I have just returned from a 5 day trip to Madrid, Segovia, and Toledo with my program, and I loved it! We saw a ton of art in Madrid, and the other two cities were absolutely precioso, which in Spanish means beautiful in a cute way and usually refers to places that you like a lot.
On Wednesday we went to the Prado, which has a ton of famous works of art, including some Rafael and Velázquez and Goya. To be honest, it was mostly boring, but there were some art students painting copies of Velázquez works, which was really fun to watch because they were great.
Thursday took us to the Reina Sofia museum, which has mostly modern stuff that I don’t like, such as Picasso (tons of him on loan currently – unfortunate since I already went to the Picasso museum in Barcelona) and Miró and Dali, which I did actually enjoy. In the afternoon we took a historic walk with a very funny and easy to understand tour guide, Edu. Did you know that Madrid has an ancient Egyptian temple a few blocks away from the Plaza de España? Yeah, the sister to it is in New York City, and was given to Spain and the States as a thank you for helping to move another larger temple to prevent it from getting washed away by water which was being diverted by a hydro electric dam, if I understood Edu right. Anyhow, it was a great walk with lots of history, and that evening I walked to el Parque del Buen Retiro with a few girls and we took silly photos.
We headed out of Madrid on Friday to see El Escorial, a monastery an hour out of the city that houses a huge library full of books which were banned during the Inquisition, including books in Arabic and Hebrew, and some covering topics of astrology and palm reading. After that we went to El Valle de los Caídos, which is a memorial for the Spanish Civil War built by the dictator Francisco Franco, who is buried there. It was a totally strange place, because it’s a huge church built into the side of a mountain, so it’s long and dark and you can see some of the mountain rock in some areas, and as one guy in my program noted, you can totally see Harry Potter fighting the Basalisk in there. There’s a huge cross built on the top of this mountain which you can see for miles. One of the oddest parts of El Valle is that the only people buried there, and thus the only ones memorialized, are those who fought and died on Franco’s side, and there are a lot of symbols inside to remind people of the power Franco had. Very creepy, odd, and interesting location. On a happier note, we returned that night to Madrid and a few of us went searching for somewhere to eat dinner and stumbled upon a little Indian restaurant. It was a little nicer than we’d meant to eat, but we got food money from the program and we’d been having kebap for a couple days and had some extra money leftover, so it was alright. The food was delicious, and at the end of the meal, we were given free champagne for who knows what reason. It was yummy too – I don’t know what good champagne is, but this was definitely not Cook’s. Also, our waiter put on a fake mustache and asked us how the meal had been while we were drinking our champagne and we laughed with him and when we finally left, he held the door for us and shook our hands and wished us a good night. A very fun experience!
We were in Segovia for Saturday, which is architecturally a feminine city, according to Edu, who once again took us on a walking tour. I had a picnic lunch with some folks and we saw the oldest preserved aqueduct in the world, which was so totally cool – the stones are held in place by gravity, with only sand between them, no cement. We also saw a castle there which Walt Disney visited and used as the basis for the design of the castle in Snow White. Pretty neat, and very pretty! That night we watched “Jamón, Jamón” at the hotel, which stars Javier Bardem and Penelepe Cruz, and is totally weird because of the extensive and graphic love triangles, and the fact that at the end, Javier’s character kills another man with a leg of ham. We laughed a lot.
Finally, Sunday, today, we went to Toledo, which I think I liked the best of all the places we went. We focused our attention on the Jewish quarter, because Toledo seems to have one of the best preserved examples of Spanish Jewish history. Edu told us a story about the Jewish Expulsion from Spain in 1492. Apparently, some families were under the impression that the Expulsion was just temporary and that they would be invited back to Spain when it was more politically feasible. As such, they brought their house keys with them, and some families passed these keys down through the generations as they preserved the hope that they could one day return to their homes. 1992 marked the 500 year anniversary of the Jewish Expulsion, and as part of the observation of this, the Spanish government invited the decedents of the Spanish Jews to come to Spain as a symbolic returning, and one family came back to Toledo with the keys that had been passed through their family for 500 years, went to their house, unlocked the same door that had been on the house since the 15th century and entered their house – they actually came home. It’s amazing that the keys stayed in the family, and the door of the house was never changed. No one knew where the house was, but I really wanted to visit it to see. Anyway, because of this history, a lot of the tiendas that sell souvenirs include rings of old looking keys, which I think is neat. So, we visited two synagogues, one of which included a really interesting Semetic Jew museum. We also went to a mosque which was turned into a Christian worship space, and is now kind of an active archeological dig. We walked through and we met a really nice cat in the gardens. It was lunch time, so we found a very traditional Spanish restaurant and I tried melón y jamón for the first time, which is exactly what it sounds like – melon and ham, together. Mmmm, sweet and salty! After lunch we headed home, and now I’m here, really excited to get some clean clothes!
Only two more weeks until my trip to Liverpool and Dublin to visit my friend Heather! I can’t wait!!!
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