Tropical rest

Friday, November 24, 2017, Key West, Florida--We have enjoyed a lazy few days lying by the side of the pool, although the water is too cold to swim, reading and talking, and venturing out for coffee and lunch or dinner.   We even cooked at home one night--fresh Key West shrimp with fennel over campanelle and a Mondavi Fumé Blanc (the same wine we had for our first dinner together at John's house in 1982) and an old vines Zinfandel.  Lovely evening in the gazebo.

Wednesday we had lunch at Salute at the beach then dinner with friends Jane and Eleanor at Azur, just up the street from where we are staying.  Very good yellow tail snapper for Ben and me, and very good, though still whole branzino for Jane and Eleanor.  We enjoyed appetizers of octopus and ahi carpaccio.   A good albariño followed by an acceptable, though grassy, NZ sauvignon blanc.

Yesterday a huge feast at Jane's house with old friends and family, most of whom we had seen on Tuesday.  Very nicely done turkey, excellent avocado salad, and an out
 standing raspberry cobbler.  An interesting Scribe pinot noir nouveau rosé from Carneros Creek (Napa), California--only bottled in October, much like a beaujolais nouveau. 

Today we are enjoying our coffees--John's a cubano and Ben's a cappuccino.   Ben has been getting his bone dry capps with art from Old Town Bakery.  Yesterday's art was spectacular and seasonal; it's a Santa Claus. 

Soon off to the airport and home.   Good times in the Conch Republic.

Key West for a 75th!

Key West, Florida--We flew down yesterday from chilly Washington to the tropical rains of Key West to celebrate our friend Jane's 75th birthday as a big surprise on a nearby key.  Wonderful evening with friends and family.   We are sitting on our friend Roy's deck enjoying the warmth (it's about 80F, 28C) after a huge rainstorm last night.  


Key West is putting up their version of Christmas trees--lobster pots--and decorating all the palms near the harbor with lights.  Huge cruise liners are in port and the place is quite festive.  Little evidence of the huge hurricane, apparently it got the keys further north very badly but the Conch Republic survived.

Doing nothing but laze by the pool today and tomorrow.  We'll eat too much with John's old college chum and his god-children and families on Thursday and then home Friday.

Yesterday we had lunch at Turtle Kraal on the harbor and then dinner at an island resort on Sunset Key to celebrate the birthday.  Huge success.  Cobia, a local fish.

Adios, Espagne

Madrid, Terminal T4

Thursday, October 26, 2017, Arlington, Massachusetts--The vacation was wonderful.  We enjoyed it immensely.  The trip to Boston yesterday was relatively uneventful, a small delay at the airport while a piece of navigational equipment was replaced.  Easy Lyft ride to daughter's home and a welcome by grandsons.  

We enjoyed our last dinner at Nimu, in the Chueca barrio in Madrid with friends Tim and José Carlos, whom we had met in Chile a few years ago.  The food was good, even if some of the dishes were not particularly novel.  John really enjoyed a new-to-him dish of "veal cheeks" which was a combination of tripe, veal meats, chorizo and black pudding in a thick gravy.  Ben enjoyed another version of butterfish. We completed the meal with an excellent smooth albariño.   

Tuesday we also walked the neighborhood we had stayed in and then packed.  Back to Washington on Saturday.

Granada, Alhambra and back to Madrid

Monday, October 23, 2017, Granada, Spain--Granada is grand, and it's been quite an experience spending almost five hours walking the paths and the palaces of the Alhambra, the residence of sultans and kings.   Some pictures explain the overwhelming grandeur of the palaces, and the beauty of the gardens from the intricate ceilings and archways to the manicured pathways and even special bannisters down one path to carry a stream of water. 

Barry Simpson and Ben

One of the really fine things about this trip to Andalusia is that we have not had to worry about anything.   Becoming a "client" of Barry Simpson, of YourAndalusia.com made the trip so easy.  He managed the hotel reservations, made recommendations for restaurants, drove us hundreds of kilometers (along excellent roads and narrow city streets), and kept up a friendly running commentary of all we were seeing.   An ex-pat Scot, he also has a delightful accent. 

Besides the Alhambra yesterday, we spent a major part of the morning at the birthplace of Federico Garcia-Lorca, who was born near Granada in 1898 in the village of Fuente Vaqueros, became an influence playwright and poet in the 1920s and was murdered by a Falangist squad during the Civil War in 1936.  His body has never been found.  While he only lived in the house we saw until he was seven, it has been restored by his younger sister and includes a very fine small museum on the cultural scene of Spain in the interwar period.

Churros and Chocolate, local delicacy

In Granada, we explored several barrios, which included the magnificent cathedral, a perfume museum, the Moroccan shopping lane and a fountain in one of the major plazas that portrayed androgynous grotesques.

We completed our trip to Granada with a night of flamenco at the Jardines (Har-dinn-eth) de Zoraya, on a hillside above the city.  In the small world category, we were seated next to a couple from Washington, who live about a mile from us and have mutual friends!

Now to the AVE train to Madrid from Malaga. 

Mezquita and Mountain Snow

Above the mihrab

Sunday, October 22, 2017, Granada, Spain--Yesterday was, we think, the crowning jewel of the trip so far.   In Córdoba, the Mezquita, the original Ommayyid mosque built on the grounds of a christian basilica, then turned back into a cathedral when the christians took over the kingdom of Granada in the 13th century, is a world historical site--deservedly so.

Walking around the rows of columns, coming to the mihrab where the imam preached, and then turning around to face a huge, though not as huge as the mosque, cathedral plunked down in the mosque's center, is a trip through centuries, and different views of art and decoration.

Mezqjita columns

At the Mezquita

From the muslim prohibition on portraying humans in art to the christian exhuberance of statues and paintings is a cultural dichotomy that we have only seen here on such a scale.

Patio atelier

Alcazar Mosaic of Oceanus

Ben at the Alcazar

Córdoba also has a fair-sized Alcazar, which we toured, built over Roman ruins.  The excavators found number of mosaics which are now in the interior museum.  The city also has sections where the interiors of the homes, patios, have been opened for artists' ateliers.   They are decorated with walls of geraniums and other flowers, and used not only for art but also for parties during a May celebration, called "patio week."   It had 1-million visitors last year.

Snow on the Sierra

From Córdoba we drove east through olive grove after olive grove, with castles perched on some mountains, observation towers on others, all dating from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, to Granada.  Thanks to Barry, we had a view of the snow covered Sierra Nevada, brought on by two days of rain at lower elevations.

Today we have a full schedule, but last night, after so much walking, driving and talking we decided to dine in the hotel, the NH Victoria, and were pleasantly surprised by the food, braised beef for John and cod filet for Ben.  An early night.

From Anchovies to Sea Anemones, Cathedrals and Caliphs

Sea Anemones with eggs

Saturday, October 21, 2017, Córdoba, Spain--John got his anchovies on Thursday night at a tapas restaurant on Calle San José in Seville, along with chicken, cod in a tower with eggplant, small calamari and stuffed zucchini flowers.  La Bartola.  We enjoyed a Rioja Riserva with them.  Following along the same line, dinner last night in Córdoba at Regardera was even more fish-related.   Along with a Majorcan red wine, which was excellent--named "12 volts," it was not battery acid--it opened beautifully and went with the four dishes we ordered to share:   anchovies on spinach with a red pepper couli sauce, tartar of butterfish on teriyaki sauce, tartar of tuna with warm mashed potatoes, and the most interesting dish, if not the tastiest--deep fried sea anemones on a bed of scrambled eggs and kale.  Deep fried anemones have a similar taste to fried clams, nice but not that different in taste.  


We began yesterday with two hours at the Seville Alcazar.  It's the oldest still-inhabited royal palace in Europe.  The Spanish royal family uses it as its residence in Seville when they are there.   It was built by a Christian king, Pedro the Cruel, but the base architecture is entirely Muslim.  They were the better craftsmen.   Additions in later reigns brought gothic architecture to the additions, but the basic palace is mudéjar architecture.

The place is splendid.  From the intricate plaster designs to the colors to the ceilings representing the heavens, it is overwhelming.   

From there we stopped to look at the battery operated trams that run nearby and charge themselves at each stop so as not to require wires above the streets (Why don't we do this on H Street NE in Washington?).

Córdoba

Then off to Córdoba, the place where Christopher Columbus got permission and three ships to sail to the Americas from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabelle.  

Synagogue interior

We spent the final hours of the afternoon walking the old Jewish quarter, where the prominent and powerful Jewish families advised royal families, both muslim and christian, until Ferd and Issy kicked them out in 1492.   It is a barrio of narrow twisting streets, with one remaining synagogue built in the early 14th century, now a museum, that is small but fascinating with its Hebrew inscriptions.  It was restored to its existing state in 1889, having been a church, storehouse, and with a number of other uses over the centuries.  Nearby is a statue of the great Jewish philosopher, Maimonedes, who influenced St. Thomas Aquinas, and a square named in his honor.

Maimonedes

Our hotel, the Eurostar Palace is super modern, even to the bathrooms with their double showers and whirlpool baths, and perhaps the most up to date bidet we've seen.  All built for bodily cleanliness.   Clearly bidets are returning to the scene as they have been in every place we've stayed in Spain.  Ben thinks the entire room is designed on a sexual scheme!

 Today to the Córdoba Alcazar and the Mezquita.

Roman Bridge at Night

Ronda in the Rain, Seville in its Grandeur

Thursday, October 19, 2017, Seville, Spain--The past two days and nights have been incredibly full.  In the middle of the night on Tuesday, the wind blew our window open in the midst of a huge rain and thunderstorm, waking John up.  He raced to close it as the pelting rain began to smatter on the window and the heavens lit up with lightening.  Quite a sight at 3 AM. 

Our room was in the
middle of the cloud

Used once a year!

By dawn, at 8:30 AM--it's strange being at the western end of a very large time zone, daylight is really screwed up--the rains had turned to off and on and the lightening had gone.  We breakfasted with fog moving up the Tajo gorge and made decisions for the day.  Ben headed off to a local art museum in honor of Joaquin Penado, who had grown up in Ronda and left to pursue his art work in Paris in 1940 and did not return until the late 60s. He became friendly with Picasso presumably in Paris and was a neo-cubist.  John headed off to the Bull Ring to see where modern bullfighting began in Spain in the mid-18th century.  Both were excellent for the respective attendee.

Following that we lunched at an organic restaurant, Biopicnic, on a salmon bocadillo, and then were picked up by tour director Barry Simpson of Your Andalusia and headed off to Seville. 

The view from our window

Seville is magnificent.  It's a relatively large city, about 700,000, the fourth largest in Spain, and the site of the Spanish court when the last Muslim kingdom in Granada capitulated in 1492, and coincidently 
Columbus sailed for the New World. 

Celebrating Columbus

Columbus has a a mausoleum in Seville Cathedral, though there is some doubt about where he is actually buried--Madrid, Santo Domingo, Havana or here. He brought great wealth to the city but that ended when the river silted up and the boats began to anchor at Cadiz on the shore. 

The cathedral is the third largest in the world after St. Peter's in Rome and St. Paul's in London.  It's enormous and excessive, almost mad in decoration and design.   The belltower is an old minaret, but the cathedral itself is post-Muslim.   There is no easy way to describe the grandeur of the place, the ostentation of the decoration, or the gold, but it is a site to see and enjoy.

Barrio Santa Cruz
street scene

-Today we also did a tour of the city on foot, seeing the Torre d'Oro on the river where Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand decreed that all ships from the New World would dock and unload their treasures; the financial building that headquartered the merchants making a killing from the Americas business; the old Jewish quarter, the Barrio Santa Cruz, from which the Jews were kicked out in 1492; and, the site of the Ibero-American Exhibition of 1929, whose architecture is an overblown collection of bits and pieces reminiscent of American 1920s movie theaters or the grossness of San Simeon.  This is not a city that does anything quietly.

Wild white pidgeons

Plaza de Espagne,
1920s architecture

We dined last night at the San Marco restaurant where we enjoyed carpaccio of ostrich, pâté of scorpion fish with grilled shrimp, then roast pork and grilled sea bream.   Our wine was a local, a Borsoleta, a combination of temperanillo and cabernet sauvignon with a touch of petit verdot, 2015.  Tonight we will eat tapas.  White anchovies, John hopes.