Madrid, Spain (still...)

I can't think of anything interesting to write (you may have noticed that this has been the case quite often of late) so I'll settle for just photos on this occasion. Moving on soon!

Palacio de Cristal in Retiro Park

The Senate

Feminist Garden.
Defiantly untrimmed.

A melding of cultures both high and low:
Velazquez's 1656 masterpiece 'Las Meninas' is currently the subject of sculptures being placed randomly all over Madrid.
Also there's a new Wonder Woman film out.

In Segovia I was tickled to find a restaurant called Selfish Poke.
Here in Madrid I have found Pokes that are Healthy and Tasty.
Now I'm on the lookout for Drunken and Furtive.

Madrid apartment #3. My favourite digs of this trip, and possibly of all my trips ever.
Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, one chandelier. Less than 200m from the Royal Palace.
36 quid a night.

Madrid apartment #4. 
Not as big as #3, but better located for nightlife, and with a bit more sunshine.

Edd vs Food #93
Spanish pasties at Market Cafe 24H
Very nice, but it remains to be seen if they'll do a Christmas Bake...

Madrid, Spain (again)

Today's exciting news is that my spray bottle of 1-Cal sunflower oil has finally run out. I bought it, just before my departure, for £1.50 from B&M Bargains or somewhere like that. It's served me loyally through dozens of improvised self-catering meals. To replace it, since I'm now on the continent, I've had to go a little bit upmarket and buy a spray bottle of extra virgin olive oil (calories per spray not specified) from Carrefour for €2.15.

Carrefour is the only real hypermarket chain present in Spain. And there are no full-sized Carrefours in central Madrid - you have to go way out into the suburbs for that. Most people do their shopping at smaller shops, or at midsized supermarkets such as El Corte Inglés, which is very roughly like a Spanish M&S. Aldi and LIDL are both present, which is handy. The other main local chains include Día, Mercadona and Eroski. They all have their respective pluses and minuses, upon which I'm slowly becoming something of an expert, as I already am with American fast food.  

I like doing my food shopping here but sometimes I miss the microwaveable meal soups that I get from Sainsburys back home. I also miss being able to buy curry sauce in jars. (Here you can find curry sauce if you really hunt for it, but it comes in tiny little pots at about €4 a go.) And of course I miss getting my frozen Greggs pastries from Iceland.

But I've been very well behaved on this trip where junk food is concerned. I haven't had so much as a McDonalds coffee since I left the UK. Temptation has reared its ugly head here in Madrid, where there are several Taco Bells, but I'm staying strong. The only prominent domestic fast food chains in Spain are Telepizza, a cheap Dominos type affair which I'm not curious to try, and VIPS, a sandwich chain which I tried and now wish I hadn't. See Edd vs Food.

Anyway. I'm still in Madrid because the surrounding comunidades are still closed. As you can tell, there's not a whole lot going on here, other than that I'm continuing to succeed in dodging both Covid and the winter blues. I'll keep at it.

Early morning view east on Gran Vía from the Plaza de España, near my first apartment

In Retiro Park at sunset: a monument to King Alf The Twelfth.
They're currently on King Phil The Sixth.

Palacio de Cibeles

The Royal Palace, seen from across the Campo del Moro

TRIGGER WARNING (read the sign)
I'll come back in a few years to see if anything gets erected for Boris.

Madrid apartment number 2. Not really keen on this one.
A bit borstal-esque. Also a hopelessly underequipped kitchen.
It's no way to live, trying to peel carrots with a regular kitchen knife.

Edd vs Food #92
VIPS (see text). Very disappointing. In the Nandos league.
Lukewarm microwaved French fries. Also note the big slices of 'reformed' chicken.
Ten euros!

Madrid, Spain

For the first time on this trip, which is two months old today, I'm returning to a place that I visited in 2017. Arriving here was a lucky bit of timing, because the crest of the second Covid wave has resulted in border closures between Spain's various comunidades, and so skipping from city to city has been taken off the menu for a while. If I'm going to be trapped anywhere, I might as well be trapped here.

Madrid doesn't really have any big tourist attractions along the lines of the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty. And indeed right now it doesn't have any tourists. Just the locals, and me. The streets aren't empty but they're a long way from jam-packed and everything is very manageable. It's tasteless to say it, but global pandemics do sometimes have their benefits.

On a couple of occasions I've ventured out, duly masked & sanitised, to sample a bit of Madrid nightlife. It's a pleasant surprise how affordable the drinks are, although this has much to do with the fact that beer taxes here are literally less than a tenth of what they are in the UK. And the city centre is quite compact, meaning that it's just about possible to incorporate all the good districts into one big walk, punctuated at agreeable intervals with food & drink as required. You certainly couldn't do that in London. There's the snot-nosed upmarket area (Salamanca), the bohemian gay district (Chueca), the slightly dodgy immigrant quarter (Lavapiés), and so on...

I've spent quite a few euros in the local bottle shops in order to give Spanish craft beer a fair hearing. Some of it was pretty good, but most of it was average, and none of it was great. I think there are two main obstacles holding the industry back. One is that the demand just isn't there. In the UK & USA, the first thing that beer nerds like me do upon walking into a bar - any bar - is to scan the casks and kegs and see if there's anything unfamiliar worth trying. In Spain, of course, most people don't even walk into the bar at all. They just sit outside and wait to be given a choice between cheap mass-market keg beer and modestly expensive mass-market keg beer.

Which leads me to the second obstacle. In the UK & USA, the craft beer surge was an unexpected phenomenon that caught the global brewing giants unawares. (The industry is much more concentrated than you might think: Budweiser, Becks, Stella, Corona, Boddingtons, Staropramen...all one firm. Amstel, Sol, Tiger, Heineken, Fosters, Moretti...ditto.) The big Spanish brewers have seen what's happened elsewhere, and they're making damn sure it doesn't happen here, using clever marketing and cosy supermarket deals to push their faux-craft 'premium' brands and prevent the Spanish craft brewers from making any real inroads. I just can't see a Spanish Brewdog appearing any time soon.

Fortunately the best British and American craft beers are available in Madrid, if you know where to look. I drank a few in my apartment while watching England's miserable defeat against Belgium last night. Football on TV is the only football available to me...I very much regret that I can't go along to the Bernabeu or the Metropolitano to see Real or Atlético do their thing. Indeed right now I'd even settle for Getafe or Leganés, both of whom are just about within walking distance. But maybe it's just as well for my readers that I won't have the opportunity to bore you with football as well as with beer. I'll try to think of something more exciting for my next blog.

Gran Via, seen from the rooftop terrace of the Circulo de Bellas Artes

Cibeles fountain, towards sunset

Ópera. This area is where I stayed last time, in 2017.

Paseo de la Castellana, closed for the Vuelta (Spain's equivalent of the Tour de France).
I couldn't be bothered to wait for the riders to come round.

Edd vs Food #91
Chicken burrito at Cherry Pecas ('pecas' means 'freckles')
Drink included for scale - that's a pint glass.

Madrid apartment. Bit poky, due to being very central, but it'll do.

Segovia, Spain

If you saw my blog for Avila last week, then you don't need to click this link. But something appears to have gone wrong with the email subscriptions, which are sent to you by Google's Feedburner service. Fingers crossed you all get this one OK. I've tried troubleshooting it - I am nominally an IT professional, after all - but I can't see what went wrong. Maybe Google's algorithm has assumed that I'm a Russian fake news cyber-spam-bot? Has anything been happening in the world of politics that I should know about?

Here in Spain the US election coverage has been pretty wall-to-wall, just like everywhere else. The newsreaders, needing to read out Trump's name using Spanish vowel sounds, and thus unable to simply say 'Trmp' like English people do, are faced with a stark choice between 'Troomp' and 'Traamp'. The latter usually wins.

As for the public, they're interested, but not quite as emotionally invested as we are in the UK. Perhaps they feel, to a certain extent, concern for their fellow hispanohablantes in central and south America, and thus generally favour Presidents who take a softer line on immigration, both legal and illegal. Incidentally, the one foreign country that Spaniards seem determined to completely ignore is the one right next door. Watching the news every day, it's like Portugal doesn't even exist. This is of course gross hypocrisy from a man who's been to over 50 countries, but not to Wales...

Watching the teary-eyed victory speeches, and indeed the spittle-flecked refusals to concede, it strikes me that things always sound smarter - or at least less stupid - when they're spoken by foreigners. When Trump's speeches are subtitled or dubbed into Spanish, the translators always remove the stumbles and mistakes and other infelicities. There is no Spanish word for 'bigly'. This is vaguely similar to how footballers always sound more cultured during post-match interviews when they're speaking in French, but only until you discover that they're actually talking about "giving it 110% for the full 90 minutes Brian at the end of the day."

My longer-suffering readers may recall that I was in Cincinnati for the last election in 2016. After one big USA road trip under Bush Jr, and four big USA road trips under Obama, I didn't have any during the Trump presidency. (I did have one highly enjoyable spell in Chicago with friends last year, but that was just a casual weekend visit, as you do.) Now I'm looking forward to my next USA road trip during the presidency of Kamala Harris. Because frankly I think the Covid pandemic will live longer than Joe Biden will.

Back to reality. It's only a short bus ride from Avila to Segovia. The latter is high-up and windswept, like the former, but it's a very different kind of place. If anything it reminds me of my time in South America: the ramshackle houses sprawled across the hillsides, the ornate railings on the balconies, the endless little plazas and churches...it all had me thinking about blood feuds and knife fights even before I chanced upon a copy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'Chronicle Of A Death Foretold' on the bookshelf in my little studio apartment. And indeed that apartment is literally on the Street Of Life And Death.

Segovia contains arguably the best-preserved of all surviving Roman aqueducts. We don't know for sure exactly when it was built, but certainly it's not much less than 2,000 years old. The tall section that you see in my photo is only one part of the structure: you can follow it round to the south and east, and it gets progressively less tall as you go uphill, so that the top of it remains flat, obviously. 

Apart from the aqueduct, Segovia is mainly famous for its signature dish of roast suckling pig. See Edd vs Food. It was my duty to indulge, and I did so. Pigly.

What have the Romans ever done for us?

View to the south-east from above the aqueduct

Inside Segovia cathedral

The Alcazar
Frankly, from this angle I think it looks like a Nintendo game backdrop.

A more pleasing view of the Alcazar, from below and to the northwest

I'm stupefied by the name of this place.
Whatever a 'selfish poke' is, it has no place in polite society.
Actually I've just googled it and 'poke' is apparently a Hawaiian seafood dish.

Edd vs Food #90
Roast suckling pig. Complete with cute little trotter at the right hand side.
Culinary highlight of this trip so far. From the Asador David Guijarro.
Not from Selfish Poke (see picture above)...
...otherwise it would have been a pig in a Poke. Ha ha.

Bohemian little studio, with balcony

Ávila, Spain

I made a last-minute decision to come here from Salamanca, saving Madrid for later. It's nice to have the option of being spontaneous. Spontaneity can be an expensive habit while travelling, as anyone who's ever paid rack rate in a UK hotel can testify, but right now I'm getting cheap travel and accommodation at short notice pretty much everywhere in Spain.

In 1960 Orson Welles was asked where in the world he'd most like to live, and his answer was here, Ávila. It wasn't necessarily a compliment. He described it as 'a strange, tragic place', and probably what he meant was that it appealed to him more for its theatric and cinematic qualities than for its inherent quality of life. His words reminded me of the Brazilian footballer Emerson, who signed for Middlesbrough in 1996, prompting his wife to describe their new home as 'a strange and terrible place'. 

The air is clearer in most places than it is in Middlesbrough, but it's especially clear here, because Ávila is 1,132 metres above sea level. (The highest mountain in England is 978m.) As soon as you enter the Roman walls and wander around the old town, you begin to see where old Orson was coming from. It doesn't have the comforting sun-dappled sandstone yellowness of Salamanca: it's bleak and grey and windswept, even the cathedral. When the sky is overcast, it's almost like being in a black-and-white movie, with two millenia's worth of ghosts from the Roman occupation to the Spanish Civil War loitering glumly behind you. And right now it's especially ghostly and empty, thanks to Covid.

I took a break from the general Ingmar Bergman aura to pop into a little bar and watch Barcelona 1 Real Madrid 3 on telly. It was the first ever crowd-free El Clasico. One of the many annoying aspects of Covid is that it's depriving me of the opportunity to attend Spanish football in person and thus inflict my match reports upon you all. I reckon I'd have been to at least three games so far, had this been a normal year. But I do at least get too see live footy on the TV, because plenty of second-division games and indeed some from the top-flight are shown free-to-air. This compares very favourably with paying £10 a match to watch somebody filming Sunderland's hapless Third Division exploits on a hand-held camera. Strangely enough, in Spain, showing football on free-to-air TV does not appear to reduce either clubs or players to penury, and nor does it lower the quality of the football in question. There's a lesson in there somewhere.

11th-century walls

Walking around the outside of the walls

Basilica de San Vicente

Another view of the Basilica, from the top of the walls

Again on the walls, this time looking south to the cathedral

Edd vs Food #89
Your mood never dips
with kebab and chips.
https://deliciouskebabpizzaavila.es/

Not much happening on AirBnB in Avila.
4-star hotel for £45 a night instead.
Photo taken on departure, hence the unmade bed.