got up earlier than we needed to and found ourselves at the train station with 45 minutes to wander around. I discovered that the overpriced Burger King in the train station, which advertises that it sells breakfast, does not actually open until 10:30am on Saturdays. Mirror World. A pastry shop sold a dreamy egg and ham croissant, though, which I was mostly able to order in Spanish.
Historic Segovia is a walled city with a functioning Roman aqueduct that, so we have heard, was still in municipal use until the 1980s. It’s an amazing and awe-inspiring structure to see.
The great aqueduct
The acqueduct carried water over/through the city walls, which are also intact.
The city wall
We tried to follow the aquedect until it terminated but it wasn’t that clear, so we just wandered around the narrow streets of the city for a while. For a town with a heavy tourist trade, Segovia is surprisingly unpretentious. The shopping streets were almost completely free of sovenier shops and mostly filled with practical stores for locals — grocery shops, cooking stores, lamp shops, clothing stores. We picked up a little pizza pan for cooking in our small covertable microwave/oven.
Eventually, we found Plaza Mayor and the The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Ascention and of St. Frutos, the last gothic cathedral constructed in Spain.
The Gothic Cathedral
It was built in the 1500s on the ruins of another cathedral that was burned down in a war I’m not familiar with. We couldn’t take pictures inside, of course, but we were able to take pictures of the cloister, which dates from the 1100s and 1200s, I believe, and was moved over stone-by-stone from the original burned church.
The cathedral cloister
After visiting the cathedral, we settled down for a three-course high-end Spanish lunch. We’d been planning for the splurge, and we picked a nice historic inn that had converted its courtyard into a restaurant. The food was very good, though the soup and dessert courses outshone the entrees. I think this is because we didn’t order the pork — we’ve been getting just a bit sick of ham. After we got home, I double-checked our book and was reminded that Segovia is renowned for its suckling pig. D’oh! Also, we think that I may have been served the wine that went with BOTH meals, since Terran refused his. The wine never seemed to run out, and I was just a bit drunk by the time we left. Still, it was some of the best red wine I’ve had yet.
After lunch, we hit the castle of Alcazar.
Alcazar viewed from below
Interestingly, the castle had no restrictions about photographs at all, so we had a field day. They had an armory exhibit that was much smaller and less spectacular than the one at Palacio Real, but it was still cool, and I took the opportunity to get a few pictures of armor.
Jousting armor on models
We finished up our exploration of the castle by climbing to the top of the tower, which was used as a prison in its day.
A prison door in Alcazar tower
We had a bit of time and energy left after that, since we’d schedule the last train home. We took a switchback path down from the city walls and visited a 12th century romanesque church that featured an inner sanctum used by Knights Templar for all-night vigils.
Inner sanctum
We made our way back to town via a nice public park that kept us cool and refreshed (as refreshed as we could be because now we were REALLY exhausted).
We have devoted today to sleeping in and noodling around on the computer.
So we’re back from a trip to Segovia yesterday. More of a trip report later, but first a small “mirror world” observation.
(For those who haven’t read William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, the reference is to an observation by the book’s main character to the effect that travel often takes you to a “mirror world”, where things are almost, but not quite the way you expect them to be.)
One of the things we love about Europe is the well developed public transit system. Large cities all have subway and/or light rail systems that (with the exception of Rome) can take you nearly anywhere you want to go around the city with minimal fuss or hassle. For longer distances, there are national and international rail systems. Overall, you can be very mobile for cheap and easy. As short-term residents/tourists, the system is fabulous for us. And the locals seem to love it too — some of my colleagues were highly complimentary of the local metro as well, and many people seem to live car-free. (Not to mention, based on returning home about 11:00 PM on Saturday night, it’s a great system to avoid needing an inconvenient designated driver. ;-)
But in the few days we’ve spent touristing, we’ve encountered some inconvenient “mirror world”-style differences. Specifically, there are many fewer public restrooms, drinking fountains, and public seats.
For example, the Charmatin metro station in Madrid, which is the intersection between the city subway system and the country-wide rail system, is a huge, beautiful, modern station. It’s actually two stations — the rail station (above ground) and the subway station (below ground). The subway station is immense, spacious, elegant looking, clean, modern, and decorated. Polished stone floors, gleaming steel, glass, a maze of fast escalators, bright light, and a fascinating two-story tall digital waterfall art piece. But no seats. Anywhere. Not in the huge halls, not near the train tracks, nowhere.
Why? I can only assume that the designers don’t expect anyone to be lounging around for long. Which is a reasonable assumption, I guess. But you can stand around 10 min waiting for trains at some points, or, say, if you’re meeting people. Not to mention people who may have physical difficulty getting around. I’ve seen plenty of older folk and even a few people on crutches using the metro. Surely they would enjoy some seats?
Similarly, the lack of bathrooms is… Almost painfully inconvenient. I guess that many Europe travel guides written for US consumption mention this, but it, um, presses home when you’re actually here.
(To be fair, the Chamartin train station itself does actually have both seats and bathrooms. The bathrooms are tucked in the back and hidden down flights of stairs, which makes me wonder how anybody with physical disabilities gets to them.)
What doesn’t get talked about as much is the lack of drinking fountains. So far, we’ve been to two museums, a palace, and a castle. I have been in to the Polytecnica’s department of Information Sciences a few times now, and we have done a bunch of shopping in local department stores and grocery stores. We have trekked through numerous metro stations and wandered confused, looking for kitties, through half of the Barajas airport.
No drinking fountains. None.
Compounded with the fact that you pay for water in restaurants and it typically comes in 0.5 l (~2 cups) units, plus the generally dry climate, I have felt constant low-level dehydration. The only thing that saved us yesterday is that the town of Segovia has a number of free-flowing public drinking fountains. But Madrid does not seem to have anything like that.
I guess this all just brings home to me some differences in world views. Spain is clearly interested in spending large amounts of tax money on having really first-rate modern public transit systems. But it appears that things that US folk would consider to be necessary in any public space — seats, restrooms, drinking fountains — just don’t rise to the level of consideration here. I assume that it’s a historical trend — there were, I guess, no public bathrooms in the sixteenth century, so no expectation of them was built. But it makes me wonder how it came to be a deep-set social expectation in the US.
Yours, in dehydration, Terran.