Author: cpcrowley

People in Spain

We like to take pictures of the people we encounter. People love it when you ask to take their picture. Here is Hannah from our hotel in Toledo. She cleaned the rooms, made breakfast and checked us out when we left, she does it all.

Here is the woman running a coffee bar in the Madrid train station:

Here are the two chefs at the place in the Barcelona market where we ate twice because it was so good:

And our hard-working waitress, from the back unfortunately, she never stopped moving long enough so that we could ask her to pose for a picture:

 

Foreign Languages

Wynette and I are in a foreign country, and I don’t mean Spain. It is hard to understand the signs. The menus are especially hard since they seem to have a language of their own. You see a different national flag.

I am speaking, of course, of Catalonia and Catalan. Many signs are only in Catalan, which seems to be a mixture of Spanish, French, and Italian, and maybe some Basque, who knows. The words have lots of Xx and double Ls. Often there are cognates with Spanish but they seem to be far enough off to be hard to get. We learned the Spanish menu words but they are useless for Catalan and often the dishes are something like partridge Catalan anyway which doesn’t give you much information.

The desk clerk at the hotel in Barcelona said that the schools teach only in Catalan. English and Spanish are taught as foreign languages. She wants her son to be a native Spanish speaker so he can easily live anywhere in Spain, so she has to work extra with him in Spanish.

I still have some high-school French so sometimes I am better at guessing the words than Wynette with her Spanish.

Processions in Toledo

Post by Wynette: In addition to the Palm Sunday procession that Charlie wrote about earlier, we saw two other semana santa (holy week) processions.  For all 3, we more or less just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

For the first, below, we were sitting on the main plaza having coffee and noticed lots of people and said “wow, people sure like to hang out on this plaza”.  Then we heard a band and saw a float with Jesus riding the donkey into Jerusalem.

Following the float was a marching band.  They were good.  Incredible trumpet playing.  Even though the songs weren’t exactly spanish songs, they sounded so spanish with the trumpet.  I was quite moved by it.

Then, our last night inToledo (April 2), as we were heading back from the restaurant to our hotel, we saw crowds lining up along one of the main streets, so we found a spot and waited for another procession.  Another float with Jesus, and, I think, the same wonderful band we heard before. That’s the top of Toledo’s stunning cathedral behind the float.

Notice that several people, in hoods, are carrying this one.  The first one, of Jesus on the donkey, was on a wagon that was pulled along by a single man.  We were amazed he could do that.

 

Paella

Post by Wynette: Well, we haven’t had any paella yet.  We are holding out for a place that comes with a good recommendation.  Do you think we should have tried any of these places in Toledo?

I think the person who decided on the following brand name didn’t quite understand nuances around the word “ok”.

We met a couple waiting outside a restaurant, he was from New Jersey but had lived in Spain for 20 years.  She was Spanish.  He said his theory was that a company manufactured these and froze them and the bars all around sold them.  Because we saw LOTS of signs like the 3 above.

Or, how about something we saw in the market, what Charlie calls “shake and bake Paella”:

Meditating in the Center of Barcelona

Post by Wynette: Our first night in Barcelona (April 3) we walked down to La Rambla and then, on the way back, through the Plaza Catalonya which is near our hotel.  Paz, who checked us into the hotel and gave us a long  and delightful introduction to the sites in Barcelona including how to get to them, told us Plaza Cataloyna is considered to be the center of Barcelona.  As we walked through the plaza we spotted a circle of young people who appeared to be meditating, sitting in the center of the circular plaza so, the very center of Barcelona.  As Charlie mentioned in an earlier post, the first day we arrived in Spain we encountered what they called the “Huelga General”, a country-wide strike, I think having to do with the terrible economic situation here in Spain.  It affected us because all the trains and 80% of buses and metro were shut down.  We saw a large peaceful demonstration in Toledo.  Paz told us that in Barcelona the protest turned violent and some of the violence was just outside our hotel — people were not able to leave the hotel for hours.  I think, perhaps, these young people meditating is part of all this.  But, emphasizing the peaceful part.  It was nice to see them.  We’ve heard that the unemployment among people younger than 24 in Spain is around 46%.