Parque del Buen Retiro

El Retiro, Madrid's main park, is a terrific oasis in the middle of this giant city. It is also a weird and varied slice of urban life in Spain.

The most striking feature of El Retiro is the very formal lay-out and careful planning of the entire park and all of its landscaping. It is a beautiful, though certainly not the best (La Granja maybe?) example of this quintessentially Spanish design. The formal garden has two historical antecedents in Spain. The first, obviously enough, is from Islam; every major mosque was attached to a formal garden, complete with water-features, that were supposed to communicate a vision of paradise to the worshippers. The second comes by way of the Bourbon dynasty, which took over the Spanish monarchy at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Predicatbly enough, Philip V was somewhat inspired by his grandfather's garden at Versailles, and tried to recreate it in several locations (Palacio Real, Aranjuez, La Granja).

El Retiro started life as a part of the royal palace in Madrid. After Philip II officially withdrew his court to the nearby El Escorial in the later sixteenth century, there was still a need for a palace in Madrid apart from the old Muslim castle (Alcázar) that sat where the current Palacio Real stands.
The result was a complex, including a very large formal garden, on the eastern side of the old city of Madrid. Philip IV was largely responsible for the layout of the formal gardens in the 1640s.
After 1700, the Bourbon dynasty created the current royal Palace across town near the Manzanares River. The palace complex of El Retiro fell into disuse, and was heavily damaged during the war with Napoleon. Today, only the Prado museum and the Casón de Buen Retiro (also part of the Prado) remain.

The real treasure, however, was always the formal gardens. They were restored after years of disuse by Carlos III in the 1760s. He opened the royal preserve to the city's public in 1767. Carlos III was responsible for a whole series of restorations and public building projects in Madrid. This Enlightenment monarch should probably be remembered as one of modern Spain's three greatest kings (the others being Alfonso XII, who modernized Spanish government, and Juan Carlos I, the current king, who saved Spain from itself).

So the park became public, and gradually shrank to the existing size, surrounded completely by the city. In many ways, El Retiro is the perfect aristocratic island of beauty in the middle of the urban hussle. The grand avenues, fountains, statues, monuments, and trees introduced by generations of royal patrons remain the Park's outstanding feature. It is also the civic heart of Madrid: home to all manner of special events, and visited by nearly everyone.

The downside of El Retiro is that it is the most accessible park for a giagantic population of city dwellers of all shapes and sizes. It is always crowded. I have also witnessed an unfortunate array of weird events there. Today, I watched a nice old grandfather aid and abet his six (or so) year old grandson while he shit beside a tree. While Gretta and Gail were here, we watched the cops pull a big dead labarador retriever out of one of the fountains (I can't imagine how it got there). El Retiro also bears the brunt of the Spanish litter problem, to which I referred in an earlier post.

Despite these strange and unfortunate events, El Retiro is probably my favorite part of Madrid. It is every bit as nice as Central Park, but with far more character.

Döner Kebab

Spain is full of random Middle-Eastern take-out places, all called some variation of "Döner Kebab".
The Döner Kebab is a somewhat recent Turkish convention, which basically takes the rotating roast of compressed lamb, familiar to all Gyro lovers in the US, and puts the product on a Pita with some sauces, lettuce, and tomato. Here, and apparently everywhere in Europe, they come in lamb or chicken form. Apparently Döner Kebab literally means rotating meat.

So the Döner Kebab is a cheap (under 4 euros) and tasty choice. The sauces are some cross between tziki and mayonnaise, ketchup and hot sauce. The meat is good but greasy. All things considered, one could do worse for fastfood, healthwise, costwise, and tastewise.

Now Döner Kebab is usually considered drunk food in Europe, particularly in the UK. But I have leaned somewhat heavily on the greasy meat tubes in my time here. I think someone could make a killing with a Döner Kebab place in downtown Asheville.

Hiking the Guadarramas

Today I decided to go hiking in the Sierra de Guadarrama to the north of the city. My goal was the Calzada Romana, the restored remains of Roman road that once connected Toledo and Segovia. The road is reached through the town of Cercedilla, about 35 miles to the north of Madrid.

The trip started rather inauspiciously. I arrived at Chamartin station to discover that the schedule for the Cercanias (nearby routes) train to Cercedilla had been changed, and apparently the Internet was the last to know. In the end, I ended up leaving Madrid at 3pm, over an hour later than I had intended.

The train trip took slightly more than an hour. The Cercanias line ends at Cercedilla, where I picked up another, smaller train, to take me to a ski resort at the top of the Guadarrama ridge. The ski resort is called Navacerrada, obviously a derivative of "closed due to snow".

The small electric train which climbed the mountains above Cercedilla was pretty interesting. It bumped along for about 25 minutes, past ever more incredible views, to drop me at Navacerrada.

Navacerrada was rather active for an off-season ski resort, mostly because it sits astride an important road between Madrid and Segovia. It looks like a fantastic place to ski, but it took me a while to find the trailhead. It was 5:30 by the time I was on the trail, named the Camino Schmid after the German hiker who first popularized this part of the Guadarrama range.

So starting from about 5700 feet in elevation, I hiked down the Camino Schmid. After about 4 or 5 kilometers, I made it to the Puerta de Frenfria, the pass through which the old Roman road runs. From Fuenfria, I turned on to the Calzada Romana itself, and descends to the national park below over the course of 4 more kilometers.

The Calzada Romana was pretty neat. Apparantly the road was restored by King Philip V in the early 1700s to make the route to his summer palaca at Rio Frio quicker, but the old Roman road is quite apparent. It turns out, actually, that hiking on the ruins of a 2000 year old road is sort of like hiking in a dry stream bed, in that it was rocky, uneven, and a little bit slow-going. Nonetheless, the road looked great, and made the whole hike very much a worthwhile experience.

I reached the national park of Fuenfria a little over two hours after leaving Navacerrada. After carefully navigating through a random crowd of bulls (grazing inside the park), I came to the end of the Calzada Romana. It was only then that I discovered that I still had to walk more than 4 kilometers back to the train station. Luckily this was all on a sidewalk, so I made considerably better time, and reached Cercedilla in time to catch the 8:45 train. All told, I hiked between 7 and 8 miles in about 3.5 hours.

More things they do right in Spain

The Spanish seem to be all over the alternative energy issue. I have seen a half-dozen solar plants, two natural-gas power plants, and about 500 windmills. Moreover, there are trucks with giant, 80-foot windmill blades all over the highways.

They are also pretty serious about conservation here. Despite the heat, lots of places don't use air-conditioners. My apartment building turns the AC off at midnight (very unfortunately). Most of the hotels (and this apartment) require you to place your key-card in a special switch activate the power. When no one is home, nothing is left on (except my refrigerator... I think).

Spain seems to be a bit ahead of Italy in this regard, which seemed to have a lot more nuclear power plants.

Good luck trying to see the dozens of windmills in this picture...

More things they do wrong in Spain

Or in Madrid anyway... private security. This is a real change here, which I assume followed upon the 2004 Al-Qaeda bombing at Atocha Station. There are private security guards everywhere: the train stations, the metro stations, every museum, and every government building. My general sense is that the Aznar government was big on privatization, and some of these contracts must have pre-dated the March 2004 attacks. It is not as though Madrid lacks cops, as the municipal, provincial, and national cops all have a high profile (not to mention the Guardia Civil), but the private security guards (amusingly called vigilantes en español) are too numerous to count.

They are also totally ineffective. While there are metal detectors and luggage x-rays all over the place, the operators are frequently all-together absent. The guards seem to spend most of their time socializing. Most of them, especially the ones in the Metro, are sort of unkempt and rough-looking (more like bouncers than uniformed guards). I am not sure what they do, but I watched four kids smoke meth on the subway right in front of 25 witnesses today, and then walk right past the guards, with their pipes still in hand. I did see four of them hassling an insane woman though. They also walk around with muzzled German Shepherds. Now at first I assumed these were bomb-sniffing dogs, but then I noticed that all of them were muzzled with metal cages. I also noticed that they were never sniffing anything. Then I ran across this notice from the Communidad on the Internet. Apparently they are there to "help" the guards with "evictions" and generally to discourage crime. Nice.

To top it all off, the Metro guards have been accused of numerous crimes, from beating immigrants to molesting women. Apparently the company defended the guys who thrashed some Argentinian by saying the guards work long, hot, stressful hours.

Note-- I was going to photograph the guards, but decided that this was not such a grand idea. So I will append the "servicios de perros" notice for illustration.

What they do wrong in Spain

Litter. I noticed this in Italy too. Apparently southern Europeans are casual with their garbage. I remember as a child visiting a picnic area near Zaragoza, and finding it literally ankle-deep in garbage.

Of course Madrid is a big city, and big cities are dirty... but I've noticed a lot of trash in weird places, like the campus of Complutense University. Between the litter and the spray-paint, the place looks like a war-zone, not Spain's academic center. The graffiti is a huge problem here as well, not just in the city, but pretty much everywhere that I have visited.

Spain also employs more street-sweepers than anywhere else I have seen. Maybe this is a weird job-promotion plan?

What they do right in Spain

Since I have nothing dramatically blog-worthy planned until at least this weekend, I am going to do a series of posts about things they do well or poorly, or simply differently here in Spain. The basis for my comparison, of course, will primarily be the United States.

So the first post continues the on-again, off-again discussion of cars. The wide array of small and efficient cars is certainly one of the things that is done well in Spain. Many of them are diesel, to boot. However, it is worth noting that I did not see bio-diesel in any of the gas stations I visited when I rented a car last month. I will check further, but this is a marked contrast to Italy, where we saw lots of bio-diesel. On the other hand, olive oil costs less than gas here, so you could just poor it straight in the tank during the super-hot summers.

Anyway, this picture is from an advertisement on a construction-site dust shield. We aren't getting Toyota iQs in the US soon. The car is advertised here as getting about 54 mpg. I like the slogan: one in five people are not able to enjoy it.

Storks

I have mentioned them before, but I feel the storks deserve their own post. These birds are very common in central Castilla. Strangely, there really aren't very many in Toledo. But they are on the high-tension power cables all along the train tracks south of Madrid. They were also all over Segovia, and to a much greater degree, Ávila.

Storks seem to need a high-place to build their nests. Apparently these nests are multi-year, multi-generational projects, and the same stork returns year after year to her nest. They also apparently need lots of grasslands for grazing, as we saw several of them doing just that in Segovia.

These storks are all Africans, and they migrate south in the winters. Apparently some do not get much further than southern Spain though.

More fun facts; they do not look so big on the ground, but they have a massive wingspan, as you can see above. Also, storks are one of a very few species of birds who are mute. They make up for this by making lots of racket clattering their bills. I believe you can see a young stork in the nest in the picture to the right.

Back to Toledo

After deciding that the train schedule was far to sketchy to invest in a more distant and adventurous weekend trip, I ended up spending Saturday afternoon and evening back in Toledo.

I was just fine with this, as it gave me a chance to look at the Romanesque murals of the church of San Román at greater length. I hope to find a way to incorporate them into my research. The church was rebuilt and reconsecratedin 1221 by the same Archbishop of Toledo who was instrumental in managing the Las Navas campaign in 1212. The extensive wall murals date to that period. I have been trying to work out some sort of coherent meaning in the series of paintings and texts.

The return to Toledo also gave me a chance to visit the park in which I spent so much of my time last month, and eat at the very neat outdoor grill restaurant there. The six or so hours I got to spend there today certainly cemented Toledo's place as my favorite Spanish city.

Bureaucracy of the Socialist System

I have finally managed to get the Spanish Ministry of Culture to recognize me officially as a professional historian. This was no mean task, and I did not anticipate the level of bureaucracy with which I have had to tangle.

I won a grant about ten months ago from the Ministry of Culture ($2500) through a visiting scholars program. I thought that would make life in the archives and libraries of Spain easy, but it turns out that the different parts of the Ministry have nothing whatsoever to do with one another.

The Árchivo Historico Nacional (above) is run by the CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigationes Científicas). Spain, in the nineteenth century European tradition, likes to downplay the distinction between the physical sciences and the social sciences or humanities. Spain has had reputation for difficult-to-access archives. Being aware of this, the CSIC dropped its "proof of credentials" requirements a few years ago. Now, all you need is a valid ID to access any Spanish state archive.

The AHN, in their own literature, suggests this makes them easier to deal with than non-state or church archives. My experiences suggest otherwise. Where Toledo was easy to use, except for the esoteric 11AM-2PM hours, the AHN is a pain. During the summer, they are open an only slightly less weird 9AM-2:30PM. They also have lots of security: ID check when you enter the building, strict rules governing what can and can't be brought into the reading-room, and double or triple signature plus computer-system number control over documents. Everything must be requested through their Windows 98 era computer program, and then you have to wait for up to thirty minutes for the archivist to fetch your documents. Just today they decided that the last requests must be made an hour before closing time. You can also only have three items at a time. They will only allow me access to photos and microfilms of medieval documents; to see the real things, I have to "make a case" for it to the "Constable" of the archives. The constable is also one of the three people you have to see in order to pay for photocopies. My total bill of 3.88 euros required three signatures and visits to two different buildings. Basically the AHN is terrible when compared tothe Cathedral of Toledo, where the archvists freely handout multiple 800 year old documents with no worries, and where I could make my own (expensive) digital photos of anything I wanted, all on the honor system. Unfortunately, the reality is that in two weeks in Toledo I found about eight useful things, and in one week here I have found about twenty.

The Biblioteca Nacional is also its own entity, with no contact with the rest of the Ministry of Culture. I thought, since I had been allowed to use the AHN with relatively little trouble, that getting into the BN would be no problem. I was wrong. They have three security checkpoints, where one has to explain one's business, before you ever get to the actual library. The first step was applying for my card. They needed all kinds of credentials; luckily my advier Dr. Burman anticipated this and made me take some letters, department stationary, and my school ID with me. They needed all that, plus my passport, plus a recent utility bill (to confirm my address), plus a hand-written explanation of why I wanted access to the BN. Forty-five minutes later, they gave me my carné (Spanish word for card is almost the same as the word for meat) de investigad(or). I can't wait to see what happens when I try to go to the Royal Academy next week.

Santa Teresa de Ávila

Saint Teresa is Ávila's most famous citizen, and she left a major mark on her hometown. The most obvious is the church (right) built over her original convent (or over her birthplace of 1515, depending on your source).

Teresa was a mystic and an ecstatic. She entered the Carmelite Convent of Ávila when she was of marrying age. Apparently she was a sickly girl, because most of her early visions are associated with illness. These episodes became the subject of much of her writing, in which she the joy of direct connection with God, and a renewed understanding of and fear for the power of sin in human life. This last idea, which formed the core of much of her work, made her an important inspirational figure in the Counter-Reformation. The importance of the intercession of the saints to help ameliorate sin, and the power of the Church to assign pennance, were some of the ideas which the Protestants challenged most aggressively. She also wrote extensively on meditative prayer.

Her experiences made her an avid reformer. She set out to return the Carmelite nunneries to stricter observances of their rules, and ended up founding the Discalced (shoeless, though sandals are OK) Carmelite Order, originally for women, and then for men too with the help of her friend Saint John of the Cross. As often happens with charismatic reformers, there was a backlash against her from within her own order. The Inquisition became involved; Teresa was arrested, as were several of her friends. She spent much of her 60s defending herself and her new order, and finally won the support of King Philip II and the Pope. In her later years, the Discalced Carmelites flourished. Teresa died while travelling between some of her convents in 1582.

Fittingly, Teresa became a saint in the seventeenth century. Her relics are split between the active Carmelite Convent outside of Ávila and the Convent/Church over her birthplace (and no doubt a million other places, in good Catholic tradition). I got to see her desicatted finger, still wearing a ring. It is not nearly as incorrupt as the propaganda suggests. Also there were her sandals, her walking stick, some of her writings, and the scapula of John of the Cross.

Cathedral Statuary

The Cathedral does feature a couple of very impressive thirteenth century doorways with a myriad of statues. The north door (above) is the best, with some fairly standard iconography: the twelve apostles (two are cut out of the picture), Christ Pantokrator in the middle. Scenes from the life of Jesus, including the very visible Last Supper. The arches seem to include some visual allegories of people struggling with sin.

The western door is also interesting. I have no idea what this guy is supposed to be.

Cathedral of Ávila

This church claims to be Spain's first Gothic structure, though there are several "protogothic" churches which combine Romanesque and Gothic styles. This building is unmistakeably Gothic. It dates from the second half of the twelfth century, and retains many of its early features, such as the impressive northern doorway from the early thirteenth century.

All in all, it is not the nicest cathedral. Its most redeeming quality is clearly the Girola, a series of chapels behind the main alter in the walls of the apse. The red and brown sandstone makes the construction very impressive.

Murallas de Ávila

Ávila's most prominent feature is its completely intact set of medieval walls. The walls surround a fairly large area of the old city, and date from the twelfth century.

As the city's nicest feature, they charge for access. Four euros gets you an opportunity to walk the walls. Unfortunately, like everything else in Spain, they are under construction right now, so you can't actually walk the full circuit of the walls. Nonetheless, they are impressive.

One of the more usual features of the wall is that the apse of the Cathedral is built directly into them. It makes that part of the Cathedral something of a fortress.

Day in Ávila

I decided to spend Sunday in Ávila, a town to the northwest of Madrid (about 50 miles away). As I have mentioned before, generally I have enjoyed my time outside the city greatly. Moreover, I hoped to find more interesting churches, architecture, or historical details which might augment my research. Unfortunately, I did not really find anything of the sort. I did, however, have a relatively pleasant day in a very quaint town.

Getting to Ávila was a bit of a pain. Where Toledo and Segovia are served by the high-speed AVE trains, Ávila (and the entire NW) are served by regional commuter trains. They are not nearly as nice as the 120mph electric miracles from my earlier journeys. Some of these trains are slow electric trains that look like the subways. Others are weird little diesel trains that seem to have an engine in each car (rather than a single engine at the head of the train). They are bumpy, and they stop at small stations along the way. So while Ávila is no further away than Toledo, it takes a solid hour and forty minutes to get their from Madrid.

Once I arrived, I was lucky enough to stumble into the middle of their Corpus Christi Sunday procession, which I filmed and photographed.

Different Perspectives on the Apartment

After receiving some feedback on the apartment post, and how terrible it made my place here seem, I decided to add a couple of pictures to rehabilitate the reading-audience's perspective on Apartamentos Juan Bravos, 9E.

Above, Cervantes and El Toro judge my 75 cent bottle of wine in the kitchenette. Below, they contemplate why I wasted money at the Feria del Libro in the "living room" part of the apartment.

Reconsidering the "24-hour city"

A little while back, I compared Madrid to NYC, and called it a "24 hour city". I am not sure that is entirely accurate. Madrid certainly has a very active nightlife-- I can remember wandering by a discotheque very early one morning near my grandmother's house (7:30 AM), and seeing people just finishing their evenings.

However, in other ways, Madrid is not nearly the "always open" place that NYC, or really any modern US city is. From a practical perspective, I enjoy the way the crass commercialism and rapacious struggle for capital accumulation has made the American business cycle a 24/7 quest to lure one into spending money. Late-night grocery stores, fast-food, and Walmart can all be very useful. In Europe, not so much. The only business open past 9pm are restaurants, bars, and the all-night pharmacies (and Spanish pharmacies are just pharmacies, not mini-supermarkets a la Walgreen's). This is to be expected when businesses close daily from 2pm-4pm so that everyone can go home for lunch. At the end of the day, I expect this makes for a much healthier consumer culture, and a better work schedule for clerks and shop-owners. But you'd better make sure you have everything you need for the evening by 8pm.

So this European business pattern rained on my plans today. I left the apartment intending to go shopping at a number of used book stores. Unfotunately, I made it to only one of them before they all closed for the day at 2pm. Because god-forbid the owner of a bookstore lose his saturdat afternoon working.

So instead I went to a couple of museums. I visited the Museo Arqueológico Nacional and the Biblioteca Nacional, which share a building on the Plaza de Colón (pictured above). The BNE is a fantastic library with a rather goofy museum charting, awkwardly, the history of the book. I hate to say it, but it was a waste of time. The MAN, on the other hand is a fine museum, currently undergoing a major facelift. Unfortunately, that means that about half the exhibits were in storage. I got to see the famous Dama de Elche and the absolutely terrific Tesoro de Guarazzar (more on this later), but a lot of the medieval stuff was not displayed.

I did get to do a brief bit of book shopping at the Feria del Libro in El Retiro, the world's biggest book fair (pictured below).

The Alcazar de Segovia

Segovia is probably best known for its fairytale castle, the Alcazar. The castle is built on the sight of the original Roman military camp, and is the result of generations of additions and reconstructions. The modern appearance is largely the work of Juan II of Castilla and Philip II of Spain.

Aside from its impressive location, the castle's most interesting feature is the very tall tower of Juan II, built on the city-side of the fortress (left-side in the picture). Climbing to the top is quite a feet, as it is accessed by a very long and narrow spiral staircase. The views were worth it, however (see the picture of the Cathedral a few posts back).

Iglesia de la Vera Cruz

More from Segovia. This neat church dates to the early thirteenth century. Almost all the literature attributes the church to the Templars, which makes sense to a degree. The church is a 12-sided polygonal construction, basically a circle, surrounding a central circular cloister designed to imitate the edicule of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. Many Templar churches follow this model.

However, the local historian of the place insists, probably rightly, that the church actually appertains to the Order of the Holy Sepulcher. It really does not make a difference, as the facts remain the same: a crusading order built a Jerusalem-inspired church in Castilla in the early years of the thirteenth century.

The church is surrounded by several older tombs, and a sort of strange dirt area which was full of bone fragments. There were several American college kids out there sifting for human remains to keep as souvenirs. That strikes me as a particularly poor idea.

Iglesia de Santos Justo y Pastor

This is a neat Romanesque church near the aqueduct in Segovia. The apse contains a series of impressive frescoes from the late twelfth century, and the tower is home to multiple storks. Definitely interesting.

The storks are fascinating birds. The winter in Africa, and nest in Western Europe during the spring and summer. They build huge nests on towers, to which they return year after year. Also, they apparently find a lot of their food grazing in pastures, something else we saw them doing in Segovia.

The Aqueduct

Also like Toledo, Segovia has a Roman past. Unlike Toledo, Segovia retains a spectacular monument to that past, the Roman Aqueduct.

The aqueduct is simply amazing. It is part of a 10 mile system that brought water from the mountains to the fortified old-city, which was originally a Roman military camp. The massive public work was built in the first century AD.

The unmortared bricks of the aqueduct are still quite strong, and the structure still carries water. It was partially rebuilt in the sixteenth century, though the architects took care to match the repairs to the original work.

Segovia

Several days ago, we visited Segovia, a small town on the northern side of the Sierra de Guadarrama, about 40 miles from Madrid. The town is smaller than Toledo, maybe about 40,000 people.

The trip was very easy thanks to the bullet trains, and this time we got to go through a 12 mile tunnel under the mountains. The tunnel opens right into the Segovia train station. The day was rainy and cool (highs in the low 60s at best), but the weather simply made the scenery a bit more dramatic.

The town itself is beautiful. Like Toledo, and many other ancient towns, it is built on the hills above a river, in a natural defensive position. Also like Toledo, it is full of terrific Romanesque and Gothic architecture.

The Segovia Cathedral is beautiful but strange. It is a sixteenth century late Gothic building, and as such, far too young to be very interesting to me. It is quite nice to look at though.

Corpus Christi

Today was the first day I found myself vaguely pissed about the Catholic liturgical calender. Now if I was in Toledo, or another town that celebrates Corpus Christi, I might appreciate it. In Madrid, however, it is just an excuse for everything to be closed. Archives, libraries, museums... everything that might have helped me have a useful day, closed. I would love to be able to blog about what an interesting holiday Corpus Christi is, but unfortunately all I can say about it is that it effectively makes a huge city seem like a ghost town.

The disadvantages of living beside the swimming pool...

There is a man in a nice speedo three feet outside my window. Somehow he seems to be invading my personal space. In return, I will photograph him, and ridicule him on the internet.

Madrid vs smaller cities

The new, northern business district here in Madrid looks like it belongs in Atlanta. That is really unfortunate, but it is several miles north of the center of town, thankfully. Still, this really exemplifies my current perspective on Madrid. Since my family lives in Madrid, I have always made it the center of my trips to Spain. Prior to this trip, I had not spent a night in Spain outside the capital since 1984. In many ways, Madrid was Spain to me.

This trip has been a very pleasant change to that model. Of course I spent two weeks in Toledo, but also two days in Córdoba, and a night in Valdepeñas. As a result, I have totally changed my perspective on this country. Spain is a much nicer place outside of the capital. The small towns have character, atmosphere, and history. Anyone travelling to Spain should endeavor to spend as much time in the smaller towns as possible.

Now this is not to say that Madrid is a bad city. Madrid is actually a great city. It reminds me a lot of NYC. It is full of fascinating museums, beautiful architecture, and all of the hum and chaos of a twenty-four hour metropolis. There are now almost six million people in the Comunidad (the greater metropolitan area of Madrid is its own province). I think that makes it the third or fourth largest city in Europe.

So my perspective on Madrid has changed permanently. This is probably to be expected, and I am sure I don't need to explain to too many people the advantages that a city the size of Asheville has over a city the size of L.A.

Mercado de Maravillas

In one of my first posts on this blog, I referenced an article in The Atlantic discussing Madrid's local markets, and how they have changed. On Monday, Gretta and I visited the Maravillas market, Madrid's largest. It was impressive and vast. Each individual stall was rather tiny, but there were more than 200 of them. The amount of meat and seafood was impressive: all manner of strange North Sea fish, sardines, crabs, langostinos, pig heads, cow tongues, whole rabbits, and every possible cut of pork. The fruits and vegetables were no less amazing, though the tomatos we picked up were somewhat crappy. Nonetheless, for less than 15 euros I was able to pick up quite a bit of food, and we made ourselves a pretty nice meal: bocadillos de chorizo, espárragos, jámon, pepinos con tomates, y pan.

Apartamentos Juan Bravo

So the second apartment is much better than the first apartment. This place isn't cheap (1200 euros per month, something like $1800), but it is a real apartment, with a pool, kitchen, etc. It is fairly convenient to everything as well. Their is a grocery store immediately next door, and the Metro is within a few yards. It also has a pool, though I don't expect to use it much, if at all.

Back to work

Or something like that. Gretta and Gail are both gone, and I am here for four weeks alone. Hopefully I will be able to get a lot of useful work done for my dissertation. However, my motivation and enthusiasm are not what they were before. Frankly I am somewhat tired and homesick. Hopefully getting back to work in the Archivo Historico Nacional will refocus my energies.

At any rate, I greatly enjoyed the vacation segment of the trip, and I think Gretta did as well. Unfortunately Gail was sick for most of her time here. It has been sort of a weird two weeks.

Obama mentions Al-Andalus

The Spanish newspapers were all quite impressed or amused that President Obama mentioned Al-Andalus and the Caliphate of Córdoba in his speech in Cairo. They also all chuckled because he said Cordóba, with the emphasis on the wrong syllable. Though his reference to the Spanish Middle Ages was somewhat superficial, I am impressed that we have a president and administration that would actually go to the effort to use an Al-Andalus reference to remind the Muslim world that they too are part of "the West".

Also, it is very interesting watching American news filtered through another culture. The things which impress them are not always the most obvious, and the things they ignore are sometimes surprising.

Madinat al-Zahra

On a hillside outside of Córdoba stand the ruins of the palace of Abd al-Rahman III, the Madinat (Medina) al-Zahra. Arab historians reported that Abd al-Rahman built the palace-city for his wife Zahra. It is more likely, however, that the construction of the new city was part of the political propaganda surrounding Abd al-Rahman's declaration of an independent caliphate in Córdoba.

The palace-city covered several hundred acres, only a tenth of which has been excavated. Most of the archaeological work has been done on the palace itself, and many of the gardens were replanted in the 1960s. The throne room has been entirely reconstructed, but was largely closed for restoration while we were there.

This is a very impressive site. Most of the guidebooks underrate this place. It is surrounded with several small archaeological sites from the Roman and Caliphate period. One could spend days exploring these outskirts of Córdoba.

Mezquita de Córdoba

The Mezquita in Córdoba is one of the most impressive and bizarre structures on earth. It is the Aljama Mosque, started by Abd al-Rahman I in 784, and expanded through the early eleventh century by his successors. It was built over the Visigothic Christian church of San Vincente, and was apparently sold by the local Christian community to Abd al-Rahman.

When the Castillians captured Córdoba in 1232, the Mezquita was consecrated as a church. A Christian altar was added, and the minaret was rebuilt into a bell tower, but the structure of the building was not heavily modified. This all changed during the middle of the sixteenth century, when a perfectly hideous plateresque/late-Gothic cathedral was built in the middle of the Mosque. While the architects did take care to integrate the new and existing structure, the outcome was wholly bizarre.

Nonetheless, enough of the original, impressive structure remains to truly impress. It is a genuine wonder.

Life Experience

So it turns out that renting an apartment sight-unseen is a tricky business. I ended up with a horrible hovel complete with broken air-conditioning. As the weird metal badge on the cheap wall unit says, it was an adventure. After a day of trying to get the landlord to fix the issue, we decided to leave the place. By a nice turn of luck or good karma or whatever, the rental agency gave me back all of my money. Tomorrow I will be moving to the slightly more expensive but nicer apartments my cousin recommended to me. A learning experience to be sure.