Of all the dominant architectural features in Spain, the Roman aqueduct at Segovia is perhaps the most, well, just flat out impressive. The original inscription is gone, but archeologists place … Read more
Eating at Asador Etxebarri restaurant and meeting the genius Chef Victor Arguinzoniz. The absolute highlight of our lifetime quest to eat ourselves silly at one of the best restaurants in the world.
Just so there is no mistake, Kris does all the work when it comes to the horses. She hauls their hay from the big roll across the road from their … Read more
It was an odd choice for us to leave Spain where we’d spent the past two and a half months to spend ten days in Portugal just when Spain … Read more
I’ve seen perhaps six or seven corridas (bullfights) in my life. Most of those were in the late 70s in Madrid and Barcelona…back when Barcelona had corridas. We saw some good ones, and some bad ones. We saw some brave bulls and toreros, and we saw other days when the bulls and toreros seemed to be running away from, rather than toward, each other.
When Kris and I lived in Madrid thirty-two years ago we worked at a language school that was about eight blocks from our apartment. One of the routes we often took to work took us past a nondescript building with two large oak doors and a small sign beside one of them which identified it as a convent. (Here’s the Google map.)
The same sign offered tours during limited hours, but in all the time we lived here, and in our many subsequent visits to Madrid, we never got around to seeing what was inside the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales. We remedied that this time.
Madrileños, unlike most denizens of big cities, are genuinely friendly and eager to talk about their city, Spain, and almost anything else you want to discuss. Our first night here, we had a discussion about journalism and its position as a profession in Spanish society over beers and a plate of olives at an outdoor cafe in the Plaza Mayor with a young man named José Angel. José Angel’s girlfriend is a journalist and he’s a carpenter, so he allowed as there was some friction with her parents over his “station” in life. I assured him that their positions would probably be reversed if he came to the United States and he’d be welcome to visit us anytime the in-laws got to be too much.