Madrid and Wine Country

Finishing up, six months later. Because I'm a completionist :)

The last two days in Spain I stayed in Madrid. I like spending at least one night in the city I'm flying out of, just in case something comes up I have some buffer to catch my flight. I caught the train to Atocha, then the metro to Puerta del Sol near my hostel. Checked in, dropped my stuff, and went for a late lunch at a Basque place they recommended. I also accidentally ordered way too much cider thanks to my crappy spanglish. The waiter asked what size I wanted, and rather than a 'a medium' I apparently ordered 'a half' liter. Ah well.

Wandered a bit, then headed back to the hostel, where I mostly just hung out for the rest of the day. Bought dinner at the hostel, which was a pot of shakshuka (a tomato, onion, and pepper stew from Israel). Went for a drink with Joel, a guy from the hostel, then crashed.

The next day I went on a tour of the wine country around Madrid, centered around a town called Colmenar de Oreja. The famous wine areas are in Rioja, Rias Baixas, and Ribera del Duero, but they're all pretty far to the north, so I saved time on the bus and gave the underdog a shot. The shuttle picked us up from a cafe near Atocha. I got there a little early, so I just grabbed coffee and a pastry at the cafe bar. Guide showed up and drove us down to the first vineyard, Carlos V. It's a 400 year old winery, but has only made wine for the past 30 years or so thanks to royalty and nobles selling it to various other enterprises for spare cash for years.

Next, we went to the town square of Colmenar de Oreja and then walked to the second winery, Bodegas Peral. Where the previous winery was a grand royal estate, this was more of a work-a-day winery, like the ones we have in Woodinville. While the guide was giving us a rundown of the winery, someone from town walks up with what looked like a 3 gallon jug, gave the owner a few coins, then filled it up straight from one of the vats. Apparently until Spanish wine wasn't really popular internationally until a few decades ago, and until then that's basically how most of the wine in the country was sold. Got a lovely tour of the cellar, which were full of GIANT clay jars big enough to fit several of me in. It's apparently the traditional way of storing wine in the area, but no one knows how to make them anymore. As the existing ones slowly crack or break with age, the count keeps going down. After the tour, we swung through the shop where I got a couple nice bottles at a STEAL (the most expensive was $4). Meanwhile, a few tourists from Hong Kong had apparently already sampled a bit too much and were trying to convince the owner to sell them a whole 20lb leg of cured ham (the winery also sold meat and olives). The guide tried to tell them they wouldn't be able to get it through customs, but they seemed convinced they could.

The final winery was Dona Consuela, owned by a lovely woman who is exactly what you picture a small Spanish grandmother to be. She showed us around the winery, then we sat and ate grapes, bread, and cheese while trying her wines. The olive oil was really good, but she ran out of the 300ml bottles before I could buy some. I asked if she had any other sizes, and she said, "Yes! I have 3-liter cans as well!" and then ran off. She came back and plunked a giant can of olive oil in front of me and I had to politely decline.

After the wineries, we had lunch in town. Food was lovely, but one of the people on the tour caused a bit of a kerfuffle by not paying attention. The guide had asked for everyone's dietary restrictions to pass along to the restaurant, and apparently despite this guy not saying anything, he didn't eat beef. When the beef stew came out, he THEN said he couldn't eat it and made the restaurant make him something else. He then complained that the chicken thighs he got (for free, don't forget) were small and chewy and came out after everyone else had finished. The tour guide was remarkably restrained in not leaving him in the bathroom, I thought.

Back to the hostel, where I packed for my flight the next day and went to bed. The next day I got up, had one last tortilla sandwich at the airport, and hopped on my plane home.

Catching up: Cordoba

The street I lived on in Cordoba.

After the hubbub and grandeur of Granada, Cordoba was a little sleepy and boring, which I actually really enjoyed. It felt like I could see all it had to offer no matter how lazily I walked around (though man let me tell you, I tested that).

The day I arrived, I dropped my stuff, yanked a couple pages out of my Rick Steve’s guide (mostly about where the good food was), and walked down to the river (the same one as in Sevilla, the Guadalquivir). I saw the old Roman bridge there, which looked AWESOME at sunset. I took the obligatory pictures and walked along the water until I found a juice bar and coffee shop to set up shop in and read for a while. After that I kept wandering and realized I’d walked way farther than I intended. Mr. Steves had named his favorite restaurant in the city in the various pages I ripped out, but it sounded like it was much farther from my hostel than I felt like walking. Well ‘much farther’ was now suddenly ‘3 blocks that way’, so I decided to stay in the area until dinner. Thanks to Spanish meal times, that meant killing an hour, so I just got a drink at someplace nearby, which was a cross between a swanky cocktail lounge, a tourist restaurant, and nightclub.

Swanky.

When dinner time rolled around, I realized it had been almost 12 hours since I’d eaten jamon, so I basically just ordered that, bread, and ajo blanco (cold almond and garlic soup) for dinner. I also accidentally almost ordered an entire bottle of a local wine the guidebook said to try, as it wasn’t marked as a bottle and only cost 7 euros. Thankfully the waiter realized what I didn’t, cocked an eyebrow and said, ‘Un botella? Solo para usted? (A full bottle? Just for you?)’ then laughed when I went ‘uhhhh….no. un vino blanco por favor?’ I also got dessert (a brownie in cold chocolate soup; what is it with Spaniards and cold soup?), but the combination of salt from the ham and what I now believe to be a whole head of raw garlic in the soup had me feeling a little refluxy, so I figured finishing it was probably a bad idea. I paid, wandered home, and crashed pretty much immediately.

Jamon and the Soup of Too Much Garlic

The next morning I woke up, yawned, and from the utterly atrocious taste in my mouth realized exactly how much garlic had been in the soup the night before. After thoroughly scouring my teeth and tongue, I went to see the Mezquita, Cordobas take on the church-turned-mosque-turned-back-into-a-church trope of Andalucia. This one though was VERY clearly a former mosque, as the Muslim influence on the building had been much better preserved than the cathedral in the Sevilla. Part of the result of that was I kept getting turned around inside, as there wasn’t a very clear ‘front’ to the church. It didn’t help that the exit and entrance weren’t labelled and kept moving (No, seriously; they were doing some repairs and moved the exit and entry signs to various different doors while I was inside).

Mezquita interior

After I left I wandered a bit and found a store that specialized in the local version of sherry, so stopped and grabbed some to share with other folks at the hostel. The shop owner was nice and patient, and I think amused at the mishmash of Spanish that I knew and didn't know. I knew "denominacio de origen calificada," "pedro ximenez," "systema solera," and "moriles montida," but had to ask her to write out the price of something because I couldn't tell if she was saying 30 or 13. On the way home, I grabbed lunch at a taberna near the hostel, and once again asked myself why Americans have a reputation for eating unhealthy. I ordered a 'flamenquin,' which from the description sounded like a breaded pork cutlet. What it actually was was cured ham and bacon, rolled up in a flattened piece of pork, rolled into a tube, deep-fried and then served with a large blob of mayo. I made it halfway through then admitted defeat.

Un Flamenquin. Also known as 'the stick of pork.'

Back at the hostel I read for a bit, then went for a walk near the river. Cordoba has two main bridges (one left over from Roman times and a more modern one), so I crossed one, crossed back on the other, then had dinner on the river (and ate my first salad for the entire trip). I headed back to the hostel and shared some of the newly acquired dessert sherry (which was made from raisins and I SWEAR tasted like liquified fig newtons) with some girls who had arrived that day. Can't remember a single one of their names, but they were all in various stages of college, and were there to celebrate one of them having graduated. We went for a quick drink, though we only stayed for a round or two of beers before heading home. Again, how do restaurants in Spain function? I spend one and a half euros on two small beers and got two snacks for free. WHERE IS THE MONEY COMING FROM.

Anyhoo, the next day I walked back to the train station and caught the AVE train to Madrid, which will be my next (and last!) post.

Catching up: Last day in Granada

Last day in Granada was fun, but nothing particularly unique. I wandered a bit, grabbed some churros and chocolate for breakfast, wandered around the city center for a bit (mainly around Plaza Nueva, where I

passed someone plein air painting a very pretty bridge scene), then grabbed a tapas lunch of seafood risotto and various fried fishy bits at a popular seafood spot. True to form, getting to lunch at around 1 seems to be the best bet in Spain (when the tourists are all done and the Spaniards haven’t settled in yet), as the restaurant was packed before I got there and packed when I left, but mostly empty while I was eating. After, I walked back up the Albiyazin and re-saw some fun bits from the other day. When I got up to the view of the Alhambra again, there was a gypsy playing guitar, which I totally ignored until an older and (slightly tipsy-looking) Spanish gentleman waddled over and started dancing flamenco next to him. I watched for a few minutes, then realized the clouds on the horizon looked an awful lot like thunderclouds, so I headed back. Sure enough, ten minutes after I was back inside the skies opened up, so I remained holed up with a book while waiting for it to pass.

Once it did, I took my book to a posh-looking cafe nearby, where I grabbed a table near an even posh-er looking British couple, who proceeded to get more and more posh the farther down their bottle of wine they went. Many “quite so”s, “mmyes”s and “indeed, dear”s were heard, as well as bemoaning the downfall of wine with proper cork in it. I just sat and read until it started feeling like dinner time, the went back and went to dinner with Iffa, where we ate falafel and couscous and burned the tar out of our hands while trying to pour ourselves some Moroccon mint tea. Why would you make a teapot handle out of silver, I ask. You do realize it conducts heat, yes?

Couscous and lamb

The next day, I caught a series of metro buses back to the bus station and grabbed a bocadillo and coffee while waiting for the bus to Cordoba, as well as a bottle of shampoo (mine went missing in the hostel). While I was waiting, a woman walked up and asked me something in Spanish. I didn’t understand her and said, “Perdona, solo Ingles,” to which she responded, “Oh thank god you speak English. Is this the bus to Cordoba?”

The countryside was gorgeous, though by the end of the trip I started feeling mad at olive trees, as there was almost nothing else growing the entire way. We only made one stop along the way (at a super sketchy looking stop hidden behind an auto garage in a Podunk little town), so we made really good time. Once there,

Olives en route to Cordoba

I hopped off and walked the half-mile to my hostel where I made the amusing discovery that no one there spoke English. Like, at all. I’m not one to expect others to speak my language when I’m abroad, but if you run a youth hostel, you think you’d pick up things like, “room,” “key,” and “towel.” Aside from that, it was a lovely place, and I had the entire room and bathroom to myself the two nights I was there, which I was rather pleased at.

After that I wandered the city a bit, but will cover that in its own post.

Home!

After 20 hours of planes, trains, and nosy US border officials, I'm home!

Blog posts will continue until I'm caught up (just missing like 2 or 3 now) and I'll slowly winnow through the photos I took.

But for now: sleep. Good night!

Granada Groupies

So the folks in Granada were a little more...rowdy than I'm used too. Still fun, still lovely folks for the most part, but definitely not my usual crowd.

Another list in no particular order.

• Señor Hipster. Don't actually know his name, but this gentleman works behind the hostel's bar, cooks breakfast most mornings, and is a frankly impressive example of hipsterdom. Pomaded hair pulled back into a man bun, the sides of his head shaved, a thick-and-thickly-waxed handlebar mustache, various pop culture references tattoo'd all over, and skin-tight jean capris over a pair of espadrilles (but not a pair of socks). Only had two exchanges with him other than giving him a drink order, both of which were memorable
• One was when I ordered a gin and tonic and he discovered he was out of gin. The look on his face could best be described as 'confused panic' as he proceeded to ransack every nook and cranny of the hostel's ground floor for another bottle of gin, yelling all the while in Spanish. He eventually gave up and gave me what little bit he had for a euro. I would've been fine with a beer...
• The second was my last night in Granada. Walked up to order a beer, and got to the bar just in time to see him showing off his ass-ets. Pantsless. I just kinda paused, made eye contact with him, and tilted my head to the side, and he re-pantsed himself, pointed to a girl at the bar, and said (in heavily accented English), "She said she would do it too if I did first," at which point she blushed and buried her face in her drink pretending she didn't know what he was talking about. I just got my beer and went back to my table.
• The Unnamed Ditsy Roomie. Lovely person, but not the clearest thinker. In the two days we shared a room together:
• She woke up when I came in late one night, then started to panic and try and wake her roommates up because she saw '1:15' on her watch and thought they'd slept all day (despite the open window, with a view of the pitch black square outside?)
• Another of my roomies for some reason had her phone alarm set to the sound of cats meowing. They had an early train, so it went off at 6am and the ditsy roomie proceeded to freak out that one of the city's myriad stray cats had snuck in the window. She went down the line of beds looking for it, asking who's bed it was on, until we sorted out where the sound was coming from.
• Upon hearing that the walk to the Alhambra was 2/3 of a mile up a hill on a dirt and gravel road, she looked at her brand new open-toed wedges and said, "I could probably still wear these though, right?" Me and both her travel partners just met that with disbelieving stares until she got the point.
• Simon, a righteously chill bro from France who I swear I did not see without a cigarette in his mouth for any longer than it took to get the old one out and the new one lit. He was the closest to my typical social circle, a judgment I make based entirely on the fact that we had a conversation about Dungeons and Dragons and the fact his laptop wallpaper was a battlecruiser from Starcraft. He was in Granada for a few months (can't remember what for at the moment), and was just staying at the hostel until he found a sublet.
• Lukas, another french guy, that I had a lovely conversation with about his desire to be a high school teacher and all his various experiences with hallucinogenic drugs. Insert pun about 'opening minds' here. Actually quite a nice dude who was surprisingly level-headed
• Thomas and Stefan. There probably should be an accent over those 'a's but that's too much work on an American keyboard. Two more french dudes, living up to the national stereotype of chain-smoking most of the time I was with them. 
• Violeta, Diana, and their Spanish posse. Violeta was a native Spaniard from just outside Granada, and Diana was her travel partner of the past 6 months or so. I have no evidence to back this up, but I got the feeling they were on the verge of running out of money and were going to try and hit up Violeta's parents before heading out again. Some of their friends met up with us when we went out for tapas (a small miracle given the giant religious festival that was going on), but they didn't speak much English so I didn't talk much with them.
• Iffa, a girl from Germany who I went for dinner with my last night. She had wanted to try one of the Moroccan restaurants on the street our hostel was on, but wasn't sure if it was okay for a woman to eat alone in one, so I tagged along.

Hella Not Halal

I think Spain is still trying to catch up from 500 years of Muslim rule, because I've had 4 different types of pork today and I wasn't even trying.

Also, where's my Lipitor? I know I had it around here somewhere.

1001 Alhambrian Cats

Okay that might be an exaggeration. There were more like 3.

The Alhambra is Granada's biggest sight, and is one of the biggest in Europe. Tickets for it sell out online weeks in advance, but fortunately (and totally unbeknownst to me) hotels, hostels, and other businesses in the area all have a separate pool of tickets they can sell from, so I was still able to see it (huzzah!).

The gist of the palace is this: the Alhambra was a compound of three Islamic palaces built on a hill overlooking Granada when the city was one of the last Moorish strongholds left in Spain. Picture an Islamic palace with all the arches and fountains and courts and such. You're probably picturing the Alhambra. Why? Because it and the Alcazar in Sevilla are the two palaces that pretty much every documentary and film uses as a backdrop when it needs one. When the Spaniards finally forced the Moors out of Europe, they built another Renaissance palace in the compound.

You were picturing something like this, weren't you? Told ya.

I won't go into details too much since my day basically boils down to "Chris went to the pretty palace. Chris saw pretty things in the pretty palace. Chris took pretty photos of the pretty things in the pretty palace. Chris is waaaay behind on photo processing and probably won't get to it until back in the states." It was a hike to get up there though, I'll say that much. And for some reason the path I took dropped me off in the middle of the palace compound...inside the ticketed area. Not sure how that happened. I still needed to show a ticket to get inside any of the palaces, so I spent half an hour to figure out where the ticket pickup was before actually seeing any of them. I saw the grounds and two of the palaces, then killed a half hour drinking coffee and watching some kittens beg for scraps while I waited for my slot to get into the Nasrid palace (the big kahuna palace, which you're only allowed to enter during the timeslot on your ticket).

Alhambrian cat.

While I was inside I realized why everyone hates selfie sticks. There's lots of awesome viewpoints in the palace, which always had a line of folks waiting to take a photo from them. Unless you had a selfie stick. Then it's apparently TOTALLY FINE to reach it front of all the people waiting, block their shots, and pretend you don't see them while you're doing it. Like this jerk.

Class A jerk right here. Made him real big so you can see his jerkiness better. Note how he is holding his
phone DIRECTLY in front of the camera of the guy next to him.

On the way home I stopped by a shop that made wooden mosaics in mudejar-style patterns, and got a backgammon set and a cool wooden tray, which I guarantee I will find some way of fitting into my luggage before it's time to leave. Honest. Totally. Maybe. After that, I just got home, dropped my stuff, and went on a tapas crawl with some folks from the hostel. Honestly, none of the places we ate were all that great (one was SMACK in the middle of a row of tourist traps and decorated in cheesy medieval armor), but it was still a fun time going out with a big group. I have more stories on them for a later post.