I wasn´t supposed to be here today, either

Okay, so it was mostly my fault and I'll get over it. But just for today, I fucking hate Madrid. I really thought that I had mastered Spanish buses: they're confusing and you have to ask lots of questions and I have to say como (what) a lot, but I can make it work. Then today hit a whole new low. I was going from Plasencia to Segovia, had to change buses in Ávila. No problem. When I asked for a ticket to Ávila, the bus driver said something incomprehensible about Barco de Ávila. When I asked him to repeat himself he mocked me, muttered some more, and gave me a ticket to Barco de Ávila. Okay, whatever. From Barco de Ávila it should be clear how to get to Ávila. I've got lots of time. No problem. At Barco de Ávila (an hour away from Ávila), he makes us all get off the bus and line up to get back on the bus where he's now selling tickets to Ávila or continuing on to Madrid. It's the same bus, same driver, same ticket machine; there's no reason he couldn't have sold me a ticket to Ávila back in Plasencia. And the tickets are expensive. I hate this bus company. Pero, bueno, I'm headed to Ávila as planned. No problem. After ten minutes or so the bus stops and the driver yells something. I don't hear what he says because I'm listening to music, but buses stop in pueblos all the time. He's probably just announcing the stop. We're definitely not in Ávila. As we're pulling away it occurs to me that a lot of people got off at that pueblo, including this girl who I thought said she was going to Ávila. And there was another of the same company's buses sitting right there. I wasn't supposed to get on the other bus to go to Ávila, was I? Wouldn't the bus driver have mentioned that when I bought the ticket? Or yelled at me when I didn't get off? He clearly thinks I'm an idiot foreigner, wouldn't he want to get rid of me? This may be a problem. Nothing I can do about it now, though. We're clearly heading in the direction of Ávila; I spend the next hour praying to no one that we actually stop there. We don't. Now there's a problem. I really don't want to go to Madrid, and I really don't want to deal with the asshole bus driver now that I've ridden farther than I paid for. But that's what's happening.

It could be worse. At least I know I'll be able to get from Madrid to Segovia. But I hate Madrid. It's hot and chaotic and an hour out of the way. Buses to Segovia probably leave from the main bus station, but who knows where the bus I'm on will drop us off? And this isn't exactly inconsequential: My hotel in Segovia told me they'd give the room away if I'm not there by 4pm. I should still have enough time, and if not I can call and explain; they probably won't really give the room away. But I don't want to have to call, I hate talking on the phone, and what if they're assholes like the bus driver and they do give the room away?

It takes forever to get into Madrid, but at least we go to the main bus station. I sneak off the bus without the asshole driver noticing. It's 1pm, Segovia can't be more than an hour away, and I think the buses run all the time. No problem. I ask at the information booth where to buy a ticket to Segovia. "Otra estación". Fuck. I throw a little yelling fit. Not sure whether my yelling in English made me look like more or less of a wacko. Otra estación means I have to get on the metro, which is hotter than fucking hell and not fully functional, at least it wasn't two weeks ago.

Turns out I can get to this other station without changing metro lines, which helps, but because of the construction I have to go the long way around on a circle line. Luckily the metro is nowhere near the inferno it was two weeks ago, but it takes forever. I'm really grumpy. I spend the ride being annoyed by everyone around me: Stop fanning yourself, it's not that hot; button your shirt, it's definitely not that hot; lose the sunglasses, you're underground. Sixteen stops later, all the up escalators in the station are broken.

Joder.

...My tale of woe pretty much ends there. I made it to Segovia, they hadn't given my room away, no more yelling fits. But still, just for today, fuck Madrid. Okay, I'm better now.

Last thoughts on Extremadura

Blood sausage could not look more revolting. It's like a big turd, served up on a plate, but it's really, really good. I'm a little embarassed to be seen eating it, it looks so much like poop, but it's worth it. It's really popular here, especially in Guadalupe, although maybe only among tourists since they seem to be the only people in the restaurants. Most of the restaurants in Guadalupe are on the square in front of the monstery and I'm imagining that they all share one big underground kitcen, because the food is pretty much indistinguishable. Not bad, just all the same.

Extramaduran food in general is pretty hearty. (I think sometimes they put jamón in their gazpacho.) One of the popular dishes here is migas, basically stuffing but with big hunks of assorted pork products. Because of the hunting thing you see rabbit and partridge on menus a lot. I never got around to trying either (bad me!), but I did have duck once here and liked it more than I usually like duck. And torta de casar, soft sheep cheese, is really popular here. I wasn't that impressed: I pretty much like cheese as long as it's not blue, but I think I prefer regular old hard sheep cheese. If you order wine here without specifying red or white, you usually get vino de pitarra; not sure what that means exactly, but it's starting to grow on me. It's light red and kinda spicy and served cold; it even works okay with fish. Cherries are popular in northern Extremadura; they drink this cherry-based liquor that I wanted to like but tasted like terpentine.

And they do lots of stuff with acorns (bellotas). They make this acorn liquor that's not bad, way better than the cherry liquor, kinda subtle and sweet but not too sweet. I had this desert made from acorns and almonds and eggs that was also subtle and sweet and good. And like everywhere in Spain, the really good expensive jamón comes from acorn-fed pigs. Not just for squirrels.

The Birds

Swans are such assholes. They're all pretty and graceful but once you get within ten feet they start hissing at you. Fuckers. Ducks, on the other hand--I love ducks. They make funny noises and I like their feet and they stick their butts in the air to eat. There's not that much to do in Plasencia, the last stop on the Extremadura leg of my trip, but there is this bird park. I like animals anyway; after spending most of the past few weeks looking at buildings, I really liked them today. And except for one cage-like thing with real plants and grass and stuff, they were all free, so minimal guilt issues. There were ducks and swans and owls and hawks and cranes. And peacocks, which may be the most brightly-colored things I've ever seen. I sat and watched one for a while, displaying its (his? the pretty birds are usually male, right?) feathers to no one in particular. There was this cute little hoppy bird minding its own business and the peacock kept following it: It would get close and then kinda start stomping, taking small but really exaggerated steps and waving its feathers around. Little bird was not impressed. I, on the other hand, am apparently pretty easily impressed.

Anyway, Plasencia is nice enough, but there's just not that much to say about it. It has some typically nice architecture, some churches, museums that don't open. There's a hunting museum here; that I'd like to see, but it never opened. And what I can only imagine are some kind of mutant ninja mosquitos. You never actually see them, but I'm suddenly covered with these giant welts that itch so bad I could easily let them give me a nervous breakdown. I'm blaming the fact that I haven't met anyone here on my constantly scratching myself.

There's this street near my hotel called Calle de los Quesos (Street of the Cheeses). And at the bottom of the street sign it says Dedicada a Hernán Cortés. Kinda random.

....And that's all I got to say about Plasencia.

Like a virgin

Extremadura is brown and green and relatively flat. Not breathtaking or anything, but I kinda like it. The sun is always shining and the sky is a pretty shade of blue and it all looks like a nice simple landscape painting. Heading east towards Guadalupe it gets hillier (the Sierra de Guadalupe mountains are over here--you're never too far from mountains in Spain) and there are these funny tall skinny leafless trees. Imagine the landscape painting (now with mountains) and then add some rows of black vertical lines, little kid-style. It kinda looks like that.

I came to Guadalupe to see the Monastery of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Back in the fourteenth century a shepherd had a vision or found an icon or something (sorry, details) and so they built the monastery here. Way back when, the virgin of Guadalupe was made the patron saint of all the Spanish colonies in the Americas, which is why there are a lot of Guadalupes from Texas south. Guadalupe, Spain, is a big pilgrimmage site, and really touristy. The monastery itself is incredible: huge, 14th-16th century gothic with Mudéjar tiling on the turrets. I got a little pouty because to go inside you have to take a guided tour. Which would be fine, except it's a group tour and the group is a bunch of other tourists. I hate tourists. They're loud and they bring their kids and they get in my way. It wasn't so bad: The guide spoke loudly and clearly so I could mostly understand, even with the dull roar of the group on the background. The monastery has some really nice art (Goya, el Greco), jewelry, chandaliers, woodwork. After taking us through the non-virgin parts of the monastery, the tour guide left us with some sort of priesty-type person (monk, friar, I dunno). I couldn understand him very well, but I did get that he really wanted us to be quiet (¡Silencio!). After that, whenever I couldn't understand him I just pretended that he was telling the people who were still talking that they were going to hell. He herded us into this little room and before I knew what hit me, there was the virgin and there I was, kissing part of her. I'm not religious, but I usually dont fuck around with religion, either. If I don't believe in the virgin, what business do I have kissing her? But once I finally realized that that's what I was about to do, it would have been obvious and awkward and weird to just leave the line. So I kissed her. What could happen, really? f there's a hell I'm already going there, independent of this one minor act of heresy. And who knows? Maybe I've been blessed or had my sins forgiven or something. It's kind of a weird setup with the virgin (who's really just a very dressed-up doll), and not just because they treat you like a farm animal before you get to see her. She's normally facing the congregation (or whatever you call it--facing so that the people attending the church service can see her). But the tour takes you back behind the alter (or whatever you call it) where they spin her around on this microwave-style turny thing. Remember in Inspector Gadget there was the boss (or maybe he was the bad guy or something, I forget) who would spin around in his big chair, say a few words, and then spin away? It was kinda like that.

I forget why I decided to stay three days in Guadalupe. There's not much to see besides the monastery, and the forced guided tour ensures that seeing it only takes an hour or so. But changing my itinerary once I got here would have meant negotiations and phone conversations that I just don't feel like dealing with so I've had a lot of free time here. In addition to reeeaaallly long lunches, I've been doing a lot of walking. You can see Guadalupe itself in about ten minutes, but if you keep going pretty soon you're out in the Extremaduran countryside. It's pretty hilly, and it doesn't take long before you're looking down on Guadalupe in its entirety: the stone monastery in the middle surrounded by white houses with their orange Spanish rooves, with mountains and nothingness all around. I was coming back from wandering a while in some direction the other day when I started hearing voices. Really. But wouldn't god know better than to talk to me in muffled Spanish? Turns out the monastery loudly broadcasts some sort of message every day at noon. No religious experience for me.

On the bus ride here I met this Chilean man named Valter (not sure how you spell it, but he was very clear that he's not Walter or Wally). Valter came to Spain to visit his son who lives in Madrid, but the son was busy working all the time so Valter hit the road. Isn´t that sad? But good for him that he's not just moping around Madrid. He had been in Trujillo, home of Francisco Pizarro, and after Guadalupe was going to Medellín, home of Hernán Cortés, and then to some other Extremaduran town, home of some other conquistador. I asked what he thought about the Spanish taking over (most of) South America and he said that European dominance was inevitable, he was just glad it was the Spanish who came first and not the Dutch or the English. I've got no problems with the Dutch or the English, but Spain does have better food.

The peak of self-absorption

Fifty euros and two trips to the Vodaphone store later, I have a new cell phone. Not much of a silver lining to the robbery story, but I do like this new phone better than my old one. Always the way, the stuff I'm really bummed about losing wasn't worth anything monetarily (which I think is why I wasn't being that careful with my purse in the first place--I knew there wasn't anything worth stealing in there): two Infant of Prague charms that my mom gave me before I went to Prague last year, my compass, the tuna kuna. And that fucker who robbed me probably won't even get the beauty of the tuna kuna because he probably doesn't speak English. The compass should at least be easy to replace, but it had sentimental value. I had had it for years and it saved me from all kinds of directional mishaps. Everyone I've traveled with has mocked my compass and then eventually benefited from it. I made it part of an interactive photography exhbit at this weird modern art museum in Helsinki. I loved that compass.

Okay I'm a twit and I deserve no sympathy. I admit it. That's not gonna stop me from feeling a little bit sorry for myself for a while. The other problem is I lost my Spanish identity card and if I need that card to get back into Spain from the US I totally fucked. I'm mostly not thinking about that right now.

Whatever. Robberies, like all things that suck, build character. And the trip to the police station was actually kind of fun, if an exercise in futility. The cop who took the report was telling me how horrible George Bush is and how Bill Clinton was a much better president. Then he started giving this other cop a hard time for smoking in the office. I said "But you´re the police, you can't smoke in here, it's illegal!" (Smoking in any office building is illegal in Spain.) And he said "Don´t yell at me, yell at him, I don't smoke!" You probably had to be there, but it was all very entertaining, and very Spain.

People just ain't no good

I wrote such nice things about Cáceres. Then some dickless piece of shit stole my purse and there went my notebook. I still mean the nice things I wrote, but I dunno if I have it in me to rewrite them all. I've lived in Barcelona and New York, I know how to not get robbed. I got all stupid about small towns and wasn't being careful. I don't wanna talk about it.

The old part of Cáceres is very old and very preserved: The walls are still up, the buildings (15th and 16th century) are all made of stone, the streets are narrow and cobble-y and authentically hard to walk on. Beautiful houses and churches, ivy, gardens. The houses have the crests of the families who built them carved in stone on the front. When I first got here I thought it was kind of an eyesore that a lot of the buildings (especially the churches, maybe because they're tall?) have big piles of crap on top of them. Maybe I've been in the city too long (or maybe I need to go back to the city, where I know how to take care of myself...): They're not piles of crap, they're birds' nests. And not just any birds, they're storks' nests. Very cool. They have these little bodies with big wings and long skinny legs and beaks; they make these loud woodpecker-like noises by opening and closing their beaks really fast. They look just like the cartoon storks that bring the babies.

The night I got here I was walking around feeling lonely and sorry for myself because I don't have any friends (here--I don't have any friends here) when I met this guy Valentín. The Spanish word vale doesn't exactly translate; it's sort of a catch-all expression for yes/okay/thank you/I understand. You don't learn it in Spanish class, but you hear it constantly. Valentín is a pretty cool name, but Vale is an even better nickname. Somehow Vale and I got on the topic of bullfighting. He didn't change my mind or anything; I think killing for sport is wrong, period, but it was an interesting conversation and one of my favorite Spanish phrases, es complicado, kept coming up. He said that the bulls that aren't used for bullfighitng live for a year or two in shitty conditions before they're killed, whereas fighting bulls live like kings (viven como reyes, he kept saying--don't know what that means exactly, though) for four or five years before they're killed. He assured me that after they're killed, fighting bulls are used for meat and leather. Let's assume that Vale isn't full of shit. If I had to choose between a short shitty life followed by an unpleasant death and a longer good life followed by an unpleasant death, I'd want to be a fighting bull. Not the point, but it did make me think a little. And apparently it's really hard to become a bullfighter because they make a lot of money and have a little mafia thing going. Vale also told me that Extremadura is really backwards and undeveloped compared to the rest of Spain: no airport, no communications infrastructure, no jobs. Apparently the service industry is the biggest employer in Cáceres; he specifucally mentioned street-cleaning. And drugs seem to be big here. No wonder tourists get robbed.

Cáceres has been designated as some kind of European culture capital for the year 2016 (whatever that means). I get it: It has history, some art, some good museums, a university. And all kinds of music. On Saturday night I heard a group of oboes and clarinets playing in one of the squares. Then in the museum courtyard was a music/spoken word concert. The music was five flutists (flautists?), an upright bass, and percussion. The spoken words probably would have been cheesy in English, but they were in Spanish and I was thrilled that I could mostly understand them. Then in a different square was a guy with a guitar singing Spanish folk songs. And no one was even collecting money. One of the bars had live music and that was free, too.

Slightly less cultured were the three Spanish military guys I met on Sunday. We drank beer and played darts (dartos, en español); I even beat one of them. The one from Asturias may have been a little bit of a warmonger: I asked if he thought there should be a more international presence in Iraq and he said yes because he wants to go. (At least I think that's what he said.) Or maybe he just likes to travel, I dunno.

Dude looks like a--

Now. European guys of all nationalities are way more metrosexual than their American counterparts. They wear cropped pants and sandals and use all kinds of hair product. Straight European guys are also far less fearful of looking gay than American guys are--they'll hug other guys, touch their arms, dance with them, whatever. Neither of the aforementioned facts really explains the guy I just saw wearing a skirt. Not a kilt, a skirt. He was kinda hip: He had a mullet and piercings and was holding hands with an attractive woman. He was also wearing a skirt: a red, clingy, slightly above the knee skirt that I think was made of cotton. Definitely not a kilt. Whatever.

Francisco Pizarro, of Incan infamy, was born in Trujillo, Extremadura. Trujillo now has a Pizarro statue, a Pizarro museum, a Pizarro Restaurant, streets named after several members of the Pizarro family. I don't know what I propose they do instead, exactly, but it seemed like a lot of glorification for someone who killed a whole lot of people. Surely others have waxed more poetically than I can about judging historical figures by current moral standards. And Pizarro certainly did some good things for Spain. I get that his hometown is gonna make a big deal out of him; it just seemed a little unbalanced. The museum didn't even touch on the fact that taking over entire civilizations and killing people isn't very nice--maybe it was lost in my bad translation, but I don't think so.

Anyway, in addition to all the Pizarro stuff, Trujillo has what I'm pretty sure is the shittiest plaza in all of Spain (there's one in Badajoz that's pretty awful too, but at least that one is under construction and so ostensibly being improved.) Pizarro had this sidekick named Almagro. I don't exactly know the story (in addition to not understanding everything I read in Spanish, I tend not to remember very well what I've read), but they had some kind of a falling out and Pizarro's people killed Almagro and then Almagro's people killed Pizarro. The Plaza Almagro in Trujillo is way over on the edge of town, even farther from civilization than the bus station, and it's so crappy and neglected that you have to wonder if it's a political statement. Almagro wasn't from Trujillo.

Oh, the streets of Rome

I don't usually get excited about ruins. They can be kind of impressive, sometimes, but my typical resonse to a ruin is something like "Yup, that's really old, hmm" and then I move on. Mérida, on the other hand, is a whole town full of Roman ruins. It doesn't even pale in comparison to Rome, since I've never been. Mérida used to be Augusta Emerita, starting back in 25 BC when it was founded, apparently for veterans of the Roman wars in Cantabria. Which kind of made it a Roman retirement community, huh? Anyway, Augusta Emerita was the capital of Roman Luisitania and basically the capital of the whole Iberian peninsula for almost 800 years, until the Muslims took over. Mérida now is the capital of Extremadura, which is pretty much the same, right?

Anyway, the ruins. There's a whole Roman theatre and an amphitheatre. They take advantage of them by having a classical theatre festival every year (how cool is that?), but I happen to be here during some of the very few summer days with no performances. Poop. Would have been money well spent, even if I couldn't understand the words. Anyway, the amphitheater is where they had the spectacles that people liked, mostly gladiator-type stuff and fights between animals. You can see what used to be box seats where the rich people sat, and tunnel where the performers entered. The theatre is where people had to go, for stuff like politicial speches. Both apparently held thousands of people, although they didn't seem that big. And weren't ancient people really short? Maybe they were really disproportionate or something, but the stairs were sooo steep. I really had to stretch to climb them, but the tunnels weren't much taller than me so the Romans couldn't have been much taller than me, either. Maybe that's how they built up their leg muscles, I dunno. But there's lots more. The remains of two excavated houses are open to visitors. Some rooms had nice mosaic floors that were really well preserved, and one of the houses had these cool indoor ponds with openings in the roof above to collect rain water. There's a cemetery with some preserved masoleums, aqueducts, one of the longest Roman bridges anywhere, the old town forum. Also the circus, which nearly gave me a nervous breakdown because I could. not. find it. The place allegedly held 30,000 people, how do you miss something like that? (Okay I have driven circles around the Michigan highway system looking for the Palace of Auburn Hills which holds 21,454, but the roads are confusing down there and it was dark.) Well for one thing, you had to walk down an unmarked tunnel to get to the circus. And then once you go through the tunnel, there is no fucking circus. There's an open field with some rocks, and they call it preserved. This is why I don't usually get excited about ruins. But overall, this place is really amazing. The stuff is over two thousand years old. Joder. Makes you feel very small and insignificant, kinda like looking at the ocean.

Mérida was great, but it really kicked my ass; the stuff is all spread out, and to see everything I walked around all day and it's hot and kinda humid. Whine. I'm exhausted, I'm sweaty, I'm dirty, I'm sunburned, my feet hurt, I can't possibly smell good. (Reminds me of this Bob Dylan song--I was bald...) Brutal, just like the Romans.

Sexual politics of meat

My literary hero Julie Powell once described some marrow-based dish as tasting like sex. That's kinda how I felt about my lunch today. I've been in Extremadura all of about three days now and (still) haven't really eaten anything particularly extremeñan. There's nothing else to do here in the afternoon anyway, so I decided to blow some money on a big lunch; what I thought was the restaurant associated with a local cooking school (the Lonely Planet fucks up again) turned out to be an Argentinian steak house. No suckling pig or artisenal cheeses, but omigod that was a good piece of meat. Big and thick and tender and barely cooked with big rocks of salt on the outside. How is it that Argentinian food is so good and Chilean food is so bad, when they're right next to each other? Don't the Chileans know what they're missing? In a pathetic attempt not to gain ten pounds in a single day, I ordered water instead of wine. About halfway through I decided that was the nurtitrional equivalent of taking a bus instead of a cab to go blow all your money at the casino. Red meat that makes you want to moan needs red wine. I just won't eat for a few days--it was worth it. The meal came with a free shot of some Argentinian liquor; it was kinda sweet but I'm not sure really what it tasted like. I tried asking the waiter, I really tried, but all I got was "It's like Coca-Cola." Hmmm. I can't understand Argentinians. They have these strange accents and they might as well be speaking Catalan or Portuguese. But I'd run away with one tomorrow if he'd only cook for me.

Anyway. Badajoz has some not bad art museums. And a gun club. This is the first I've heard of guns for personal use in Spain, I thought they were illegal. Apparently hunting is a big thing here. Even kids can join the gun club, with a parent's permision.

I was born in a small town

Mondays can be kinda boring because the museums are usually closed, so I went to this little town called Zafra that doesn´t have any museums. Some churches, some cute little squares, and the friendliest people ever at the tourist office. One thing I´ve noticed about Spain is that people seem to really like the towns where they live, even ones that to me don´t seem to have a ton of merit. Not just tourist office employees--I´m talking people who don´t get paid to like their towns. When I ask people what they like about where they live the answer is usually something about the people, and in smaller towns the words más tranquila usually come up. I don´t go around asking small town Americans what they think of their towns (and maybe the Spanish people who strike up conversations with foreigners aren´t representative), but I´m pretty sure the responses would be a lot less positive.

Anyway, Zafra. As the weather gets more extreme, so do the siestas. I was forced (forced!) to have beer for lunch because I accidentally waited until siesta time to eat. Bars, restaurants, grocery stores, everything was closed. I finally found the one open bar in town, but they weren´t serving food, period. I had my heart set on gazpacho--I keep craving these very typical Spanish foods and then not being able to find them. The place had gazpacho on the menu--I´m sure there was a big drum of it in the kitchen. All someone had to do was put it in a bowl; they could have charged me more, I would have paid. But that´s just not how things work here.

Sick of myself

Madrid only got worse. The hostel was so hot that I was sweating just laying in my bed. Got maybe an hour of sleep and my 5am alarm was mostly a relief. At 6am, the streets were still crowded with people for whom it was still Saturday night. The subway was not only hotter than hell, it was packed full of drunken zombies. Got to the bus station insanely early for my 8am bus (but with the metro various forms of broken, I wasn't taking any chances) and it was closed. Sat outside and waited for it to open. I have a confession to make: I really like bus station cafeterias. I like them the way some people like diners: they have character and are usually staffed by competent older men who also have character and it's Spain so the coffee is always good and they always have jamón. I had my heart set on café con leche and tostada con aceite (thick slabs of toasted bread with olive oil and salt, so good) at the bus station, but when it finally opened I found the cafeteria closed for repairs. The only other bar around didn't have tostada, only pastries that were nowhere near good enough to be as unhealthy as I'm sure they were. I'm all whiny for some reason--good thing I'm back to traveling solo because I'm really not very good company right now. And. The extreme tolerance I had been cultivating for bus travel? Long gone after having a car for three days. The trip from Madrid to Badajoz took six hours. I think it's only about a four-hour drive, but we stopped in every fucking pueblo in between. And my assigned seat was an aisle seat right behind the bus driver, which meant I had to either listen to crappy bus-driver-preferred radio (they all listen to crap) or turn my iPod up dangerously loud to drown it out. Jeez, I'm so grumpy I don't even like myself right now. Maybe it's the weather or something like that.

Anyway, six hours and three bus drivers later, I finally got to Badajoz, on the western edge of Extremadura. Extremadura is on the western edge of central Spain and is the poorest of the autonomous regions. Weatherwise, it's as if I'm descending farther and farther into hell. 41 degrees today, that's 106 F. The average summer temperature in Extremadura is 38, which is about 100F. Ouch. Arriving in a new town in Spain on a Sunday is always a bad idea: You'll feel really alone because Spanish people mostly don't go out on Sundays, expecially in small towns. Add 41 degrees to that culture, and you get a ghost town.

Badajoz seems to be in kind of a transitional state. There are some improvement projects going on, but overall it feels kinda neglected. It has a nice plaza with a big church and a fountain, but most of the other buildings are pretty run down. Like most Spanish towns, it has a castle; unlike most Spanish castles, it's in near total disrepair. Which I actually kinda liked. I probably wouldn't want to look at a falling-apart castle every day, but I've seen a lot of castles and this was at least something different.

The streets and plazas in Spain are pretty much all named after someone. One thing I like about Badajoz is the street signs (when they exist) tell you who the person was. Bad example: Calle Hernán Cortés, Conquistador 1485-1547. I can't really get behind naming things after Hernán Cortés, but that's not the point. For someone like me know doesn't know jack about history, the extra information is nice.

I wasn´t even supposed to be here today

Madrid is ruining my small town vibe and making me grumpy. I woke up in Almansa today, as far east as you can go in La Mancha. I wanted to get to Badajoz, which is all the way across the country on the western edge of Extremadura. It would have been doable in a day if it were a weekday, or maybe if I had just gotten up earlier, but getting across Spain just wasn't in the cards for me today. The only place you can get to from Almansa is Albacete and the bus didn't leave until 2:30. Albacete and Badajoz are both smallish and far apart and going between them on a Saturday asfternoon wasn't happening. Madrid isn't directly between Albacete and Badajoz, but it's not that far out of the way and you can get anywhere from Madrid, so I'm here for the night. I really don't feel like being here; about the only thing that appealed to me less was staying a night in Albacete. (It's just kind of a hole.)

Madrid is great; I'm psyched to spend some time here next month. But tonight I'm getting over a minor bender and all I want to do is sleep. I'm gross and sweaty. I have no energy for or interest in going out, and I'm staying in this hostel full of young dolled-up British girls who are gonna be a total pain in the ass when I'm trying to sleep later. And one of the metro stations is closed so to get from the bus station to the hostel I had to get off the metro and take another bus just to get back on the metro which, by the way, is about a thousand fucking degrees, no air conditioning, no ventilation. Joder. If only I had that benefactor I could have just rented a car, since it turns out I really can drive a manual car, more or less. But no benefactor for me, just a slight detour and a hostel full of young people making me feel old. Whine.

While I've been writing this, one of the ubiquitous rose-selling south Asians approached the couple at the table next to me. And the guy part of the couple started negotiating with the rose guy. I lose all kinds of respect for any guy who buys me one of those stupid roses, but to try and negotiate a lower price for one? So many magnitudes more lame.

The good thing about today was I met this old lady on the bus from Almansa to Albacete. She was so cute. She asked me to help her off the bus. While we were waiting in Almansa I had told her that I was trying to get to Badajoz but might stay overnight in Ciudad Real. She said I should take the train there and when we got off the bus she walked me to the train station (not far away), holding my arm the whole time. Preciosa.

Lost in La Mancha

Don Quixote was a total fuck up. I love him. (Now I just gotta finish the book—way too heavy to carry around on this trip though.) And I kinda love La Mancha, too. It's hot and dry and the scenery is repetitivee and the cities are mostly nothing special, but it speaks to me the way things sometimes do. I really like the scenery: the wheat shines golden in the sun and the fields alternate reddish and gold and green (karma, karma, karma, karma) and there are mountains in the background. There are some really pretty river valleys and we saw waterfalls and almost went rock climbing in flip flops but I chickened out. Got mildly accosted about speaking English by cell-phone-throwing idiots whom we weren't even talking to, but that's part of it, too.

We decided we're in the Cleveland of Spain. I've never been to Cleveland specifically, and I'm okay with that, but someone who's only been to New York and Boston and San Francisco can't really claim to have seen the US. I want to see Spain, all of it, and it's not all museums and beaches and aesthetic appeal.

The creek

I grew up about a block away from a little creek. My cousins and I spent countless Saturdays exploring the woods around the creek; we'd go to the party store and spend all our money on Paydays and Jolly Ranchers and then hang out in the woods all day. Sometimes we'd even go swimming—there were lots of cleaner swimming options but the creek was close. Our parents would not have approved, so we had to be a little sneaky. The little river running through Alcalá del Júcar (river seems like way too strong a word, it's tiny) reminded me a lot of the creek in my old neighborhood; kinda dirty and buggy, with some little trails around that didn't seem to go anywhere in particular and felt more removed from civilization than they really were. More charming than it probably sounds.

Alcalá has the river, a church with a fake bell, and an old castle. We (met up with a friend of a friend of a friend whom I somehow managed to convince that bumming around remote central Spain was worthwhile) got to the castle just behind some kind of senior citizen outing and the old people were singing—very cute. Rocky hills rise up around the river valley, making for dramatic scenery and scary driving. It's funny how some of the things I don't like about small towns can become more appealing when I'm just visiting. If there's not much to do, you just start drinking earlier.

Peaches come in a can

Holy fucking christ it's hot here. (Here is Cuenca, in Castilla-La Mancha, in the middle of Spain.) The day I got here I saw a thermometer that read 52 degrees. Clearly that was wrong, that's almost 130 Fahrenheit and people weren't actually dying in the streets, but it didn't feel too far off. Luckily there are faucets and fountains with not bad water all over the place; I drank so much water my stomach hurt, but was still thirsty all the time. And if I carried my water bottle around for long without drinking, the water got hot. I totally understand siestas. It's a dry heat, but it's still really fucking hot. There's kind of a breeze, but it's only slightly more refreshing than a hairdryer. And apparently there's a heat wave that's hit the entire region except Cuenca, so I'm not even in the hot part of the middle of Spain. It cools off at night anyway, so there's that.

The old part of Cuenca is on this hill that comes up out of gorges made from two rivers. They're little rivers, I dunno how they made such deep gorges. Anyway, there are these houses built into the side of the cliff, casas colgadas they call them; when you walk onto their balconies you're over the gorge. There are good views if you walk across a long scary windy bridge that crosses the gorge. The bridge has a big construction sign next to it.

Back in the 1960's a group of Spanish artists was fed up that there was no forum for contemporary art in Spain and that the works of most Spanish artists were displayed outside Spain. So, led by this guy Fernando Zóbel, they started their own museum. The Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art is in one of the casas colgadas, and it's perfect. The house was built vertically so you keep going up and up and the rooms are small so the art fills them up without making them cluttered and there are views across the gorge and gush, gush, gush. It's really fantastic. And I love Fernando Zóbel; check him out if you like contemporary art that's not two-piles-of-dirt contemporary. And there I was, looking at the displayed book of Zóbel sketches, when what do I see but two pages of the Cambridge (MA) skyline. Turns out he went to Harvard. And they had this great Zóbel quote about how Cuenca is out of the way so only sophisticated tourists would come to the museum. I took it personally, even if in reality I'm broke and smelly.

Speaking of tourists, there don't seem to be any here. That can't really be true, because when I was making reservations a lot of the hotels were booked, but I dunno what the other tourists are doing. And there's no one around period during the afternoon. I'm all for siestas, kind of, but even the grocery stores here close for 3+ hours in the afternoon. Grocery stores are air-conditioned, what's the point of throwing the employees out on the street?

The hills around Cuenca are rocky and go up in steps with pine trees growing on their tops, making stripes of grey and green. The countryside is green and gold and brown with the occasional field of sunflowers, although both the fields and the sunflowers themselves are smaller and less intense than I remember from my first trip to Spain. They grow apples and peaches here; I was bummed that they apparently don't use the apples for sidra (hard cider, way better than what you get in the US), but I bought some peaches and omigod wowowow they are so good. So much better than any peaches I've had before, ever. Small pleasures. I bet you could make something sidra-like using peaches, and I bet it would be good.

On the bus ride out of Cuenca, the bus river pulled over and got out to buy a loaf of bread. I love Spain.

The middle of nowhere

There´s no nice way to say this: Ademuz is pretty crappy. It has some nice scenery, red hills like in Teruel, but that´s it. A lot of the houses are literally falling apart. But, I wanted to see small towns so here I am. I got in around 5pm on Saturday and went to buy some fruit to supplement my recent ham and bread diet, but everything was closed. It felt deserted, and as I walked around I imagined giant cartoon arrows flashing and pointing at me: “She´s not from around here! Outsider! Foreigner!” (Does contemplating how self-absorbed you are make you more self-absorbed or less?)

Luckily the one other person on the bus from Teruel to Ademuz made friends with me. He´s from the Canary Islands and really likes Ademuz and had never met an American before. He likes the scenery and the quiet and the people here. (It continues to amaze me that sometimes I can have entire conversations in Spanish but buying bus tickets still trips me up sometimes. It is getting easier, though.) I´ll keep being honest: We probably wouldn´t be friends if we lived in the same town and/or spoke the same language. But we don´t and we don´t, and he made what probably would have been an insufferably boring weekend kinda fun. Ademuz has a pool with a little outdoor cafe and the whole town seems to spend the weekends there. It´s a little bit of a walk down an unmarked road and I never would have found it by myself. The people here are nice and friendly and nonthreatening now that I´ve gotten over the town itself (says the girl from the rural midwest). The people are nice BUT. I missed the second half of the Germany-Portugal game because they switched the bar TV to coverage of the pope´s visit to Valencia. The friggin´papa. He looks like Hannibal Lecter.

And my hotel reminds me of the general store from Little House on the Prairie. It´s a hotel, bar, restaurant, banquet hall, and store, all in one big building with a huge front porch. There´s a little river that runs through the town and the Ayuntamiento (city hall) stocks it with fish so people can go fishing. I think that´s cute (I know they do it all over the place, but it´s still cute.) The river turns red from the dirt when it rains.

So Ademuz was okay. I wanted to run like hell when I first got here, but I´m glad I didn´t.

¡Teruel Existe!

Apparently the population of Teruel province (roughly the southern third of Aragón) has decreased by about 50% over the last hundred years. There´s this ¡Teruel Existe! (Teruel exists) campaign to promote the province. I´m not sure what it consists of, exactly, but I´ve seen a lot of ¡Teruel Existe! bumper stickers.

The 6:40am train was less painful than I thought it would be. We passed all these wheat fields that looked really nice in the morning sunlight. Sun shining on wheat fields makes me inexplicably happy. And closer to Teruel, the dirt turned red and there were red hills off in the distance. Kinda cool.

I got to Teruel city right in the middle of Fiestas del Angel, the yearly weeklong celebration of the founding of Teruel. I guess that´s why I had so much trouble finding a hotel room. It´s kinda cool that I´m here for this festival, but the museums are closed all week because of it. I went to the cathedral, but there really wasn´t anything else to do but walk around. There is some cool architecture here: A lot of Muslims stayed in southern Aragón after they lost ruling power (in Spanish they´re called mudéjars) so there´s a lot of Islamic influence. And a lot of very red brick. (Does that have anything to do with the fact that the dirt here is red? I dunno.) But Teruel is really small—you can see all the interesting buildings in about an hour, and then what do you do? Worse, most of the plazas are blocked off in preparation for the night´s festivities, so there aren´t even good places to sit and observe. And festivals like this are really good for making you feel like a total outsider, if that´s in fact what you are. Whine.

For lack of anything better to do, I took a little siesta today. I had the TV on in my hotel room and the local station was covering the festival. I´m pretty sure I´ve seen all there is to see here, because everything they were showing on TV looked familiar. Then they switched to interviews with various locals, and when I went back out a while later I found that the interviews were being recorded live a block away from my hotel. Small towns are good for stuff like that.

But. All of these Teruel stories are a long digression from what´s really important here, and that is the ham. The streets of Teruel smell of ham. Not all of them, but enough that I can say it without really exaggerating. It is so good. Omigod it is so good. I´m not really a food person; I like food, but I´m not very good at talking about it. I was trying really hard to figure out what was different about Teruel ham compared to regular old serrano ham (which is already pretty fucking good), but I´m not used to thinking about food that way. The texture is a little different: cut a little thicker and slightly drier. And it was a little bit smoky; it almost tasted a little bacon-y. That´s all I got. It was just really, really good. And, a whole plate of it only cost three euros. In fact, I had a plate of the best ham ever, three tapas, and two glasses of wine all for four euros. I didn´t really need the second glass of wine (which was actually the third before 9pm--I was bored in Teruel, okay?), but when bartenders are giving out free alcohol you kinda have to drink it.

I didn´t really get the maño thing before Teruel. Zaragoza is a biggish city, with presumably more non-Aragonians; Torla was full of hiker tourists; I wasn´t in Huesca long enough to notice much. But here in Teruel, people are definitely more brute-ish. Drunken fighting (mostly good-natured, but still), yelling, shirtless fat men singing loudly. Okay, so there is this festival going on, but I´ve been to other Spanish festivals and they´re normally far less brutish. There isn´t even a good ice cream place here.

Aside from being more brutish, Friday night´s festivities were pretty typical for Spain: drinking, music, fireworks, little kids up way past any reasonable American bedtime. On Saturday morning the park and bus station were full of passed-out people. I saw one guy wake up from sleeping in the grass, pick up a pair of hot pink thong underwear that for whatever reason were laying next to him, put them on over his jeans, walk about 20 feet away, and pass out again, face down, the pink triangle of the thong displayed prominently on his ass. Maños.

While I was at the bus station waiting to leave Teruel it started raining, hard, and the red dirt made all these red rivers running down the streets. It would have been miserable if I´d been outside in it, but from inside the dry bus it all looked pretty cool.

Jose, can you see?

So the Fourth of July came and went. I celebrated by pretending to be German. It was an honest mistake: While watching the futbol game, the bartender asked "¿Alemania?" and I said "Sí", meaning that I was cheering for Germany in the game. But of course he was asking me if I am German--by the time I realized that it seemed too late to explain. At least he didn´t try speaking German.

Anyway. The posting at the park and three different TV stations´ weather reports all said it was gonna storm today. But one channel said it was gonna rain in the afternoon, and I´m only here for three days, and it was clear at 9am. So I went back to the park hoping for the best but knowing I might end up wet and miserable far away from civilization; I don´t even have rain gear. Sometimes you get lucky. I hiked from about 10am until about 3pm and at about 3:30 it started raining. A good part of the hike I did today was around the side of a mountain--exhilarating but kinda scary. It would have been easy enough to go over the edge. I didn´t. I saw some chamois deer, and ate lunch on a rock by a waterfall. I wouldn´t want to live in the wilderness, probably not even close to it, but it really is great to be out in it now and then.

Torla, the town where I´m staying, is really cute. Just what you might imagine for a little village tucked away in the mountains. Of course it´s full of tourists, but it doesn´t feel touristy. Wilderness tourists are more innocuous than city tourists, I think, even if they do smell a little worse.

Monteperdido

Zaragoza is perfectly nice but completely missable unless you´re reeaaallly into Goya or want to see all of Spain. I´m glad I came, though. Hanging out with Angel and Gustavo made me feel like kind of an honorary Spanish person for a few days, even if they did keep calling me gringa.

On the morning of my last day in Zaragoza, Gustavo and I did some limited sightseeing, limited because it was a Monday and almost everything was closed. Zaragoza has a former Muslim palace and we went to that; it was interesting but hard to get excited about after seeing the Alhambra in Granada. And one of the banks here has a very small collection of Goya paintings and we saw that. In the afternoon, I sat on the couch and watched TV--can´t remember the last time I did that. Passed out for a while from a migraine (maybe too much TV is that bad for me) and Angel woke me up for dinner. With Gustavo, the still-shirtless neighbor, shirtless neighbor´s girlfriend, and their drag queen friend. He wasn´t actually dressed in drag, but I´m pretty sure he dresses in drag. Maybe I overuse this comparison, but he really did belong in an Almodóvar film. I couldn´t understand most of what he said because my knowledge of Spanish profanity is embarrassingly lacking. Angel wasn´t wearing pants.

Anyway. Today I left Angel and Gustavo and their crazy friends to go to Parque Nacional de Ordesa in the Aragonian Pyrenees. It´s supposed to be the nicest part of the Pyrenees. After a five-hour hike today, I believe it. There are waterfalls everywhere, and these bright yellow flowers, and rock that looks all different colors when the sun hits it. The hike I did started out foresty; for a while the tree coverage was so thick you could barely see the sky. In the middle it opened up and got grassy, following a stream for a while, and the end was high enough up that you could see a little bit of snow left at the tops of some of the mountains and there was a huge waterfall. And there was this little herd of cow-like animals with fuzzy stuffed animal ears. (They were wearing bells, so they weren´t exactly part of the natural scenery, but whatever. I liked them.)

I´m a little bit stressed that my shoes don´t fit quite right, because these are the ones I´m planning to wear on the Camino, but I always stress about shoes. I didn´t get blisters, anyway.

ZaragOH!za

(it´s what the signs all over the city say)

So Zaragoza. It´s fine. I´m not blown away or anything, but I wasn´t expecting to be blown away. Goya is from around here an there´s a good small art museum with a whole room full of his etchings. There´s also a museum dedicated to Pablo Gargallo, a sculptor from here, in this cool old palace. Churches, Roman ruins, plazas, fountains. El Corte Inglés.

Maño is a term for an Aragonese person (Aragón is the autonomous region where Zaragoza is; it´s right next to Catalunya). Maños are stubborn brutes, apparently. The eat these candies here called adoquines that are really hard and chewy and take forever to eat (you have to be a stubborn brute to finish one) and are supposed to have a jota (some kind of Aragonian song) inside. I learned all of this from Angel and Gustavo whom I´m staying with. Angel pretty much speaks English and Gustavo speaks some, but they´d call me a gringa if I tried speaking English to them, so Zaragoza is good for my Spanish.

It feels a little like a sitcom. Gustavo is Mexican and the whole house is very decorated with colorful things from Mexico. Angel keeps telling him not to talk to me because I need to learn Spanish not Mexican. Angel is a judge and Gustavo is a law student and they have another roommate who´s never around and apparently smokes hash all the time. This bothers Angel not. Last night their neighbor came by. He wasn´t wearing a shirt and he was really sweaty and carrying a man´s purse. He drank one of their beers and then left. It was at least as funny as the Spanish sitcoms I´ve seen.