Madrid

It is 6:30 PM so the day isn't over yet, but we are taking a break before dinner.  We are hopeful that we may finally be back in a place that has internet that can post photos, about a week's worth by now.

Again, olive trees as far as the eye can see.

We drove away from all the dramatic natural beauty (it reminds us of Hawaii, the way the mountains are  close to the ocean, and the greenery and the temperature and the clear blue skies) and headed north just as the sun was coming over the mountains.  It was an easy trip.  We hadn't really planned on doing this much driving in Spain but since we had never been here before it was hard not to want to visit as much as we could reach without straining too hard.  On a second trip we might find it easier to settle into some sort of village-based routine (kind of what we thought we might do this time, but we were naive).  Anyway, by the time we were ready to turn in the car, we had driven 3419 kilometers (2051 miles).

On all our road trips, Jon navigates the complicated parts while I drive.  We are pretty good at it by now and there is very little angst, although sometimes we do go around the traffic circles more than most people.  In Spain there are circles at almost every intersection so Jon tells me which lane to be in so I can get back out without incident.  When we got to the train station we tried to find the place to return the car. We even asked some people but they had no idea.  So we looped up and around and back and forth until Jon finally spotted the tiny sign that indicated the ramp.  We returned the car without a scratch, and without any bad stories at all (see Florence for our least favorite car story) and walked away with our bags.

Half the famous Plaza Mayor.

For a whole city block they are
gutting the building but leaving
the facade.

The Madrid Metro is easy to understand, buying a ticket is simple, and we made our way to our hotel (sweating in our coats), right in the middle of all the historic sights.  We are on the fifth floor, we don't have a balcony but we have a window that can open up to the sounds of the city below, and it all feels very fancy.  We walked around for a few hours, I wouldn't let Jon get tapas at the fancy Mercado de San Miguel because we would have had to eat standing up.  Instead we ate at an uninteresting little place, just patatas bravas and clams, and continued our wandering.  Madrid is impressive.  Many other people have written much more eloquently than I can about the architecture and the plazas.  There is much to see on every street, and street performers in the plazas.  Seeing Madrid I now understand where Mexico comes from. This looks like what I remember about Mexico 45 years ago. It also feels like Paris. 

Last Day in the South

View from the Balcony of Europe toward the sea ...

After a domestic Sunday morning at home, we finally drove down to the beach town of Nerja and parked the car and got out. On our previous forays, we had driven through and found it underwhelming. This was Sunday when most businesses are closed so we thought maybe it would be less crowded. We parked on the street and walked down toward the Balcon d'Europ. a lookout point that is above the beach and provides a vista back toward the mountains.

... and then back toward the mountains. Note the kids
getting their toes wet in the surf.

A beautiful day, a stunning  location, the whole town,
young to old.

We found a crowd, a swarm, a mob of people on bicycles, milling around getting ready for something to start. There was a DJ on a bandstand, representing some radio station that was sponsoring this race or whatever it was.  The people on bicycles ranged in age from about two (no pedals, just pushing along with their feet) to about 82. Lots of children, lots of families. Everyone had a number on (the highest number was in the 1900s) showing that they were eligible for the bike raffle, or maybe for a hot dog, who could tell. Clearly it wasn't a real race but it was hard to tell what was going to happen.  The sign said it was starting at noon but it was already 11:55 and there was no clear movement toward a starting line. So we wandered up the street to start looking for lunch.  After we had walked about a block we saw police putting up barricades to block traffic and then about two minutes later a flatbed truck with loudspeakers and the DJ and two teenage girls on stationary bikes facing backwards came up the street, leading a parade of bicycles.

They were of all sizes and types. Note the small bike in
the crosswalk has no pedals, just her feet on the ground.

It appeared to be a local celebration of an annual festival in Andalucia.  It was a grand parade of all sorts of bicycles, some with training wheels, a few sturdy tricycles, several tandem bikes, one reclining bike that was custom built to hold a family of four, only one road bike (with skinny tires), lots of families riding together, watching over their little ones. As Jon said, it was clear that people get on wheels at a very early age around here. It is very hard to ride that slowly without crashing into each other, but we saw no tipping over at all.  Very jolly. At the very end there was a bike with 7 seats and 7 elderly gentlemen pedaling along, looking like they had done this before. After it was over, we saw a lady pushing her toddler, strapped to a wheeled toddler vehicle, bumping over the cobblestones, and the baby was fast asleep, tipped back with her mouth open.

We left the densest tourist area and had lunch in a small cafe.  The food was real and fine -- I ordered the vegetable soup and found that it was chicken based, but it was tasty.  We got to use the internet there and Jon satisfied himself that he had all the maps we needed to get to Madrid the next day.

Back home for another quiet evening of trying to eat all the groceries before we give up the kitchen. It was a heroic effort involving garlic green beans, a mountain of cauliflower, more chicory salad and store bought flan.

From our balcony, the sea just barely seen
above our heads.

Today Jon got caught up on all the accounting (unlike his father, he does not set a budget before the trip, but like his father, he tries hard to keep track of all the expenses).  He even calculated the mileage on the rental car (between 40 and 45 mpg). And while he was hard at work with the calculator, I tried to make a better fingerless mitten using double pointed needles.  It came out much better.

Cordoba

So, we decided that bigger cities have more stuff and that's why you visit them, especially when you don't know anyone to visit and you can't just drop by a farm and introduce yourself because that is about as far as you can go in Spanish.  We got up and out by 7:30, back on the road (which is really no hardship because there is no significant traffic and the roads are new and safe and smooth now that tourism has become the economic engine).  I went back to sleep and Jon drove the two hours to Cordoba.  There were big swaths of olives again, and wide open plains and more geometric expanses of grape vines.  It was kind of a rainy/sunny day, maybe in the low 50s.  Mostly not raining.

We are much more adept at finding the city center now, following the helpful signs with the circle that looks like a target and the words "ciudad centro."  It is not rocket science for sure.  The old city is inside of a wall, like Jerusalem, and the parking garage that we used was just inside the wall, which seemed shocking to me.  Today we didn't have a good map so we wandered around, slightly disoriented, through the narrow alleys and lanes. We had two destinations:  the big cathedral/mosque and the Jewish quarter.  Jon thinks that they are trying to support the guided tour industry so they don't put any signs up.  A continuous stream of tour groups flowed around us as we walked around corners, doubling back, feeling unmoored by our lack of a map.  We did see actual church officials in purple robes and tall hats coming out of the cathedral to meet a casket that was carried by five men who were not particularly dressed in funeral attire.  Apparently the church was closed for an hour and a half for the funeral.  We felt like we had seen a snippet of real life.

But we had to attend to some physical needs.  Since arriving in Spain we have found, to our great satisfaction, that there is always a very nice public bathroom close by, wherever we are.  Today they were not so easy to find.  We paid 0.30 euros so that I could use one of those funny stand-alone toilets in a cylinder in the street.  That was the best 33 cents ever spent.  There was even a sink in there and the little round room was clean and cozy. Then we had cafe con leche in a tiny cafe and felt ready to face the work of tourism. 

Touching the toes of Maimonides
for good health -- one his many
pursuits was medicine.

The tiny (20' x 20') synagogue
built in 1315.

Because a walled city is a walled city, we eventually found the Jewish quarter (that was very close by the whole time) and the statue of Maimonides and the tiny synagogue: one of three left in all of Spain from medieval times.  It was a small room with a high ceiling, four walls, decorated like the Nasrid Palace in the Alhambra, with plaster patterns (reconstructed and renovated). There was a women's balcony off to the side, a place for the ark on the eastern wall, and not much else. Just across the street was a museum of the Sepharad, so we bought tickets for a tour that would start in about an hour.  We spent some time in a courtyard that housed an artist's co-op, and bought some Judaica from a tiny workshop.  All this on Shabbat. There is no Jewish presence here, only history.

One of the two museum guides
singing in Ladino.

One of the ways Jewish women could have a trade was
in fine needle-point brocades. They continued the
craft, even after becoming marrano, going on to
decorate church robes.

At the museum, there were two young men who did the tours and one young woman who took tickets and ran the gift shop.  The men spoke French and English and Spanish fluently, and switched between the languages as needed.  We joined a French-speaking tour group to listen to the introduction (in two languages) to some songs that one of the young men sang for us, tunefully and well, in Ladino. Then Jon and I had a private tour with Ramon who looks like Eric Plaksin because we were the only two English speakers there.  It is a very small museum with about six rooms: one to show how the single women had the job of making the silk and embroidering decorative ceremonial clothes (evolving later in Spanish culture to include the church and the bullfighters' attire).  Another room taught about the Jewish holidays because no one really knows about that in Spain anymore.  Another room houses the only true synagogue space in Cordoba because it has a Torah. A room about Maimonides, the brightest light to come out of Cordoba in medieval times, and next door a room about the darkest thing: the Inquisition.  That was where we spent the most time because Ramon had the most to say there: the main message was that it took several centuries of oppression and repression and violence and criminalizing to wipe out Judaism entirely in Spain.  He says that sadly, Spain has the unique distinction of being the only country in the Diaspora that succeeded in erasing the Jewish memory.  There were many families that held onto traditions, not even understanding them generations later, doing things because their mothers did them (and reinterpreting Biblical tradition because they had no written record of their own, creating saints like Saint Esther and Saint Moses). He said that one of the most reliable ways for them to remember their practices was to see the list of things that were forbidden, written out by the edict of the Inquisition.  We had forgotten that marrano means pig, or dirty.  He said that one of the ways that Jews tried to prove that they were true converts was by putting some pork into their Shabbat meals, as did the Muslims.  

Needless to say, we were curious about the stories of the two tourguides, but it didn't seem appropriate to ask.  They were juggling several tours at once, and they were so earnest and hardworking that we could only surmise that they somehow were Jewish themselves, in spite of the lack of Jewish community.  We asked the young lady who it was that built the museum and she said a historian who was interested in reviving awareness of the Jewish story.  

We had lunch outside (cold, should have been inside) in Plaza Juda Levi.  Tourist prices but not tourist flavors.  Real food served on real dishes, cooked just right. My "salad" was a plate full of perfectly prepared roasted vegetables. Jon's paella was made with local chicken instead of seafood.  

The best parts of the castle: the parapets,
the gardens ...

... and Hana.

Fortified yet again, we went to the castle of the Christian kings.  It looked like something out of Robin Hood, with towers and passageways and those classic castle walls.  The sign outside said that the Inquisition was run from inside those walls, as well as "planning the discovery of the Americas."  There were some lovely gardens with fountains and pools and orange trees.  I admired all the toddlers running around.  There are cute kids everywhere.

By now I was out of gas and was not at all curious about going into the cathedral that had been built inside a mosque, or vice versa.  My feet were tired.  We decided to skip the most famous thing in Cordoba and try to find our car instead.  

This time I drove and Jon slept.  We went to Malaga on the way home, in search of a wifi connection, a snack, a bathroom, and some groceries.  I thought to myself, if we were in the States, where would we go?  Parking is the biggest challenge, so I thought we would go to a strip mall of some kind. That is not a thing here, but we followed signs to a shopping center, which turned out to be a big mall.  Perfect. We joined the crowds at the mall, found a bathroom and a bar that sold snacks -- you just fill out an order form and bring it to the counter and they call your name when it is ready. Jon did all this by himself while I posted my backlog of daily updates.  The snacks were unremarkable, even though they had names that we recognized by now.  Malls are not really the place to get real food, but the wifi was excellent.

Pig in every style imaginable, including whole
himd-quarter and leg. This is only a fraction of the
full selection.

On the way out of Malaga we saw a Carrefour with a big parking lot. We have been warned that nothing at all will be open tomorrow, Sunday, so we stopped for groceries.  Or that's what we thought we were doing.  Turns out this store is kind of like a Target and a Walmart and a Costco but with more fancy ham than any of those stores would ever have.  We were looking for things like salt and matches.  Completely the wrong scale. Jon likes shopping and I don't, so he persevered much longer than I would have. I eventually found the salt but we never found matches.  We bought a beautiful cauliflower for one euro. In fact, food is surprisingly inexpensive here in the stores.

Since arriving in Frigiliana, we have only eaten out for dinner that one time with Benjamin.  But we eat on the Spanish time table -- we started cooking dinner at almost 10 PM tonight. We have cooked dinners that are more full of vegetables than anything we ever cook at home in the winter, and we keep re-inventing our leftovers. Tonight Jon blended the soup that I made yesterday and added day old bread.  And we have been eating chicory for salad! I really believe that the bitter escarole and endive we grow and the disgustingly bitter greens that Zach and Heinz grow are ALL meant to be grown in the winter in the Mediterranean region.  They taste delicious here.

Getting Out of the Fast Lane

For the first time since last Sunday we woke up as late as we wanted and we moved slowly.  Had breakfast at home, left the house at about 11.  Headed to Motril, about a half an hour to the east. Parked successfully (having a car can be a mixed blessing, for sure) in an underground garage and looked for the tourist information office.  It was not quite obvious enough for us so I went into a farmacia and used my pidgin Spanish and got directions.  Not much English spoken in this town, especially not by the people in the shops.

Views from our balcony, toward to sea ...

, \

... and toward the mountains

We headed for the only museum of this type in all of Europe -- a museum of pre-industrial sugar cane production.  Motril was the capital of sugar cane in the 15th and 16th centuries.  The Moors figured out about 500 years before that it would grow here, and somehow it arrived from New Guinea via India and Persia.  The warm weather and abundant water here is perfect for it.  Sugar cane pushed out all the other normal food crops and took over the economy of the area, but it was mostly exported or eaten by the very rich. It was a huge amount of work making sugar:  cutting it by hand with a machete, stripping the leaves, loading it onto donkeys, taking it to the mill, putting it through giant rollers powered by water, then resquishing all the smashed cane again by using a huge press (a lever with a fulcrum near one end; a man at the far end of a beam twisted a giant screw, lifting his end and exerting downward pressure at the other end about 40' away...the smashed cane was stacked just like the cider press at home, with layers sandwiched between, and they squished every last drop out), then boiling it over a hot fire, making a syrup, taking out the impurities, getting it hot enough to crystallize, then packing it into these ceramic jars to make a sugar loaf. Every single ceramic jar had to be broken to get the sugar loaf out, so someone had to make hundreds and hundreds of those cone shaped pots with a hole in the bottom (so the molasses could drip out). It was hard to understand the quantities, but they said this particular sugar mill made 822 tons of sugar (a year?).

There were many downsides to this enterprise, both ecological and societal.  It used up all the wood in the whole region eventually.  The sugar was taxed so heavily that the people who were making it really didn't benefit from the money that was flowing.  Eventually the New World became too competitive with its slave labor and vast capacity for production, plus someone else discovered sugar beets which was a whole lot easier than sugar cane.  The industry died out, was reinvigorated when steam power was invented, but ten years ago the very last sugar mill closed.

Motril is another port town, full of regular people doing regular shopping and work.  We did not find a quaint city center but there were certainly narrow streets lined with classic looking residential buildings, and fountains and squares, just nothing that looked ancient or precious. At about 2:00 the whole place closed.  We walked around trying to figure out how to find a wifi connection (the one at the library was too weak) and eventually found an open network when we were sitting in a plaza.  Jon discovered there had been no major crises at work. Then we had some lunch at an outdoor cafe even though it was getting cold and grey out.  I can order food as long as I don't have to construct a whole, coherent sentence.  

It turns out all those acres of plastic greenhouse structures are filled with a variety of vegetables and fruits.  Apparently about 20-some years ago this whole region started growing produce under cover during the winter months. It is too hot in the summer. The guidebook moans that this is unaesthetic and has lots of issues, but I would say that if they are producing most of the fresh fruits and vegetables in the winter for Northern Europe, more power to them.  They must have figured out that this works best, although it must create a different kind of problem-solving.  They work on some intensely steep slopes in this region.  I don't think there are many farms in the US that would attempt that.

Instead of going straight home we went up a long and winding mountain road to see the town of Competa, famous for its Muscatel wine and probably other things. By the time we got up there I didn't even want to get out of the car. It was getting dark and looked like rain and it was about 15 miles back down the same switchbacks all the way to the coast.  It was certainly picturesque, tucked up in the mountains -- the guidebook said that about half the residents are expats from Northern Europe.  

A "white" town: like little boxes rolled down the hillside until they stop, one on top of another.

Back at home, I finished reading Hotels of North America and Jon took a nap and read a Nero Wolfe book on his phone.  He says what we have been missing is all the Trump news.  Ah well.

Malaga

ANOTHER early morning, this time to get Benjamin to the airport in Malaga (there is an accent over the first "a" but I can't manage that on this keyboard).  Dropped him off at 8:00 and he headed off to Austria, via Rome.  We will miss him, and not only for his Spanish and his internet connection.  He is good company, and so patient with us (I still am always surprised).  He and Jon can talk for hours, and he is on my team when it comes to not worrying. He has a lot of confidence as a traveler, which makes everything seem easy.

So we were one our own, just like when Rebecca left us in Venice by ourselves after taking care of us through Greece and much of Italy.  We do need to take a trip with Alissa sometime so she can take care of us too!

We drove into Malaga, got our bearings by missing several key turns and driving all the way through the interesting part of town in both directions, eventually figuring out where to find a parking garage right in the old city.  Go us.  It was so early that the streets were still pretty empty of pedestrians and shops and restaurants were just barely getting open.  Malaga is a port city, first inhabited by the Phoenicians, then the Romans and so on.  We went into the big chunky cathedral (that is maligned in the guidebooks for its mix of architecture and dark interior) and heard mass being sung on the other side of a screen. As usual, the cathedral was built on the site of a mosque, about four or five centuries ago.

Wandered around in the pedestrian-friendly streets, stopped at a cafe to sit in the sun and drink cafe con leche and have churros with chocolate.  Went to the Picasso Museum and appreciated the beautiful building, the organization (thematic), the way they really want you to understand what Picasso was doing, and the small number of paintings (about 200 or so).

Went to the bustling market that was full of shoppers buying fish and olives and vegetables and fruits and meat.  We bought another round of beautiful vegetables, this time from an organic farmer, plus some delicious looking pastries and some olives and oranges.  Felt pretty pleased with ourselves.

The Costa del Sol.

My feet and legs were tired of all this walking on city streets, day after day, so we decided we had done enough in Malaga.  Cathedral, cafe, museum, market.  Good enough.  Drove to Nerja, our local beach town, and found a restaurant for lunch. Jon got tapas and I got fish. Food is fresh and wholesome, and pretty unadorned. Nothing to complain about except the lack of garlic, really. By now it was 3:00 and time for a nap. We drove down to the beach and parked in the sun and took naps.  After driving around trying to figure out where there might be wifi, with no success, we headed back up toward our house, taking a detour into the older and more scenic part of Frigiliana.  So many gleaming white buildings stacked up on that steep hillside, looking down over a long green valley, all the way down to the sea.  It could not be more picturesque-ly Spanish.

Between all those houses on the hill-side are groves of olives, or
vegetables or citrus or avocados.

Like yesterday, once we got home, we didn't want to go back out again even though there were still two more hours of daylight. With no internet, we had to read books.  And take some more naps.  And then cook a yummy dinner using yesterday's pasta as a start for another round of vegetables and olive oil.  This is so deluxe, having a house with a stocked kitchen, fully furnished with everything we could ever want.  It is a dream destination.  Except for the lack of a wifi connection - which we could purchase but it seems too extravagant to Jon so instead we will hold onto our money and wait for another solution.

Frigiliana, another "white" town.

Alhambra

Since there are no furnishings ...

... in the Alhambra, all the ...

Another early morning -- at 6 AM it is still dark as night out and there are almost no vehicles on the roads. We were in a hurry to get to Granada to pick up our tickets for an 8:30 entrance into the Alhambra.  Until a few days ago, I had never heard of this place.  Lonely Planet in 2011 said it is the top spot to visit. So Jon ordered tickets online and we headed back north.  It was frosty and clear and Benjamin with his thin Israeli blood was freezing while we stood in line waiting to be among the first.

... views are up  ...

... until you get outside.

The Alhambra is a fortress, a royal palace, part of a complex with a long history. Last year we went to the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, it also had housing for the harem and a throne room, etc. This building is different because it has been painstakingly renovated with room after room of intricate decorative plaster, inlaid wood ceilings, tile floors and walls.  The trouble is, there were almost no signs telling us what we were seeing -- except for the explanations about the renovation process.  Obviously the people who have spent so much time recreating this Moorish/Christian building are very interested in that aspect, but we would have liked to have some context.  Again, I really missed having a movie to explain everything.  That is so normal in the US, the movie, a good narrative makes all the difference.  There were grand hallways and fountains and sculptures. I like to be able to imagine the people who lived here.  The Topkapi Palace did a much better job.  There were other grand buildings in the complex -- Charles V, who had royal palaces all over Europe (Holy Roman Emperor) wanted a more comfortable and modern place to live here so they started building a big round Renaissance structure with a big open courtyard in the middle, Greco-Roman columns all around the perimeter.  It took them over 400 years to finish it.  We wonder why they thought it was important to finish it, since those royal families were long gone.  There were some great views of Granada and the Sierra Nevada mountains from on top of the towers of the military fort.

From a parapet, looking back at the palace.

Looking up into the Sierra Nevadas.

Looking out over Granada.

Running water where handrails
would be.

View of palace complex from
some of the newer gardens.

Hana, trying to join a work crew, but she forgot her green and blue jacket.

We went into the center of the city, braving the traffic, driving on forbidden roads by mistake but leaving quickly enough, eventually found a parking garage and set off on foot to find lunch and sightseeing.  Another sunny, warm day by then so we sat outside in a touristy block of restaurants, watching the crowds of school children go by.  Lunch, then wandering, then some gelato, then back to the car. Benjamin said that Granada felt mostly like a European city but he couldn't get a feeling for its unique character. We probably didn't try hard enough.

The view of the mountains and valleys was much clearer this time -- snow on the peaks and rugged, craggy, shadowy ridges. 

We stopped at a big supermarket in Nerja where many of the signs were in English as well as Spanish because this is a big destination for British tourists.  They were in evidence.  Apparently many have timeshares here and spend the winter months in the sunny south.   We bought nice vegetables and other supplies and headed back up the valley to our whitewashed village in the hills.  

Benjamin got two new hats on this trip, a total success.

Naps, knitting, eventually we decided we didn't want to go out for dinner so Jon cut up some vegetables and made pasta and used lots of olive oil and salt (we finally noticed they don't really eat garlic here).  I finished making Benjamin's hat and he put it right on and said it was great.  Whew -- the last thing I made him was not a success, with its too long sleeves and its stretched out body.  This hat uses the same pattern that Nell used for Becca: it has a hole at the top for a ponytail to stick out.  Nell sent me the pattern less than an hour before we left on this trip, and I grabbed some yarn from my stash and started knitting at the airport.   While Jon and Benjamin reviewed the rules and strategy of backgammon (using a board that B. drew on some paper and all the coins they could scrounge to use as checkers), I made some fingerless gloves, to Benjamin's specifications: narrow wrist, wider at the palms, narrow again at the top.  The second one was better than the first.  So now he has a wool hat and gloves to wear in Austria this weekend.  They played backgammon and talked about mathematical probabilities before each move.  

Jon gave Benjamin his leather hat, saying that now that he has found one he likes he will be able to find another.  

We have not been able to post any pictures because we have been using Benjamin's phone as a hot spot (leaving us tomorrow) and it just isn't quite strong enough to do that task.

Off Line

Ever since Benjamin left us yesterday, we have been without the Internet. But I am dutifully writing posts to be shared when we get back on line. At the moment we are sitting in a quiet square in Motril using someone's open wifi after unsuccessful attempts at a public library.  On our tenth day of beautiful weather. Like Hawaii but a little cooler.

Woman at market selling one bunch of leeks, one endive, two cabbages and one bunch of chard.

La Costa del Sol and the Rock

The Army Corps of Engineers
(or the equivalent)
commissioned their own
statue, as would we all,
given the chance.

We didn't realize that we were coming to such a tourist-centered area, but since we are traveling during the off season it is hard for us to tell what usually happens around here.  The whole coast is a long stretch of hotels and resorts and golf courses and fancy houses.  Our apartment is uphill from all of that, but apparently in the summer this little town is also inundated with tourists.

After reading through the Lonely Planet guidebook that Laura passed on to us, Benjamin decided that today we should go to Gibraltar.  I have to say I didn't even know such a place existed, except sort of mythically.  It took two hours to get there (the roads are very good, if expensive) and then we showed our passports to the guard and were driving into a British territory, or something along those lines.  Britain controls this four mile peninsula, a giant rock with a small town at the base and a very long history. We parked and went to study a map on the main pedestrian street.  Immediately a gentleman with a comically perfect British accent offered to help us, and showed us how to find the Gibraltar Museum.  The street was filled with shoppers speaking mostly Spanish and English, and there were tea shops and pubs and red telephone boxes and post boxes.  It was hard to take it seriously, but we did have to change some money to spend pounds instead of euros.

Two big macaques, one very small.

The museum was sort of musty -- a series of signs and paintings and photos and documents telling the story of this piece of ground, and its natural history too. The building housed some medieval baths which have been excavated. There was an Egyptian mummy in pretty good condition that had fallen off a shipwrecked boat traveling from Egypt to Britain, scooped out of the ocean by a Spanish fisherman. We were sorry the room with the movie was being renovated because it would have helped to tie all these disparate elements together.   Gibraltar has been strategically important over the years, it withstood a four year seige in the late 1700s (the French and Spanish were trying to get the British out), and it is also a unique environment because of its climate and separation. Neanderthals lived here the longest, as well as many species of birds and mammals. There are still macaques roaming around.

Lunch was at a pub. We sat outdoors in the glorious sunshine (about 68 degrees, clear blue skies) and ordered fish and chips and bangers and mash from the waitress who spoke everything. As the guidebook had said, the food tasted like England in the 1970s.  That's when I lived there, and I can vouch for it. Filling but not excellent. Benjamin got a good vegetable soup, at least.

Jon has been thinking about a certain hat for years, and even tried to buy one from Amazon before we left.  But Amazon made about three different mistakes (uncharacteristically) and sent the wrong size hat to the wrong post office, not giving him correct information on the location of the package.  Anyway, I said that maybe he could buy a hat in Spain.  Turns out no one wears hats in Spain.  But they do in England. So Benjamin and Jon actually bought a hat, for a price that Jon could live with, and Benjamin put it on and wore it for the rest of the day. He looks like a guy in a Western, except for the dreadlocks.

Looking back toward Spain.

Benjamin, with new hat and new friend on rental car.

Then we got the car out of the car park and headed up the big hill for our driving tour of the rock. Many people were walking up the steep road and Benjamin felt that we were doing it all wrong but I was just as glad not to be walking up and down all those intense slopes.There wasn't all that much to see but the views were awesome. And we did visit with some monkeys who barely paid us any attention. When we got back to our parked car, there was a macaque sitting right on top of it, warm in the sun.  At the end of our tour there was tunnel in the middle of the rock to walk through but it was extremely civilized, with lighting and a paved walkway and signage and even military music (completely different from the tunnel in Jerusalem, in every possible way). We learned about the siege, how they invented more sophisticated ways to aim cannons and to get the cannonballs to explode in the air instead of just landing in the sand with a thud.  War does bring out the best in humans, yes it does.

Like the "Guns Of Navarone" (WWII novel reference).

We wrote a few postcards so we could send them with British stamps and then we bought some McVities so we could spend some more pounds and then we headed home on the coast road.

We had dinner in Frigiliana at one of the few establishments that was open. It ended up being perfect.  Nothing written in English, only Spanish spoken, but we each got a nice meal that wasn't exactly what we expected but was perfectly fine. Mine was the best because I got a mix of seasonal vegetables cooked perfectly, seasoned only with salt, in addition to a skewer of some meat that might have been pork tenderloin. They are not into seasoning beyond olive oil and salt here.  And we sat out on the veranda, away from the smoke and the noise of the game on the TV.  There was a full moon and stars and it was warm enough to be without a jacket, although it might have been a little better with one more layer.

Road Trip from Pamplona to Frigiliana

We were on the road by 8:00, heading south.  In Spain they do not put any hints about east/west/north/south on their signs.  They just put the name of a town that is ahead, usually a major one.  We americanos miss the sense of direction greatly, especially as we occasionally head off in the wrong direction, not really knowing which towns are relevant all the time as we are relying on erratic GPS information through the phones.  Not my problem, I just go where they tell me when it is my turn to drive and if we get off course they eventually find us and get us back on track.

We drove through big agricultural spaces all day long. In the morning it was mostly vineyards, patchworked up the hills on both sides of the roads, in addition to olives and green cover crop.  Both today and on the trip from Barcelona there were big wind turbines on the ridges and acres of solar panels sprinkled around. For the first half of the day it didn't seem like there were any houses or tractors or farm equipment associated with the fields (where do the people live who do all this work?) and then when we got closer to Madrid there were small farms with houses and trees around them.  And the olive trees kept on coming.  

De rigeur picture of picnic table.

We stopped at a supermarket on Ocano and bought lunch and then we stopped at a rest area and had a picnic, always my favorite.  Bread and cheese, hummus, lettuce, yogurt, orange, a sweet coffee and milk drink -- all for about 12 euros total.  

While the boys napped and I drove I began to notice that the olive trees were endless.  For over an hour, at 120 km/hour, there were olives growing all the way to the horizon, up the hills and over the plains. When Benjamin and Jon woke up, we talked about the incredible number of olives and of course Benj did some research since we couldn't even begin to describe the quantity. He read that there are 300 million olive trees on 5 million acres in Spain and most of them are right in the region we were crossing through.  In 2012, an especially good year, Spain produced almost half of the world's entire olive oil crop.  Italy came in second with 25%, Greece was third with 20%.    In recent years there has been a bad pest that has damaged the crops in Europe and Tunisia has stepped up production.  But still Spain ends up pressing most of the olive oil, and Italy ends up blending and packaging the most.  Or so says the google.

Very hard to relay how the olive trees go on as far as the eye can see.

Meanwhile, we were hurtling down toward the coast, traveling about the same distance as between DC and Boston -- but so much easier driving and so much more beautiful.  It was hazy, which was too bad, because we couldn't see the Sierra Nevada mountains clearly.

Finally we got to the east-west road that would take us to our destination, Frigiliana, about 6 km inland from the coast.  We went east instead of west for a while, which made Jon fret, but we saw acres and acres of some mysterious crop that was shrouded in a tight cover.  We have to find out what is inside those plastic structures   wrapped up so snugly. It can't be olives, unless the fly is particularly terrible near the coast.  

We arrived at our lovely apartment which we have rented for a whole week -- a friend of our neighbors owns this place.  The back balcony overlooks a deep chasm in the mountains, and way down the hill we can see the Mediterranean.  The town is perched on a steep hillside, rows of white houses along curvy narrow roads, all very tippy.  After we got ourselves settled in, had some tea, read the guide book about local points of interest, we decided it was time to go out in search of dinner.  We have been trained to think that dinner is not until 9:00 at the earliest but when we walked around, almost everything was dark and closed.  After about two blocks we decided we were not that hungry anyway and we would go home and make dinner from the leftover groceries plus things that were nicely left in the pantry.  It was still a mulit-course dinner with salad, soup, bread and cheese, a fried egg, an after dinner hot drink and chocolate.  We know how to camp.

Jon found a lizard from Muskitz hiding in our dirty clothes and Benjamin caught it for us, then tortured me with it before letting it go outside.  Poor lizard has been moved to an entirely alien climate. 

Benjamin is with us for two more days so he gets to choose what we do until he leaves.  We can be lazy after he goes.  

Muskitz, Day Two

We all slept as long as we wanted this morning, wandering into the kitchen whenever we got up.  Found nice rolls baked by Uxua (sister of Ramon, not niece), tea, fruit.  By about noon we were all ready for some low level activity -- although it must be said that Ramon's brother Mickey was cooking up a storm in the kitchen. He had pots bubbling on many burners, preparing the vegetables for a huge dish for dinner.

Ramon's siblings and in-laws arrived through the day, and by lunchtime they were all here:  Mickey and Teresa, Koldo and Sylvia and daughter Uxua, Maria, Uxua, Javier, Inaki, Ramon and Laura, Marta and 3 year old Otto. Their oldest brother Juan died about ten years ago.

Un-renovated house to the left.

In the meantime, Laura and Peio took us on a full tour of Muskitz. First we went through the whole house from top to bottom. Then we went next door and explored the uninhabited house that the family owns but cannot possibly afford to renovate right now. They put a new roof on a few years ago, to keep it from falling down.  In the lowest level it is very spooky, with cobwebs dripping from the large oak beams, and chickens and rabbits living in cages.  Someone takes care of them.  The middle level has a vast hallway down the middle with five doors on each side.  Bedrooms, kitchen, dining room.  The kitchen has a huge chimney over the center, a cone that carries the smoke from the fire, up and out.  The top level is one huge space -- the whole building, which must be 80'x100' (wild guess).

Pretty loud when so close.

A reasonable distance when the
bells ring.

We went to see the recently renovated village church, even climbing up into the bell tower (which surprised us by ringing at 1:00 and then again at about 1:01 and then about 20 times...we couldn't figure it out).  Saw the new space for a new gastronomic society that Peio and Antxon now belong to (so much like the common house, but with a beautiful bar) and three apartments above that are soon to be rented.  They got funding from the valley (all the villages in this valley, together) to renovate the building, and the valley will get the rents from the building for the first 30 years.  Very cool.

I can absolutely imagine Peio being the mayor of this village at some time. He is exactly the same here as he was in Virginia. He stops and talks to everyone, everyone is a friend, he is interested in every possible conversation. 

From Benjamin's seat at the table.

At left, tuna, canned by Mickey; in center, big pan of
vegetables with white asparagus spokes and
fried cauliflower; and at the right, a salad of
pickled onions and olives.

Dinner was at about 2:30.  All the family around the table, with the English speakers clustered at one end.  First course was pickled onions and olives, second course was a giant pot of vegetables and ham and eggs (artichokes, cardoons, cauliflower, asparagus) called Menestra (mixture) that was a masterpiece, third course was sausage from their own pig, and for dessert cheese and nougat candy.  Then coffee and conversation.  Various people drifted off to the couches or chairs for a nap.  The family sat in small groups, big groups, hanging out for hours.  I typed and typed, trying to catch up with the last few days.  Benjamin and Peio and Jon went out for an early evening walk in the hills.

Javier (not sure of relation), Inaki, Mickey, Koldo, Uxua (the younger), Antxon (standing) and Sylvia
during the cheese course.

10:30 PM update -- 

We are now back at the apartment in Pamplona, have said goodbye to Peio who went back to school about 100 km away (a school for Basque people only, training them in maintaining and fabricating industrial machinery), and have had yet another delicious meal.  Chicory raw and cooked, both delicious. Not bitter at all, just like lettuce in salad or like spinach or chard when cooked.  Eggs, then cheese and apple jelly for dessert.  More lively conversation about the chicken/egg question, snapping turtles, and Laura's grandfather and father's life work spreading adult literacy throughout the world.  Tomorrow we leave the cozy care of the Ayestaran family and head south.

Muskitz, Navarra

Picture perfect house and village.

We are in a small village about 24 km north of Pamplona, in the country house of the Ayestaran family.  As we have never seen anything like this in real life, it is most like a movie set.  I am in the living room/dining room area on one of two large and comfortable couches in front of a fireplace that is big enough for a bed.  On the mantle and the beam above are collections of bells, small copper pots and crockery pitchers that have accumulated from the various families that come here for their weekends together.  All around the room are collections like these: antique copper cookware, dishes, tools for making sheep's milk cheese.  There is a long dining table with twelve chairs, and lots of space between all the furniture.  But what is most remarkable, other than the countryside just outside the windows, is the construction of this house, which must be four hundred years old.  A stone house with walls that are two feet thick, dark, hand-hewn beams holding up the ceiling.  White washed plaster between the beams on the ceiling, tile floor. On the level below are the tools and supplies that relate to the outdoor work of having a garden, some amount of surrounding yard, two donkeys, and cutting firewood.

There is a three year old coming down the steps as I write (hooray!) and I can hear the chatter of the family members on the other side of the kitchen door.  Upstairs Jon and Benjamin and Peio and Antxon are still sleeping.  Instead of glass windows, there are wooden shutters that keep every bit of light out when they are closed. It is easy to sleep long into the day in that much dark.  I haven't counted the bedrooms, but Peio says this house sleeps twenty easily.

Yesterday morning we were supposed to leave at about 9:30 to go to a farmers market in a village to the northwest.  I woke up when I heard some creaking boards and I asked Jon what time it was.  9:30.  We hustled into our clothes and came downstairs to find Benjamin on this couch and others in the kitchen but Peio and his brother were not yet up. Phew.  We had a quick breakfast of toast and oranges and grapefruit (local) and then we piled into the minivan for a long day of touring.  I felt like we were traveling with Uncle Babe and Auntie Arlene -- the plans were all made, all we had to do was sit in the back and listen to the stories and background about what we were passing.

We are in the Basque Country.  No flat areas, all hills, with mountains all around.  The roads are narrow and winding, sheep are on the grassy slopes (we saw a shepherd moving a flock down the middle of the road in one village) and the villages are clustered tightly with no houses on the hillsides between.  We drove on a road that followed beside a brisk stream, winding through the woods, and Laura told us that this area had been early to industrialize, as it had water power and lots of natural resources.  Over the years, this part of the region got richer and more people were landowners than in other parts. As we got closer to the town with the market, we saw various large factories tucked into the landscape.  Lumberyard, cookie factory, and then we were suddenly in town again with roundabouts and narrow streets and no easy parking.  All the signs are in Basque and in Spanish.  

Cheeses at one end ...

... and vegetables at the other.

The market was far more sophisticated than our markets -- it has probably been in existence for centuries, in some form.  It has a large covered space with no walls, heaters in the ceiling, benches down the center facing outward in both directions, and the vendors are lined up all around the outside edge with an aisle between them and another row of vendors.  Just outside was the river, with boats of young rowing teams practicing.  It was a stunningly beautiful day, with deep blue skies and sunshine, about 17 degrees C.  In season now: leeks, cauliflower, cabbage, chard, beets, carrots, cardoons, endive and escarole, spinach. The leaves were sometimes full of holes.  Everything looked like it was grown without pesticides.  Also lots of beans that the region of Tolosa is famous for, and every possible cut of pig meat.  The market provides the space, the tables, the table cloths (as far as we could tell, since they were all the same and there were carts of tables at one end of the building), electricity.  It would be so much simpler to load up to go to market if all you were bringing was the food.  There were no grand efforts to display anything differently from the others.  They just put the vegetables out on the table, loose or in boxes. Benjamin bought a bowl of beans from the Slow Food kitchen at one end of the market and they were tasty, just plain with nothing but a slice of bread.

The colors were irresistible.

The cafes were packed at midday.

We walked around the town, wandered through other markets, stopped at a bar for a pintxo (Basque for toothpick, but it is the same as tapas).  At noon the bars were crowded with people stopping for a drink and a snack, as lunch was still a few hours off.  We had some hake, some fried calamari, various beverages, and moved on.

The family discussed the various options for our next destination -- with 20 km of coastline and 17 villages, they were trying to decide which one was best to visit.  We would not have known the difference. Everything was picturesque and beautiful to the extreme.  

Peio, Benjamin, Antxon. To the left is France,
to the right is Spain.

Out of place maybe, but still
scenic.

We went to a fishing village, Hondarribia, crowded with cars and walkers on such a gorgeous day.  Parking was hard, so Ramon let us get out and he went to find a place to put the car.  We walked down the wide street lined with bars, with tables and people outside. The street echoed with conversation.  The trim on the houses was brightly painted in green and red mostly, and Antxon said those are the only true colors.  The blue houses were inappropriate in his view.  The sidewalks were swept clean, and all the buildings were in excellent condition.  We walked out to see the boats and to see France on the other side of the bay.  We could see surfers and walkers in France, probably speaking French or Basque.

The family, and we, take part in the ritual.

We meant to stop for a quick pintxo, with someone going into the bar to choose the plates, but a waiter came out so we just ordered and ended up having a light lunch. Sardines, anchovies, mixed salad, mushrooms, croquettes (fried balls of ham and cheese), drinks.  By now it was about 4:00, maybe.

Then on to the next town.  I think only Ramon stayed awake, since he was driving.  We woke up in a large and elegant city, probably less than a half hour from the village.  We were in San Sebastián, where it feels like Nice or somewhere on the French Riviera.  A wide promenade with a fancy white iron fence to walk along and stop to lean on as you look over the beach and the surfers and the other people walking up and down.  We ambled along. Benjamin tried to listen to the languages going past to see who was here -- almost all Spanish and Basque, a small amount of French and almost no English.  All the most expensive real estate overlooks this view.  It surprised me that they weren't all hotels, that real people live in those grand buildings at the edge of the water.

The carousel and city hall with the spires. The whole
town, plus tourists, on the promenade.

We sat down on a bench to watch the carousel with all the cute kids, we watched someone blowing giant bubbles, we went to the Naval Museum where we thought we would see an exhibit on boats and history but it was a new exhibit on Women and the Sea. Ah well, we learned something about how women do most of the work in fishing, really, and they don't get paid as much as the men, and they have been an integral part of the industry forever.  They don't go out on the boats so much, but  they do all the prep work with nets and gear, they pull the boats, and they do all the post-fishing handling.

Pintxo, on the bar in San Sebastian.

The sun setting behind Jon, Benjamin and Hana.

Then we wandered the streets of the old city, looking in the shop windows, admiring all the bar food, stopping once for a quick snack. I wanted a bag of potato chips that were being made right in front of our eyes, so Peio bought them for me (why struggle with language when you have your own Peio). The main plaza, once again, was something out of a movie.  Surrounded on all four sides with identical arches on the ground floor, and identical windows for four stories above.  The windows had numbers above them to show where the spectator boxes went during the days when the plaza was used as a bull fight ring.

Ramon, Laura, Hana, Benjamin, Peio and Jon,.

Antxon filling a glass with cider,
at the typical distance of 3 feet.

Finally it was time to go to dinner at the cideria, back in the country closer to their village.  We took a bigger highway this time.  The village was completely dark, with winding streets, no light shining through the shuttered windows, but we wound our way to the parking lot behind one of these huge stone buildings and ducked into a doorway. A low-ceilinged room with huge barrels of cider along one wall, tables and benches around, and one small wood stove in the middle of the room. It seemed like the show started at a certain time, as everyone arrived at once, at about 9:15. The proprietor would open a barrel, yelling "gozhe" (or something like that) and everyone would crowd around, glass in hand, to catch the stream of cider as it poured straight out of the barrel. Peio told us to catch the cider, letting it hit the edge of the glass, and to get about a finger or two and then step back and let someone else catch the cider.  This went on all evening, with pauses. The owner would yell GOZHE again and everyone would get up to taste the cider from a new barrel. It was stronger than English cider, and less sweet.  After a few small samples, I was done. Dinner was served without plates, just a serving dish to the middle of the table, and we each had a knife and fork. First course was an egg and cod omelet. Yum.  Second was a hunk of steak, warm all the way through, grilled and juicy on the outside, rare on the inside. We ate and ate. She brought a second plate out and we ate some more. Peio said he could have eaten more but the rest of us were finished. Dessert was quince jam and sheep milk cheese.  All of this was with two giant loaves of bread. At the very end of the evening, the last barrel was in the room where  they press the cider, and we all wanted to see the press, so we waited to the end. The owner explained it all to Ramon and Peio in Basque, while the rest of us tried to figure it out for ourselves. The machine could process 3000 kg of apples an hour (about ten of our little 17 bushel bins) and it was understandable up until the part where the pressing actually happens.

It could not be more authentic: the post-and-massive-beam construction, the wide plank tables, the small wood
stove in the middle of the room, the 2200 liter cider barrels, the basic menu of bread, eggs, fish, meat and
cheese, he loud communal atmosphere fueled by all the hard cider you could drink.

We got home by 12:30 and went straight to bed.  Touring is hard work, even when you stop to eat a bite every few hours.  Tapas is a way of life, not something that happens only in one restaurant.  And dinner is late. What a day.