A little slice of heaven

In keeping with Portuguese people being generally quieter than Spanish people, I get cat-called a lot less here than I did in Spain. But I get honked at a lot. Sometimes the guys yell something from the cars, but mostly they just honk. Pedro says it's because Portuguese guys are shy.

Mehmet told me that Portuguese people have an inferiority complex about Spain. I asked Pedro's friend Paolo (as if anyone would own up to having an inferiority complex) and he said no, he just doesn't like Spanish people.

A lot of the buildings here are tiled on the outside. It's called azulejo and the tiles often have a lot of blue but not always. It looks really nice, but up-close photos mostly don't work out so well because the tiles are old and so usually a little worn when you look closely. I passed this building today whose tiles were in really good condition, even up close, so I stopped to take a touristy picture even though there was a guy standing right outside. (I mostly try to act like a tourist only when no one's watching.) The guy told me they weren't the original tiles. Caught! No wonder they looked so nice. I told him they would make a nice photo, anyway. And then he asked me if I wanted one of the original tiles. He works in the building and told me that they recently remodeled and retiled the building, but they have lots of old tiles laying around. What luck! Maybe I should act like a tourist more often. Unfortunately he couldn't find any and was about to go look in the garage when an older guy who I'm guessing was maybe his boss showed up. After some animated discussion in Portuguese, it turned out there were no extra tiles--none for me, anyway. Damn. Would have made a really good souvenir, with a good story to go with it. I got nice photos, anyway.

I didn't really do much today, which is why I'm kind of rambling. But I did have pasteis (pronounced posh-taysh) de nata. It's a little tart-like thing, with a flaky crust and filled with heaven. I suck at describing food: It's sweet, it's creamy (nata means cream), with a slight flavor of cinnamon or nutmeg. Kinda like creme brulee a little? I dunno, but it's sooooo good. It is so good. I dunno why they don't seem to make it anywhere else, but come to Portugal. Try it. You'll like it. You'll love it.

Ouch

Ouch. Nothing like two hot nineteen-year-old Estonian girls, massage therapists hitchhiking across Europe, to make you feel old and ordinary. My ego hurts.

Anyway. Évora is an hour and a half-is east of Lisbon. It's walled and quaint and cobble-stoned and, I had heard, must-see. And I probably would have agreed two months ago, before I started seeing walled, quaint, cobble-stoned towns on a very regular basis.

Évora is really nice, I just couldn't get that into it. It's really hot, and I kept getting lost. Which really wasn't Évora's fault. I'm always getting lost (especially now without my compass) because I have no sense of direction, and I was stubborn and didn't get a good map from the tourist office because they were too big. I spent most of the day grumpy, anyway.

Back in Lisbon, I finally saw some Fado, so the day wasn't lost. Fado is kinda like flamenco, but a little more restrained and without the dancing and clapping. It didn't speak to me quite the way flamenco does, but I did like it. You can't go too wrong with good guitar and gaping-wound vocals.

And they drink beer with coffee here. I don't think they drink it a lot, but apparently dark beer mixed with coffee and sugar and I dunno what else is a traditional Portuguese drink. (Either that or my new friend Pedro was just fucking with me.) I disliked it less than I thought I would, but that's the highest praise I can give. I forget the Portuguese name for it, but it means "kick in the cunt." Ouch.

The plural of octopus is not and never has been octopi

Yesterday I basked in evening sun and suspension bridges; tonight I'm basking in my dinner. I found the perfect restaurant. It's a little hole in the wall. It's not really in the middle of nowhere because it's pretty close to the city center, but it's on a dark, otherwise residential street and marked only by a string of Christmas lights and a handwritten sign in the window.

I ordered octopus. I really like seafood, but I'm so picky about it that I often don't bother ordering it. But this was really, really good. Eat until it hurts good. And they brought me cheese just like my food friend said they would, and it was really really good too. And the waiter/cook/owner didn't argue when I told him I speak Spanish. And I had bread, cheese, octopus, water, too much wine, and coffee all for 10.95€. I do like Portugal.

Before dinner, I did touristy stuff. Two art museums, one modern and one a collector's collection (Calouste Gulbenkian, sounds like Guggenheim, right?). Señor Gulbenkian must have really liked René Lalique, because he had a whole room full of his stuff. Some glasswork and mostly jewelry. Really nice jewelry. I also really like René Lalique.

The contemporary art museum had this great installation made out of books. Imagine an open square made of stacks of books, maybe five feet wide and about ten feet high, with openings on two sides so you can walk through. Inside, the ceiling and the floor are mirrored, except for a thin mat that you walk across. Not sure if the description works, but the effect is you feel like you're walking across this bridge with nothing underneath, the books just go up and down forever. There was a sign discouraging people who fear heights from entering--I'm not sure it was that realistic, but it was a little disconcerting.

Beef Kung Pão

So. It's my first night in Lisbon and I'm having Chinese food for dinner. I can explain. Kind of. I walked all day and I'm really tired and don't have it in me to look hard for a restaurant or walk very far. But everything around my hotel has menus in about ten different languages and really annoying waiters outisde trying to draw you in. Except this one mostly empty Chinese place. So here I am. The beef is fair, the rice is awful, and the wine that I somehow accidentally ordered myself a whole bottle of is good. Could be worse, and at least I'm not getting a bad impression of Portuguese food from some tourist hell restaurant.

Anyway. I was ready to leave Faro this morning. How I managed to make an anti-semitic* virgin-seeking Muslim fall for an infidel like myself is beyond me, but Mahmet was getting to be a little much. Time to move on. Even in the capital, Portugal feels almost entirely calm and quiet compared to Spain. And so far, Lisbon has been completely manageable: I showed up in town without a place to stay but found a room pretty quickly. The bus station is far from the center but the metro is easy. I haven't gotten even slightly lost yet. And most people speak English; in fact, I think I'm annoying people by trying to communicate in the Russian-accented bad Spanish that I try to pass off as Portuguese. (Written Portuguese looks like Spanish; spoken Portuguese sounds like Russian. Weird. Several times I've almost answered questions with da instead of sim for yes.) In Spain people mostly appreciate the "English-as-a-last resort" attitude; here, not so much.

But I digress. Lisbon is sort of a filled-in U shape surrounded by the Rio Tejo. Six km west of the center is an area called Belém. (For having a fairly smallpopulation, Lisbon feels spread out.) I arrived in Belém really tired and all sweaty because I thought it would be a good idea to walk there. 6K is a pretty long walk when it's hot and there's no shade. Anyway, I mostly went to Belém to go to this design museum that's there. The museum is in this large complex that reminds me a lot of the Contemporary Culture Center in Barcelona: very modern and open and airy and confusing as hell. Once I finally found it, I liked the museum: kinda art but kinda different. It had a lot of furniture, and it was pretty funny to see what was on the cutting edge of design fifty years ago: A lot of it looked like it could be from Ikea today. They also had some nice glass art, wich is one of my new favorite things.

After the museum I paid 1.50€ to go to the top of a tallish building. Deep thought: Lisbon is really nice. It has nice architecture (lots of the buildings have these cool tiles all over the outside) and lots of green space. Plus, everything looks beter when it's really bright and sunny. It's really windy here, but the wind is somehow doing good things for my hair; that's never happened before. After the view I sat by the river (it is so calm here) and basked in the fact that I'm in Portugal. I took a bunch of pictures of the setting sun shining on this suspension bridge. Bridges are cool anyway, and this one is especially nice because it's a nice shade of red.

So, Lisbon. I like it. Bad Chinese food and all.

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*I'm not stereiotyping. I asked him what he thought about Israel, and he asked me if I'd been to the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam. I have. He started talking about how big the house was, and how wealthy the Franks were, and how the Jews had too much money and the German government had to do something, and that he wrote as much in the Anne Frank House guestbook.... And here I felt guilty about getting stoned after going to the Anne Frank house.

Livin' is easy

The nice beaches in Faro aren't really in Faro, they're around Faro. For five euros round trip you can take a boat to an island with nice beaches. Perfect. (Actually I don't really like boats that much (I get seasick sometimes), but never mind, I'm taking a boat to an island to lay on the beach. Perfect.) I just had to get to the boat.

Walking is one of my favorite forms of transportation. It's reliable, easy, and good for you. I really didn't care that it was a long walk from Mehmet's place to the boat. But he insisted on taking me to the boat, and on biking there. He said it was a short walk to the gas station to fill the flat tire, and that we'd be riding on trails, not in traffic. Both blatant lies. It was a really long walk, mostly uphill, to the gas station. I didn't realize until it was too late that the bike was too big for me. The seat didn't go down quite far enough. Really, really painful. And then once we filled the tire and started riding, it was all on city streets, with cars and stoplights, pedestrians, traffic circles. And then we hit the cobbled sidewalks.

Poor Mehmet. His intentions were good; he was really trying to help. That didn't make me want to strangle him any less when I finally got off the bike. BUt then I got to go to a remote island and I calmed down. The island was a lot more remote than I'd expected; the boat ride took an hour. But once I finally go there it was really, really nice. It wasn't deserted, but it wasn't really that crowded either. The sand was white and soft. The water isn't the brilliant blue/green/teal/turquoise and everything in between of Croatia, but it's a very pretty shade of blue and it shines like glass and is the perfect temperature. A few times this trip I've had these nearly overwhelming feelings of contentment, these realizations that I'm exactly where I should be, doing what I should be doing. It happened when I was hiking in the Pyrenees and when I was driving with my friend around Castilla-La Mancha, and again today at the beach. It's a very, very good feeling; if I could get it chemically I'd be hooked. Anyway, it was a great day to be at the beach because it's really friggin' hot here. It's less dry than Spain was and the sun is intense. I haven't seen a Portuguese cloud yet.

Ferol is the name of the island (I think). Aside from a four-wheeler with a trailer that some guys were using to move butano or something, the only vehicles on Ferol were two shopping carts chained together. (I didn't ask.) All signs pointed to everything being screw-you expensive, but I had a decent sandwich and a beer all for 2.50 euros.

And. I had decided to go topless. I was alone, a day away from leaving town, and in no danger of running into anyone I know. No tanlines. I had sunscreen. Maybe it would be freeing and liberating. I was gonna try. Until I noticed that no one else was topless. This is so not Spain.

In another country

Quick, go--first thoughts on Portugal: It's a lot quieter than Spain. People don't talk as much or as loudly; doors aren't slammed as much; there are fewer motorcycles. People speak more English and smoke less than in Spain. It's cheaper here.

I was kinda supposed to be in Lisbon today; I'm only in Faro because of the terrorists. See, the bus ride from Sevilla to Lisbon takes 7.5 hours, and at the bus station they told me to buy the ticket ahead of time because they buses often sell out. So I bought the ticket before I went to Cádiz, which was back when I thought I might not be able to charge my iPod for months. (And I need a new charger because my old charger got ruined by shampoo, which exploded because the terrorists made British Airways make me check my bag.) Seven plus hours on a crowded bus without music seemed like cruel and unusual punishment, and the bus stops in Faro, a mere 2.5 hours from Sevilla on the south coast of Portugal. And I've been feeling beachy lately and I have a place to stay. So here I am in Faro.

Right after I got here I had a drink with this Italian-Swiss guy that I met on the bus who has perhaps the nicest teeth I've ever seen. He had an hour to kill before catching another bus to Lagos to go surfing. So we're at this cafe and this old guy sits down with his little dog. I think it was some kind of poodle. The waiter brings him a Coke, a glass of ice, a glass of water, and a saucer. After pouring some Coke into the glass with ice, he pours a mix of Coke and water into the saucer and feeds it to the dog, who's sitting on his lap. He was one of those older guys whose mouth is always smiling, and when the dog's ear got in the Coke he wiped it off with a napkin. It was the cutest thing ever. So far so good.

I'm staying with Mehmet, a Turkish civil engineering student. We had lunch at this place that felt like someone's backyard, where an old guy with about three teeth cooked sardines on an old beat-up grill and told war stories that I could only barely follow. (Portugal had some involvement in Angola. I did not know that. Later I saw another older guy with some names and Angola 1972 tattooed on his arm.)

Mehmet is Muslim and seems to be in something of a transitional state with his faith. He doesn't eat pork and he prays, at least sometimes, but he started drinking occasionally when he came to Portugal and he's currently reading the Koran to get a better sense of things. And he wants to marry a virgin. I wanted to start trying Portuguese wine, so I ended up pre-partying (there's a term I haven't heard since college) with one of the more devout Muslims I've ever personally met. Bizarre. He lives a longish walk from the city center and thought we should ride bikes to the bar. Sounded like bad idea jeans to me (I can't ride a bike properly when I'm sober), so I was relieved when one of the bikes had a flat tire. But he really didn't want to walk, so I rode on the back of his bike. (We've gone from college to junior high.) Not on the spokes, because there were no spokes: I was on the seat and he was on the pedals. It was a little fun and exhilirating, but mostly scary and painful. (I had to hold my feet up and back the whole time to keep them out of the way of things like walls and oncoming traffic.) And sobering, so the pre-partying ended up being for naught. And I can't tango.

I'm back!

Yesterday wasn't the first time Spain has started to all look the same, or the first time that this trip has started to wear on me. It doesn't make for great writing (or maybe I just don't like to own up to being unhappy). I didn't really want to go to Sevilla en route to Portugal. I wanted to go to Cádiz--I hadn't been before, my guide book raves about it, and it's close to Portugal. Sevilla is really, really nice, but it's really hot and I've already been there. But the buses to Portugal leave from Sevilla and I couldn't easily find a place to sleep in Cádiz. My room in Sevilla is cheap, but also windowless and musty as hell. The toilet is across the hall and the shower is a curtainless corner of the room that's impossible to use without soaking everything. The walls are Spanish-tiled, but the tiles are falling off. Pretty gross. The people at El Corte Inglés told me that Apple, not El Corte Inglés, is sold out of iPod chargers. It's hot and touristy, and I've spent the better part of the past two weeks surrounded by really good friends and, okay I admit it, yesterday was kinda lonely.

But that was yesterday. Today I got up early and took the two-hour bus ride for a day trip to Cádiz. Totally worth it. I just like it here. Cádiz is a good size--small enough that you can get your bearings pretty quickly but big enough that after a few hours of walking around I ws still finding things. The architecture is different enough to look new. And the really long hot sweaty walk to El Corte Inglés paid off and I found a new iPod charger. I love Cádiz.

I've been inland for most of this trip. It never occurred to me to be bothered by that, but it's really nice to be on the water again. And it's new water, kinda of: Cádiz is on the Atlantic coast, not the Mediterranean. It's not really as beachy as I thought it would be: the 4.5km "beach walk" described in my guidebook is only about .5km of actual beach; the rest is sidewalk with a view of the water. But whatever, I put my feet in and convinced myself that salt air is good for my cold. And I met the cutest puppy, who licked my hand and very gently bit my finger. His owner glared at me, but fuck her. And I got excited about travel again. And I'm going to Portugal tomorrow. Life is good.

One more try

Four years ago I came to Córdoba. I was with seven other people in two rented cars. Several of us had fairly strong personalities, and none of us really spoke Spanish. We showed up without a place to stay, had trouble finding a place to stay, argued about where to stay. Once we finally found a hostal, I promptly got myself mugged, sending some of us to the police station and leaving the rest on hold for what I think was a really long time. Without cell phones. We managed to somehow make it out of there without hating Córdoba or each other. (Well, we don't have each other now anyway....) That said, I liked Córdoba much better on the second try. No muggings, no fighting, no tears. I did get a cold, but I deserve it.

I think my favorite thing about Córdoba is the courtyards. It's the Muslim architecture--you see it all over Spain and especially in the south, but Córdoba just seems to do courtyards better than anywhere else I've been. We saw flamenco under the stars in a courtyard. Touristy, yeah, but it wasn't bad and the setting went a long way towards making up for any lack of authenticity. I was convinced our hotel was the same place where my less-broke friends stayed four years ago because I was sure I recognized the courtyard, with its plants and tiles and fountains. But then I passed another place that I was evenmore sure was where they stayed. And then it happened again. Okay, I clearly have no idea where they stayed. ...Which isn't to say that all the courtyards look the same; they're just all really nice, and nice is apparently all I remember about the one from four years ago.

My least favorite thing about Córdoba is salmorejo. I had seen people eating it, got grossed out, and then accidentally ordered it myself because I didn't know what it was called and was feeling adventurous. It's like gazpacho but thick and creamy. Really thick. It actually doesn't taste that bad (I had ordered it and was gonna pay for it, I had to try it), it's just that gazpacho is really good, and even kinda healthy. This stuff can't possibly be healthy. And even worse, it is such an eyesore. It's this light, bright orange that looks like a cross between Thousand Island salad dressing (gag) and that "cheese" dip they sell with nacho chips at sporting events (wretch). Pretty foul.

Deep(er) thoughts

Flamenco is like pornography that you don't have to feel dirty about.

When the music's over

So I finally got my backpack back from British Airways. I was hoping for some kind of severance package, but not at all surprised by the lack thereof. I was so happy to have my stuff back I couldn't even be grumpy. And now that I've calmed down and am wearing clean underwear, I mostly just feel sorry for British Airways. They didn't mean to lose my stuff, and they let me use their lounge when I was stuck in Heathrow for an afternoon. That's still way more than you'd get from any of the American carriers.

One major problem remains. My shampoo exploded and one of the things it got all over was my iPod charger. After pulling a few fabulously stupid electrical stunts, I've now convinced myself I need a new charger. But there are no Apple stores in Spain. Maybe a regular electronics store will have one; if not, my future bus trips just got a lot more painful.

Whiiiiine

Oh Christ, where do I start? First, thanks to everyone who checked in on me after the blog disappeared for a while. I'm alive and well, mostly. Seattle was great. Went canoeing, went to the beach, had sushi, hot tubbed. Had friends waiting for me in Madrid and getting into the apartment we rented there ended up being a nightmare, but aside from that the three extra days in the US weren't really a problem.

The problem was that, three days later, getting back to Spain still meant getting through Heathrow and the carry-on restrictions hadn't yet been relaxed. So I checked everything. I am so fucking cooperative when given no other choice. Never ever ever ever ever ever ever check luggage. Of course they lost my bag. They lost everyone's bag.

And, two days later, my bag is found but still in London.

At about hour 27 of the trip, I finally left the Madrid airport, dutifully carrying my clear plastic bag with my passport, cash, credit cards, tampons, and some Excedrin I'd smuggled on the plane (don't tell). And nothing else. No public transportation at 3am, so I shelled out for a cab. I did magically find my friends without the aid of my phone which, in the middle of this debacle, was a little piece of incredibly good luck. Sleeping on the street in our neighborhood would have been pretty horrible.

Tuesday was mostly a write-off--slept all day. No one answered at any of the baggage claim phone numbers. So today I trucked back to the airport. FUCK the Madrid metro. Fuck it. The stop near our apartment is closed. To get to the airport you have to get off the metro, take a bus, and get back on. You're always changing lines. It's slow. Fuck it. Then once you get to the airport stop you have to take another bus on the highway, in traffic, to get to Terminal 4. Who designed this?

I'm in survival mode: I don't even try speaking Spanish to the Spanish staff at the British Airways counter, except to confirm that they speak English. They make a phone call, hand me the phone, and leave me on hold for a while. I'm surprised by how well I can understand one of the desk clerks flirting with another customer; maybe I should have done the negotiation in Spanish after all. He tries to draw me into their conversation and I'm glad I've temporarily forgotten how to speak Spanish. I've been wearing the same underwear for three days--I can't be charming under these conditions.

Someone finally answers they phone. They've found my bag. In London. Call back tomorrow. So. Not only do I still lack all of my possessions except those in my Ziplock bag, but I have to get right back on the fucking subway. After I take the bus on the highway to the subway. I'm starting to feel defeated.

What's keeping me sane are my friends here who are both good sanity checks as well as approximately my size. That counts for a lot.

Grounded

Maybe I should just move to Seattle and work at a record store. I guess I'm a little suggestible these days....

Because I insisted on flying British Airways (was in Seattle for a job interview), the thwarted terror attempt thwarted my return trip to Spain. My refusal to get stuck in London meant three extra days in Seattle. Bummer because I have friends in Spain right now waiting to visit me, but at least I'm stuck in a cool city where I have a place to sleep. I sat in an independent coffee shop this morning wearing a sweater and feeling grungy. (Okay, the sweater was brand name and probably expensive, but it was also itchy and borrowed and too big. That counts.) Good coffee. I walked through a park and went to the art museum. It had an exhibition of glass art: very different, very cool. And. Seattle Art Museum: SAM. I made friends with a guy on the street collecting money for the DNC. I told him I have six dollars, a friend, and an ATM card that doesn't work. He told me to keep trying to convince Spain that Americans aren't all bad. And he invited me to go sailing tomorrow but I already have plans to go kayaking. I went to book stores and record stores and a newsstand. (Does life get better than a used book store with a resident cat?) The sun eventually came out. I bought good Belgian beer at an organic grocery store. Just when I was really thinking I could get used to this, I realized I'd paid $8.25 for a glass of wine with lunch. Ouch.

All come praise the infanta

Maybe France or Italy had more, but Spain has produced a fucking lot of great artists. There's this famous Velázquez painting called Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor) of Felipe IV and his family. (Velázquez was the royal family's official painter when Felipe IV was ruling.) It centers on Felipe's little daughter, the infanta Margarita (isn't infanta just about the most dramatic word ever?). She's wearing this big fancy dress and surrounded by servants and midgets (what was it with European royalty and their midgets?) and a dog and Velázquez himself is in the painting, painting. Picasso painted all these interpretations of Las Meninas that, even thought they look nothing like the original, do somehow kind of get at its essence. (There are a bunch on display at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, and the dog in one of them prompted on of my favorite Mom quotes ever: "Oh. I thought that was a cute little triceratops." It did look a lot like a triceratops.)

Anyway, the Prado Museum in Madrid has the original Meninas and, as part of a special exhibition, some of Picasso's interpretations. Very cool. The museum in Barcelona has a print of the Velázques painting, but it's way better to see the real things together. The problem is they're still not really together: The Meninas are in another room, separated from the Picassos by a large hallway, so you can't see everything up close at the same time. It would be so easy to move the Meninas into the Picasso exhibition. It's the same museum, they don't even need to get anyone's permission, they could just do it. It would temporarily take away from the Velázquez room, but that's what temporary exhibitions do.

Oh well. Anyway, as I already knew, Madrid is much better as a destination than a connection.

Guernika

I don't know anywhere near enough about art or writing to come up with anything appropriate to say about Picasso, really. (Except to go on about how huggable he was, but I've already done that.) I'll try to stick to the facts. It's the 25-year anniversary of the return of Guernica to Spain, and the museums are celebrating. As Picasso wanted, it was in New York at MOMA until Spain went back to being a free country. After Franco died, it got to come home. I like that story. Not the evil dictator part, but I like the idea of New York keeping it safe for a while, and I like that it's back in Spain now.

I had the Guernica story a little wrong. Picasso had been commissioned by the Spanish Republican government (the side that lost the civil war) to paint something for an upcoming world exposition. He had already started work on what would become Guernica when he found out about the bombing--it affected him and provided final inspiration and a title, but it wasn't exactly the case that the bombing happened and then he decided to do the painting. Which really shouldn't matter. I mean, there was a war going on and people were dying and it was terrible and he created this phenomenal piece of art espousing the horrors of war and it ended up being particularly influenced by one specific tragedy. What's the problem? There isn't one, besides the obvious, but, well, I dunno if it's my soft spot for the Basque country or how proud they are of their Peace Museum in Guernica or what, but I found myself a little disappointed--disappointed really isn't the right word, but I don't know what is--that the painting had just a little bit less to do with Guernica than I had originally thought. I know that's ridiculous, but....

One little pig

Roast suckling pig is really popular in Segovia. A new Spanish pork product! I was excited, even if the cuteness implied by the name inspired even more guilt than usual about my carnivory. But you know what? I wasn't that impressed. It was good, but it wasn't that good. Maybe I chose a bad restaurant, or maybe I just prefer my Spanish pork a little more mature. And cured. I dunno.

I like Esteban Vicente. He painted shapes in two or three colors on large canvases (think Rothko, slightly scaled down and with more circles). Stuff that might make me say "So what's the big deal?" if I didn't like it so much. But he's got great colors and makes it work. Unfortunately the Esteban Vicente museum in Segovia (he's from Segovia) was half full of a temporary exhibition of sculptures by this guy Gottlieb, a contemporary of Vicente's. I think they went to art school together in New York or something. I like sculpture. I even like some modern sculpture. But modern sculpture that looks like cardboard cutouts of arcs and stars glued together and painted yellow and black just doesn't do it for me. And it took up so much space that would have otherwise been filled with stuff that I like, dammit.

Segovia's other art musuem is one of those free bank-sponsored spaces that hosts temporary exhibits. Most Spanish cities have at least one. One of the exhibitions was this series of September 11-based paintings: before, during, after. Not what I was expecting to see. It was really well-done, though. You knew just what you were looking at, but it was abstract enough that you could look without recoiling. Maybe that's too easy for me to say, though, since I wasn't actually there for September 11.

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I've been to the Russian and now the Spanish version of Versailles, still not the real thing though. Felipe IV was a grandson of Louis XIV and ruler of Spain after his side won the War of the Spanish Succession. (Catalunya backed the other guy and paid for it.) He built a Versailles-like palace with fountains and gardens in La Granja, just outside of Segovia. The fountains weren't turned on, which was kind of a bummer but understandable given that they serve no real purpose and Spain is in a drought right now.

European royalty back then must have been a pretty good gig if you could get it. And didn't get beheaded or anything. They got to live in these fabulous palaces with great art and beautiful gardens. I guess European royalty today have it even better though: They still get to be rich and usually beautiful, don't really have to do anything, and are pretty safe from the guillotine. I don't remember wanting to be a princess when I was a little kid, but it sounds pretty nice right now.

Remember the princess who lived on the hill

There's just no pleasing me. Speaking Spanish all the time is hard and makes me feel like an idiot, but the sound of American tourists makes me want to run screaming. Segovia felt like tourist hell when I first got here, made me want to hightail it to the nearest pueblo. Right, because I fit in so well with rural Spaniards. I am so full of shit. Segovia is touristy, but for good reason.

It looks like a fairy tale. The cathedral is huge and beautiful and there's an aqueduct and this castle with what used to be a moat. (Another confession: I don't really understand how aqueducts work. But the one here is big and old and impressive nonetheless.) It's hilly, so there are all these great views of the countryside with cute Spanish houses and more churches and mountains in the distance. And it's surprisingly easy to find places where tourists don't go.

I went to church today. I can explain. There's this monastery. Visits are free and I have a strange affection for monks and I had read that they chant at 1pm. So I went. While poking around the part of the monastery that they let you see, I got just a little bit envious of the monks. They live in this incredible building, surrounded by beautiful countryside and looking over a valley to the castle. It's so pretty and peaceful, and what do monks have to worry about, really? Anyway, I went to their daily mass to hear the chanting. Far be it for me to judge (I really mean that, I'm not being obnoxious), but it wasn't that good. Which makes sense: Chanting is a lot like singing (they were doing more singing than chanting, even), and not everyone can sing well. I bet you don't have to pass a singing test to become a monk, and there were only eight of them--not surprising that they didn't form a great choir. They were kinda fun to watch, anyway. One of them kept yawning and another one kept coughing and there was this short bald one who was adorable (Sleepy, Sneezy, Dopey?). And a young one, who fascinated me. He looked younger than me, and had a cool haircut and a vaguely trendy beard sans moustache. And he's a monk. I mean, I guess most of the old monks were once young monks (at around what age does one generally become a monk? I dunno), but monkdom is just one of those professions (like school bus driver or professional Santa Claus) that you only picture older people doing. (As an aside, speaking of facial hair, the moustache sans beard remains popular among older Spanish men. I get a kick out of it, but the Magnum PI look is a little dated.)

So anyway, I'm one of five people in the audience at the eight-monk mass. Luckily there were people in front of me so I could follow their lead for sitting, standing, kneeling, and crossing myself. The kneeling part really hurt. I spent the last half fretting over communion. I'm not Catholic; I can't take communion. That would definitely fall under the category of fucking with religion. But what if I'm the only one who doesn't? What if they offer it to me? I know how to say "I'm not Catholic" in Spanish, but should I maybe not even be here if I'm not Catholic?

....It was fine, of course; I didn't have to explain myself and wasn't ostracized or expelled. Churches do make me nervous, though.

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In a span of about 24 hours here, I met four north Africans. One is a dead ringer for Art Garfunkel. I got an earful from a Moroccan guy about how George Bush is evil and wants to kill all the Muslims. He doesn't like Spanish people because they're closed and drink too much (he doesn't drink or smoke or eat pork or have tattoos), but he bought me a beer. And I had an Egyptian guy, in the context of Iraq, tell me that the US has a right to defend itself but that he doesn't want to go to the US until after Bush stops being president. I read in the paper today that the number of foreign workers in Segovia province has quadrupled in the past year or so.

I also met this old Spanish hippie. He had a really long beard and was smoking a cigar and told me that he lived in New York in the 1960's. But when I asked him where, he said in the Kennedy airport terminal. Whatever.