More to see in London and Paris November 27, 2007
Posted by Niels in : Personal, Photos , add a commentOof, there’s too much to say about Marrakesh, so I’ll have to save those pictures until I get a chance to write them up. But now that I’m back home, I’ll wrap things up with my final days in London and Paris…
After five trips I was beginning to think I’d seen all there was to see of London and Paris. Of course, I was wrong.
I went to the English seaside. Not touristy Brighton, but quaint Eastbourne, down the road. I think I actually prefer stormy, windy days by the ocean to the perfect, clear, and sunny ones. Those white cliffs are Heady Point, not the white cliffs of Dover. Easy mistake through, as Heady Point is actually prettier and therefore used instead of Dover’s cliffs in movies.
Apparently there used to be twelve of these houses but with the cliffside eroding there’s just three left.
The British countryside has sheep. And hedges!
And thatched roofs! I’ve only seen those in themeparks before…
I got a student Eurostar ticket from London to Paris for $50! The new station at St. Pancreas is classy, elegant, and has a ginormous statue of a couple making out.
Paris has gutters inside its subway! They rinse them out at night automatically to get rid of the urine! I love France!
I’d seen all the major Paris sights so I did some searching online and decided to look up Saint Chappelle. It’s Paris’s best example of Gothic architecture, possibly more beautiful than Notre Dame. It’s inside the Palais du Justice (later built around the chapel) so I had to go through metal detectors and security to get to it.
The chapel is stunning. Every wall is filled with hundreds of intricate stained glass designs.
Like an centuries-old comic book, thhe stained glass windows tell the story of the bible.
Afterwards I discovered a particularly interesting Christmas display.
And finished the trip with old friends. Magnifique!
Report from Madrid: Day 5 November 24, 2007
Posted by Niels in : Personal, Photos , 1 comment so farNovember 10: No city has exploited my love of street food as successfully as Madrid. After watching an impressive street performance,
I was hungry so I had some roasted corn on the cob. No butter, just lots of salt. I’ve never had corn on the cob that way before, but it was delicious. Almost worth the $3 I paid for it.
I ate a $2 waffle cone. No ice cream, just the cone. It was good.
Also among today’s purchases: Nutella pie, toffee, orujo (a Spanish liquer), horchata, chocolate covered everything, and Turron, a popular almond-based Spanish candy that was surprisingly hard to track down.
Pre-dinner meal was at El Tigre, a popular Spanish tapas bar. In Spain, when you order a drink, you get tapas, which is Spanish for free food. And at El Tigre in particular, you get a lot of free food. I love this city.
Dinner was at a Japanese restaurant where we ordered four desserts between three people. The black sesame flan was good, as was the red bean ice cream, but yesterday’s dessert just set a really high bar.
Tonight found us at the street market for a third time where I assisted a bronze statue and examined vats of olives before discovering my new favorite snack in the entire world: roasted candied sunflower seeds. I can’t even put into words how much more delicious these nuts were than every other roasted nut product I’ve ever eaten.
This has been a productive trip. Before arriving in Madrid, I was under the impression that I didn’t like calamari, roasted chestnuts, or sunflower seeds. Turns out I was wrong on all counts.
I took the subway home and felt sorry for anyone who gets violated from behind by a large blue rectangle.
Report from Madrid: Day 4 November 21, 2007
Posted by Niels in : Personal, Photos , 1 comment so farNovember 9: Today in the Plaza Mayor, I met a wineglass virtuoso. Seriously, he was playing Tchaikovsky. It was impressive.
Sarah bought me a stick to chew on. It tasted a little bit like licorice, but mostly like stick. Woody.
We had lunch at a Mexican restaurant with swings at the bar. No barstools at all, just really, really wobbly swings. Yet another brilliant idea that would never fly in the US.
I saw a woman in a glass cage (still not sure whether it was art or advertising),
a park at night,
There’s one restaurant in Madrid that’s so good and so cheap that you have to arrive 30 minutes before it opens to get a seat. Dinner was delicious, but the desserts were mindblowing. We ordered three for two of us, and the slice of chocolate ice cream covered by crème brulee swimming in a sea of rich chocolate sauce was beyond compare.
And on the way home we passed a market where herbalists insist they can cure whatever ails you.
Report from Madrid: Day 3 November 20, 2007
Posted by Niels in : Personal, Photos , add a commentNovember 8: Woke up late this morning, giving me just enough time to get to a local nunnery to buy cookies. Apparently their nuns aren’t allowed to even see men, so I had to use a turntable, enabling the nun and I to complete our transaction without ever laying eyes on each other.
The one glitch appeared due to my poor Spanish, so after several failed attempts to explain the different products and their prices, the nun just put everything she had on the turntable, I took what I wanted, put a 20 euro note down and rotated the turntable back, hoping I’d get change.
In Madrid, it is popular to have a big statue on top of your building.
Calle Fuencarral is the center of trendy fashion in Madrid, but I wasn’t impressed. I did see the New Rock store, though.
But all I ended up getting was a free HIV test. It was an interesting experience, interpreting the results with me speaking broken Spanish and my tester speaking broken English.
I continued to be impressed by European’s comfort level with sex. This display of inflatable sex toys is from the front window of a Diesel clothing store. You can just make out the inflatable sheep behind the old lady walking by.
On the way to dinner I passed the Museo de Jamon (Museum of Ham), a chain of stores selling meat as far as the eye can see.
I saw street musicians, rocking out on their panpipes.
At the Cava de Guitarra, our dinner stop, there’s always a guitar and a stool sitting by one of the walls than anyone can pick up and play. One guy did while we were there. I’ve never wanted to play guitar so badly.
In Madrid, tiny convenience stores are called Chinos because they’re all staffed by Asian immigrants. At night, the shopkeepers come out and sell snacks on the street to drunken, hungry bargoers.
Today finished off nicely with wandering the city until 5am. Plenty of time for playing in plastic,
barhopping with friends,
and of course, churros and chocolate. The chocolate dipping sauce is the consistency of hot, melted chocolate. Such an improvement over the American cinnamon and sugar version.
Report from Madrid: Day 2 November 19, 2007
Posted by Niels in : Personal, Photos , add a commentNovember 7: Did some laundry today, so I now have enough socks and underwear to make it through Marrakesh. I can wear pants for weeks on end and shirts day after day. I’m even willing to double up on underwear, but I have to have clean socks every day.
I had to hang my clothes out to dry. I’ve never done that before - it was actually quire enjoyable. Though I suspect that if I had to do it more than once it would be less fun.
For lunch I went to a shop that had 100 different bocadines (little sandwiches) for 1.20 euros, did my best with the Spanish menu and then headed to La Museo Reina Sofia to listen in on Sarah’s art class. Today’s lesson was on Miró. There’s something really cool about learning about art and seeing the actual painting in front of me, rather than some tiny illustration in a textbook.
On my way home I stopped in a bakery and ordered the most interesting looking thing, which turned out to be a pan dulce. It wasn’t that good, so I went to an asian supermarket and bought a prepackaged horchata, which also wasn’t that good. And so I ended up going out for pinchos (little snacks, like tapas but you pay for them), followed by a trip to a Giangrossi where we sampled about 10 different mysterious Spanish flavors of ice cream(including carrot!) before finally settling on turrón, lemon ginger, fruit and granola, mint chocolate chip, and hazelnut.