Barb and Baden’s Excellent Spanish Adventure – Part 5
Of Ham and Football
Day 10 (cont):
We had a few hours to kill before heading out to the football game so we took the opportunity to get our laundry done. We usually end up doing this boring (but necessary) task about once a week while we travel.
We took the metro down to the stadium for the football match. About 5 or 6 stops before the station, we saw more and more people getting on wearing all manner of Réal Madrid shirts but mostly scarves. The energy level was building until we finally reached the stadium stop and when we got onto the street, the place was sheer pandemonium. There were about 50,000 people on the streets and most were blowing these long plastic horns or others with horns powered by compressed air. There was this one section of the street next to the stadium where there were easily 100 tour buses parked side by side. On the street in front of the stadium, there are several vendors selling all manner of Réal Madrid items and I purchased a scarf to better fit into the crowd.
We made our way into the correct gate of the stadium and climbed (and climbed) the stairs to get to our level. There are 5 levels in Bernebau stadium and we were in the 6th row from the very top. The place was about 95% filled and the game was as exciting as I thought it would be. It is quite obvious that football is a very important sport to the Spaniards and the home team didn’t disappoint and won 2-1. I was able to see stars like David Beckham and Brazilian star Ronaldo (who both play for Madrid). Ronaldo scored both goals and the crowd just went wild when the home team scores. Overall we were very happy to have experienced this part of Spanish (and European) culture and I was very impressed that I saw no rowdiness or vandalism at any time during the evening.
Day 11:
Today we made our second day trip as we were going to the town of Toledo (pronounced: Toe-lay-do). Toledo is famous for it’s large cathedral (hence the term: “holy Toledo”) as well as it manufacturing of swords.
We took the train out to Toledo from Madrid and walked around the medieval town. The first thing that we noticed was that there were a lot of stores selling swords. I mean a LOT of stores. I didn’t count them but there are probably about 90 stores selling pretty much the same collections of swords. I find it interesting that at some point, someone must have had to say to themselves: “well there’s 75 other stores in town selling the exact same collection of swords, I should open a store to sell the same thing and be #76”. If you were going to film a movie in which swords were required, this would definitely be the place to go to outfit the cast. I saw swords for Conan movies, Klingon knives, Japanese swords and many, many Lord of the Rings swords. In fact, most of the stores sell the Lord of the Rings “rings”. I was curious to know how someone would bring home a 5 ft. long sword? It’s not like this would fit into your suitcase and you couldn’t exactly bring this on board your flight.
By the time we found the cathedral, we were pretty much under the impression that Toledo while interesting, was extremely touristy and was mostly filled with sword shops selling the same trinkets.
This was until we saw the cathedral.
From the outside, the Toledo cathedral looks pretty unimpressive and I was almost not going to go inside. However the inside of the cathedral was (in my opinion) one of the most impressive sights to see in all of Europe. I feel that only St. Peter’s basilica in the Vatican is more impressive that this cathedral which is really saying a lot. The altar of the church has a number of carvings which describe the life of Jesus and are all made of gold. Apparently most of the gold used here was plundered from the new world by Columbus and subsequent people which ended up in places like the alter of this cathedral.
Day 12:
We would be leaving Madrid today and taking the train south to spend three days in Sevilla (pronounced: Se-via but known as Seville in English). We knew that we were going to miss Madrid as it was definitely a favourite of
ours on this trip.
One of the things that we had noticed all over Barcelona and Madrid were these billboard ads for an Italian suit company which featured George Clooney. The as shows George wearing this nice Italian suit on the golf course and swinging a 9 iron. The line at the bottom is “La marca del hombre” (“the mark of a man”). Naturally, the message here is that if you want to be cool like George Clooney on the golf course, then you’ve got to be wearing this Italian suit. I hope that he was paid a bundle for doing this ad as he looks pretty stupid in my opinion.
When we left Madrid, it was actually getting to be quite cooler but when we arrived in Sevilla, the temperature and humidity was back up there and we have subsequently been sweating again every day. As we arrived in Sevilla just around noon, we had most of the day left so we spent it exploring the town as we normally do when first arriving somewhere new. By this point we were almost getting tired of seeing another cathedral but decided to see the one in here as it didn’t costs us anything. One of the particular distinctions of this cathedral is that it contains the remains of Cristóbel Colón (Christopher Columbus to most people). It has always surprised me why names of cities and people are so often changed to something quite different when translated to different languages. I’ve yet to see the logic behind this.
Day 13:
Today was Barb’s birthday and we had been discussing for about a month what we would be doing on this day to celebrate. When Barb and I first talked about this last month, my first comment was that “I’m taking you to Spain for your birthday”. However, after further discussion, we had agreed that this would be a good day to see a flamenco show and had made arrangements with the hotel to go to one. Since flamenco dancing had its origins in Sevilla, we thought that this would be a nice place to see this and also make it a special night out. One of the concerns that I had about going to a flamenco show was that it was going to be very touristy and similar to the hula shows in Hawaii where they have a gift shop out front and always bring a few people out of the audience to try there luck at the dance and generally make a fool of themselves for the delight of the crowd. However, we would have to see how that turned out that evening.
Sevilla does not have a metro system (unlike Barcelona and Madrid) and as such, it makes exploring the city much more difficult as you generally have to rely on walking or bus/taxi. With a Metro (and in possession of an appropriate Metro pass), you can basically go anywhere in the city for dinner so the possibilities are much more open.
We spent the morning walking along the Gaudalquivir river and it’s many bridges and it brought back memories of Paris walking along the Seine last year. The layout of the river and bridges in Sevilla is quite similar to Paris in that respect.
As we were exploring Sevilla, we found quite a number of stores which sell flamenco costumes and shoes as well as castanets. Shops selling fans were also in abundance and reminded me of the many sword stores in Toledo.
When it was time to go to the flamenco show, we struck out in search of the street where the place was and promptly got lost. We ended up being a few minutes late as the place was this real hole in the wall off this dark alleyway. We were ushered to our seat and the show had already started a few minutes earlier. It only took a few minutes of watching the show to realize that this was no tourist show and quite simply, the show was incredible. The dinner club where it took place was crowded and hot and the stage was very small but the energy and passion shown by the performers was indescribable and we thoroughly enjoyed it. This show was easily one of the best experiences of anything we that we had seen in Europe on *any* trip. This is a must see event if you are in Spain.
Day 14:
After the highlight of yesterday’s flamenco show, we had another day trip planned today to go to the town of Jaréz. This town has an interesting history as it is known by many names (depending on who were the rulers of that area at the time). The Arab name for the city was Sheréz and the English translated this to Sherry. This seemed appropriate enough as on of the major things produced in this town was Sherry. We planned on visiting a bodega (winery) and also see the Andalusia horses at the famous riding academy in this town. The unfortunate part is that (unknown to us) today was a holiday for the town as they were celebrating their patron saint and as a result many things were closed. The horse academy ended up being fully booked so we were disappointed about that but managed to go on a tour of one of the wineries where sherry and brandy were made. We bought a bottle of each from their store to bring back home.
Tomorrow we leave Sevilla and head to our final leg of our trip. Here we will wind down and relax for a week in a the rented villa just outside of the town of Ronda in southern Spain. We will also be picking up our only car rental and driving out to the villa which should be about two hours drive from Sevilla. For the next week there will be no more cathedrals of other such things to see but we intend to spend time exploring the swimming pool at the villa in great detail.
I will conclude with the final chapter of our Excellent Adventure next week from Ronda.
Take care,
Baden and Barb
Continue on to Barb & Baden’s Excellent Spanish Adventure – Final
