Santiago de Compostela

I'll finish up some Madrid stuff later...probably closer to the end of the semester or when I get home (in just over two weeks!). I still need to catch up about a couple of the trips I still haven't talked about...the first was on Halloween weekend to Santiago de Compostela!

Santiago de Compostela is in the Galicia region of Spain. It is near the northwest coast...I was really surprised, after seeing the dry, brown land that surrounds Madrid and extends into southern Spain, to see such green and densely forested land that was still in the same country! It is supposed to look like Ireland and I guess that's appropriate because Galicia is one of the places where the Gaelic (Galician=Gaelic) people came from. I know that my grandmother's maiden name is Spain and I believe that we've figured out that that is Irish and used to be Spanish (de Spain...from Spain). So Elise and I took a weekend trip to the land of our ancient ancient ancestors!

Santiago is also famous because it is the end of the Camino de Santiago (journey/walk of St. James). He walked from somewhere in France all the way to the northwest coast of Spain. Today, hundreds of pilgrims do the Camino every year...we saw several throughout town with their giant backpacks, thick beards, walking sticks, and shells on their backpacks to signify the number of times they've finished the Camino. We took the hour flight from Madrid on a Friday morning and got to our hostel early that afternoon. I had been feeling pretty sick and weak for a couple of days, so we both napped and then started to walk around the city (not a big one!) to find the old town and a place to eat. I didn't have much of an appetite (so if you know me, you know that I was feeling VERY sick), but we stopped at a place where I got tea and a little pastry to get some energy. There was a beautiful garden in the old town, as well as winding streets and great little shops. We even got to listen to two great tenors singing in the street...they were fantastic! The Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela is the main reason people go...it is giant! Gorgeous cathedral and one of the most interesting bits of info is that they have a giant, ancient air freshener (incense, I'm sure) that hangs over the pews because of the stench that the pilgrims gave off after their trek. That night, Elise and I went to dinner and got the local specialties -- pulpo de gallega (octopus tentacles!), shrimp, and pimientos de padron (fried little green peppers), and some great Galician wine. It was a great dinner (I wish I could have eaten more, but my stomach was still struggling) and we were certainly entertained by the lobster tank that we sat next to!

The next morning, we headed to the bus station to catch a bus for a few hours to Fisterre or Finisterre. It was known by the Romans as the end of the world (Fini=end, terra=earth) because it's about as far West in Europe as you can go (I think one city in Portugal may actually be a bit further, but you get the picture). We were on the bus with a bunch of stinky pilgrims (never thought I'd say that), but they were entertaining and we ended up finding one of the cloudiest, foggiest days...but it made the coastline look all the more like it truly was the end of the world. It was a pretty lousy day (rainy and chilly), but we had a good time walking around the town, getting a bite to eat (some of the biggest and best shrimp I've ever had) and enjoying the scenery and the fishing village together. That night (Halloween), we forgot our costumes (unless we were trying to look like American students studying abroad and taking a weekend trip, in that case, we nailed it) and were exhausted from the week, so we called it an early night, found a Domino's pizza for a taste of home and awaited our early morning flight the next day.

Flew back to Madrid to great weather, but it was really fantastic to get to Santiago, see some very interesting sights and enjoy the green landscape that reminded us both a lot of North Carolina!

More Madrid

I also finally got to go to El Escorial. Though Madrid has a royal palace, El Escorial is better known as the grand home of Spanish royals during the Renaissance period. It is about an hour's train/bus ride from Madrid and is a great day trip. I tried to go very early in the semester, but it was closed (I found that out at the front door) and the second time it was closed again (I found that out before I left Madrid that morning).

Robert, Kesh, and I went with a group of students from Vanderbilt to El Escorial while Elise was traveling with her sister. It's always fun to see a palace or castle (this place is a combination of the two...old Spanish architecture but gorgeous gardens and grand rooms), but the best part was that El Escorial is like an art museum, displaying just a fraction of the giant collection of the Spanish royals...complete with works by Titian, El Greco, Velazquez, and other immortals. Really cool to see.

After lunch, we took another bus to El Valle de los Caidos (the valley of the fallen). This place was important and interesting for two reasons -- it is a giant memorial/monument to the soldiers who died in the Spanish Civil War (early 20th century) and it is also the tomb of Francisco Franco. Franco was a fascist dictator who took power of Spain in the 1930s and held it until the 1970s. Though he kept Spain technically out of World War II, Franco also was a buddy of Hitler and let Germany bomb Spanish towns here and there. Though his policies were responsible for boosting the Spanish economy in the 1950s, he also really set Spain back technologically and socially...some of those affects are still seen today...it is only in the last 20 years that Spain is really catching up with the rest of the world. El Valle was really cool...great views in the hills of Spain...a giant cross on top of one hill with a tunnel-like church built into the hill. It is a very creepy church...it is very long and cold and looks like a missile silo. Still, it was interesting with its tapestries of the Apocalypse and the tomb of Franco. Very interesting and worthwhile day.

A bit more to come on Madrid in the next post...

MADRID

Well. Almost a month with no posts. Great job, Graham.

In that month (the month of no posts), I have gotten to travel to plenty of places like Santiago de Compostela, Paris, Venice and Milan, and Toledo, so that should keep me busy on this blog through the rest of the semester. First though, I'm going to catch you (that's a presumptuous 'you'...leave a comment to let me know you're still reading!) up on life here in Madrid.

I must begin by talking about the weather. It is absolutely phenomenal. It has gotten to the point where I rarely need to check online to see if it will be sunny. Every two weeks, we have one or two cloudy days and the rare rainy day. Though it has cooled off since early September, it is still in the 60s, sunny and clear just about every day. This past week (November, mind you), I wore shorts and sandals and walked to school all week. It is a magical, magical place.

In late October, I got the opportunity to go with Elise and Robert to see a Real Madrid futbol (soccer) game. Real means royal, so the team has some history with the Spanish royal family honoring the soccer club as the "royal" team of Madrid. Real Madrid is a team comparable to the New York Yankees -- huge global fanbase, the most championships in history, purchases the best and most famous players (Cristiano Ronaldo), and usually wins. We got to see Real play against AC Milan, one of its rivals. The stadium, Estadio Santiago Bernabeu, is about a 2 minute walk from our NYU campus, so we are very familiar with it. We paid some high prices for nosebleed seats (the stadium holds about 80,000, I believe), but it was one of our best experiences in Madrid. We arrived to the stadium about 45 minutes before the game started, ran across the street with hundreds of other people to a grocery store so we could make sandwiches (bocadillos) to bring in. Finding our seats at the 2nd row from the top of the stadium, we had a great view of the field (maybe not the players' jerseys) and the crowd...the home crowd looked a great deal like the Cameron Crazies if the Crazies were all 45 year-old Spanish men. The AC Milan fans were shoved in a corner at the top of the stadium surrounded by netting to keep them from throwing things onto the field! It was a very tense match from the beginning, with plenty of scoring, drama, faking injuries (come on, soccer), singing and shouting, but Real Madrid was upset by a score of 3-2. What a great time!

I'll continue this Madrid update in my next post...