New Year's with Family (continued)

Upon arriving in Sevilla, we dropped our things at my apartment and made out way to two flamenco tablaos. New Year's Eve proved a frenetic day. Because the holiday loomed, the city’s major attractions planned to close early. This required that we get an early start on the day. Our first visit of the day threatened to knock us off schedule almost from the beginning – so much to see! It was probably for the best that the tower guard in La Giralda warned us of the pending noontime tolling of the bells, which hang suspended just a few feet above the viewing platform. My sister hightailed it out of there ahead of the coming exodus to street level, placing us back on time.

Across from the Cathedral, at the Real Alcazar de Sevilla, we were able to wonder the grounds for a brief couple of hours. Though I mean to commit a full post to the Real Alcazar at a future date (it certainly deserves one), for the sake of the pictures here I should mention that the complex was once part of an elaborate Moorish palace. Much what appears in the present, though suggestive of Moorish design, was actually built by Catholic monarchs in the mudéjar style during the medieval period. Still further additions were made during the Spanish Renaissance. As a college student, my sister worked on an exhibition of Islamic tilework that was prompted, in part, by her memory of this place back in 2001. I could tell she enjoyed showing Mike around for the first time. During the period I study, the site served successively as the residence of the Crown’s appointed representative, the meeting place of the Supreme Junta of the national resistance to the French invasion, later as the administrative seat of the French occupational regime in the region after the city’s fall, and finally, once again, as the property of the Spanish Crown at the conclusion of the war. It’s been through quite a bit! Unto the present, the site still housed several compartments that comprise a formal residence of the Crown, though I’m told the royal family has never really made us of them.

In the afternoon, we went (really by chance) to take a guided tour of the Plaza de Toros de la Real Maestraza de Sevilla, Spain’s most important bullring in the surprisingly rigid though somewhat simple cosmos of tauromaquia, and that evening we went to a nice dinner before going home to ready ourselves for the big celebration in the streets. Back at the apartment, we neatly packed bundles of twelve grapes into plastic wrap (my mother’s idea) in preparation for our trip to the square in front of the clock at city hall. As per custom in Spain, we joined the crowd to eat grapes at midnight, one for each bell chime, in order to secure our good luck for the coming year. I think only Mike was able to finish the grapes before the sound of the last bell died out – I think the rest of us were too busy laughing at him. Afterwards, out came the cava to join the street party.

New Year’s day we arose to catch a bus for Ronda, one of the more dramatic sights in all of Spain and the birthplace of the Spanish bullfight. Much of this white city rests atop sheer cliffs that drop down into the canyon that splits the canyon in two and the surrounding valley. We spent much of the morning taking advantage of the city’s cliffside walkways, my mother and sister keeping a good distance between themselves and the railing.

If it had not been a holiday, we would have taken the dark and musty stairway built by the Moors to the canyon floor, but we contented ourselves instead with a trail that stretched along the medieval walls guarding the city’s sloping southerly approach. In the afternoon, we visited the Plaza Real Maestraza de Caballería de Ronda, Spain’s oldest bullring, where we were allowed to walk the corrals, stables, and chutes behind the main ring unattended.

The next morning I accompanied the group back to Madrid by train in order to catch their flight back to Madrid. All in all, it was a short visit, but a very fun and memorable one.

Ironically, as I post this, I’m readying myself for a visit to Barcelona, where my mother has (rather surprisingly) gone for work. However, before I write about Catalonia, I need to post a couple of other updates. Bear with me...the journey continues.

New Year's with Family

The Sunday after Christmas, I woke up at 9:00am; all too late for my 8:45am train to Madrid. I frantically jumped out of bed reeling from the discovery that I had not actually set my alarm clock the night before. My Mom, sister and brother-in-law-to-be were set to arrive in Madrid in an hour and a half and I was a two and a half hour train ride from the city’s main station, to say nothing of the multiple Metro lines it would take to skip across town. As it so happened, I did not arrive all that late to Madrid (thank goodness for a country that had the good sense to invest in high-speed rail lines some years ago), though I did receive a frantic call somewhere within the tube of the Madrid Metro from a concerned sister and a very worried mother.

After hugs and hellos at the airport, we boarded the Metro into the city to deposit luggage a short distance from the Palacio Real on a side street flanking Plaza de Santo Domingo. Determined to catch the Museo del Prado before it closed for the day (not to reopen again until Tuesday morning). I dragged my weary guests across town to the Paseo del Prado, just in time to line up for the museum’s weekly free entry hours. My sister was determined to see the Prado if it was the one thing she did on the trip, even if it that meant standing in a line that quite literally wrapped around the length of the building, which it did.

Now my first memories of the Prado recall a very young sister who, both tired and overwhelmed by room upon room of historical paintings, came close to throwing a tantrum in the museum a distant summer day in 2001. What a change to note her admiration for the collection of the same paintings, albeit several years wiser and with a bachelor’s degree in art history to boot. Wow, did I feel old.

After the Prado, it took little effort for my mother to convince the group to try a small restaurant she spotted in Plaza de Santa Ana. Exhausted from a day of travel and curios to see what gifts lay in store, we were all in favor of an early return to the hotel to exchange gifts. A pile of shredded wrapping paper strewn about the floor of one hotel room, sleep soon followed.

In the morning, we braved the rain to visit the Royal Palace (Palacio Real del Oriente) with its pharmacy and armory. At lunch, I seem to have made a rather convincing defense of the claim that I’d try anything, at least once, in this case traditional Madrid-style callos (tripe with blood sausage). Delicious! After lunch, we went to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia to see Picasso’s Guernica and then for a stroll along the Gran Vía as the sun went down and the holiday lights came to life overhead.

Tuesday morning, we trudged about in the rain once again to visit the Parque del Buen Retiro and the southern reach of Barrio Salamanca before rushing pack to the hotel in order to check-out and pick-up our luggage. A few minutes later we caught a train to Córdoba, a former Roman outpost and capital of Moorish Al-Andalus.

Sadly, the weather did not improve in Cordoba. As we made our way under the Roman archway leading to the 2,000 year-old bridge that connects old Córdoba to its hinterland to the south of the river, it started to pour. We were forced to take refuge in the southern tower of the bridge in order to wait out the storm that was already beginning to submerge buildings within sight further downstream.

Later that night we darted from shop to cafe in La Judería (the historic Jewish quarter) with umbrellas in various states of abuse. Thankfully a dinner of hearty salmorejo (Cordoban tomato and ham porridge), flamenquines (pork loin wrapped in cured strips of cured ham and then fried), and berenjenas fritas con miel (fried eggplant with honey) made up for the weather, if only slightly.

Wednesday morning we visited the famous synagogue of Córdoba (above, right), one of only a handful of surviving Jewish religious spaces dating to the period prior to the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. Of course, the most impressive sight in the city is La Mezquita, the immense Moorish mosque with its undulating forest of red and white archways. After some time in the former mosque, now also the Cathedral of Córdoba, we went to eat tapas, took a stroll by the restored Roman temple in the center of town and to enter the town’s small but impressive Museo Arqueológico. By the evening, another train had deposited our ragged bunch in Sevilla.

To be continued...