Our arrival in Salamanca Spain at 2:30 am was not by choice. This happened to be the only train we could get from Portugal. After five hours in the train station waiting for the sun to come up we wandered out and headed for town. We were hoping to find someplace open for breakfast. Being Spain what we found was a bar that had not closed yet from the night before. The last remnants of the partyers were still wandering the streets. Welcome to Spain, the country where restaurants open for dinner at 9:00 pm and the nightclubs have hours like 11:00 pm - 6:00 am. The people in this country love to socialize. On one Sunday afternoon we were wandering the streets with our friend Carlos in a suburb of Madrid. The streets were crowded with people even though none of the businesses were open. The Spainish character as we experienced it was summed up in this excerpt from a Spainish history book. Before Aragon and Castilla combined to form Spain the parliament in Aragon had the following oath of allegiance, "We who are as good as you, swear to you who are no better than we, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord provided you accept all of our liberties and laws, but if not, not". The specifics of our travels here will have wait for the slide show but here are a few of the highlights. I was especially impressed with the Moorish influence in the architecture evident throughout Spain and highlighted in the Alhambra of Granada. As we were in the country for the Easter holiday we got to witness the processions of hooded church members that wind through the streets with candles and elaborate floats. These processions start at the local churches and end at the main cathedral. As many processions can occur on a given night, each with its own colors and accessories, it can be difficult to get around town. Seville was definitely the most impressive place for these celebrations as the entire town turned out to watch until all hours of the night. I was personally greatly effected by a visit to Franco's tomb near El Escorial outside of Madrid. This huge hall that is a monument to a fascist dictator tries to pass itself off as a basilica. I had real problems with this especially after watching a group of "nationalists" (read neo-nazi) praying over the grave of Jose Antonio, the founder of Spainish nationalism. A more positive experience was sitting in a tapa bar on the main square in Segovia, sipping cerveza and sangria with the bar tender, who after his shift joined us for a drink, watching a light snowfall on the mid-evil square. Our time with Carlos in Madrid was great as we could use the train system to get around easily and on the weekend the three of us explored surrounding areas by car. We ended our Spain adventure with five days in Barcelona, a great desert to the main course in the south. Barcelona has so much to offer and so much variety that we easily could have burned another week there. The modernist architecture of Gaudi and friends offsets nicely with the museums featuring religious art from the middle ages. The Olympic face lift that the city received for the 1992 games is holding up well and they are now setting their sights on expo 2004. We have now left the Iberian peninsula crossing the Pyreneese into France where the adventure continues.
© 1998 michele_drew@hotmail.com
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