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:
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.
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