Have arrived in Brussels, and spent an inordinate amount of time looking for an internet cafe. Now I’m spending a ridiculous amount of time typing, because it’s not a qwerty keyboard…

The train from Barcelona to Paris was great. I had a bed in a cabin with a guy from Chile and a guy from Canada, who were both nice. Unfortunately, since Spanish was the native language for both of them, I got left out of a good deal of conversation, but it left me time to do my crossword. I’m all set up in a hotel here around the corner from the central square (which surprisingly doesn’t have any internet cafes…), which is a great square. It also looked like some sort of performance might be going on tonight, so I’m hoping to get back there later.

Back in Granada, when we arrived at the hotel that we had made a reservation for, the door was closed and no one answered the buzzer… flashbacks to San Sebastian went through my mind. Luckily, after a few minutes, a guy from the hotel down the street came up and it turned out our room was in his hotel (they’re run by the same people). Phew. We settled in and then went and got some tapas at a local place, including a baked potato with a mixture of stuff on it including cocktail sauce, which was interesting…

The next morning we wandered around the downtown in the morning, seeing the ornately decorated royal chapel, and the very large cathedral (with an interesting circular archway behind the alter area), and the little streets that go back and forth in the area with lots of little shops.

In the afternoon, we went up to see the Alhambra. When you see it, you make a reservation before getting to the city for a particular half-hour timeslot. If your timeslot is in the afternoon, as ours was, then you can’t enter the site until after 2pm. The timeslot is for when you enter the royal palaces, which is only a small (though quite important) section of the site. This means that you have to pay attention to the time while you wander in the site, so that you don’t miss your window.

The site is amazing. There are gardens, a fortress, a moorish set of palaces, a later christian palace, and ruins of moorish dwellings. We spent five hours at the site, and though we may have seen most, there were certainly areas that we didn’t get to. The moorish palaces are the best. They look incredibly plain from the outside, but the inside is lavishly decorated. Definitely worth seeing (though maybe in a cooler season… .

After the Alhambra, we followed the guidebook’s suggestion and went over to the old arab quarter and walked around the streets, ending up at a viewpoint from which one is supposed to watch the sunset on the Alhambra. Of course, as with all these places, there were lots of people there waiting, and I had some passages from Geoff Dyer’s book about the strangeness of such sites running through my head. The glow of the Alhambra was indeed quite nice, and hopefully some of the photos came out, but that spot has one problem for its assigned task: you can’t see the sun. Therefore, determining when sunset is finished becomes somewhat of a guessing game…

We flew the next morning back to Barcelona, by way of Palma Mallorca, or something like that. I still have no idea where it is. I woke up for a bit on the flight there and noticed we were over water, so maybe it’s an island. All I do know is that the airport is not set up for transfers… I guess they figure anyone who arrives in this wonderful place must want to stay awhile. We did make our flight, but the fact that they had it on the board as “last call” about 15 minutes before take off time didn’t help our serenity.

On Jen’s last night in Barcelona, we went back to a restuarant we had gone to before, where we had gotten some very tasty, though rather oily, paella. We had a less oily, but also less tasty, rice dish this time, and then when we left the restaurant at around 11:30, found that the direction we had come in through was now gated off. I will admit that the neighborhood on that side seemed a bit sketchy (and the fact that they had to barricade themselves away from it at night certainly increased my wariness of it), but I wonder how that restuarant survives, since most meals in Spain are pretty late. Both times we went to that place, we were the first ones there at around 9:30-10pm…

Anyways, all caught up now. And since this neighborhood where this internet cafe is is in a somewhat less-than-ideal neighborhood, I think I’ll head back before it gets dark. Signing off.

Nope. We didn’t see any rain. Though that might have helped. The south of Spain particularly was hot hot hot. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Jen and I spent the first four days (3 really, since I arrived at 9 or 10pm on the first day) in Barcelona. Barcelona is an interesting city, and there are a number of sights that we saw here that I really liked, but it’s also a fairly gritty city (especially around las ramblas, the big touristy street that has people walking up and down it at all hours — good for people-watching). It also seems to be almost entirely populated by tourists (again, mainly around las ramblas and the old parts of the city), as every other person is either carrying luggage or looking at a map or something.

The sites designed by the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi are something else. I’d guess it’s where we get the word gaudy, but I don’t know for sure. Parc Guell is a big park that he designed, originally as a gated community for the well-off, but they ran out of money as they couldn’t develop enough interest and ended up selling it to the city. It’s like something out of a fantasy land, with colorful dragons, collonades shaped as a crashing wave, and a huge “natural plaza” supported by something like 90 columns. Definitely a terrific site. He also designed an apartment building, La Pedrera, which was used for much of the century, and now is a museum with a recreation of what one of the apartments looked like in the early 1900’s. I also very much liked this building, partly because it’s fun to imagine living in history.

His biggest design is a grand cathedral, La Sagrada Familia, which is nowhere near finished. They think maybe in 50 years or so… Of course, I think St John the Divine’s in NY has a similar time-frame, and that one at least has a roof… It’s, umm, very interesting. The interior is meant to resemble a forest, with the columns branching off many times as they get higher, like a tree would. As I said, no roof yet, but it seems like that part will be interesting. The entrances that are done have 4 massive towers each (there will be 3 entrances, so 12 entrance towers to represent the disciples, 4 in the center to represent the evangelists, and one tallest one representing Christ). One of the entrances resembles a huge jaw opening, and has kind of modern-art sculptures representing Christ’s stories (birth, pilate, crucifixion, resurrection, etc) all in white. Whereas the other completed entrance has more classical sculptures in a Nativity facade in mostly dark stone, which honestly looks a little like an evil genius’s castle in some horror movie…

The hotel where we stayed, Hotel Peninsular, has really great staff. It’s right in the area that I guess you’re supposed to see in Barcelona, Las Ramblas, but as I indicated earlier, it’s a fairly gritty neighborhood. The showers in the bathroom don’t have any shower curtain, and for the first few days we thought that was why the floors were constantly wet… turned out the bedee had a leak, which they fixed pretty quickly. They also helped us make our reservation for a pension in the next town, San Sebastian, which I’ll mention again in a minute.

We decided earlier to drive to San Sebastian, or, really, I decided. The trains to that area of Spain are fairly slow, and I kind of like driving, so here we went. Unfortunately, my planning on this leg of the trip was a tad insufficient. First off, I haven’t driven a stick car in years… like, over a decade since I drove one for any significant period of time. So, renting a stick car in the middle of a busy city with signs in a language you don’t understand was a bit of a stretch… On top of that, I kind of forgot to find a road-map.

The green guide has a high-level map, with cities to stop at on the way, but one really needs something just a bit more detailed. We ended up going past the first turn… like 50 kilometers past. I finally found a map in a service station we stopped in, along with a spanish-english dictionary which I ended up not using much and a cd of semi-current (last couple years) pop tunes for the drive. It took us something like 40 euros in tolls before we figured out which markings on the map meant toll-road (it was in spanish!), and even with that I’m not sure we got it right. We ended up taking what seemed to be the equivalent of state roads much of the rest of the way, which were interesting, but much slower (imagine the one-lane “highways” that run through little towns across the US, sometimes known as business loops…).

We had originally told the pension that we planned to stay at that we would arrive at around 8pm, and she had in turn given us a cell number to call to reach her (though she didn’t speak english, so that call would have been tough). Given the slower roads, and the lack of planning, we actually didn’t make it into town until around 9pm, at which point we spent an hour and a half or more buzzing the pension’s door and calling every phone number we had for it. By this point, it’s 10:30pm or so on a busy Saturday evening… not a great time to find an alternate room. After calling literally every pension, hostal, or hotel in Lonely Planet and Rick Steve’s, we instead found an internet cafe and ended up using hotels.com to book an expensive, but available place. Ah well.

Once we were settled in, San Sebastian was terrific. The temperature there is kept cool by the Atlantic, and they have a huge stretch of lit beach front and a very active boulevard and old town, even at 2-3 am on Saturday evening. There’s an energy to the town on Saturday evening that makes you understand immediately why people come there on the weekends (we heard lots of french and british accents). The next day we wandered around the town, and climbed up the overlooking hill, Mount Urgell, for some nice views. By the evening, however, on Sunday, the town just empties. There are still places open, but they’re all completely empty, whereas on Saturday places were packed. It was a strange sensation to see such a difference.

Monday, we drove from San Sebastian down to Madrid, with a map and a better understanding of the route this time. We stopped in Bilbao mid-morning to look at the Guggenheim (which, of course, is closed on Mondays… ah well, I can always visit the Guggenheim in NY. Same same, right?), which is certainly a distinctive design, but Bilbao did not look all that impressive. Of course, I can’t really make that claim having only spent an hour or so there. The drive from there to Madrid was much more relaxed and interesting than our drive on Saturday had been, arriving in Madrid with plenty of time to get to the hotel (which didn’t seem like the kind of place that would have closed up shop anyway).

The hotel in Madrid on the first night had told us that they weren’t sure they could provide a second night, but would be able to find a room in the same building for us. When we got there, I could see why, as there were like 4 or 5 different Hostals or pensions in that one building. The one we stayed in had very impressive marble flooring in the room and the bathroom, and green marble on the bathroom walls, but as Jen said, “All the useful stuff was ignored in the renovations.” We ate that night in a place that was known for its Castillian stew. When we got there, a couple was just exiting and raved about it, saying that the staff had been helpful and the stew was terrific. We then went in, and the staff ended up muttering loudly around us, being completely unhelpful, and then ignoring us later. We were the only people in there at that point, so it was either that they didn’t like how we were dressed (I was in shorts, because it was hot and we didn’t know we were stopping here when we left the hotel), or that they wanted to close. In either case, the stew was pretty good, but the experience was annoying.

The next day we moved to the pension upstairs (Pension Arcos), where this great old Spanish lady, who spoke no english, ran the place. She was always there with a smile and a “buenes dias” though. This place had far more room, and a balcony on the street-facing side, and was cheaper, so all was good. We went and saw the royal palace, which had a 40 minute guided tour though lots and lots of rooms with big chandelliers and clocks (apparently the palace has 2800 rooms, and was far smaller than originally designed, but luckily we didn’t see all of them). The cathedral right next door was pretty impressive from the outside, and then on the inside was what the guide book called neo-gothic… it was really very colorful on the ceilings, which was somewhat surprising to me.

We then went to see the Museo del Prado, which had a very large collection, part of which was being shut off for some sort of event afterwards. We were sitting outside when the motorcade drove up to the door and crowds ran to see who was getting out. Unfortunately we were both too hot and tired from standing/walking to care, so guess we’ll never know.

That evening, unfortunately, started a string of evenings where I had an asthmatic reaction to something. It hit when we were out on the street, so it couldn’t have been cats, but it was the reaction I normally associate with cats. I had it there, and then again in Seville and Granada, which led to some almost sleepless nights. No idea what it was, but it hasn’t repeated in Barcelona yet — knock on wood.

We took the train to Seville, where it was hot hot hot hot. Ugh. The royal palace there, designed with some moorish influences, and the cathedral, with a huge tower called La Giralda, were both interesting, but tough to muster the energy for in the heat. We also experienced the worst audioguide experience, where the cathedral’s audioguide would ramble on about every little chapel, telling you nothing interesting about them except so-and-so did this and that, but never who so-and-so was. Combine this with the heat and it was definitely not worth it.

In the evening we went to see a famenco show, which was quite fun. They had 6 dancers, 4 women and 2 men, come out one by one and dance while a guitarist and two singers provided background. Each dancer danced for around 15-20 minutes, and it was a blast. It was also air conditioned, so maybe I was biased…

We also went to Granada and then back to Barcelona, but I’ll have to recount those later because I’m on a train to Paris in an hour. The heat here got to me, and it’s time to head north, probably farther than Paris, because I think Paris isn’t much cooler. We’ll see.

So, as you might guess from the lack of posts, the last few weeks have been busy. On the ship, I rarely got the time to get to an internet cafe, and when I did I had other tasks to do, and then the last two weeks in Spain have been practically non-stop. I’ve got more of a breather at this point, so I’ll try to cover the events.

Btw, I haven’t found an internet cafe where I could upload my photos yet, so I’m still working on that. I ended up buying a new compact flash card, so the urgency has been lessened for now…

After Phaistos, we made an unscheduled detour to Matala beach, in the south of Crete, which I think was the best swimming on the trip. The beach has some rocks right by the shore, but once you’re on either side of them it’s great, and the water was decently warm. There are a whole series of caves to one side of the beach, which apparently were occupied by hippies (nature-lovers?) in the 60’s and some of the 70’s, until they were cleared out by the town, which is why it’s referred to in a Joni Mitchell song (”Carey”).

We then visited both Knossos and Mallia, the other two Minoan palaces in Crete. Knossos was quite interesting as parts of it have been reconstructed (which was and still is controversial) so that you can see what they looked like and walk inside the rooms. We also visited Naxos, Lesbos, Syros and Sifnos — all greek islands that ranged in how touristy they were and also how interesting their sites were.

One other island that we stopped at was Delos, which was the birthplace of Apollo in myth, and therefore a religious community in ancient times which grew into a commercial center, but is abandoned today. The ship moored offshore and the local tender brought us all in early in the morning… it was hot even at that point, and there isn’t much shade on the island (by midday, when the sun is above the rubble of the remaining walls, there’s none), but it was a very interesting site. Some brave souls climbed to the top of a hill on the center of the island, but that’s a task I’ll leave for if I ever come back in winter.

The trip also included a stop in Turkey, in Kusadasi, where we visited several ancient greek/roman sites: Ephesus, Priene, Didyma, and Miletus. Ehpesus was a huge site, and we got a tour of some impressive houses that have been excavated there. They also have a large theater which apparently was used up until a few years ago for concerts by Sting, and then Elton John, and finally Guns & Roses, who unfortunately shook it enough to crack it. No more concerts. Didyma was a huge temple, which hosted an oracle like Delphi.

After the trip, some family friends and my father and I went to Aegina, an island about 45 minutes from Piraeus (Athens’ port). Three of us (another 2 were shopping) were left transporting something like 12 pieces of luggage on the ferry, which caused great amounts of stress but in the end we made it, and then relaxed for 3 nights in the Hotel Apollo, on the empty side of the island in Agia Marina. The hotel is situated right above a rocky shoreline with ladders leading down into the Aegean, which all of us swam in, but only some of us swam in more than once… (it was pretty cold, and a little choppy at times against the rocks). It was a great place, and the food, both at the hotel and in town, was terrific.

After we left Aegina, I was in the Athens airport for around 6 hours before my flight, which you might think would have been a good time to work on my blog… the internet access at the airport was a stunning 11 euros for a half hour, though, so I read instead. And then on to Barcelona…

Ok, maybe not that kind. I’m in an internet cafe in Crete tonight, and it’s around 1am. I had planned to write a blog entry covering the events of the last few days, but it’s fairly late…. “Let me explain. No, no. There is too much. Let me sum up.”

We watched a performance by some Cretan dancers on the ship tonight, which was a lot of fun. They performed some traditional Cretan dances, and then some traditional Greek dances. Lot’s of “Oopah!”, though I’m not sure how to spell it, and lot’s of audience participation towards the end (even I got up to dance for a very little bit).

The ship is great, though smaller than last year’s. It’s around 17 cabins, and each cabin is just big enough to use, kinda. Not quite enough drawer space to completely unpack, but hey. The meals onboard are terrific. Last night there was a salmon dish with garlic potatoes and onion rings that was great. Tonight was bbq, which was fine, but not spectacular.

Yesterday we had lunch at an organic farm called Agreco, which is owned by a guy who owns a large chain of hotels (the King George II, which we stayed in in Athens, was one of them). It was amazing. A constant stream of new dishes that were all terrific. Greek salad, olives, stuffed vegetables, feta, suckling pig, quail, chicken with okra, and then cheese pie, ice cream, and yogurt with honey and walnuts for desert. Along with Raki, which is apparently painfully strong alchohol. There was lots of that leftover…

We’ve spent time on the Pelloponese, and on Kythera, and now on Crete. Mainly visiting ancient sites. The old capital on Kythera for example is on the top of a mountain in the center of the island, with gorges all around, and construction literally hanging off the cliff. Supposedly they were there to avoid pirates, but if you die of starvation, is that really winning?

Today we went to the palace at Phaistos in Crete, which was a Minoan palace in the 2nd millenium bc, where the Phaistos disc was found. You’ve probably seen it before, and if it wasn’t so late I’d google for an image. Anyways, it’s supposedly the earliest example of writing in the western world, but the professor with us thinks it’s a fake. For several reasons, which I’ll elaborate on if anyone wants to know…

Anyways, having fun, though I’ve now written for long enough. Another entry in a few days…