How's your day going?

78 degrees here on the Mediterranean =)

La Sagrada Familia

Antonio Gaudi's master work: La Sagrada Familia. It's been under construction for... like almost 200 years, but unfortunately there were a huge amount of cranes and scaffolding out when I took this photo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Sagrada_Familia

Antoni Gaudi

Antoni Gaudi is a very famous architect that has had a massive influence on the architecture of Barcelona. His architecture is notable for its flowing, sinuous lines, as evidenced below.

Park Guell originally was designed by Gaudi to be basically a housing development for uber rich. It was never completed, and was eventually turned into a park.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_G%C3%BCell

La Perdrera, a house designed by Gaudi (above)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Pedrera

Casa Batllo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casa_Batll%C3%B3

Perspective

Just a follow up to a previous post that was expressing the luck involved with randomly pulling into a parking garage that was literally 100 feet from our hotel. This a picture I took of the city from an overlook... There are 1 or 2 parking garages in this mess (click to enlarge to see the city)

Technical Difficulties

The wifi in this hotel is extremely flaky. This is the first time I've been able to use the internet in over 24 hours, so this may be the last update for the blog. If it improves over the next couple days, I'll put up some final info.

Lucky Bastard

A common topic of conversation on this blog has been our propensity for getting lost very easily.

The more we travel this way, the more we have gotten the hang of how to navigate like a Spaniard. The past two or three trips between cities haven't been nearly as harrowing (though not without incident).

I intend to type of a comprehensive review of our dinner at Arzak last night - which was just amazing, but I wanted to give a quick update on today's progress. Today we arrived in our final city of the trip - Barcelona. It was the longest stretch of highway thus far; about 5 hours from San Sebastian.

We made it to the city with little incident (one hiccup on the highway which turned out OK when the road sign didn't match our directions, but intuition and direction sense prevailed).

But getting to our hotel INTO the city was... well, bizarre. As is typical, I am able to navigate us to the city, but once we're in the thrum drum of a highly populated metro area, there either are NO road signs, or the signs that exist are too small to read in time.

But this was freakin' amazing.

Having learned from our Madrid experience, I knew better than to try to drive directly to the hotel. My basic plan was to get us somewhere in the region of the hotel, anticipating the fact that I wouldn't be able to navigate while driving. So I managed to get us somewhere that I thought was close - but unfortunately was very very very lost, and not really recognizing anything at all.

So I just found a parking garage, and pulled right in. We lock the car door, walk out of the garage, and spend a few moments trying to memorize the area because this garage seems to have no name, and there are no street signs on the intersection. The last thing I want to do is lose the car by not being able to return to the garage.

We walk out onto the main street. Pelai street.

I look at my hotel address. Pelai street.

I turn my head slightly to the right.

I look up.

There's my hotel.

Now - I want you to imagine doing this in a large city. You just randomly pull into a parking garage... and it happens to be not 100 feet from where you are trying to go...

If I believed in miracles ;)

The other bit of serendipity is that, once we got checked into the hotel, we are of course starving. Anticipating the typical issue of not being able to find anything open at this time of day, we basically walk into this little deli thing two doors down from our hotel, seeing that it's open. The irony is that, as I've mentioned previously on this blog, the impetus for this trip was Mario Batali's "Spain - On the Road Again" documentary.

Among the four participants of Mario's posse on that trip was New York Time's food critic, Mark Bittman.

This little deli that we walked into had an advertisement quoting Bittman as saying it had the best sandwich he'd ever had.

Now, I'm sure he was being a little tongue in cheek, but it was another funny anecdote.

So here I am, chilling at our new digs. We had a private hot tub on our balcony in Madrid. Apparently the same holds true in Barcelona ;)

I'll type up the Arzak review in a bit. It was pretty unbelievable.

Pintxos

Pintxos, Basque for tapas, seem to be the dietary staple of San Sebastian. Count me a fan.

Above: I think I located the American Embassy.

I took a few snaps of these places. There are no less than... I dunno, 50 of these things within a 5 square block area. These are various different ones that I photographed right quick.

San Sebastian

San Sebastian is in the North Eastern corner of Spain, on the Atlantic coast. It is the capital of Basque Country. Less than 10 miles from the French border, it has a very French flavor. Architecturally it is much more like Paris than anything we've seen in Spain.

Tomorrow night we have reservations for Arzak, but we mostly are just taking it easy today. Had an excruciating wait for 9PM for the restaurants to open for dinner. A major issue has been, on travel days, we don't get settled in to our hotel until after local restaurants have closed for lunch. An oddity to Spanish culture is that... they just close. Like - lunch is from 1 to 3. If you get there after 3, you ain't eating until 9PM at the earliest. ALL of the restaurants close.

The attached photo is the view from our room ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Sebastian,_Spain

Marques De Riscal Wine Tour

Wandered around the winery of Marques de Riscal today on their tour. Saw some bottles that were bottled in 1860.

Shout Out to Mrs. Mullan!

Pillow Menu!

The impetus for this trip was watching Mario Batali's "Spain - On the Road Again" documentary. You've probably (if you are astute) have noticed the links I keep...well, linking to on this blog.

As you have no doubt read below (or will read below, depending on how studiously you keep clicking refresh on your browser as you await my updates with baited breath) - we are staying at the hotel at Marques de Riscal.

Anyway, this hotel in whence we currently stay, has a freakin' PILLOW MENU.

Check it:

Basque is Freakin' Weird (but it's COOL!)

Check it:

This photo says it all...

Wine Country

Rioja is in the North Eastern portion of Spain. It is the most famous region of Spain for wine - it's basically the Napa of Spain, though they'd be insulted by such a comparison. They're also smack in the middle of Basque Country (Pais Vasco), which I am quickly falling in love with.

Today we are staying at the winery: Marques de Riscal. Keeping in tradition with Bilbao, we're still on our Frank Gehry kick. Only this time, we're staying in an actual building designed by him.

After a rather harrowing drive through the most amazing (but scary) Basque mountains (we were extremely lost), we finally managed to navigate ourselves (after hamfistedly asking for directions... they don't speak much Castillian up here, and my Basque is non-existant) - to the hotel. It was worth the effort. I am now comfortably relaxed, about two bottles of Tempranillo in. I ain't goin' anywhere for the next 24+ hours.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KduS970_1GQ

Man, I love Spain.

Bilbao by Moonlight

The Guggenheim from the river

Reflections

Moonlight silhouette

Orbs

More Guggenheim Photos

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

By far, the most famous attraction of Bilbao is Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7DwhvAhyCA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guggenheim_bilbao

The museum consists of three floors inside, however the first floor is primarily one permanent exhibit involving these gigantic curvaceous steel structures, accompanied by several plaques explaining the use of steel alloys in the construction of large structures (somewhat ironic, given that this museum is made of titanium).

The second floor was, unfortunately, closed today due to them swapping out an exhibition.

Finally the third floor was a temporary exhibit involving Dutch masters, containing a bunch of paintings borrowed, ironically, from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. I say ironically, because I saw all these paintings last Christmas when we visited... the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam!

The actual architecture of the museum itself was infinitely more interesting than anything within. I'll just let the photos speak for themselves...

Bilbao at Night

Just took a cool photo out of my hotel window, experimenting with slow shutter speeds. This is the bridge right outside our hotel. You can sorta see the Guggenheim on the left, but it's not the focal point of the photo. I was hoping they'd light it up at night, but it doesn't appear to be.

Travel Map Update

So far, we have traveled to:

Paris

Madrid

Toledo

El Escorial

Segovia

Avila

Salamanca

Bilbao

We just checked into our hotel in Bilbao. Our basic M.O. seems to be this:

1) I research the crap out of how to get somewhere.

2) There are no road signs.

3) I navigate by instinct to get us to the next city (the hardest part is typically getting us OUT of the current city, and onto a highway going in roughly the correct direction).

4) We enter the new city, and depending on how large a city it is, we get various degrees of lost trying to find the hotel.

So, it's always a test of patience. I personally don't mind getting lost, but Deanna has no patience for this sort of thing.

Our hotel in Bilbao is pretty incredible. So far pretty much every place we've stayed has been really nice. I'll certainly post pictures of our hotel here shortly... the main attraction of Bilbao is Frank Gehry's architectural masterpiece - the Guggenheim Museum. Our hotel has large bay windows overlooking the structure... less than 200 feet from the Museum.

But I just wanted to put up a quick post to update how far we've traveled thus far. We basically checked in, then ate a late lunch (by American standards... 5pm - seems normal by Spanish standards). On a side note, I know it's a common complaint among Americans in Europe - but good lord. For any of you would be travelers to Europe out there: don't be in a hurry. If you order a cup of coffee, you're gonna be there a while. If you don't specifically go up to the dude standing over in the corner, it will be a battle of wills between his desire to go home at 8 the following morning, or his desire to actually bring you your check. They will never bring you a check w/o you asking them to.

Salamanca

Salamanca is in the west of Spain, about 40 miles East of Portugal. It is the ham capital of Spain, which pretty much makes it the ham capital of the world. If you're eating really good Jamon Iberico, it's from the Pata Negra pigs of Salamanca (black footed pigs).

I'm not kidding, there was a ham shop on every corner - any one of which would be absolutely mobbed in Seattle. They all looked great. I didn't take any photos of them, but I did record some video, so you can see them later on.

Salamanca is also home to the oldest university in Spain. On the facade of the main University building, there is a very elaborate decoration. On said decoration, there is a skull with a frog on it. Legend has it that if a student is able to locate the frog on the skull, he will get an automatic passing grade in his classes.

Our hotel was literally across the street from the main entrance to the old city. We would walk for about 4 minutes to be in the heart of the old town, and another two minutes to find ourselves in the Plaza Mayor of Salamanca, where we sat down to a wonderful dinner at the Plaza 23. The most notable thing, IMO, were these ham and cheese croquettes.