April 28, 2000

It became such a noticable change going over the border from Morocco into Ceuta, which is a small Spanish enclave on the moroccan coast just across from gibraltor. It was defiently one of those borders reminiscet of the tijuana/us border crossing, where we got dropped off in a garage and took one last over-priced taxi ride to "la frontera" with all sorts of shady activity, last-minute where do i stand in line questions and most importantly, where exactly is the border! We arrived during the Spanish siesta,when everything closes from about 1:30 to 4:30 pm everyday, no one was out on the streets, shops were all closed and the cafes were all filled with everyone taking "la comida".

Ceuta itself was only going to be a one night stopover to get the morning ferry. The ticket buying experience was one not hopefully to repeat. Walking into the ferry building was like being bombarded with every shop selling the same tickets but at various prices, rates,times and from multiple companys to boot, all very confusing. We bought ours from one company and tried to use it with another and ended up missing our boat cause we could not find the dock trough all the construction haze. It seems no one took our ferry except for backpackers and a few Moroccan families heading up to Spain. It was quite a peaceful ride once on, watching the dolphins chasing the wake off of Gilbraltor was quite pictursque.

RONDA/ANTEQUERA,SPAIN

April 30, 2000

After leaving the ferry in Algeciras we beelined it toward the RENFE train station to catch the next train up to the Andalucian mountain town of Ronda, which we pulled out of the LP book. It was a very beautiful ride up through the mountain canyons into Ronda, which is a small town situated on a high cliff with an old Muslim quarter across this deep gorge. mostly we wanted to chill here as I was fighting a cold and we needed some rest while waiting out the Fiesta in Sevilla.

4 nights in Ronda was enough as the tourist swarms, up from the Costa Del Sol, were over-running the place like some sort of modern day-tripping Visagoths!!

We wanted to head straight to Sevilla but there was an Easter Feria going on and we were told by other travellers that rooms were hard to find. So we decided to head to another small town in Andalucia called Antequera, which was very peaceful except for all the 2-stroke scooter noise that was out of control (earplugs are a must when travelling). We spent alot of time exploring this old Muslim castillo overlooking the town, drinking cheap wine and taking a hike in the "El Torcal" mountain park in the pouring rain. Defiently a good place to hang for awhile as the tourist factor was very minimal.

SEVILLA/MADRID,SPAIN

May 8, 2000

What a wild and crazy intro to Sevilla! We took the easy train (2.5hrs) into Sevilla, found the tourist office at the station, got a map, info, and went to the hotel reservation booth all by 11:30am. Left our bags in a locker to look for a place to stay. Headed to Hotel Alphalfa and went in circles trying to find it in the small medina like squares. Finally, found it and, as usual, realized we passed right by it when we first got there. The young woman was not hospitable, though we looked at the attic room which was neat - all colored glass arched windows with a balcony and a bathroom 3 stories downstairs. Had character, but the woman didn«t make it welcoming. Went again in circles heading towards the Barrio de Santa Cruz old area and trying to hide the map to not make us stand out. But as we soon saw, every tourist around every corner was with a map in their face because it was so confusing to navigate. Went to 2 other places that were in the book, but only dark rooms for 4,000 ptas. As we were walking around Plaza Santa Maria with the LP book open, we were approached by a "Kiefer" (Sutherland) character asking if we needed a room. "My friend - a very nice room for 4,000 ptas." Do we follow him? Is he going to take for a ride? Well it all worked out and we are staying at a pension with 3 rooms not offically listed on Nardo Street. The woman is very very nice, but very talkative once we ask her a question or tell her where we have visited in the city. The room is the best so far with hot water all day!. She washed my socks without asking and lent us an umbrella "para agua" whenever we needed it.

After resolving the room thing, we had a big lunch and decided to dash for the bullring to get tickets for the fight at 6:30pm which had a good line-up of known fighters We bought what seemed to be scalped tickets from a man in fron to the ring saying "official, official" holding a postcard of the seats. So we took his word and got two seats for 4,000 ptas. The seats were made of bricks and cement - kinda like an ancient Roman colliseum. The book was right - very hard seats. Everbody had personal cushions they brought or used newspaper - veterans.

The fight was amazingly bizzare and intriguing. The bull gets thrown out into the ring and stands around confused and dazed. The torradors, the junior matadors start flasing their bright magenta capes to instigate a charge. This goes on for a bit, which is the most choreographed poetic part. Then the horses! The picadores, a man on a horse "harpoons" the bull between the shoulders and irks him enough to get him to instigate a charge - though the charge is at the horse. I could not watch at this point. The bull would charge tucking his horns in and aiming for the belly of the horse with the man on top. He would eventually push the horse against the bullring and sometimes down the horse. The horse had large leather padding all over, but it was so raw and animalistic and purposely torturous to the bull to stab it and have it continously charge the horse over and over. The horse was blindfolded, so he didn«t "care" or revolt. None of the horses were hurt eventhough some went down pretty hard and fast. It took several men to get the horse back up and several other torradores to distract the bull away from the horse. This happened for every fight - 6 in all. It was hard to watch. The proceeding parts were about tiring the bull and adding more stabs into the back in a cerimonial fashion by the matador until the final stab by him, after a "dance" with the bull. The art of the matador was in some ways poetic, too, but at this point it was to further tease, torture and mock the deminishing power of the bull. Eventually the bull falls and the "ole" cheers come out! The bull is then chained to several horses with bells and pom-poms and celebretorily dragged off the ring. It was as all intriguing to watch over and over, but at the same time, the more I thought about the process, the more I squirmed in my hard seat. The dance with the bull i respect, but the rest is hard to accept as a sport i would want to follow even though the bullring had a fullhouse. After 3 hours of the fight, we got our bags and headed home on another confusing route on the buses.

May 12th - Came back to our room from a day of relaxing in the big Parque Maria Luis and heard from Pilar, the pension«s owner, that a room was broken into. The "bad guys" had broken into all the rooms and took some of our hidden cash and travelers checks. Stayed up till 4am calling the usual to cancel and replace stuff. This had left a bad taste in our mouths about the whole "Kiefer" guy who brought us in and the two other scummy looking "travellers" who showed up later on. Pilar was genuinly concerned about us and immediately changed the locks. Her tall Pitbull looking dog, Pedro, was a good guard dog for the place, until you were inside and considered a "guest". In the end, we got replacements in the morning and got burned on a horrible exchange rate at the trainstation with no other cambio options that day.

MADRID - The whole incident didn«t really hit until we got to there where it was hot and the usual big city runaround. We were tired, cranky, we argued a lot, wore ourselves out, ran around looking for food and shade. Otherwise, we arrive in Madrid expecting to see bars and nightclubs open till 4am, as the LP book says. Well we didn«t find it (at least in the few areas we explored). Our pension San Antonio in the old part of town was neat. We had a cute balcony and a decent sized room with an Irish bar right accross the street. Went to the Prado (our main reason for stopping in Madrid) and saw incredible old classic paintings by the masters. Incredible to see them in person, but after awhile, they start to look the same - all the kings and others who had money to pay for their portait were the majority of the collection. In Brief, that was how art was in those days. Went to the modern museum Reina Sofia and and saw more great works. It is hard to write about all the wonderful influences in such a short posting, but seeing it all made us realize we wanted to take up painting and other arts again upon return. Jon saw Picasso«s "Guernica" for the first time. We topped off the day with a nightcap at the Irish bar with the blond curly-haired woman who spoke spainish and a slavic language. And, markets were run by asians speaking spanish only! That was our short 3-day impression of Madrid.

BILBAO, SPAIN

May 20, 2000

Took 5hr train on regional line and it took 6 hours. Nearly all of the people on the train were 65yrs+ and didn«t seem to know each other at first. But several hours in, conversations were formed across the seats. The train was made of an older color palette of muted yellows and dark olive greens. It was a step into and older time with a new paint job. The person next to me was, I call "Rose", a mature woman with a bright red flowerly pleated skirt - probably her favorite for special trips and occasions. She had her whole lunch (bocadillo, but fresh), knife, dessert and fruit promptly to be eaten a bit after the train was in its way. We had our usual lunch of tuna, white hard baguette, cheese and our supermarket spices as flavor savior with a beer from a vending machine all on the floor of the Madrid train station.

Our main reason for going to Bilbao was to see the new Guggenheim museum. It was an incredible architectural site set along the river right in town. The outside of the building is made of sheets of semi-matte steel layered like fish scales. The overall shape is completely organic - no two intersecting walls or panels are perpendicular, parallel or semingly measured angles that someone carefully calculated to make look accidental. The wining architect of the competition had to create ideas in 3 weeks. Frank Gehry won and had the challenge to create a modern look that would be fully integrated into the city (the curving river, many bridges, stony old buldings covered in the industrial soot) and express the past industrial past of shipbuilding and fishing commerce. Those metal outer sheets subtely relfected the changing blue sky and sun«s glow and surrounding buildings with a collage of toned downs colors all melting together like watery watercolors. The interior heart of the museum was a full swoop upward like a cathedral but without any straight angles. The walls narrowed as they went up, but others did the reverse. If i moved 2 inches in one direction , looked up again, i saw a wonderfully different view to entice my eye for hours. There were organicly shaped tall "mushroom" stalks intersection curved balconies echoing the NY Guggenhiem space, but so much more exquisitedly natural. If you went up and looked down , people were small elements in a fantastical white-walled, layered glass panels and soft tan marbled world like being inside a whale with not symetry. The main show was the Art of the Motorcycle, which both of us were drooling to see in person and had missed in NY. The layout of this show also echoed the organic, softly curving edges of the museum along with the exquisit designs of the bikes using the spotless chrome highights reflecting off the walls along with the shadows. We stayed in this space for 3 hours easlily, just for one show. The exterior was a photographers heaven! Pix were not allowed inside, but i saw several people shooting inside the heart when the patroling security guard tuned his back. Overall, Bilbao and the museum were a place that offered much more than i had expected from the description in the book. i was sorry to leave the beautiful building in such short time and without snagging a spy pix from the interior.

SAN SEBASTION, SPAIN

May 23, 2000

San Sebastion is a small city on the bay of Biscay coast in the heart of Basque country, this place has a real small French city feel to it and it's mostly laid back with a good couple of beaches and plenty of wall to wall bars. It seems that its also popular with Americans as they seem to be everywhere. We came here mostly to slow down abit before heading over to Barcelona. The town has a very cool old section that we stayed in with lots of decaying pesiones over all-night tapas bars. We both discovered that the tapas up here are some of the best we found in Spain, as they make them fresh and lay them out on the bar under all the swinging ham legs for you to just point and say how much you'd like. We explored this great set of Spainish forts and fishing boats that keep the place full of fresh fish. The one funny thing we did was to see the movie "Acid House" with Spainish sub-titles and we found that we could read the Spainish sub-titles better than trying to understand the Glasgow accents!!

BARCELONA. SPAIN

May 28, 2000

Took the over-night train to Barcelona crammed into a cabin with reclining seats with these two guys who looked like "Milli Vanilli". the AC stopped after awhile and the whole cabin started to smell like a den of dirty socks! The ride was mostly a 9 hour stop and start affair with everyone sleeping on top of each other as the train lurched along. Barcelona is like the art capitol of Spain. There is just soo much to see in every direction. Mostly we wanted to see all the Gaudi Architecture, Parks and Interiors, lots of it around too. We are staying in the Barn Gotic section of town, the old "Gothic Quarter" very close to the action on the "La Rarnbla" which is a street that defies description except that it seems to hold half the population of Barcelona. lots and lots of street performers,tarot readers,human statues overpriced cafes an plenty of drunks and pickpockets to keep you on your toes. Barcelona is quite fun and loud, a bit tooo much American Frat boy drunks to keep you away from your sleep. We are getting set to head to Italy from here via the Gran Navi ferry to Genoa.