Our Iberian Roads

  We leave this town tomorrow. We arrived last night.  This has been the pattern for the last few towns.  Potes . Olviedo . And now Finisterre .  This last place - Finisterre - is confusing because it goes by different names - Finesterra, Fisterra, and some other variants. The basic meaning is - "The End of the Earth" - and it feels like that.  Although, the end of the Earth apparently has a gift shop. And cat sleeping under the merchandise.  Tourists in this town - but many of them are pilgrims, which imparts a different flavor to the place. Less raucous than the ordinary tourist town. There are bars, of course, but so many of the people coming through here are dropping by as part of the pilgrimage, walking the Camino to Santiago de Compostela.  It's a real town too - apart from the tourist business. People baking bread. Hanging laundry. Kids playing in the street.  Our previous stop: Oviedo. Beautiful old city with an imposing ancient cathedral ...

 Today we have our last full day in Bilbao before renting a car and driving down the coast. It's been a quiet  and lovely stay. The city presents a stark contrast to Barcelona, which seemed noisier, dryer, hotter, and - at least in many sections of the city - more frenetic. The Bilbao we have experienced has been cool, damp, and relatively quiet.  Our lodging is in one of the thousands of apartments in apartment blocks that crowd the steep hills. This apartment block probably dates from at least 1960. The buildings in our area differentiate themselves by their different colors. Our block is blue. The next one is red. The neighboring block is yellow. And so on.  Our first full day was at the Guggenheim Museum, a notable attempt at urban transformation. In 1991, Bilbao was a post-industrial city slipping into chronic economic depression, when the government of the region suggested to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation the plan to build an art museum in the city's run...

June 21  One snag in trying to keep a travel blog is that we don’t usually sit down an write while traveling. We are out exploring - visiting museums or churches or graveyards or strolling new streets and people watching. So - now we are on a train to Bilbao, and now is a good time to catch up with a little writing, recounting our adventures in the last two cities where we have stayed - Madrid and Barcelona.  We left Madrid on Sunday, June 16, on a late morning train. Our apartment was small but wonderfully situated, right up the hill from the Botanical Gardens and the Prado. Our neighborhood was at the edge of the so-called Literary District, a section of town where Spanish literature greats such as Lopez de Vega and Cervantes had lived. It was a section with many small bars and restaurants and a few bookstores. The street pavements were punctuated occasionally with quotes from Spanish literary greats.  First impressions of Barcelona were not great, because our first ram...

  The morning is quiet from where we are staying. (It's the door right next to the Hotel Mexico.)  Last night, we walked up the street to our lodging and saw a large, lively party across the street. But we heard nothing once we were inside. The place is nice and quiet, except for workmen doing projects in the afternoon in a neighboring apartment. Our big event yesterday was going through the Prado, floor by floor. Of course, we saw many beautiful artworks. Interesting to see the the ful Garden of Earthly delights triptych. Evidently, Phillip II was deeply moved by the religious message of Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516), and so collected several pieces by the Dutch painter. (Interesting to think about the less obvious meanings of Bosch's work. It's been conjectured that the work contains strong nationalist content, and that Bosch's work expresses some desire for expiation because he was accepting large commissions from the Hapsburgs, betraying the memory of Charles the Bol...

  We happen upon a lovely little spot in the literary quarter on our first night. Feels magical. Who needs a menu. It’s just what’s fresh. We’re very excited about being in Madrid.  Quiet place. Dog sleeping under barstool. Soft, soft, piano, jazz playing, while slow passersby  by wander through the streets. 

  We are on the road to Spain, traveling through rural Portugal. Fig trees. Sandy Brown Fields . Small clusters houses. political advertisements for the election that was held about week ago.  We will be passing through the Spanish region known as the Extremadura. Until this trip, I thought the term referred to climate conditions, but actor refers to historical events. It was the last section of Spain still controlled by the Muslims, as the Spanish monarchs pursued their century-long process of the Reconquista.