Marty Stepp

On Saturday 9/19, my birthday, Jessica and I both arrived in Barcelona.  We checked into our hotel, which looks like something sent back in time from the year 3000.  Everything is futuristic and seems to put form above function.  The shower door is too small to be effective; the seating is round and hard, like something out of the Jetsons; the TV is flat and mounted in the wall; there are fake plants directly sprouting out of bizarre angular tables on one wall; everything is made of metal and glass; and the bathroom door is a sliding glass door that has been blurred, so while you can’t REALLY see details of the person inside, you can still kind of tell what’s up in there.  It’s not a bad hotel, but the design is pretty funky.  It’s not in the heart of town, but it’s right next to a major subway line so we can get to everything in short order.

The hotel has a pool, but the whole thing is green and nasty and not usable, unfortunately.  When we complained about the pool being shit, the guy at the counter lied and said it was supposed to be that color, that it’s part of the design of the pool.  Yeah, right.  We should probably complain again and ask for a discount.  The weather isn’t really great for swimming anyway.  It’s partly cloudy and in the 70s, with occasional rain; not quite warm and sunny enough.

For my birthday dinner, Jess and I went to La Rambla, Barcelona’s main bustling thoroughfare.  It’s a huge long street with a central brick walkway, full of shops and restaurants and bars and tons of people.  There were jugglers there, musicians, puppeteers; we got offered a chance to purchase some “hashish o cocaina” (we politely declined).

There are a lot of people in this area, mostly Spaniards but also various tourists.  We got to do a lot of people-watching.  Jess and I decided that Spanish women are pretty, but not drop-dead gorgeous.  Mostly they have great olive skin and good fashionable clothes, but beyond that they are not perfect either.  We said there are a lot of 6es and 7s, but that’s it; not a lot of terrible 3-4s, and not a lot of 8-10s.  Compare that to the USA, where I think there is more of a broad range.

La Rambla connects to a set of roads and alleys named Barri Gotic that I guess was the center of the old city of Barcelona.  There are tons of small restaurants and bars tucked into all these alleys.  It’s a cool scene, not at all sketchy like you’d think an alley would be in the USA.  Lots of people are roaming around having a good time and making noise.

We stopped at a restaurant there named El Salon that came highly recommended by Jessica’s Rough Guide book about Barcelona.  They served us a GREAT dinner that made me very happy on my birthday.  We had some Spanish wine called cava, which is a kind of sparkling carbonated wine from this area.  It was good stuff.  We had yummy salads with serrano ham in them, this delicious duck pate on dry bread, a rare tuna steak, and more.  It was a delightful meal and a great way to celebrate my birthday.  During dinner we waxed philosophical about life, love, politics, and solved most of the world’s problems.  A very productive evening.

On Sunday 9/20 Jessica and I went to Sagrada Familia (“Holy Family”), a huge unfinished Catholic church that has been under construction since 1882.  Apparently it’s the top tourist attraction in Barcelona.  It is not close to being done, and they expect it to take until 2026 or later to complete it.  Part of the reason it’s taken so long is that they stopped working on it during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s; also the economy in Barcelona is pretty terrible, so they haven’t been able to throw as much personpower at it as they might like.  It isn’t yet used for actual church services but is solely a tourist attraction for now.

La Sagrada Familia is considered the masterpiece design of famous Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi (1852 – 1926).  He is huge in Barcelona and designed many famous buildings and monuments and things in this area.  And yes, Gaudi is the guy who gave birth to the English word “gaudy” to describe something that is tacky or unconventional.  That’s the way Gaudi designs things, apparently: the tops of the church spires have these weird round brightly colored fruit ball things on them, and the towers have these weird swooping shapes to them.  It’s a very strange looking, yet very impressive, design.

Even though the place isn’t complete, that doesn’t stop them from fencing it off and charging people 11 Euros to take a tour of it.  Then they charge you an additional 2.5 Euros to go up their elevator to actually be up in its towers and see the view.  Barely any of it is accessible to the public, and it’s full of boards and planks and construction equipment.  There’s a small part of the ground floor area that is accessible, and the lift takes you up a few hundred feet, so you get a neat view of the beautiful city of Barcelona.  But there is very little space up there, and you almost immediately need to start going back down the stairs and exit for lack of space and lack of anything else to see or do up there.

On one side it has a huge carved nativity scene, and its outside also has a huge crucified Jesus.  They have a little mini-museum in its basement that shows lots of little models of what the church *will* look like 20 years from now.  It also has plaques of the various sculptors that Gaudi hired to help design all the statues and sculptures and such around the building.  The museum isn’t all that impressive unless you are a huge Gaudi fan or architecture fan, in my opinion.  Maybe in 2026 it will kick ass.

Jess and I had some late-lunch tapas at a place just outside Sagrada Familia.  We got this tortilla espanola dish which is like a pie made of eggs and potatoes and onions and stuff.  No cheese; perfect.  They also have lots of smallish light sandwiches such as tuna or calamari or thin sliced serrano ham.  That plus a salad makes for a fairly light yummy meal.

After visiting the unfinished church we went back to the La Rambla thoroughfare.  Unfortunately it then started raining cats and dogs.  Everybody fled the center of the street and huddled under restaurant awnings and the few covered sections on the side of the road.

Jess and I camped out there for about half an hour waiting for it to die down.  It didn’t.  Luckily Jess had an umbrella and raincoat that we donned to stay kind of sort of dry.  Out of nowhere TONS of guys showed up trying to sell umbrellas to everybody.  It was crazy; literally every 20-30 seconds a new guy would walk past shouting, “paragua?  paragua?!” (umbrella)

We eventually made our way down the wet street to a restaurant called El Choquito that served us some decent food.  We tried to do things the Spanish way by having a light dinner.  We got salad and mussels and some mini chorizo sausages and some yummy sangria to drink.  If you haven’t had sangria, it’s basically wine mixed with fruit juice, often served in a tall glass with ice, fruit slices in it, and a straw.  It is quite nice.

As we were eating we noticed that on the nearby TV, it was playing the final of the Eurobasketball championships between Spain and Serbia.  Spain kicked Serbia’s ass and won by over 20 points.  It was kind of interesting to watch since Spain’s team has a lot of current and former NBA players including Pau/Marc Gasol, Rudy Fernandez, Jorge Garbajosa, Juan Carlos Navarro, Ricky Rubio, and one or two others.  The players and the fans seemed extremely excited to win.  It’s refreshing to see people get genuinely excited about things.  Why don’t Americans do that?

We lingered at the restaurant for some time, and then we decided to make our way back home to the hotel.  We ended our night probably much earlier than the locals (not long after midnight — they stay up for hours past that), but we want to try to get out earlier tomorrow to see more sights.  We suffered a bit today for starting our travels so late after sleeping in too much.

More photos can be found in my Barcelona photo album.

More of my adventures in Madrid, days 2 and 3.

I’m out walking the streets of Madrid once more. One thing that is nice here (as in most of Europe that I’ve seen) is that they don’t BS you around about prices.  When they say something costs 10 Euro, it costs 10 damn Euro.  That’s with the tax already included.  And they don’t treat you like an idiot and say it’s $9.99, they just say 10 damn Euro.  This always annoys me in the US.  You think you are getting something for 9 bucks and it ends up being 13.  Of course, even with tax already included, the prices kind of stink for everything.  You tend to think of a Euro as a buck, but it’s actually worth around $1.47 as of this writing.  So that entree for 12 Euro, or that T-shirt for 9 Euro, they actually aren’t quite such great bargains.

Still sampling the yummy local cuisine.  One thing about restaurants overseas is that the ordering and departing etiquette is often different in some subtle and annoying way.  For example, they often won’t come ask you what you want until you put your menu down.  That kind of happens in the States, too, but here it’s more rigidly adhered to.  Also, when you’re done, they are not bringing you the check unless you flat out ask for it, probably 2-3 times.  They don’t want you out of there.

On all the TVs they are showing coverage of the Spanish national basketball team, which I guess just won some games in the latest Eurobasket tournament.  The amount of bias in the TV coverage is a lot higher than you’d find on, say, ESPN.  They make it out as though Spain is this juggernaut, they win every game, the rest of the world trembles before their basketball prowess.  They love their point guard Ricky Rubio, whom the announcer calls “Ricky Business.”

Today I visited El Palacia Real (The Royal Palace).  Kings and queens of Spain lived here, and apparently not all that long ago.  The last one died in it in 1885.

I was a little annoyed because there was a super long line to get into this thing.  I probably waited almost an hour just to walk around this palace.  And there were these super impatient German-speaking old ladies in line behind me who kept trying to cut in front of me and were complaining about how long the wait was.

There were about a dozen tourists scooting all around the palace gardens on Segways; they must have had them for rent somewhere.  Now that looked fun.

You’d think the palace was ancient, but then you discover that it has a BILLIARD ROOM in it.  That’s right; there is literally a pool table in the Royal Palace.  Spanish royalty know where it’s at.  There is also a “cinema” room where they would watch films.  FILMS.  In this old old looking royal palace.  So really it’s been in use not so long ago.  No wonder the Spanish people went nuts and revolted in the 1930s; their rulers were living in a prime bachelor pad.

There are a lot of interesting rooms, including a very lavish throne room and a room just for the queen to perform her ceremonial donning of the vestments.  That’s right, they had a whole hoopla every day just for the queen to put on her clothes for the day.  I don’t know much about the lineage of Spanish royalty but they had a lot of things from King Carlos III and IV, as well as Queen Maria Francesca something.  Room after giant room, each with some very simple purpose, such as a thinking room, a sitting room, a dressing room.  They never did any two things in the same room, these people.

The dining hall in there is amazing.  It’s like something you’d see in a movie, 50 seats long on each side.  There are also several rooms with a distinctly Asian decoration.  I guess “Chinoisation” and Japanization was in at the time, so they’d bring in regarded designers from there and have them design a room or two.  Looks cool but kind of out of place with the other architecture.

I also visited El Museo de la Reina Sofia, a museum of modern art named for a past Queen Sofia.  It is actually very new; it has only existed since 1992.  It’s full of modern art painted during the 20th century.  There are  Pablo Picasso (the uber-famous Spanish painter who did most of his work in the early 20th century.  He founded the cubist movement and basically inspired a generation of ugly-ass paintings.  A quote of Picasso’s adorns the entrance to the collection: “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”

The most famous painting in the museum is Picasso’s Guernica, which is a weird montage of stretched people and animals and things, all flailing about as though they are in pain, dying, or dead, or something.  It’s supposed to be about the attack on Guernica by the Germans during the Spanish Revolution of 1937, I think.  Picasso wanted to show how much innocent people are hurt by the decision of their rulers to go to war.

Guernica is sectioned off in this room all by itself; it’s a giant mural, probably 25-30 feet wide.  Lots of people are crowded in the room to look at it, and two security guards stand at each side.  But it’s not encased in glass or roped off or anything; were it not for the guards, you could walk up and poke at it.  As Jay Sherman’s dad on The Critic would say, “Take THAT, Guernica!”  The painting was actually stored in New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) for many years before they sent it back to its native Spain to be put in the Sofia.

There are a lot of other Picasso paintings in the museum.  Picasso likes drawing minotaurs for some reason.  Or at least, people with cow/bull-like heads.  That is pretty cool.  He is also into drawing “nude women,” or at least, things that look like you took a Claymation nude woman and put her in the microwave for a few minutes.  Everything is drooping and falling off and all over the place.  I guess he’s a genius and perhaps the greatest of all modern artists, but as many have said before me, it’s all quite bizarre.  He likes to draw people with two big eyes next to each other and then a big droopy nose that hangs off to one side.  Lots of people have made fun of this style over the years, such as a Season 2 episode of the Simpsons where Mr. Burns commissions several paintings of himself.

The Sofia Museum also houses many works by Salvador Dali.  He is a Spanish surrealist painter from around the same era as Picasso.  He is probably best known for his famous painting of the melting clocks, which is called “The Persistence of Memory.”  Sadly, that one is not in Madrid.  But he has a lot of similar paintings of things melting, such as telephones and Hitlers.  Really.  He has one called “The Enigma of Hitler,” with a melting telephone dripping onto a melting Hitler on a plate.  Yeah.  He also did one called “The Great Masturbator” which depicts a woman, only she looks like she is stuck inside a banana or cow or something.  There is a giant mutant fly on the bottom of the banana/cow trying to free her.  She is also standing vaguely next to a guy’s package.  Unfortunately for her, the man in the painting is Han Solo and his nether regions are encased in carbonite.    Hey, it’s my interpretation; if you don’t like it, you fly down here and look at it yourself.

There are some other famous artists here on display, such as Joan Miro and Juan Gris, and a number of foreign (non-Spanish) artists.  But Picasso and Dali are probably Spain’s two most famous, and their work gets top billing and best placement in the museum.

The last place I visited was the Museo del Prado, which is the King Kong art museum of the area.  It houses older art than the Sofia, and it is much, much, MUCH bigger.  It is huge.  I gave up after a few hours walking around in there; you almost can’t see it all in one visit.  I remember feeling that way in the Louvre when I saw it in 1999.  I read that there are over 3000 canvases of art in the Prado.  Among the famous artists there are Diego Velazquez, Francisco Goya, Raphael, Rembrandt.

Unlike in the Sofia where there are a few rock-star artists or paintings that you must see, here there are like 100 fairly famous ones but not a lot that you’d immediately recognize if you aren’t a scholar of art.  There are a toooon of religious paintings, Jeebuses on crosses or in various states of agony, lots of Virgin Mary paintings, various paintings of muscly nude men fighting each other, that sort of thing.  There are paintings of gallant Spanish conquistadors and of rich Spanish rulers who could afford to pay people to paint them and their families.

There are some Rembrandt paintings, from before he turned into a full-time teeth whitener.  His Artemisia (1634) is supposedly very famous. It depicts a peasant giving a cup to a noblewoman, possibly containing poison.

There is a cool one from Francisco Goya called Saturn Devouring His Son (1820) which Goya apparently painted onto the wall of his dining room to remind of the ravages of age and time.  That’s an appetizer.

There is a famous two-piece set called Maja Vestida (clothed) and Maja Desnuda (nude).  Before and after shot?

Anyway, the place was so, freaking, huge that I kind of got overwhelmed and had to leave at some point.  I didn’t get to see everything.  It was very impressive, but it was a little too big for me.  I got a little lost in there and missed a few famous paintings because I couldn’t find them.  But it is clearly the art powerhouse in the city and was well worth seeing.

Here are my general impressions of the city of Madrid, which I visited from 9/16/2009 – 9/19/2009.  This first day I roamed the city and took in lots of sights and tourist attractions. Tomorrow I’ll write about some of the museums and palaces and that sort of thing.

Madrid is a very walkable city, which I like.  I got a map from my hotel’s front desk and took off around the city.  Everything is within 30-40 minutes or so at most, and I like walking and seeing the sights, so that suited me just fine.  The streets are full of people walking and tiny cars zipping around.  When you have a “walk” signal, the cars will pull right up to the crosswalk.  That is, if some guy from the cross traffic wants to turn onto a side street but is blocked by people crossing, he’ll pull his car right up so the nose is in the walkway and practically hit everybody.  I guess that’s how you have to drive to survive there.  Nobody seemed to mind.

One thing that made me chuckle is that you see all these official government buildings around.  Departmento de la Administracion Publica and such.  Tall old buildings, not that large; each with two guards standing out front.  They wear these drab-colored forest green uniforms and ridiculous pirate-esque black hats and stand up straight, like those guys in the stereotypical movies about Britain with the Marge Simpson hats who aren’t allowed to laugh or react to you when you’re acting like a jackass right in front of them.  These Spanish dudes seemed a bit more chill than that, but still very serious for guys who looked like they were late to help Captain Jack look for the Black Pearl.

I would have taken pictures of the guards and their funny hats, but I should mention that I am taking all my photos using a netbook and its webcam as the world’s crappiest makeshift digital camera.  As in, when I want to take a picture of something, I am literally fishing a netbook out of my bag, opening it up, waiting for it to resume off of standby, clicking some buttons to take the blurry crappy picture, and then shutting it back down. Yes. I look like a total freak show doing it, but I don’t care. I had a camera in my cell phone, but it isn’t available at the moment.  I also brought a legit digital camera, but no memory card. So I didn’t have other options.

There are lots of funny little shops around on the streets.  In particular they have a lot of “manor de juegos” (house of games) where you can go play slot machines and presumably other kinds of gambling.  They have sports houses with several HDTVs where you can watch futbol or something.  I didn’t go in.

Lots of people here smoke.  You don’t see it so much as you smell it.  Even in a lot of buildings, smoking is either allowed or else there is a fairly sizeable “fumar” section.  People say that we in the US are way behind Europe in every way, but I always bring this one up as a counterexample.  Europeans are very forward-thinking in most ways, but they still like to suck ash way too much.

Spanish couples like to make out.  In public.  A lot.  If you wait in line at a restaurant or something, there’s about a 40% chance some couple in line will start making out in front of you.  I saw a couple making out on the metro train.  Didn’t bother me; it’s just different.  I saw the occasional gay couple walking around; it’s kind of hard to tell, since it’s hard to tell if they’re just European.  But some of them look a little too European, if you know what I mean.  Or they’re two guys holding hands, which even my spotty ‘dar can pick up.

The police (“la policia”) here are pretty funny.  They are the most laid back policemen I have seen.  They are few and far between, and a lot of them are on horseback.  They have the occasional tiny, non-threatening-looking car as well with “POLICIA” on the side of it (see below).  Somehow just the word seems funny.  Policia.  It doesn’t sound menacing at all.  And they look so lethargic, just sitting around, either on a bench, on their horse, wherever.  They don’t have that tough/serious look you would expect from American cops.  Maybe this is a good thing.

Prostitution must be legal here, or else la policia must not care very much about it.  Because if you walk down certain streets around 10-11pm, there are quite a few ladies of the night about.  And these are well-lit, not especially ghetto, streets full of people.  They will stand there posing, or they’ll walk up to some gentleman and put themselves on his arm and whisper sweet nothings at him.  I didn’t see anybody pick one up, but their presence was very noticeable.  They also seem pretty chill about porno.  You can find lavish adult shops and magazine stands selling essentially 100% porn here.  Do people really still buy porn?  Don’t they have the internet in Spain?

Spanish are pretty serious about their Catholicism.  I went into some giant church cathedrals on my walks, such as Catedral de la Almudena.  The interiors are huge and lavish, full of pretty stained glass, big displays, candles, the works.  In these churches there are usually sections labeled “no turistas” (no tourists) that are for actual legit worshipping.  Whenever I was able to peek into such an area, it was always full of people.  At 2pm on a Thursday.  Out in the main tourist-allowed area, there were a good lot of people sitting in the pews and looking at the various displays.  Often they would cross themselves or mutter some prayer with their head down as they looked at these symbols.  Like I said, they don’t mess around.

I also went in one “cripto” (which means “crypt,” though I got excited for a moment because I thought it meant “crypto” like encryption).  It had all these giant marble grave slabs set into the floor and walls, each with somebody’s name and years of birth/death on it.  Some of them had fresh flowers laying on them.

The food is interesting and generally yummy.  A personal challenge for me is to find food “sin leche” or “no productos lacteos” (without dairy products).  This is a challenge both because of the language barrier and because most of their food revolves around, well, leche.  Ordering things with fish in them seems to be a safe bet, but who wants to eat that?  I have ordered conservatively and have gotten by without any major stomach aches so far.

The main meal of the day for Spanish people is “la comida,” which means literally “the food” but actually means “lunch.”  They take it at around 2pm.  A lot of places put out a sign advertising their “menu del dia” which is a selection of various yummy dishes that you can order as a group. You usually get at least two courses, a “postres” (dessert) and “bebido” (drink).

So they stuff their faces at lunch and then go back to their jobs until 8-9pm or so, presumably.  They eat dinner super late after that, at around 10pm.  But their evening meal is a lighter one made up of smaller dishes (“tapas”).  Then they stay up till 7am partying and drinking and dancing, or something.  So basically the average Spanish person’s meals and nightlife closely resembles that of a drugged out American raver.

A lot of the restaurants are counter-only, so really they’re more like bars (“cervezerias”).  Keep in mind that Spain is a smushed town full of small shops and restaurants packed into every storefront, so a lot of the little restaurants are just a counter with a guy behind it and 5-6 stools at the counter.  So you walk up and sit down and order your food from the guy and he prepares it.  There are usually 2-3 grungy looking Spanish barfly types there to keep you company.

They have some foreign food like “Coreano” (Korean) and “Japonez” (Japanese), but the places looked sketchy and were always dead empty of customers.  I never chanced it.  Somehow I doubt that Madrid has the world’s best bi bim bob or bulgogi.  I did have lunch once at a place called “Maoz” that served veggie falafel pita bread things, so that’s something.

One of the larger chains I ate at is called Museo del Jamon (literally, “Museum of Ham”) which has racks of meat hanging all around and lots of various meaty tapas you can order.  Almost every restaurant in Madrid also serves alcohol, so most of the people in the Museo del Jamon are standing or hunched at a counter with a little plate of some meat tapas and a goblet glass of light blonde-colored beer.  It’s a noisy place; they are boisterous and chatty folks.  It’s kind of hard for a gringo to place his order or understand anything.  But the food is good.

They do have some American health food staples such as McDonald’s, Burger King, and KFC.  It cracks me up because each place lists their various value menu items under “tapas.”  I wasn’t aware that a 6-piece nuggets or a medium fries counted as “tapas,” but now I know. They serve regular Coke and Coca-Cola “Light” (Diet Coke).  I peeked in the McD’s and BK to see who was in there.  I thought maybe it would be full of white people, scared American tourists reaching for something familiar and comfortable.  Nope; full of Spanish.  Not a single American-looking person I could see.  They also have Starbucks (natch), complete with tapas menu.  They even have Dunkin Donuts, but it’s called “Dunkin Coffee.”  I think this is because every coffee shop either has the word “cafe” or “coffee” in its name, to be unambiguous.  Also maybe they realize that naming your restaurant after donuts wouldn’t play as well here as it does in the States.

That’s not the only place you see American culture.  They have lots of ads for various American products.  Their cinemas show translated versions of American films, including “los maltidos bastardos” (Inglorious Basterds, with Brad Pitt) and “reunen en las vegas” (The Hangover).  They also had a live theater where they were playing an all-Spanish version of Monty Python’s Spamalot musical.  I overheard some audio where they were singing “siempre something something positivo, de la vidaaa!” (Always look on the bright side of life) to the same tune from Life of Brian.

You will see the occasional person wearing an English / USA t-shirt.  I saw a guy wearing a black shirt with a red Thundercats (Hooo!) logo on it. Way to represent. The funniest one I saw was a guy wearing the classic green shirt that says (front) “Make 7″ – (back) “Up Yours.”  So money.  There are also a lot of folks to be seen wearing t-shirts with mangled English on them, such as one that said, “(brand name), in memory of, blue jeans.”  Oh really?  I’m so sorry to hear about your loss.  When did your blue jeans pass away?