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England and Scotland . Russia . Scandinavia . The Czech Republic . The Netherlands . Germany . Switzerland . Italy . France
September 11 Just heard about Twin Towers attacks. Things ok here in Spain. Hope you all are well. will keep you updated if anything happens or plans change. thinking about taking a boat home.
September 13th FYI, before all this happened, our travel plans were to fly from Paris directly to SF, on United. We´re not so big on this idea at this moment. Probably KLM from Amsterdam to someplace in Canada, and then train ride home. But we don't know yet. We were touring Gaudi´s cathedral in Barcelona when we heard about this- our tour guide said something about "oh, did you hear about those buildings in NY?" we said no, and she told usthat those 2 buildings had been blown up, and flights were stopped. we didn't really believe her- it seemed an odd thing. We left the cathedral, and all the street vendors were playing the news, and I started translating slowly, and hearing stuff about planes and twin towers and white house and bush going into hiding and twin towers gone. We went to the subway station, and there was a tv moniter with pictures and headlines in spanish- i am better at reading spanish than hearing it, so it became pretty obvious.. a bristish woman walked up to us and told us everything too, and then added that we had declared war on palestine, just for good measure. we tried to call home- well, every home number we knew, but they were all busy. we headed to an internet cafe, and it was overfilled with 100s of people staring at cnn.com, and announcements from the loudspeaker saying things like "theives aree in the room, your bags are being stolen, if you are not holding onto them, they are gone" and no one paying the slightest bit of attention. surreal.
the past 2 days have been weird. unless we go out of our way to find english news, we just hear little snippets, all the time, in spanish about it. everyone is talking about it.
The Gaudi catherdral is the most impressive catherdral I've ever seen and it's barely half way done. It's got leaning coloumns, tree-like supports, a canopy of a roof, majestic towers, etc. The birth of Christ facade looks almost alive. It's covered with plants and animals and the stone is cut in a very organic manner, it looks like an unlikely cave formation. Higly ornamented, it's a blend of a neo gothic and modernist style. Matthew should get his internship working on this thing. The math and physics behind it was more advanced that anyone could grasp until recently. Gaudi just had a sence for it, and some brilliant insights about how loads are beared. He would hang strings upside down with weights on them, to simulate the support structure. The strings can only be under tension, so when you flip it over, it's only under compression, so he could do very lightweight, but complicated designs. The other finished facade is the passin of Jesus (that means his death, not what you might be thinking). The columns look strained, as if even the building is in pain. All the statues in that are very modern and not the original design. They have harsh squared edged and look very tortured. And the Roman gaurds look very menacing. We went to look at a few other Guadi buildings, including his first house, which is Moorish in style and relatively sedate in comparison. Nothing is angled or bulging, but it is covered with colorful mosaics.
September 14
September 15
We saw a chapel in the Barcelona cathedral dedicated to St. John the Baptist, but it contained no relics. Also there was the grave of the founder of the Carmelties. Foolishly, I did not write down the name of the saint who did this, but I'm sure my mom knows, big Carmelite booster that she is. Touristing stuff returning to normal for us. Ignoring the news, or just watching it in Spanish. I'm hoping that it will cause me to suddenly become fluent, but in the interm it's nice because you can look at the pictures but don't have to hear anything.
We left Barcelona early because we weren't having a very good time. it was bad enough that our hostel was horridly uncomfortable, no sheets, and only had cold showers, but hours after we showed up, the twin towers dissappeared. so we spent the entire time there feeling twitchy, and jumping when we heard airplanes, and reading the news, and being scared, and trying to distract ourselves and failing. So, we're going to go back to Barcelona someday, but we decided we couldn't handle it right then. We are in Madrid for a couple of days, and will be taking day trips to Todelo and Segovia. Madrid is weird. We got here at 7 this moring, and then waited around until 10 for the early morning coffee shops to open. Ah well.
When we got here, all the flags were at half mast.
September 16 And now news from your sane correspondat: weather is very hot. we went to toledo today, and looked at a cathedral. there was an altar to saint john the baptist in there, that seemed to have a reliquary, but it wasn't labeled, so we don't know what it was. El Greco has a lot of paintings there, and Saint Lucia's entire forearm is in a box. I just love Catholic Churches. They are so weird. Why would anyone think that it was good idea to stick someone's forearm in a box, and then charge money to have people see it, I'll never know. There were a "bajillion" reliquaries, and about 3'4 of them were unlabeled. There´s a monstrance the size of a cadillic. I don't know what a monstrance is either, I'm just typing what celeste tells me too. oh, apparently it's a thing that holds a transubstanciated communion wafer. If you are still confused, read _Further Tales of the City_. (celeste would like me to say something else here, but she won't tell me what. oh, okay. it means a communion wafer that has uh gone through a mass and so is actually jesus. right there in a monstrance! Only the one that we saw didn't have a wafer in it. You know what? I still don't remember seeing this thing. celeste said that it was 20 feet tall and made out of solid gold. california gold, most likely.) and we saw santiago´s grave. there´s about 2734554321 chapels off the side of this cathedral, so a monstrance here, a relic there, who knows. we probably saw 3 more heads of John the Baptist. There's an amazing organ (not a relic) and the most amazing choir loft that I have ever seen (also, not a relic. i think) with carvings of everything all over the chairs- the beheading of St John the Baptist in the Altos, a picture of toledo in the basses. and random animals carved climbing up the chair legs. At 9:30 every morning, they have a visigothic mass in the cathedral. The church tried to put a stop to this, in the 11th cent, but people got mad, so they've been having the mass since. apparently, it's rare that anyone shows up anymore, but.. but to get to todelo by 9:30, we would have to leave Madrid at 6 am, which is not on my plan of things to do in Madrid. There was a lovely little note on our map of toledo that said "Roman Aqueduct" so we walked over to look. But there was nothing there. But, tomorrow, in Segovia- that's where the really cool Roman Aqueduct is.
We haven't seen any of the things that one is supposed to see in Madrid, all the lines are long. And the food is good.
September 19 Segovia was very cool. they have an amazing aqueduct, that is over 30 meters high in parts, and has no morter or cement holding it up. we also saw the original disneyland castle- the one that is drawn at the start of all disney movies. it's the epitome of what a castle should be- turrets, moat, all that stuff. the inside of the thing is okay too- very richly decorated. The cathedral was impressive on the outside, but closed for renovations. We also had some of the best food we've ever had at one of the local resturants. We ate so much that we haven't been able to move for 3 days.
On our last day in Madrid, we headed to the Prado, which once again had dreadful lines that weren't moving. but we stood in the line for a long time, and then headed across the street to the Museo Thyssen - Bornemisza, which was very nice, and had a wonderful surrealists section.
We also saw the Monestario de las Descalzas. (After we viewed an El Grecco painting at the museum where angles were playing harp, lute, virginal; and viola de ga,ba. angels stay abreast of musical instrument innovations. they probably play electric guitars now. anyway....) We got a tour of the cloistered convent in Spanish, so I can't tell you much about it, except that its full of a LOT of art that came in as sisters dowries. Some of these include the bloodiest, goriest dead and dying Jesus statues you have every seen. Christi says that if I describe them in detail, it will make you feel queasy, but this is our savior we're talking about. Still, Christi is wise. Anyway, they also have an extremely large reliquary. They got relics from all over central and northern Europe during the reformation, because protestants don't have saints. They also got all the relics from north Africa when Catholicism fell out favor there. Recall that a relic is a piece of a dead saint. They had a room 3/4 as big as you typical elementary school classroom, with the walls just as high and the walls there were filled floor to ceiling with relics. Some were just tiny bits of saints. Then there were the skulls, many, many skulls. They had arm shaped holders with arms in them, a few complete skeletons, all just stuck in this one room. We asked if they had any pieces of St John the Baptist, but they said that the most important relic they had was the dried blood of a saint, on whose feast day, every year, the blood became liquid. This is the only place outside of Naples where that happened. The curator looked very happy that we knew about the Naples miracles.
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