Gypsy Rhythms

There are still two towers guarding the former city walls

Our final week in Spain we spent three days in Valencia and four in Barcelona.

So from Seville we grabbed a nine-hour train to Valencia, where we did two things of note - went to the massive aquarium and went to a flamenco show.

The aquarium, or L'Oceanografic, is the biggest in Europe and is home to thousands of species of fish, birds and aquatic mammals. It has new tanks and lots of english information, which is great because its always a plus when I understand what is going on. It was expensive; but we spent five hours wandering through the exhibits and the various climate displays. The dolphin show was packed with daring tricks that to my knowledge aren't standard in North America - a trainer would have a pair of dolphins throw her up into the air ten or fifteen feet to do flips and dives, for example.

The flamenco show we saw was small. The venue was a gently lit bar full of locals, mostly - the kind of place where performers know their audience. We grabbed a glass of vino tinto and settled into a bench against a side wall as a guitarist, a drummer and a singer took their place on the stage. Flamenco music is beautiful. It's a gypsy art taken to new heights by the Spanish; the intricate rhythms and graceful, yearning melodies pack a powerful, wild sadness.

Just as we'd become resigned to the idea that we would be only seeing a music show, which is common, a woman in a feathery black and white dress joined them sitting on the stage. She looked nervous - maybe she doesn't perform often - but she put on a hell of a show. Swaying to to the rises in the music, twirling her hands and twisting about, then suddenly the stacatto of her heels and her arms snap sharply. As the music became more intense, she beat the crazy rhythms out and swirled and snapped faster - gorgeous. By the end of the show I was standing on the bench to see because the enthusiastic crowd had moved up from the bar and I wanted to watch her feet.


I'd been hesitant about going to a show in Valencia because I'd heard that flamenco is just not the same away from its heartland in the south of Spain. I could not be happier that we stumbled on such an informal, intimate show.

We grabbed a bus the last Saturday afternoon in April and headed to Barcelona, only a four hour ride and on a decently comfortable bus.

We'd heard a lot about the pickpockets in Barcelona - a few years ago there was apparently a real problem, and even today it isn't safe to take too many valubles out onto the streets. dan noticed a couple of guys watching me closely when we first got into the metro system with our giant backpacks (obviously holding everything we own...) but we were careful to be aware and over our four days we felt as safe as in any other big city.

Me and Mindy on a tapas mission

The next day we met up with Mindy and Lindsay, who I worked with in Ottawa - Dan and I got day-drunk with Mindy, hopping from bar to bar while we wandered looking for beer and tapas and catching up on each others' adventures. Lindsay's flight didn't make it until late in the evening, at which point her and I got the full Barcelona experience and stayed out til six in the morning talking to Brits and drinking tequila. I was obviously pretty rough the next day, although I didn't have to catch a flight like the girls did. It was so great to see familiar faces - good luck in your travels, ladies!

Sagrada from Park Guell - Just. Massive. 

Barcelona was a great city to wander around - the buildings in the old city are gorgeous and the streets are alive with patios and revelers every day of the week (when the weather is nice!). And the architecture... we spent a full day on Gaudi. We bought day passes for the metro and flitted from site to site to check out the most famous sites - the Sagrada Familia and the Park Guell.

The inside of the Sagrada

The Sagrada Familia is well known as the church that has been under construction since the 1880s (and is certainly nowhere near finished) but the architecture is what astounds people once they get anywhere near it. Two of the three facades on the outside of the building are finished - elaborate illustrations of the life and death of Christ in the form of statues and carvings, overlooked by masive towers, the grandest of which are as yet also unfinished. Gaudi took much of his inspiration from the natural world, so the columns on the inside are designed to appear as trees stretching up to a leafy canopy. The most intricate details are drawn from Gaudi's research into the mechanics of the natural world, and the rejection of straight lines makes for a daring and unique look that stands out in a country already known for its giant cathedrals and elaborate churches.

I feel as if I could spend weeks in Barcelona and barely scratch the surface. I was worried that because I had fallen so in love with Portugal, I wouldn't enjoy Spain, but I worried needlessly. Spain is a stunner and I'd go back in a heartbeat.

S

Seville

Seville is every Spanish stereotype you can think of. It unabashedly embraces late nights, wild gypsy music, bullfighting, Flamenco dancing and partying til dawn. It is the hottest place in Europe, literally, and is featured in more operas and stories (think the Barber of Seville and Carmen) than anywhere other Spanish city. And rather than resent these labels, or try to fake an image to live up to them, Seville simply IS the label, with a passionate zeal for life.

Cathedral from the tower

After our evening drinking Sangria on the hostel rooftop, we decided to get some culture into us. We took the hostel`s free (well, tip-based) walking tour and over the course of a four-and-a-half hour ramble through the city, we learned a LOT. What sticks out most to me now was the architecture - Seville`s signature cathedral, one of the biggest in all of Europe, stands where the Islamic mosque stood until the city was captured and Christianized in the 12th century (in fact until a fire a few centuries after the conquest, the cathedral actually just existed in the building of the mosque itself, because the king liked the building).

the organ

The tower that adjoins to the cathedral, called the Giralda, was once the minaret of the old mosque. The windows have the traditional keyhole shapes, and the way to the top of the tower is a ramp rather than stairs so that the man calling everyone to prayer five times a day could ride a donkey up the seventy metres rather than walk.



We went into the cathedral the next day to explore and the thing is huge... the organ alone is over a hundred feet high. The decorations were all made in the colonial era, so there is Peruvian gold all over the elaborate displays. It is stunning.

Ham hocks hanging in a traditional tapas bar

After our walking tour, we jumped right onto the tapas tour, also organized by the hostel. Tapas are small plates of virtually anything... meat platters, mushrooms stuffed with cheese, stews, salads, fish, olives, pig cheeks, eeevvverything. It is essentially how you eat in southern Spain. This tour took us to a traditional tapas bar, the kind with full smoked pig legs hanging from the ceiling, to a more modern place with contemporary dishes, and to one half way between that had amazing tapenade  (on fried bread. So oily. So delicious).

All fed and mildly liqoured, we took off on the bar tour (all tours all day!) led by a leaping madman of a guide. On a Monday night we found decent bars and saw the nightlife districts of Seville. Dan and I left early... at 3:30 am. Seville is a wild, fun city. Dan even danced. Well. Swayed.

The next day we took it easy, explored the cathedral and went out for more tapas for Dan`s birthday dinner. A nice day after a wild party.

S

Schengen Woes

As we left our beloved Portugal for Spain, we made two major discoveries.

Rainy hikes near Constantina

The first was that Seville is a great place to go for Easter... if you are not on a budget or if you booked WELL ahead. We did neither and were consequently out of luck. The Easter holy week, Semana Santa, is a huge deal in Seville - it's the biggest celebration in Spain and involves numerous processions  and special events. The hostels that were available were far too expensive, so we put our heads together and decided on a new plan - we would head north and hike in the Andalucian mountains for a few days and come back to Seville when Semana Santa had quieted down. So we grabbed a bus straight out of Seville and north to the Sierra Norte National Park, to the town of Constantina.

We were in Constantina from Thursday til Sunday. It stopped raining briefly after dinner on Friday. We did manage to get a couple good walks in, through the hills with their herds of sheep and goats and through olive groves. It was gorgeous... then it started to rain again.

The sunshine we waited three days to see!

Easter Sunday we caught the bus back to Seville, because in Spain the big hullabulloo all happens on Good Friday rather than Sunday. We had a quiet night at the hostel, indulging in homemade paella and all the sangria we could drink.

On Monday afternoon we went for the hostel`s free walking tour, where courtesy of some new friends, we made shocking discovery number two:

If you are not a European citizen, you are only allowed to be in a certain portion of the EU for 3 months out of any 6. Which, considering we were hoping to spend roughly 5 months in the countries that constitute this zone, is a little frustrating. This is called the Schengen Agreement. Somehow we missed it in our Euro-research!

So the next night we went out for a long dinner, sat down with a map of the EU and a list of Schengen countries, and made a new plan... rather than blow off our plans to meet Dan`s parents in Italy in late September, we just need to exit the zone by late June and not re-enter until our three months are up. This is helped enormously by the fact that Britain, Ireland, Romania and most of the Balkans are not involved.

So despite the wrench in the plan, I am actually now very excited to have the opportunity to explore more of Eastern Europe than we`d originally planned.

S

Super-campers on the Algarve

The Algrave in April... bleak, but beautiful

In the morning, in Lisbon, having successfully turned the walking tour into a pub crawl the night before, we shook off our hangovers, swore off sambuca forever and wandered off to the train station with no real plan in mind, other than it was time to head south.

The last minute decision, based on a number of google searches, was that we would head to Lagos, on the western end of the Algarve (the south coast of Portugal) and that we would try camping again. With the help of a knowledgeable cab driver we ended up at Touriscampo, just outside of the small town of Luz, four km from Lagos.

Sagres: next stop, America!

As was the case before, the campground had a small store and a restaurant (expensive this time though...) and this time we even had a pool at our disposal.

We stayed in Luz for three nights, wandering the cliffs that fall into the Atlantic during the day and eating tasty pizza and seafood from the enormous selection of touristy restaurants at night. It seems that the Algrave has a large population of British expats, and as a result the menus can be rather geared towards British tastes (but still retaining the Portuguese finesse in regards to seafood).

We took the bus out to Sagres, which was considered to be the legitimate end of the earth before Columbus happened upon the Americas. It is potentially the windiest place in existence. Set right on the corner of Europe, it's crowned by a fortress that is still in a decent state of repair, and that has a number of interesting displays on Portugal's efforts towards renewable energy. Inspired, clearly, by the wind rushing over the fortress walls, and the fury of the Atlantic beating away at the bottom of the cliffs.

Also it was free, and that was nice.

On Tuesday morning, having survived our first night of rainstorms in the tent (which held up fantastically), we packed ourselved up and hopped a train to Tavira, almost entirely because we were just not prepared to leave Portugal quite yet. We opted to continue camping, and although the new site wasn't quite the luxurious set-up we´d had in Luz, we appreciate the giant canopies over the tent sites because the rain never really quit for the next two days. We were able to explore Tavira´s cute riverside core, as well as its hilltop castle, which has been turned into a (free!) botanical garden. The castle was cute - it was nice to see a different presentation, and the view was great. Although Dan had to spot me on the steep, narrow and slippery staircases up the walls and towers.

And then, sadly, after two nights of rain and dampness in Tavira, we decided that it was time to leave Portugal behind and continue on to Spain - and Seville.

S

Lisbon - Dog Poop and a Beautiful Castle.

From Madeira, we returned to Lisbon, on Friday, April 15th. As we'd only spent one day in the city before flying out the previous Monday, we booked ourselves into the This Is Lisbon hostel in the Alfama area - the oldest, formerly Moorish, part of Lisbon. Before we'd stayed in a little budget hotel in Baixa, which was good enough for the night, but not a place to meet new people, so we were excited for the change.

We spent the afternoon wandering around Alfama and the Castello Sao Jorge (Saint George´s Castle). We weren't overly impressed with Alfama - although in character it was loads better than Baixa's commercialism, it was really dirty and really not as interesting as I was hoping for.

The exception to this is the Castle. At 7€, it was an expensive entrance fee for Portugal, but this was by far my favourite part of Lisbon. The actual fortress section of the Castle is largely intact and well labeled (excellent news for those of us with barely rudimentary Portuguese). The ruins of the former palace, which dates back to Moorish occupation in the 12th century, have been turned into an extensive and very picturesque garden, and the small museum has a wealth of in depth information on the history of Lisbon.

And from the towers of the keep, you can´t even see the dog poop on the streets below.


We went out for a night tour organized by our hostel (not a pub crawl, to our general confusion and sadness) and with a little bit of context and history, it was a little easier for us to begin to enjoy the city.

Although Porto certainly still has my heart as far as Portugese cities go, I´ll admit that I am sure Lisbon is the sort of gritty, honest city that I would absolutely learn to love with a few more days under my belt.

S