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30 Dec 2008 Christmas in Madrid
Author:  |  Category: Culture, Food!  | One Comment

We had a very nice Christmas here with more fellowship than we were really expecting.

I was suddenly struck by a clue-by-four in December and went looking for an English-language Christian church.  I have no idea why that didn’t occur to me sooner.  One Google search of “English language Christian church” turned up Community Church of Madrid, which turned out to be a fantastically welcoming congregation formed from a core of English-speaking expats and a lot short-timers like me.  I went to a bilingual candlelit Christmas Eve service that was co-hosted by them and a Spanish-speaking sister church.  It really put the mood back in the season for me.

In the theme of family and home, Terran made rabbit stew the way his father used to make.  Rabbit meat is more easy to buy here than in the States.  I’d never had rabbit stew before.  It was very good.  (Kind of tastes like chicken! :) )

On Christmas Day, we had an invitation from Terrans’s madrileña postdoc, who is home for the holidays, to have Christmas lunch with her family. We had a lovely time and were able to use some of our baby Spanish. The parents spoke no English, but Terran’s student’s siblings did, so we bounced back and forth between languages. At the end, they put on a children’s video for the 3-year-old, and Terran and I laughed that the Spanish was just about right for us. The food, of course, was amazing and unending, but this time I was braced for it: ham and bread and cheese for an appetizer, followed by gambinas (~prawns) cooked in butter and garlic, followed by a main course of suckling pig in the style of Segovilla, followed by a traditional dessert of turron (almond sweets) and marzipan. We’re glad we got a chance to taste suckling pig before we left, since we missed it when we actually visited Segovilla. It was amazing.

We got home in the late afternoon, which was still morning, back in the States, and called our families.  It wasn’t the same as being nearby, but it was a good time.

Now, we’re in the last day of our time here in Spain.  It’s hard to believe the time has gone so fast.  We want to find a way to hold on to the Spanish we have learned, and we hope to be able to visit Madrid again someday.  We think it is one of the undersung cities of Europe.

We still plan to post the story of our Pisa trip and hopefully a couple of other bits about Madrid, but all of that will have to come after we’re settled in London.  We fly on New Year’s Eve (tomorrow!).  The last few days have been crazy and stressful, and I’ll feel better venting about it after everything has turned out all right.  Wish us luck!

23 Dec 2008 It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas
Author:  |  Category: Culture  | 2 Comments

Which is, I guess, the only title you could give to this post :).

So, the holiday decorations are out.  Madrid is very proud of its decorative lighting, and apparently some areas hire professional designers to do avant-gard things with the lights.  We have only started to tour around to look at decorations.

For one thing, highly stylized glass or plexiglass “trees” seem to be en vogue.

Christmas tree in downtown Madrid

Christmas tree in downtown Madrid

We hope to go back when it’s dark, so we can see this tree lit up.

We also saw some similar ideas while we were visiting Pisa, Italy and its surroundings for Terran’s work conference.  (We plan to do a whole post about that, but this one seemed more timely :). )

Glass Christmas tree in Luca, Italy

Glass Christmas tree in Luca, Italy

The conference sprung for a guided tour of Luca, Italy as an afternoon excursion, and our tour guide told us that this tree had cost €40,000, more than she thought the city really needed to spend on a holiday decoration.  It was designed by a famous designer, though I didn’t catch his name, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have recognized it.

Certain areas of Madrid have gone all-out with lights:

Lights on a street to the west of our apartment

Lights on a street to the west of our apartment

And some companies are well-known for dramatic light displays on their buildings.  Even our tour book and the Madrid tourism website points out the department store El Corte Inglais is worth walking by.  (BTW: We learned from our Spanish instructor that, “corte inglais” is a cut for a man’s suit coat.)

El Corte Anglais

El Corte Inglais

You can’t see it in the picture, but the snowflakes are actually “dripping” little drops of light that flow down the side of the building.

When walking through the plaza by our apartment at dusk, we were surprised by some not-Christmas.  We walked by a pavilion that sported the sign “Feliz Jánuca,” which we couldn’t make sense of until we said it aloud: Hanukkah!  It turned out to be a big menorah-lighting ceremony with what sounded like a reading from the Torah and singing in Hebrew.  Several news services were out to film it.  We, of course, didn’t have a camera.

We hope to do more of a walking tour of Madrid’s decorations over the holiday break.  Hooray!  This is my last day of work until January 3.  By that time, we hope to be settled in London.  We got our UK visas yesterday and made most of the travel reservations the same afternoon.  Yay for plans pushed to the last minute by red tape actually turning out all right.

20 Dec 2008 Thanksgiving in Madrid
Author:  |  Category: Food!  | Leave a Comment

So, this is a back post to the holiday.  We took the pictures and talked about it, but somehow we didn’t actually manage to post anything.

So, Thanksgiving rolled around, and we wanted to come up with some way to celebrate it.

Problem 1: Our family is all in the United States.

Problem 2: We have a tiny two-burner stove, one medium-sized stew pot, and no oven.

Problem 3: We couldn’t find any turkey, and we probably didn’t have anything large enough to cook it if we could.

(We actually did find a turkey later at a dedicated poultry shop.  There weren’t any at the butcher shop.)

So, being dedicated foodies, we hatched a plan to make a Thanksgiving dinner as reminiscent of home as possible.  We bought a whole chicken.  Then we cut up half a whole wheat baguette that had gone hard and mixed it with sauteed mushrooms, onions, thyme, sage, and butter to make stuffing.

(As a side note, we looked in five stores, trying to find sage.  We’d given up when we ducked into the last place, a specialty shop that sold, among other things, Peter Pan peanut butter for €4.50 per jar.  It had it.  Joy!  It didn’t turn out to be GREAT sage. There were still woody stems in it that we had to pick out while we ate, but it tasted great.)

So, we browned the sides of the chicken on the skillet in butter, stuffed it with the baguette stuffing (which turned out to be just the right amount — lucky), and shoved it in the stew pot with about a half-inch of chicken broth.  Then we covered and cooked on low for about two hours.  The effect was similar to slow-cooking or using a turkey bag.  Here’s what our compromise looked like:

Thanksgiving chicken

Thanksgiving chicken

We will NOT be sorry to trade out the kitchen in this apartment to the larger, nicer one in the UK.  Literally only one person can be in this kitchen at a time, and sometimes that’s too many people.  Here’s what we were up against:

Our half-chef kitchen

Our half-chef kitchen

We had the stuffed chicken with boiled new potatoes with butter and salt.  I don’t know what kind these potatoes are, but they taste very good that way.  And I was skeptical, but Terran was able to get enough drippings to make a nice gravy, though we didn’t have any giblets.

We got to eat this masterpiece while talking to our family over Skype.  Dad and I set up a video conference call, and everyone having dinner at my parents’ place had a chance to say hello across the ocean.

In the spirit of sharing food with people, we made some pancakes and gave them to the nice old lady and her husband who we share a clothesline with.  We told them in our broken Spanish that today was a holiday in the United States for sharing food with family and friends.  Our family was all back in the United States, but we wanted to share some food with them. She appreciated it, and she later told us they were very good.

We also attempted to make chocolate-chip cookies in our toaster oven.  This involved finding a recipe that used baking soda, since we couldn’t find baking powder (it later turned up in a huge cannister at a speciality shop, but we didn’t buy it).  As we expected, this turned out to be tilting at windmills.  You CAN make cookies in our toaster oven, but it heats so unevenly that you can only make them one at a time.  After we made a few, we gave up and ate the dough.  Ha!  No way to fail!

25 Nov 2008 Amazing Modernista Weekend (Or all Gaudi most of the time)
Author:  |  Category: History and Archaeology, People, Places and Sights  | 6 Comments

So, we’re back from Barcelona.

We went there specifically to visit our good friends Jared and Julia and their new son Zander, who are there on Jared’s sabbatical.  Jared and Terran started UNM at the same time, and by chance we ended up both spending the first half of sabbatical in the same country.  We had a wonderful time visiting, and it was great to spend time just hanging out with friends.  Unfortunately, the picture we took of us (sans Terran) completely failed to come out, or I’d post it here.  Sigh.  We should have thought to take more pictures together, but we were having a good time visiting and didn’t think of it.

So, I have heard that Barcelona is a grand old city, much older than Madrid, which really only dates as a city of significance to the 1700s.  So I expected to see a lot more old architecture.  But I completely failed to realize that Barcelona’s architectural claim to fame is Gaudi the Modernista.  So, instead of looking at more old buildings, we spent a lot of time looking at (relatively) NEW buildings.

Now, I have to say that I’m not generally a fan of weird modern architecture.  MIT, for example, is all about impractical ultramodern buildings now that it has recovered from its craze for large concrete blocks.  These buildings are wild to look at, but the all seem to be the kind of thing that is great to look at but lousy to try to use: poor acoustics, bad ventilation, unusable office spaces, no privacy, you name it.  And usually these things aren’t just mild annoyances but actual work-stoppers.  Before we left, they were planning to build a cubical farm for grad students out of cardboard.  No foolin’.  I don’t know how that worked out.

But I have to say that Gaudi absolutely blew me away.  Now THIS is a man who got it right.  Some of his buildings look like Chihuly seaforms or stranger, but he put meticulous care into the practicalities of life: ventilation, privacy, direction of natural and artificial light, chimney exhaust, air direction so that you don’t smell the clothes that are hung up to dry, all of it.  Exotically beautiful AND impeccably practical.  I didn’t know you could have both together.  We toured his townhome Casa Botlló and were blown away.

Here are some Gaudi pictures:

La Sagrada Familia

La Sagrada Familia

Possibly Gaudi’s most famous architectural project was La Sagrada Familia, or Temple of the Holy Family.  This project was unfinished when Gaudi died in 1926, and work has been progressing in dribs and drabs until now.  We’re not sure, but we think we heard a tour guide say that it was projected for completion in 30 years.  That means that the total construction time will fall in around 150 years.

The wild thing is that with modern stoneworking techniques, the whole thing looks like it could probably be done in a year or two.  Apparently, the issue is that it’s privately funded, so the limitation is the speed of fundraising rather than technology.  I don’t know if the city of Barcelona has tried to buy it up from the private group that owns it now.  I’m sure the city would love to have control of this tourist attraction.  I have to assume that they just ain’t sellin’.

The interior features columns in different shades of stone modeled to look like trees.

Interior of La Segrada Familia

Interior of La Segrada Familia

The funny thing is that when I was talking to Dad after we got home, he immediately brought up the unfinished cathedral.  It doesn’t look like all that much work has been done on it since he was there in the 60s. If it actually gets done after we retire, we absolutely have to come out to see it.  It will be amazing.

The tour of Casa Batlló was more than we wanted to pay, but it turned out to be well worth it.

Exterior of Casa Batlló

Exterior of Casa Batlló

We think we like Gaudi’s interiors better than his exteriors.  The interior of Casa Batlló was done in underwater themes.

A chandelier in Casa Batlló

A chandelier in Casa Batlló

Oh, and we also got a chance to see the traditional Castillian dancing in front of the Barcelona Cathedral at noon on Sunday.  Apparently this has been going on for a while too because Dad saw it while he was there.  It was kind of exciting that we both got to see it.

Rings of Castilian dancers

Rings of Castilian dancers

We also visited the Gothic Barcelona Cathedral during mass.  I thought it was kind but weird that they would allow tourists come in and wander around their cathedral during services.  The cathedral has a famous cloister that was just as beautiful as it said in our tour book.  It was almost impossible to photograph, though.  Here’s an attempt to show a piece of it:

A bit of the cloister at the Barcelona Cathedral

A bit of the cloister at the Barcelona Cathedral

I’d never seen a cloister with an ornamental pond, a fountain, and a flock of (VERY mean) geese in it before.

We finished the weekend with a classical guitar concert with Jared and Julia in another old Gothic church.  The music was incredible, and old stone churches are fantastic places to listen to it.

All in all, a good time.

20 Nov 2008 Epic Technology Fail (Or: How not to buy train tickets in Spain)
Author:  |  Category: Mirror World  | One Comment

So, we’ve been learning a lot about how to travel in Europe by gallivanting around and getting it wrong.

For example, we spent all week trying to buy train tickets to Barcelona for the weekend.  We USED to be able to buy these online with our credit card.  This time, we kept getting an error that our transaction could not go through.  Calls to our credit card company indicated that the transaction had never even been submitted to them.  Combine this with the fact that a normal experience on the Renfe website is a minor nightmare: it can’t remember what language it is using, and it constantly forgets your search results.

After a lot of growling and gnashing of teeth, we did some searching around to figure out what might be wrong.  And we found some enlightening and colorful descriptions of the Renfe website.

Trip Advisor says: “The website is a bit surreal. It is like Alice in Wonderland, where nothing seems to be what it really is.”

Other sites indicate that things will work and fail to work apparently randomly, so don’t take it too seriously.

Additionally, it turns out that Spanish credit cards actually have more security features than American ones.  Sites may just blindly try to communicate the Spanish protocol to your American credit card company and get confused.

New solution?  Just walk down the street to a travel agent and pay a 2€ fee to have them buy and print the tickets for you.  Yes, a travel agent.  You remember those.

17 Nov 2008 A few more things that that are not like the others
Author:  |  Category: Mirror World  | Leave a Comment

So here are a few more Mirror World tidbits about Madrid:

Almost all the doors to businesses open inward, like a house.  This would be against fire code in the US, I think, because if there were a stampede out of the building, everyone would be trapped against a door they can’t open.  However, a FEW doors open outward.  The door to International House, where we take our Spanish class, opens outward.  Common visual signals are also wrong, since there are often decorative pull-handles on the push side.  So we’re pretty much guaranteed to try to open every door the wrong way first.

In the US, if you’re in a car planning to turn left or right, and the crosswalk over your destination street has pedestrians on it, you generally don’t turn until the path is clear.  In Madrid, cars turn anyway, then stop with their bumper just into the crosswalk, and sit there half in the intersection until you get out of their way.  When I see this happening, I always think the car is going to hit me.

Most grocery stores don’t have pushcarts.  Instead, they have little plastic baskets on wheels that you tug behind you like a rollerbag.  A lot of people also have light canvass rollerbags that they use to carry larger purchases home on foot.  You usually can’t take these rollerbags into stores, so there are places just inside the door for people to lock them up with bike locks.

Fewer things are self-serve.  One of the grocery stores we use employs a full-time grocer to bag, weigh, and put prices on your produce choices.  A lot of stores are small, with the majority of their stock in the back, and you’re expected to request what you want from the shopkeeper.  This is a bit of a challenge for the language-impaired.  Our experience buying a litter box and supplies for our soon-to-arrive cats with no Spanish was pretty amusing.

Visa/Mastercard is definitely not everywhere you want to be.  The economy is almost entirely cash.  In the US, we generally carry around a small amount of cash and expect to use our credit card for most purchases.  Here, most places don’t take credit cards, and some that do won’t take an International one.  This probably contributes to Madrid’s high rate of petty crime, since people carry around so much more cash.  When Terran’s pocket was picked, we were carrying at least 3x the cash we would have expected to carry in the US.

The order of operations for the ATM is different than we expect.  After you finish making your request, the machine spits out your card first, then whirs for a bit, then finally spits out your cash, followed by your receipt.  This was very disconcerting the first couple of times but, you have to admit, it seems like a reasonable protocol.  Probably reduces the number of times that cards get left behind by accident.

A common kitchen implement in cooking stores is a special slicing rack for ham legs.  This should not have been a surprise, but it was.

10 Nov 2008 Our big souvenir
Author:  |  Category: Food!, Places and Sights  | 2 Comments

So, SB and I aren’t big souvenir collectors.  We tend to enjoy writing travel diaries (like this one!) and taking pictures over buying items that will remind us of a place.  That is, unless we find EXACTLY the right item.

So, we have our souvenir from our trip to Spain.  It’s a sentoku knife of made of Damascus steel.  (A sentoku knife is a Japanese chef’s knife — almost the same as a normal chef’s knife, but with a slightly different shape that we’re geeky enough to prefer.)  We bought it on our trip to Toledo on Saturday.

You might want to click the picture to really see the wavy patterns in the steel.

Damascus steel cooking knife from Toledo

Damascus steel cooking knife from Toledo

Toledo is THE place for Damascus steel.  Toledo is filled with shops selling all variety of Toledo steel: fancy tableware, hunting knives, full plate armor, decorative artwork, you name it.  And let’s not forget swords — replica swords from all nationalities and time periods.  In fact, many of the ornamental swords for our armed forces come from there.

And for the more media-minded, movie prop reproductions like these from The Lord of the Rings.

Reproduction helmet and gauntlet of Sauron

Reproduction helmet and gauntlet of Sauron

But the cool thing about a chef’s knife is that Terran and I cook like crazy people.  We’ve been whining about the lack of a good cooking knife in our apartment since we got here.  This is something that is special to the area, pretty, and we’ll use it constantly, even when we get home.  That’s an exciting kind of souvenir, something that kind remind you of a cool place that you will use almost every day.

29 Oct 2008 Game review hall of shame
Author:  |  Category: Random fun  | Leave a Comment

All the games in Terran’s review below were the games we thought WERE cool.  We played a few that didn’t work so well too.  Most notably, a tile matching party game based on pairing up romantic couples in a nightclub.  The instructions were very funny.  The actual gameplay sort of killed the fun, which makes it a good contrast for Accused.  I don’t remember the name now.

We also played Pinch the Poachers, a collaborative children-and-adults game about saving the cute animals from the evil poachers.  The game itself was rather nice, and I think it would be fun to play with your six or seven-year-old.  The company itself had a big agenda about using collaborative gameplay to shape young minds to be nice rather than competitive that we found to be a bit too much.

20 Oct 2008 The Rati Lane Amazing Moors Weekend – Part 3 – The Mosque at Córdoba
Author:  |  Category: History and Archaeology  | One Comment

This is the final chapter in our Moorish architechture extravaganza in Andausia.  Say that three times fast.

On Sunday, we spent the day in the Mezquita de Córdoba, a mind-blowing mosque dating from the 800s.

It’s actually pretty simplistic to call the Mezquita a mosque.  It’s actually sort of a testament to the cycle of religious conquest in the region.  A Vizigoth Christian church was torn down to build it, though the story is that the Emir actually purchased the land from the town of Córdoba.  When Córdoba was (re)conquered by the Spanish in the 1100s (?), it was dedicated as a Catholic church.  Then the Moors took it back and turned it back into a mosque.  Then Ferdinand III took it back, and it became a cathedral again. It’s still in use as a cathedral, actually.  It’s amazing to me as an American, where 200 years is old, that a building over 1000 years old is still in active use.

It’s hard to describe just how emotionally powerful it is to walk around in this building.

Mezquita arches

Mezquita arches

The Mezquita was built in four distinct phases.  Legend has it that the first phase, which went up in the early 800s, was completed in 10 months.  Our little audioguide states that this wasn’t entirely implausible, since all the columns were clearly stolen from elsewhere.  Each column is unique — different stone, different finishing style.

The dim lighting is actually pretty much the way it was then as well.  The mosque was supposed to be mysterious, with most of the light and attention going to the worship center facing Mecca.

Ornamentation around the worship center of the mosque

Ornamentation around the worship center of the mosque

In the 1600s, King Alfonso X oversaw the construction of a full-scale Renaissance cathedral right in the middle of the massive mosque.  The contrast of architectures in amazing to behold.

Cathedral in the center of the mosque

A lot of people have commented on the absurdity of the brightly-lit, white-and-gold frescoed cathedral in the center of the ancient Moorish columns, but I personally thought the contrast was beautiful.

Apparently, in the 1900s, there was a way-too-late flap about the hacking of this magnificent Moorish building for religious reasons.  Some of the Catholic shrines were torn out and an attempt was made to restore the original mosque.  There was a bitter, self-justifying pamphet distributed by the cathedral congregation at the entrance.  It seems odd to me that anyone should need to justify decisions made 400 years ago — this is just how things were done then, and hundreds and even thousands of years before.  It was part of the cycle of conquest.  The fact that the mosque is standing at all is a tribute to its beauty and uniqueness.

20 Oct 2008 The Rati Lane Amazing Moors Weekend – Part 2 – Actual Alhambra!
Author:  |  Category: History and Archaeology, Museums  | One Comment

Sorry for the delay on this one, after the ramp-up.

You may only purchase half-day tickets to visit the Alhambra.  Ours were in the afternoon.  Tickets must be purchased in advance, and purchasing them was a bit of a drama in itself.  Problems with the website on the Mac, combined with a general fear of international credit cards, meant that it took us about four tries of the course of a week to actually purchase tickets.  We originally tried to get morning tickets because there are fewer sold.  In theory, we would have been able to see the sights with fewer other tourists around. However, it turned out that the crowds weren’t crushing in October, so we were just as happy to take an afternoon slot because it was about an hour longer.

The Alhambra, originally Qal’at al-Hambra or “The Red Fortress” was the seat of the Sultan when the Moors ruled Granada.  It’s a palace complex that dates from around 1300.  We’ve learned that it’s one of the biggest tourist attractions for Europeans in Europe.  And we certainly did meet people from all over the world there.

First, we visited the Generalife (pronunced hen-er-al-LEE-fay, yes we got it wrong too).  This was the garden retreat of the Nasrid princes and their harems, and thus the buildings are really just there to give one a place to sleep amongst the fountains, ponds, and greenery.

Part of the Generalife gardens

Part of the Generalife gardens

There are books of romantic lore from the Generalife about harem favorites meeting their lovers in secret in secluded parts of the gardens.

From there, we moved on to tour the actual complex of Nasrid palaces.  In addition to your visit being limited to morning or afternoon on a certain day, you had a special appointment time to see the palaces.  Ours was for 4:30.  Fortunately, they only tracked when you entered and didn’t particularly care when you left.

These are much smaller than the kind of homes you would expect for European nobility.  In fact, when Europeans moved into the area later, they built doors between the palaces to combine two or more into one larger palace. Even the Sultan’s audience room is a fraction of the size of what you’d expect from a king.  The Sultan sat between the two doors in the picture below on cushions for his audiences.

The Sultan's audience room

The Sultan's audience room

However, what they lack in space, the palaces make up in decoration.  Virtually every surface is covered in frescoes and carvings, most of which incorporate prayers in Arabic so artfully that we had trouble figuring out where the words ended and abstract decoration began.

A random arch in a Nasrid palace

A random arch in a Nasrid palace

The grounds of the palaces are also impressive.  There are many long, rectangular ponds that are intended to reflect the walls and gardens of the palaces around them.  The effect was supposed to be peaceful and give the illusion of more space.  Did it ever.

The Partal palace and its mirror pond

The Partal palace and its mirror pond

We were really amazed by the visit.  The extra hour from the afternoon visit was useful because we stayed until the sun set and had to find our way back to Granada proper in the dark.  We have about 200 other pictures that we hope to put up in a separate gallery if we get organized enough.

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