Saturday: It has been forever since I blogged

I think that this is my longest blog hiatus since I started my blog.  It was actually pretty painful, and I missed it.  IN FACT, I was so overcome with concern at not being able to report my comings and goings that I almost had a Mac attack on Friday night and went and bought an ipad, so that I could at least tap out a bit of my travails in Spain.  I do not think that I will travel again without some way to capture my experiences.  I took a notebook and made journal notes of everything we saw and did, but it was not the same.  

Anyway, Spain was really fabulous.  My friend Melissa and I travelled together and then met her sister once we reached Madrid.  Our flight over was brutal, and I do not mean to complain or sound like the Princess and the Pea, but there is no quality sleeping to be had on an overseas flight when you are flying coach.  I sort of have in my head that the next time I go overseas, I will put all my money into one of those British Airways flights where you can sleep in the first class beds.  I will be glad to save money elsewhere by sleeping in hostels and public parks and eating Grab the Gold bars that I have brought from home.  Anything seems a worthy sacrifice.  

We began our day with an 8 hour layover in New York, where we went to see the Alexander McQueen exhibit at the MET.  The clothes were stunning, the craftsmanship was unreal and the presentation was interesting, to say the least.  We were able to have lunch at the met and to be honest, I thought that we would never get out of the MET (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) as it seemed as large as the Louvre and the more we walked the more there was of everything that you can imagine.  It is amazing that as a world population we have provided so much stuff.  Just so much stuff.  

Our overseas flight was just the worst, as above mentioned.  I staggered off the plane shellshocked that anything that miserable could last 8 hours.  It seemed cruel and unusual.  We landed finally in Barcelona, and boarded a train to Madrid.  You know the trains were so much nicer that the plane, and I took many a fabulous train nap on our trip.  I usually strolled off the train thinking that life was worth living in the world of Renfe (the train company).  

So we arrived in Madrid at around 3:45 and walked with our luggage to the Hotel Mora.  It was quite nice and in walking distance of the train station and the Prado.  We checked into our hotel and took showers and walked down to the The Prado.  The Prado is a Spanish Art museum that houses portraits of the Spanish Royal family, many Catholic depictions of various Biblical events and some portraits of various events in the lives of Greek gods and goddesses (for instance Saturn eating a baby).  We saw art by Goya, Reubens and El Boscos.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.  On the way home, we stopped at a tapas bar (La Taperia) for dinner and hit the room early for a good night's sleep before hitting Madrid hard on Monday.

Monday: On Monday, we embarked on one of my all time favorite things to do in the world:  a hop on/ hop off  bus tour.  The weather was lovely.  I wore the very best of my tennis shoe chic and packed up my trip journal and my camera and we were off.  We saw the Parque de Retiro, which houses the Crystal Palace, the Rose Garden and the Boat Pond.  We stopped into the Sal Monica shopping district mostly to find a bathroom, went to see the Palacio Real and Gardens which were once home to the Spanish Royal family.  It is said to rival Versaille, but I would disagree.  It is more eclectic with a porcelin room and a China room that you would never find in France, but it lacks the scope and especially the gardens.  We had lunch outside again as the weather was lovely.  In the evening we took a   modern tour of Madrid and saw the football stadium, some of the foreign embassies, the children's hospitals and Ingles, which is a sort of Bloomingdales of Spain.

Fo dinner, we walked to Plaza El Mayor.  It took us about 20 minutes to get there from our hotel.  We went to the Mercado del la Paz and had Churros and chocolate at San Gines.  They were crazy delicious.

Tuesday: Now, this morning, I got cocky and thought that I would go for a jaunty run through the streets of Madrid, and I felt a bit fancy as I ran through gardens, around the Prado, and circled around Neptune's fountain a couple of times.  I felt great when I came in.  I stopped at Starbucks on the way back to the Hotel Mora, and I felt like my day was off to a fabulous start.  I was, however, entirely incorrect about this.  I crashed hard as we were walking the Botanical and I took a park bench nap like a vagrant with horrible jet lag.  We had hoped to visit the Reina Sophia today, but it was closed and we missed Picasso's Guernica.  We had a quick lunch after the Botanical gardens, and then grabbed a train to Pamplona.  

I slept for most of the three hour train ride to Pamplona and when we stepped off the train I felt relatively refreshed, but it was only moments before I realized that by way of a surprise cold front, the weather had stabbed us in the back.  The weather had turned brutally cold and by the time we had moved into and then headed out of the dorms where we were staying, the temperature had dropped to 45ish degrees and it threatened rain.  It was bitterly cold.  It was so cold that I could not wrap my stiff fingers around my camera to document our evening.  On the way home from dinner, where incidentally, I had some amazing lasagna, it began to rain horizontally.  So cruel of Spain to treat us thus.  

Wednesday, June 1: So today, we were up early to catch the 7 AM bus to Bilbao so that we could tour the Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art.  I slept most of the way there, and the museum was stunning, but I was struck over and over with why they would have built it in Bilbao.  It was a three hour bus ride, and while the town of Bilbao was charming with medieval squares and a great little tram system, I couldn't, for the life of me, understand the choice of location.  I should read more about it, but it seemed that it should have been in a higher traffic location.  It seemed a bit like overlooking New York as a place for a center of modern art and turning instead to Paducah, Kentucky.  Also rather damning was the fact that the weather forced me to wear a sun dress with leggings and my dansko clogs, a cashmere sweater, a rain coat and a scarf. It was painfully frumpy.  

That aside, the museum was just stunning.  It was rife with works by Jeff Koons, a huge flower puppy and balloon like steel art.  There was a Port-a-jon with microphones over the toilet seat and megaphone speakers coming from the top of the port-a-jon that told just how much of our privacy has become public with the internet.  There was a screen  replaying the 1966 world cup while on another screen a 21st century crown cheered the game.  There was barbed wire art left over from apartheid, and pickled cow innards from Damien Hist that was supposed to help me come to terms with my own mortality.  A room of feminist art focused on fecal matter, which was rather unfortunate and actually did not resonate with me.  

After the museum, we toured the small city of Bilbao and then boarded our bus back to Pamplona (I slept the whole way home) where we got into bed early in anticipation of our early morning train ride to Barcelona.  

Thursday: I slept the whole way to Barcelona, we arrived about 11:00, and took a cab to the Hotel Condestable.  The Hotel Condestable had an amazing bathroom, but was otherwise rather sad and shabby with graffiti on the doors and paper thin walls that made it sound as if the man in the next room was actually snoring in my bed.  

ANYWAY, we took another Hop on/ Hop off tour and saw pretty much all Barcelona could offer us in two days.  We visited the Sagrada  Familia, which is the magnificent and unfinished cathedral by Gaudi.  It is over 100 years in the making and only halfway finished.  We also visited Gaudi's Parque Guell, the Palau Reial and Paellons Guell and Barcelona's futbol club.  All of these sights were amazing, we were near the ocean, and it was a great tour, but the weather somehow made Barcelona a lot less glamorous than Madrid had seemed to be.  I was still stuck in tacky, makeshift cold weather clothes and shivering about town in sad, sad tennis shoes.  I snacked on a grocery store dinner.

Friday: Somehow, today I slept until 10:30 AM, and it was completely lovely.  We started out hop on/ hop off tour rather late, but the weather was rather better and everything seemed a bit more positive.  We saw the Olympic ampi-theatre, and rode the Teleferic (air trolly) to the top of Montjuic so that we could see all of Barcelona and the ocean from this medieval fort of protection.  Of course, it was raining and cold at the top with even a bit of fog to block the view.  We visited the Barrio Gotic, went to the flea market and then toured the Catedral of Barcelona, which is their oldest church built close to the sea so that sailors could visit upon disembarking.  It was beyond medieval ornate and the church is still very much in use with people coming in and out for confession as we were touring.  We got in early, packed our bags and prepared ourselves for a 6 AM flight to Munich.

Saturday: We cut our connection from Munich to New York rather too close, the overseas films were just awful, I slept a  bit and made it home at 4 PM on Saturday.  

 No jet lag so far!!!