Crossing the pond 2

Something I forgot about our ride to the hotel in Tangier: we had a police escort in, and another one in the morning to the ferry, because apparently teenagers will try to hide under the bus (in the luggage compartment?) and sneak rides to the ferry, where the bus drives on.  People have gotten hurt, so the police on their motorcycles stayed with us to prevent that.

A ferry similar to ours, in the background.  Big catamaran.  Impressive to see them come in, then turn 180 degrees to dock.

We left for the ferry at 6:30 am and filled out the forms to cross back into Spain.  The crossing was rough this time, and there were plenty of people puking in the bathrooms, but that end of my alimentary system was fine.  Once we were properly stamped and recombobulated, we boarded the bus for Jerez.  They make what we call sherry wine there, and our destination was the Tio Pepe winery for tour, tasting, and lunch.  Sherry, brandy, amontillado, etc.  A heady smell to the place.  Have a look:

 They like to have celebrities sign the barrels.

Tapas and 3 kinds of sherry, with gluten-free bread.

Back on the bus to Seville for a 2-night stay.  Tonight's dinner is combined with a flamenco show.  Now I have seen some very touristy shows of "local culture", and then there's the difference between Irish dance and "River Dance".  Was it either of these?  I have no idea how authentic it was, but the dancing was breathtaking.  Dinner was good too, if only I could have eaten more of it.  Insides still not right, and my stomach still hurts.

Next day: Seville sightseeing.  Seville is one of those places walled in by Romans, then Arabs, and there are signs of human presence dating back 20,000 years.  It's full of beautiful architecture, much of it left from an expo in the 1920's, I believe.  We visited the Plaza de Espana, which was filmed as part of the planet Naboo for Star Wars.  Although rain broke out while we were there, I loved the tiles and mosaics.  This describes it, but does not show the tiled niches for each Spanish state.

Next stop, the Cathedral of Seville and tomb of Columbus.  I didn't take many pictures, because they would not do it justice, but if you like detail, see if you can find pictures online of the many carvings.  I spent most of my time looking up through binoculars to see as much as I could.  I feel that if somebody spent hours of his life carving the top of a pillar way above our heads, it's only right that I should spend time looking at it to balance the universe.

Lunch was excellent, and I managed to eat it.  This is typical of the kind of tapas lunch a gluten-free person can get in Spain: bread and jamon, sangria, torta (like a potato omelet) with mayonnaise, thin fried eggplant slices with honey, tuna over chopped onions peppers and tomatoes, spinach with chickpeas, codfish, stewed lamb, pork cutlet with fried potatoes and some kind of sauce, and torta de queso (like cheesecake).  Now that was good.  Dinner at the hotel was also good, although the definition of paella seems to be a bit loose - could have been risotto, but it was good.  I listened to my companions complain until I couldn't take it any more and went to bed.

Next day: not feeling well, only tea for breakfast.  Today we leave for Salamanca.  I saw my first small mammal that wasn't a farm critter or cat/dog - a bunny on the slopes through which the highway cuts.  No squirrels anywhere.  Plenty of smokestacks spewing filth that carries in the air for miles - what is going on there?  We stopped in Carceres for lunch - some locations here were filmed for King's Landing.  We had a nice lunch in a converted stone stable, including "sepia" or cuttlefish stew.  Very good!  Although I kind of feel bad eating such a clever creature.

Feverish again.

Marrakesh and dubious claims

Let's pick up the story in Marrakesh.  I was unwell overnight and still unwell during the day, but I managed.  We hopped on the bus to tour the city, visited the Bahia palace where the royal family sometimes stays, and were taken to what was described by the tour company as "a traditional Moroccan pharmacy" called something like "100,000 Spices", all of which smelled like mendacity.  Traditional pharmacy, my ass.  The star of the show (and it was a hard-sell show) was the argan oil, but the products they were selling could have been Oil of Olay for all the non-traditional ingredients.  Still, our group bought the oils and the perfumes and the "Berber lipstick".  I bought 2 grams of saffron because for the first time I could actually smell something.  Pretty sure hard drugs would have cost less, but it's a treat for myself. 

I kept an eye out for yarn, but the only time I saw it was briefly in a stall or two in Fes, and hanging over shops that sold the herbal ingredients to dye the yarn.  I did occasionally see an old guy in a knit cap, but I don't think there is much call for cold-weather garments there.  Look above the yellow car:

And a few pictures from the Bahia palace.  Lots of bronze and brass and tiles, and a few little birds taking advantage of the nooks and crannies.

If you look closely, there's a sparrow in the bronze.

In theory we had the rest of the afternoon to see the Djemaa el Fna square and shop, but it was late and hot.  In crossing the square to get to the bus we saw, among the people who had set up shop to take your money: monkeys, cobras, fortune tellers, etc.  One of our younger women was grabbed and forceably hennaed, from her account, although it didn't seem unwanted.  

Next day, back on the bus for the last of Morocco.  We stopped in Casablanca to goggle at the Hassan II mosque, which can hold 100,000, and visited a mausoleum in Rabat where again I feasted my eyes on intricately and symmetrically carved marble, mosaics, and a riot of colors and patterns.

And my only selfie outside the mausoleum.

Back on the bus, our final destination Tangier and a hotel that was right out of the French colonial playbook, and was at the top of an absurdly steep hill, which our folks gamely struggled up, dragging our bags.  Our tour payment covered porterage for one bag at each hotel, so we had to schlep everything else ourselves.  There was much confusion over gluten-freeness at dinner, there was a horrible local group of musicians playing loudly and off-key, so I departed for my room, which was like solving an escape room puzzle by the time I found it.  While there I heard a sudden shouting/chanting/singing/ululation from the streets - uprising?  Football victory? Ramadan?  As Ramadan was about to begin, I assumed that was it.  I did not have much time to think about it because our return ferry trip the next day was not noon, but 8 am, meaning we had to get out of the hotel face-slappingly early.

Some random observations about Morocco: our local guide (and apparently most of the population) love the current king "M6" as much as they hated his father, who was a cruel dictator.  It sounds like he is doing his best to bring Morocco into the modern world, although clearly much of it is not.  They think of it as an emerging economy, not third-world.  On the way to Tangier we passed acres and acres of land under plastic sheeting to grow bananas, and prickly pears being farmed for the oil from their seeds, which sells for $3000 per liter after Japanese chemists found some kind of enzyme in it.  We drove along a straight new highway, with dealerships for just about any kind of car, and hopeful traffic circles that had been built just in case a cross-street ever develops there.  We saw lots of housing being built, but to my eye way more than could ever be bought by people who could afford it.  You're not supposed to drink the water.  There is obviously great poverty and nobody has ever heard the words "excuse me", but there were fountains and roses and wildflowers and American television with Arabic subtitles and a million satellite dishes to bring it in.  And there was "halal ham" on hotel menus - apparently the Arabs have discovered how to make corned beef or lamb.

Farewell to Morocco.  Pretty sure I will never make it back there on purpose, but it was an interesting place.

More to come

Sorry for the delay - I will get the rest of the trip posted, but it has been early mornings and late nights and much going on in between, plus I've been sick.  Now that I'm home and have good internet access I'll have an easier time making these posts.  At the moment my bed is covered with stuff I haven't put away yet, two loads of laundry are in progress, I have yet to wash off the sweat of the last few days, and my brain thinks it's 12:30 am instead of 6:30 pm.  At least the cat seemed to remember me, or at least remembered that I can feed her.

The market

For once I am not too tired, too sick, or too out of time to make a post.  I might even have adequate internet.  Some catching up:

The Medina in Fes, you may have heard, is a centuries old warren of narrow streets and blind alleys packed with vendors of everything.  That just barely scrapes the surface. 

The medina from a distance

Yes, narrow streets with unpredictable footing over cobblestones, sewage grates, dung.  People all around, including those with great burdens on their backs shouting for you to get out of the way, donkeys with and without carts with drivers shouting for your to get out of the way, motorbikes dodging and weaving.  You don't have the entire alley, either, because of the tables of the vendors spilling out of the tiny cubicles of the shops.  Nobody apologizes for bumping into you or shoving you.  Elderly beggars hold out humble hands.  Cats wait for scraps and kittens cry for absent mothers.

As you move slowly past the stalls, there are the smells: spices, leather, rose and orange blossoms for making perfume, food, more dung, unwashed bodies.  Piles and piles of fruit, fresh and dried; honeyed baked goods; nuts; meat in all forms from whole carcasses (with the camel's or shark's head hanging to show you what to expect) to sausage to organs.  The street of silver, the street of leather, the street of ceramic.  And we only saw a tiny, accessible part of the whole.

The street (!) where we had lunch

I was wrong about having time.  I forgot to set my watch 2 hours forward when we came back to Spain today, so insert 3 hour intermission for dinner and flamenco show.

After the medina we were led to a rug shop, which supposedly is a government-run program to give income to widows and other women without male support.  Of course it was a hard sell without much bartering due to its special nature, but I could see the work and understand the amount of effort it takes to make stitch after stitch or knot after knot.  I bought one.  Very pretty, squares containing floral shapes with a red background.  I admired those with more stitches per inch, but could not have afforded one.  Now to figure out how to get it home.

Another tagine without couscous or, apparently, seasoning, in dubious cleanliness, then back to the hotel.  We had passed a lovely park running down the center of a wide street, with shiny electric toy cars in several squares, fountains all over, but earlier it had been empty.  By 6:45 pm it was jammed with people - little kids running the cars, people lounging in the shade, eating on the grass, just hanging out.  I never saw a Moroccan stand in the sun if he/she had shade as an option.  There are light displays attached to streetlight poles as if for Christmas, but it's Ramadan decorations.

The next day we were up early for the long trip to Marrakech, through mountains and grazing land liberally spotted with wildflowers.  We were told that many of the cattle were imported from Texas because they could handle the climate.  This is the land of the Berber people, who write in a text similar to Greek and breed beautiful horses (descendents of Dothraki or Rohirrim, no doubt).  We ran into a lot of road construction slowing us down, and in many places they used piles of rocks instead of traffic cones.  Yet another tagine lunch.  Apparently there is not much in Morocco to feed a celiac.

Fun fact: none of Morocco's rivers flow into other countries, so they anticipated less future violence over water supply than is expected for some countries that share rivers.

Next: Marrakech.

Crossing the pond 1

Another attempt to catch up.  This was the day to cross the Mediterranean from Spain to Morocco on a ferry, trying not to think about all the "ferry burns and sinks" headlines.  It was a lot of hurry up and wait.  For some reason there was a trail of crushed almonds following our route to the boat, odder still there were no birds picking them up.  On board the ferry, the hundreds of passengers stood in line waiting for one single passport control agent to view and stamp their passport.  We made it across without encountering any kraken or rogue waves, waited some more to collect our bags, and waited more to put them through a scanner.  On both sides there was a scanner for the bags, but no sign that anybody was questioning or even seeing the results.  While in line I petted a kitten - you sssppssssppsss at them and hold out your finger and they can't resist.

Now that we were in Morocco, we changed our clocks back an hour.  Franco had put Spain on the same time zone as Germany and Italy to suck up to their WWII leaders, and it was still that way.  Then we settled in for a 5 - 6 hr drive from Tangier where the ferry landed to Fes where we were staying.

We not only set our clocks back, we set our calendars back by a century or so.  The land is surprisingly green and covered with wildflowers, poppies prominent among them, but this is near the end of the rainy season and later it will all turn brown.  We passed miles and  miles of primitive human and animal-powered farms - plowing with horses, carts for transport, goats, sheep, cattle, chickens.  Reaping by hand with a scythe, carrying huge loads on heads or backs.  Few tractors or cars.  Often we would see what looked like the uninhabitable remains of a mud brick house, with laundry hanging to dry.  Occasionally there would be electrical wires and a sattelite dish.  Wells with ropes and buckets.  Fields worked surprisingly high up on mountainsides, and there are many mountains.  In contrast, at a rest stop for lunch we saw a Mercedes Maybach, so somebody has money.  They fence fields with prickly pear cactus if at all, and respect historical but invisible boundaries.  We passed through villages with heaps of fruit and nuts and vegetables, piles of watermelons, large carcasses hanging, and creative ways to use every bit of space and material.  It was like being in a documentary about subsistence farming, although there seemed to be plenty of food.

Ramadan starts on the 16th, which changes a few things for us.  Some shopping free time was moved to earlier days in case shops are closed when we get back to Tangier, and it turned out we had to set our clocks back yet another hour, but as it gave us another hour of much-needed sleep, it was okay.  We have had a lot of early mornings, and it's really hard on those who are not morning people.

Dinner was in a former palace, with beautifully ornamented walls.

There was traditional (I assume) music, although the instruments did have amplifier pickups in them, and then we were entertained (I assume) by belly dancers, one who ate fire and one who made her boobs dance, and some enthusiastic but not all that talented guys randomly dancing.  Small dishes of spiced vegetables started the meal, followed by skewers of meat and a tagine of tender lamb.  The full tourist treatment, in other words, but it was tasty and fun and beautiful.  I think now that my dollhouse is built, I'll start a new project building rooms with Arabian/Islamic tile designs and carvings.

Next post (I'm too tired to do it justice now); the Medina in Fes.  Truly a sensory overload.

Grenada and a big rock

Finally I have time and bandwidth for another post.  Going back a few days: Grenada!  Our main tour on our first full day there was the Alhambra, which is a spectacular palace.  If you like tiles, geometric shapes, water, and marble, this is the place for you.  Also cats, because it's slopping over with cats who keep the murine population down (I got to pet one).  I took a few pictures, but none that can do it justice, so I recommend you look it up online.  I got a book with much better pictures.  I can't even imagine the hours of work that went into this.  We had an amazing lunch at a little place on top of a mountain.  I would have never thought of tempura eggplant strips with honey, but it was epic.  We are constantly goggling at the drivers who can maneuver on the narrow, winding streets.  Our bus driver is a hero, but even he couldn't make the bus take those turns so we had a smaller van, and even then some of us gasped at the close shaves.  People here seem to be totally blase about it and I can't understand why I don't see more scraped sides on cars.

After lunch we got on the bus for a two hour drive to the Costa Del Sol, which is basically their Jersey Shore, except with mountains behind you when you face the Mediterranean.  I take some pictures with my camera and some with my phone, so the phone ones of the mountains and the shore are on Facebook, but if you have been to Wildwood you get the idea for the beach.  We stopped at a little town where you could ride or be pulled in a cart by a donkey, eat, or shop for tschotskys or leather.  Having found that almost every bathroom in Europe has air blowers to dry your hands, and many of them don't work or work poorly, I stopped in a store full of cheap stuff and bought a dish towel, which has proven to be a smart choice.  A guy waved us into his chocolate store, showed us his machines for hand-making chocolate from roasting the beans to crushing them to wrapping, and tried to get us to make our own chocolate bars, but whatever we buy will not survive storage on the bus.  I did have some chocolate-covered marzipan, mmmmm.

Dinner was in a restaurant on their equivalent of the boardwalk and started with plates of appetizers one after the other: tiny clams (or something like a clam) the size of a nickel, then fried fresh anchovies, then chunks of breaded and fried halibut, then calimari rings, and finally paella with more of the same, with good sangria, followed by meh ice cream.  We rolled home full.

The next day was an optional trip to the Rock of Gibraltar, a 90 minute or so drive.  There's a border to cross, and we all had our passports out, but on the Spanish side they were given a brief glance, and on the UK side there was nobody there to look.  I probably can't tell you much that you couldn't find in any other account of the Rock, but it was cool to see it.  There's an "international airport" there, although the only flights are to and from the UK.  That runway crosses the main street into Gibraltar, and is built out into the water on reclaimed land.  We and many pedestrians had to wait for flights coming and going before we could cross the runway.  Again we left our big bus behind for a little bus that could negotiate narrow streets with tight turns.  There were gulls all over the place and it occurred to me that I had seen none at the Costa Del Sol, which seems unusual for a beach.

Gibraltar tidbits: the guide told us about 4 main pillars of the economy, and one of them was online gaming!  It provides revenue and jobs.  The place is lousy with Barbary apes (macaques), which casually climb on everything.  You know how you might sometimes find cat footprints on  your windshield?  I saw cars with monkey footprints. We toured a cave, but it was the first time I had been in a cave where they felt compelled to entertain us with constantly changing colored lights and pop music.  I guess flowstone and the dripping from above are not enough for modern tourists.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono were married in Gibraltar, as was Sean Connery (twice).  Long slanted alleys are named "ramps".  The yacht "A", which I saw on my last Bob and Ruth's tour in Iceland, was supposed to be docked in the harbor - you should look up pictures of that.  It's impressive.

We were on our own for lunch, so I happily ended up with felafel and hummus.  They don't take euros or dollars, but if you change your money to Gibraltar pounds, you can't save them to use in the UK.  Fortunately everybody seems to take cards.

For dinner that night we went back to the same part of town as for the night before, in the restaurant next door, and guess what we had?  THE EXACT SAME MEAL.  Even the salad ingredients were the same.  Instead of paella we had salt-baked sea bass, and flan instead of ice cream, but it was kind of annoying.  At least we were safely fed, if not satisfied.

More later, the wifi is iffy.

Gluten-free Southern Spain and Morocco

Today is, last time I checked, May 9th.  Since I headed out on May 6th, I have been too busy to update!  Yeah, I know, and I haven't updated since my last vacation, well tough.

This is Bob and Ruth's Gluten Free Tour of (see title).  Bob deals with the food, making sure it's gluten-free, Ruth comes along, and a tour company takes care of the rest.  So far I think it has been a little strenuous for some of the older members of the group.  A few are younger than me, but of the 21, many are retired and have bad knees, hips, feet, or lungs, and we have done a lot of walking on ridiculously steep cobblestone streets.  I fear mutiny.

As I haven't been able to post, pictures are piling up and I won't post them all.  We started in Madrid, arriving in the morning, getting picked up by our tour guide and driven by bus to the hotel, where I crashed for two hours to be ready for dinner that night.  It was unremarkable - vaguely seasoned chicken breast, veggies, and fruit for dessert.  By the next day's similar lunch there was some grumbling - we're in Spain, how about some Spanish food, and how about making an effort at dessert?  But since then we have had some better food, which was worthy of its own post.  Last night was tapas at a place where the waitstaff sang opera, and today's lunch included a mousse of Manchego cheese before the chocolate lava cake with ice cream.  I'm assured that we will have paella at least twice, and tonight's buffet at the hotel was entirely gluten-free - a new experience in choices.  Nothing exciting, but it was nice to have so many options.  Some of the group have other allergies - I alerted one to the quail eggs in last night's salad, and other can't have dairy or fish.  I'm amused that although we are served bread everywhere, most of the crowd isn't happy until they bring out some butter.  Americans.  And everywhere we have gone, the background music is in English!  There's so much English on signs and in mouths that sometimes I forget we are not in the US.  And we have seen all the usual fast food chains, plus Five Guys and Tim Horton's.

So Madrid: for you sports fans we have the huge bullring and the Real Madrid football stadium:

We spent the morning touring the city by bus, then were guided around the Prado museum for an hour or so.  I don't care how great people think he was, I'm not impressed by El Greco, but he's like a saint here.  And of course the statue to Cervantes.  The guide explained how every 14 year old in Spain has to read Don Quixote and the language is so archaic that everyone hates it, like reading Shakespeare, but that eventually as adults they read it and find it has gained meaning.

My destiny calls and I go...

I have lots of random shots of interesting buildings, and of marquees for the Spanish versions of The Lion King on stage and various things on HBO, but I won't bore you and tax the local wifi with those.  I caught a little Big Bang Theory dubbed in Spanish, and saw Heisenberg icons various places.  American culture seems to saturate everything here except maybe the daily schedule for work and meals.

After lunch I signed up for the optional (meaning extra cost) trip to Segovia.  They made it sound like it was full of Roman ruins, but it's mostly just the aqueduct, but that's darn impressive for its age and height.  Some random impressions of Segovia:

Water ran along the very top until recently, when they stopped it to prevent ice chunks from forming and dropping off to kill people below.

Two views of an eclectic merry-go-round, which might be an art installation rather than a functional ride.

Pig legs are everywhere, although the glare makes it hard to see here.  All still on the hoof, and there are special shackles for holding them in place while the meat is sliced off.

These indicate that the Roman aqueduct runs beneath.

This indicates the former Jewish area of town, until Ferd and Izzy kicked them out in 1492.

View from the Al Cazar, the palace built by Arabs/Moors/Muslims and later taken over by Christians.  Interesting stuff inside, but as the original contents were consumed by fire, random representative pieces from the era have been installed.  A few things are nevertheless impressive:

The outside.  If you enlarge, you can see black dots on the surface - they used coal as decoration.

The work above the replica thrones of Ferdinand and Isabella.

I have no idea what this is, but we passed it coming back into the city.

By the time we finished dinner with the opera students and got back to the hotel, it was nearly 11 pm.

Which brings us to today: headed out for Toledo, where we watched a demonstration of some guy with a hammer beating hot metal into a general sword shape (which reminds me, they also dub Forged in Fire in Spanish), then visited the artisans making damascene jewelry by carving channels in Damascus steel and stuffing it with thin wires of gold (there were 3 grades and prices, depending on whether it was made by master, pupil, or machine).  We were then, of course, urged to buy, but were warned that we would not be able to take knives/swords into Morocco and would have to leave them at the port or have them shipped to one of our later stops in Spain.  Pretty much all of the swords and knives were related to movies or TV shows and were over the top in kitschy decoration.  The subsequent walk through the town revealed that you could buy this stuff all over the place.  Then we laboriously walked up and down steep cobblestones, heard too much Spanish history, and saw too many churches.  I thought there would be a revolt when it was after 1 pm and we were told there was another church to visit.  But it started out with some beautiful views.

This is here as a wonderful piece of Engrish.

The canopy and the fancy lanterns are preparations for some festival later in May.

And of course there's a comic/game store with Deadpool in the doorway.

Another Toledo specialty is marzipan and I would have loved to buy some to bring home, but it would have to sit in my suitcase in a hot bus for many days between now and then, and we weren't given time to shop.  After a late but very good lunch, we got on the bus for a 5 hour ride to Granada, leaving us time for dinner at the hotel and a few precious hours to ourselves.  The pace is pretty fast for this group, and we're all ready for some rest.