Reino de España, Toledo

During my Spanish expedition, I did one day trip out of Madrid to go wander around the medieval remains of Toledo. Definitely worth it; my trip was pretty aimless and I kept it low budget so I did not go inside the cathedral (for which they charge for entrance and if you want to take pictures, boo) or do any sword-purchasing, but I did walk around and look at some cool stuff, eat an awesome 4 EUR lunch, ride a bunch of escalators, and climb some towers. All in all, very worth it.

Puerta de Bisagra.

Puerta del Sol.

The idea of draping a sheet over these little alleys to provide shade is genius. It's cool-looking and makes the Toledo heat more humane.

One of the few things I did pay for, climbing the towers in the Iglesia de San Ildelfonso. I got a student price ticket by totally ethically sound means and it was really cool to get such a good view of the rest of the old city. 

Holy Opulence, Batman!

The view: 

There's a bunch of these alleyway shots in here. I really enjoyed just moseying around.

"If you drink to forget, pay before beginning"

"Wine gladdens the eye, cleans the tooth, and heals the belly"

A pen for any/every occasion: Second to left, "PERDONAME", an "I'M SORRY" pen.

Mazapan is a big deal in Toledo.

Approaching the cathedral.

  

The back entrance.

Theater.

Tile slates detailing how to make all the essentials: cheese, bread, oil, and wine. There were a few others but I figure these might be good to have on record.

SWORDS. Also big in Toledo, which bizarrely means that there are Lord of the Rings memorabilia shops all over.

 

My amazing 4€ lunch. When I first entered the shop I ordered only the sandwich (which is literally just bread and cheese but look at that thing, it's massive and it was delicious) and a soda which is cheaper, but then I figured, what the hell? Spend the extra 1€ and get yourself a little lunch buzz and dessert. So they were a little confused at first as to whether I could even have wine in a takeaway lunch, but in the end they came through and gave me the wine in what I'm pretty sure was an empty perfume bottle. It tasted good and smelled awesome. Also, mazapan. Really tasty.

Another thing Toledo is really known for: Damascening. It's really cool-looking, you can find some nice stuff for pretty cheap, and it. is. everywhere.

Madrid's manhole covers did NOT impress me (MANHOLE SNOB), but I liked these little baby pieces that were all over Toledo.

After climbing all the damn way up the damn hill to get into the goddamn old part of Toledo I discovered there are FREE OUTDOOR ESCALATORS. Okay, so it was good exercise and I feel better about myself knowing I didn't take the escalators up. But you better believe I took them down. 

Thanks for all the laughs, Toledo! (Okay not really, it's not really a funny kind of city? I just could not think of how to end this. I have done way too much blogging in the last week and my brain isn't cooperating anymore.)

Reino de España, Madrid

So one my teaching friends from Georgia, Andrea, has been working in Spain this past school year. Which as many of you may know (by which I mean, Mom, you may know), Spain and Hungary are on the same continent and are in fact connected to one another through various forms of transportation. So obviously it was imperative that I pay Andrea a visit and soak up a little Madrileño magic along the way. Also, after the insanity that was my decision to fly from Budapest to Warsaw to Wroclaw let me just say: God bless direct flights.

So I arrived and made my way to Andrea's apartment and started taking pictures, as you do. This is the view from her roommate's bedroom, at the back of the apartment. I forgot to take pictures out the front but it overlooks a fairly busy street and also has a nice little balcony. Anyway, photos!

Topical.

Andrea had a few things to take care of so I relaxed at her place for a while and then headed out with her roommate to see some of the city, meet up with her brother, and grab some impromptu tinto veranos. Delicious. Afterwards we met back up with Andrea and her girlfriend and Lindsay made us cocktails, using a juicer to make watermelon juice as the base and adding vodka and lemon Fanta. They were a delicious way to start the evening.

I did not actually try the Bert and Ernie cookies so I'm left with no other choice but to assume they too were delicious.

Afterwards we headed out into the night to enjoy the sights, sounds, smells, and drinks that the 2014 Madrid Pride Festival had to provide. And provide it did.

Long after the need for drinks had been satiated, someone in our posse decided that it was time for some of the ancient traditional Spanish drink, kalimotxo. Yes, that is boxed wine you are seeing. Yes, this a thing that people do. No, I did not feel good the next morning. If you want to know the effects of kalimotxo on the human brain, consider this: the next morning it took two fully grown, independent, and capable woman (plus one semi-capable helper, me) THREE hours to make crepes. Granted, it was due to technical difficulties. But still. Three hours.

A plaza, one of many.

So after Crepegate '14 Andrea gave me the grand tour of the city. First up: Market of San Miguel. Kind of overpriced place you might see in Manhattan (New Yorkers, think: Agata's or Eataly) with a lot of delicious-looking snacks going for a lot of Euros. Andrea and I did get some pretty great sangria, though.

Nuts!

All things pickley!

Mmmmm, cheeses.

   

Madrid has really beautiful and interesting street signs. Apparently you can buy your own at some market if you want, and if my baggage weren't already going to be several tons over the weight limit on my return flight from Hungary I probably would have.

I believe this was the Palacio de Santa Cruz?

Cool.

Less cool, more baffling.

We stopped for a beer and some tortilla Española with this exceptional view of the Royal Palace. I love this photo. The sky was really dramatic and we were actually starting to wonder if we would get rained out. Thankfully, despite the forecasts for that evening we remained unrained-upon.

Almudena Cathedral.

Palacio.

View of the palace and city from another angle.  

  

The end of our walk, at the Temple of Debod. This was actually built in Egypt, around 200 BC, and then given to Madrid as a thank you for... some stuff...in the '60s when they were building the Aswan Dam (which would have, as a consequence, destroyed this in its original site) . 

Around the corner from Andrea's place: The Museum of Ham. I probably should have gone in but I never got around to it.

The next day I went to Toledo, of which I have so many pictures that I'm going to make a separate post for them. So after returning from Toledo I had a very leisurely cup of coffee and enjoyed my borrowed copy of Down and Out in Paris and London (which I didn't get to finish before I left Madrid and had to leave with Andrea so if anybody [MOM] has it and wants to lend it to me that'd be great!) before meeting up her to visit Buen Retiro Park, Madrid's Central Park (basically).

There was a lot of senseless or obnoxious tagging around Madrid but I felt the need to document this particular masterpiece because it has so many messages it wants to deliver, I'm not sure it really coherently espouses any of them. Antinazis? Sure, great. Antifas (as in, anti-fascism maybe?) Unidos? Okay, cool. Anarchy? Well, sure, some people are into that ideology. But is that a hammer and sickle? You do know that Communism, by its very tenets, cannot support anarchy, and vice-versa? And Communism (looking at countries that have, historically, adopted Communist principles in their government) kind of invites fascism? Whatever, maybe it's not that (IT'S TOTALLY THAT) and maybe they were just going for ALL THE IDEOLOGIES!!!! But I found this graffiti incredibly confusing and yet, still far more intriguing and though-provoking than just another terrible spray painted scribble of someone's name.

Monument to Alfonso XII.

Relevant, as I was in Toledo that day! If only I'd known about this shop beforehand, I could have just spent the day in here.

Hungary reference!

The next day, I decided to take in a couple FREE museums I'd found around the city. The first one as described in guidebooks and online as an "open air museum". Which is a really fancy way of saying, somebody put some statues under an overpass.

That concrete monstrosity is an installation, not a piece of the bridge mid-fall that is heralding the doom of all who dare seek shade under its wide berth.

Turtle/dolphin/tapir. A dolpurpir, one might say.

Although I mock the use of the word "museum" in reference to these pieces, some of them were in fact really interesting. My three favorite were the two metal pieces above (I like how the second one looks like the artist is trying to recreate four-dimensionality) and the piece below, which was rushing water over these stone pieces carved and situated in a way that already looked very fluid. It made for kind of a tranquil, hypnotizing effect.

Moving on! On my walk to the next museum I passed the National Library which is a nice looking building.

But mostly I was just enamored with the little seahorses next to the gate.

Next up: I visited was the National Archaeological Museum. It was cool, although again the guide books/internet stated it was free which is not the case. It has one temporary exhibit that is free and the rest of the museum is not free, unless you are a student or having an old Rutgers ID you are still using to get into places for free. Either of those is fine.

I think I love going to free museums because it feels really low pressure. Like, if I've paid money to get in somewhere (coughcoughPalóc Babamúzeum Hollókőcough), even if it is intrinsically uninteresting or terrible, I still feel like I should get my money's worth. But since I got free admission to this museum by totally legitimate means, I just kind of meandered around for an hour or so, skipped the modern and paleolithic sections, and did not feel bad about not reading every plaque. My kind of museum-going experience. I'm not going to label all of these because some of it I honestly don't remember. A lot of these were just me playing with trying to take an interesting photo or making a mental shopping list because ancient Greek jewelry was THE BOMB.

I need this. I need a solid gold "diadem" (let's get real it's a headband) in my life.

The middle letters spell out REX. Yeah, I'll take one of these as well, thanks. Actually, just wrap 'em all up. Do you guys do package deals?

"OBJECTS THAT CAN BE MONEY"

This one was interesting. It showed the various places different cultures might place coins on a buried corpse.

This is a 20th century Pakistani wedding necklace. That is straight up just a paper money necklace. I love it.

Chinese coin sword, believed to be good luck. Sure better than nothing in battle, but still decidedly less effective than an actual sword.

FAUX LUCY. I totally thought this was the real thing because I did not feel like reading that block of text in Spanish and it was not until I got home and looked it up that I realized this was only a recreation. Decepcionado.

Ended the day by meeting up with Andrea and visiting a local market, sampling local beer! Then I'm pretty sure we went home, made some dinner, and played Scrabble.

For the last day I decided to take it kind of easy and returned to Buen Retiro park to do some more exploring, walk around a bit, and relax.

The Crystal Palace. 

There was a surprisingly high turtle population in this pond and they all seemed to be congregating on this shore. It was... adorable. 

The palace is cool to look at although there's not much to it, the inside is empty except for about a dozen rocking chairs and the kind of oppressive heat that can only come from a building made entirely of windows, none of which are open.

Next I visited the Velázquez Palace, which is a FREE contemporary art museum. It's a small space, one large room that's segmented into three spaces with some not quite ceiling-high walls with a couple of smaller rooms to the left and right of it. Most of the work I saw in there focused on race and identity and although a lot of it was, stylistically, not my thing, it was still pretty interesting.

"Black", one of my favorite pieces in the museum. It's part of a triptych, by Kerry James Marshall, that also includes Green and Red (If They Come in the Morning).

Again, Alfonso XII Monument. By day, surrounded by rowboats filled with shirtless Madrileños and/or tourists. 

Retiro metro stop. The Madrid metro system is absurdly easy to use and I loved it.

Hey, I know who that is! But... he wasn't Spanish... was he?

Last stop, went to take a look at Cibeles Palace. Pretty. Then I ate some Jamon Iberico and then I felt pretty satisfied with my Madrid trip (I still need to come back to Spain to see the rest of it). Seriously, Spain was great. Great because I could read the language (coughcough HUNGARIAN WHAT ARE YOU cough), great to see some friends, great to eat some Spanish food, just some really good times.