Thoughts on a Winter Week in Espana

Dana and I just returned from a week in Spain, including 3 nights in Barcelona and 4 in Madrid, with a day trip via AVE train to Sevilla (2.5 hrs one-way) and a ½ day trip, again via AVE train (30 min one-way), to Toledo. In Barcelona, we stayed at the Catalonia Albinoni (e179 a night, with breakfast), just a block south of Placa de Catalunya and the start of the Ramblas (also great access north to the Gaudi sites in the L’Eixample). In Madrid, we stayed at Hotel Europa (e110 a night, sans breakfast), right on Puerta del Sol, again, a great location, equidistant between the Palacio Real and The Prado, with easy Metro access. Both fine hotels, although the beds at Europa were stiff and hard. Both were clean, friendly, and inviting, ideally situated for site-seeing.

Spain’s high-speed AVE trains are remarkable: so fast, and yet also comfortable. We spent about five hours exploring Toledo, although the cathedral and museums were closed because it was New Year’s Day. The town had life, though, with plenty of shops and restaurants opened and tremendous beauty. Even the train station, well outside the old city’s walls, is quite beautiful. For Sevilla, we hired a personal guide (only e160 for the day because it was out of season) to meet us at Estacion Santa Justa and escort us to Plaza de Espana, the stunning cathedral (3rd largest church in the world), the Alcazar, the bull ring, and Barrio Santa Cruz. We also squeezed in some delicious tapas. We left Madrid’s Estacion de Atocha at 9:00 AM, arrived in Sevilla at 11:35, toured from 11:35 AM until 5:15 PM, and then headed back to Madrid at 5:45 PM, arriving at Atocha at 8:00 PM—just enough time to see Picasso’s “Guernica” at the Sofia before it closed at 9:00 PM (located, luckily for us, across the street from Atocha, and very near a Starbucks!).

What a great (and exhausting) day. A day trip to Sevilla from Madrid, admittedly, is not for everyone given the distance, but with a guide set up in advance and only a week to spend in Espana, we found it not only manageable, but also wonderful. Our guide, Elena, was friendly, insightful, open to conversation on any topic (including her father’s role in the Civil War, Spanish politics, and her most difficult experiences with tour groups…not surprisingly, with Italians, who seem to posses a natural disinclination toward order and schedules and plans!). This was one of our best days in Spain.

In terms of winter weather, the temperature was about 50 degrees FT each day in Barcelona and Madrid, and about 60 degrees FT in Sevilla. We had a lot of rain, but we were told this was quite unusual for Spain in the winter.

The Metro systems in Barcelona and Madrid were affordable, easy to navigate, and quite convenient, especially with simple 10-ride cards, which cost about a third of what a 10-ride card costs in Chicago. We had a three-day Spain pass for the AVE trains, but this turned out to be wasteful, since it was cheaper for us to buy the ticket and reservation for Toledo than to use the pass and buy a reservation, so we left Spain with one travel day remaining on our pass, which we obviously won’t be able to use. ):

Having only traveled to Italy previously—and now having spent just a single week in Spain—I would offer these thoughts, albeit cautiously, on Espana:

++While I love tortilla and Spanish chorizo and churros con chocolate—Dana relied on jamon y queso in a pinch, while I went with even more tortilla, which in Spain is not a Mexican tortilla, but an egg and potato omelet about 2.5 inches in height and cut into a triangle shape—one should not visit Spain for the food. In my opinion, the food is largely mediocre, with little emphasis on quality. Of course, there are always exceptions, and we did find a few of them, i.e. La Crema Canela in Barcelona (Wow! Dana had risotto and I had duck, both delicious, and we enjoyed conversation with two German women dining next to us). The churros con chocolate features deep-fried dough rolled into long tubes, which one then dips into a thick (but not overly sweet) cup of hot chocolate. Again, wow. We had a piece of chorizo on a paper plate with a balsamic vinegar salsa of some kind and two pieces of bread for dinner on New Year’s Eve, standing up in a smoke-filled bar, washed down with a cana, which in Spain is a small draft beer. Believe it or not, this was also one of our favorite and most memorable meals. Overall, though, the food struck us as repetitious, often not fresh, and rushed. A completely different approach to eating than in Italy, where it is an art form.

++Spain is much less expensive than Italy, especially in terms of food and drink, and to some extent, in terms of lodging. We came home with about four hundred Euros—what a pleasant surprise!—and in our travels to Italy, we’ve come home out of Euros and with some charge bills, to boot (an Italian boot, that is).

++New Year’s Eve day in Spain (31/12) is much like a full-fledged national holiday (25/12 or 1/1), with many sites and museums closed entirely, or at least shutting their doors around noon. I planned badly and did not know this. We did gain entry to The Prado for a few hours, arriving at 9 AM when it opened, but afterwards, the Sofia, El Escoreal, and the Valley of the Fallen were all closed for the day. We enjoyed visiting the town of Escoreal but were terribly disappointed about the closure at the Valley of the Fallen (and the taxi driver charged us e20 for the round trip; I now suspect he knew it was closed). We managed to visit the Sofia a day later, when it was open until 9 PM. If you visit Spain over New Year’s make certain on 30/12 that you know what will be open and when on 31/12, or prepare to be very frustrated. The new year in Espana really is a two-day holiday, unlike in the states.

++The architecture in Spain—from a preserved Medieval town like Toledo to the narrow Arabic passageways of Andalucia to the Modernisme of Gaudi’s Catalunya—is PHENOMINAL, so much so that, to me, this is one of the primary reasons visitors to Europe must include Spain. We could have stared at Gaudi’s work in L’Eixample for hours. This guy took forms commonly found in nature (like trees, or waves, or caves, for instance) and transformed them into physical structures for human beings…so creative, so fun, so new, even today.

++Another reason to visit Spain is the art: The Prado is simply one of the world’s great art museums, and Picasso’s “Guernica” at the Sofia blew me away. We didn’t have time to see the Picasso museum in Barcelona, but the art in the cathedrals, from El Greco to Murrillo to regional and local artists, is remarkable. I was really disappointed the cathedral in Toledo was closed on New Year’s Day—the website had said it would be open until 6:00 PM, but that was not the case—and so we missed some intriguing art placed in its original surroundings, but we still saw a great deal.

++Despite the later atrocities of the Inquisition and the excesses of the counter-reformation in Spain, the world can really learn a great deal about peaceful co-existence from Spanish history, with examples of Christians, Muslims and Jews residing together with mutual respect in pluralistic and thriving communities (i.e., periods in the histories of Toledo and Cordoba). In Sevilla, Muslim craftsmen went to work—using traditionally Islamic materials and themes—enriching the appearance of a Christian palace. During the so-called Dark Ages, the Islamic communities in what is today Spain were beacons of learning, art and culture while the Christian world largely lived in poverty, fear, disease, and violence. A little history lesson might do us all some good in the 21st Century, don’t you think?

++New Year’s Eve in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol can only be described as the confluence of the new year’s celebration in Times’ Square, a grossly over-sold Rolling Stones concert, and the celebration that would ensue on Chicago’s north side if the Cubs ever win the World Series…all at the same time and in the same place, AND for two consecutive nights! Spaniards flock to Madrid to ring the New Year, and actually hold a “practice” celebration the night before, nearly as mobbed as the real thing on 31/12. No one living in the US who has not seen this can really appreciate the depth and closeness and size of the crowds in and around Puerta del Sol on New Year’s Eve. Our hotel, just off the square, locked its lobby doors as revelers outside were pressed firm against its glass walls for the night, and gaining entry to the hotel—one first had to actually make his or her way to a door through the crowd—was nearly impossible. This was wild, crazy, and fun to watch…from a short distance, that is. (:

++If I had to choose one retail outlet in the world in which to invest my entire retirement fund, it would be El Corte Ingles, the Spanish department store which is packed with shoppers seemingly from the moment the doors open until closing. Think about Target and JC Penny’s merging with Meir and Walmart and Macy’s in a single multi-story building, with a giant branch in every major city. If you can’t find it in this store, it just isn’t produced on our planet.

++The language barrier in Spain is considerable. Each region seems to have either its own distinct language or pronunciation of Spanish (Catalan, Castilian Spanish in various forms, and others). Not at all overwhelming, but does require some advanced prep, probably more than ordinary for the typical tourist. At the same time, the regional differences make it very interesting to travel Spain. Sort of what I imagine traveling the US used to be like—if one could actually do so—long before our Civil War. Like in Italy, people identify more with their region than their nation, but unlike in Italy, the Spanish federal government in Madrid still has to cope with active separatist movements.

++The people we encountered in Spain were friendly and warm, generally, and always helpful when we asked questions, especially when we at least attempted the native language. Another interesting thing, though: if most Europeans are accustomed to less personal space than most Americans—and the geographic size of the nations is a factor here, in relation to the size of each population—than Spaniards, it seems to me, are accustomed to even less personal space than most Europeans. Everywhere we went in the cities (granted, it was the holidays) there were large, close, crowds of people, appearing almost to move en masse. Was different, but fun to watch, and to be a part of. The La Boqueria Market and Ramblas and Passeig de Gracia in Barcelona, and Plaza Mayor, Paseo del Prada, and Retiro Park in Madrid (and even Atocha station in Madrid) were great for exploring.

++This issue may be more European than Spanish, but it will certainly be memorable for us. On the day we were to depart Madrid for the long journey back to Chicago, the city’s air traffic controllers decided to hold their second consecutive day of a work ‘slowdown.’ Unlike in Italy, where strikes seem to be announced and publicized allowing people to plan accordingly for their travel needs, this work slowdown meant that 50 percent of the controllers simply called off sick on the day of our departure, crippling the airport's ability to have planes take-off and land on time. As if that wasn’t enough, we were informed that many pilots, to protest their own concerns over work hours and pay—or to demonstrate some kinship with the controllers—decided to arrive late for each flight. To make a long story short, we waited in line to board the plane for two hours, waited on board the plane at the gate for more than a third hour, and thus missed our connecting flight to Chicago through Frankfurt, Germany. The hapless, overwhelmed, pale and muttering Iberian clerk in Frankfurt did manage to book us and others on new flights to our US destinations—departing the next day. Dana and I made a few friends, though, in our one night stay at an airport hotel in Frankfurt, a doctor named Maria from Pamplona completing her residency in the US and a woman named Jane returning from a visit to Spain and Italy with her boyfriend from…good old Lincoln Park, Chicago, IL, of all places (it really is a small world). Both Dana and I come from union families of steel workers and boilermakers, and so we’re pro-union. But I’ll tell you this: it’s much easier to engender feelings of empathy for our union friends at 36,000 feet, than it is sitting on a hot plane for hours, on a Madrid runway.

We really enjoyed Spain, if just for a week, and would go back in a heartbeat, especially to Barcelona and Sevilla, this time to spend the night in Sevilla. We’ve also heard wonderful things about Granada and Cordoba, and one day hope to visit these cities, as well.

Some books that I found helpful prior and during the trip were “Ghosts of Spain” by Giles Tremlett, “It’s Not About the Tapas” by Polly Evans, “Picasso” by Gertrude Stein, “Barcelona: The Great Enchantress” by Robert Hughes, and “Gaudi” by Maria Antonietta Crippa (also full of color pictures of Gaudi’s Modernisme masterpieces). If you chose only one book, I’d go with Tremlett’s “Ghosts of Spain,” which combines history, culture, art and architecture nicely. Those, and of course, good old “Rick Steves’ Spain” to aid in your planning.

Feliz ano!