The rain in Spain stays mainly in...Gibraltar

Where were we? Ah, yes, we were speeding south on the famous European high-speed, er, bus from Madrid to Granada. It was a rather unremarkable journey--Andy and I slept most of the way--but I would like to point out that after all the supposedly "third-world" places we have been, Spain is the first country we've been to where the driver actually lit up a cigarette on the bus. It was parked at the rest stop, but still. Spain needs to catch up with the rest of Europe with the no-smoking-indoors rules...

The main attraction of Granada is the Alhambra, and what an attraction it is! It's a huge complex of old Moorish palaces, military buildings, and gardens, built in the early to mid 1000s, when Arabs controlled southern Spain. Here are some pics.

Great view of Granada and the surrounding hills from atop the Alcazar:

Best ceiling ever:

One of the many lovely courtyards in the palace complex:

Star-shaped ceiling dome with windows--note the fantastic blue color in the ceiling details:

We were lucky to have beautiful blue skies sandwiched between two days of rain in Granada!

Bottom line: If you ever go to Spain, make sure to visit the Alhambra. It was my favorite place on my first trip there in 1999, and probably my favorite again on this one. So cough up the 12 euros, and get there early in the day (tickets were sold out by 1PM the day we went, and that was in the relatively quiet winter season...).

After our visit, we made our way to our second couchsurfing host of the trip! Gabriella is an Italian astrophysicist studying in Granada, and she has a great apartment down an alley in one of the old parts of town. We couldn't have asked for a better host--right away, she proposed taking us to her favorite part of town, the old Moorish part that we would never have found on our own. Best of all, it had a great view of the Alhambra from afar. Check out the snow-covered Sierra Nevada mountains in the background.

We then met up with two of her astrophysicist friends and went for Moroccoan-style tea and sweets at one of the local teterias, or tea shops. There is a whole street of them in Granada, aptly named Calle de las Teterias. Andy will post pics from that outing in our next foods post. Everyone was so nice to us, and didn't even try to strangle Andy when he quizzed them on all the "discoveries" they are or aren't making about space.

That night, we found ourselves staying up too late yet again sharing a wonderful homecooked meal and conversation with Gabriella and another friend of hers (he gave us Morocco travel advice, and we taught him some more English swear words--good trade!). Meals are wonderfully epic and social in Spain. Then we bedded down for a few hours. One of my favorite things about beds in Spain is that they have one pillow, no matter what size the bed is--the pillows are just always made long enough to fit.

We had bought tickets for the 7:15 AM train to Algeciras, so we needed to be up and out early. When we got up, it was still dark and wet from the overnight rain. As we walked to the train station, we passed plenty of other people...still out from the night before! Most of them were hitting the all-night schwarma shops, getting their post-clubbing drunk food. Those Granadanians are party animals, I tell you.

Turns out that the 7:15 train on a Sunday is not the most popular train in Spain. We had a car all to ourselves and settled back for one of the prettiest train rides I have ever been on, four hours through the south of Spain. We passed many Irish-green fields and olive groves...

We finally arrived in Algeciras, found a hotel room, dropped off our stuff, and headed off for our final excursion in Spain...or, I should say, in the UK. We were off to Gibraltar!

In case, like me, you didn't really know much about Gibraltar, here's the short version: The rock of Gibraltar is a giant limestone rock jutting out into the Mediterranean. It was considered by the Greeks to be one of the pillars of Hercules, and has been of military importance (and therefore sacked) for centuries. The British got ahold of it in the early 1700s, and never gave it back, so, now it's basically a British military base and colony of 30,000 people sticking off the bottom of Spain.

You have to go through (a very lax) passport control to get into the town, and once inside you can get pounds sterling out of the ATMs, buy fish and chips, and pose for silly pictures with Britannica such as this phone booth:

So, here is the famed rock. Note the fog. The rain finally caught up with us in Gibraltar...but it was on and off all afternoon, and amazingly, whenever we were visiting an outdoor part of the rock, it stopped raining! We really had the best luck with weather in Spainbraltar.

The bad weather led to strange lighting that made the views from the top of the rock incredible. I think this is one of the best pictures Andy has ever taken. Way off to the left of this picture is the Mediterranean and Africa, while to the right the land you can see is Spain. It was cool to gaze out toward Africa the day before our voyage there.

The options for getting to the top of the rock are few and expensive--there is a funicular, but it costs 20 or 30 euros per person and closes in the rain. We ended up paying a little more than that for a 2-hour taxi tour, stopping at all the highlights. Pricey, but apparently it was Andy's dream since childhood to visit Gibraltar or something, so it had to be done.

In addition to the views, there were other cool bits of the tour. We visited some limestone caves that were very impressive (well, except for the endless loop of Theme from Canon in D that is piped in through a sound system in there...sigh).

And, of course, there are the apes. The British soldiers brought some apes from Africa to Gibraltar as pets back in the day, and now there are five or six families of 60 baboons each living wild up there. Well, "wild"--they hang around in certain areas waiting for tourists to come feed them.

Here you can see a shot of two apes. The dominant is sitting on top of the submissive one.

There were also military tunnels to visit, and an old Moorish castle that had been sacked a huge number of times. On the ramparts of the castle, we discovered another fascinating bit of wildlife: a slug.

We returned to Algeciras for a quiet night--it's the big port city, but there's not too much of interest for tourists to see or do there. The next morning, we slept in, then walked a few blocks to the port, and paid 20 euros each to get on the next passenger ferry to Tangier, Morocco...

...which is a whole new world (yes, the Aladdin reference is deliberate). More on that soon!

Northern Spain...with a side of Brussels

Hello there, and welcome to Andy and Tara's world tour...part deux! Our plan for this part of the trip is to spend 7 or 8 months backpacking around Africa, then on to India and Asia. But first, we managed to squeeze in a very whirlwind tour of three European countries.

We officially kicked things off almost a week ago with a flight from NYC to Brussels, Belgium, on Jet Airways. Yeah, we'd never heard of them before, either, but they had the cheapest deal to get us to Europe. Turns out that they are an India-based airline, which means we got Indian food for our dinner on the plane. That made it pretty much the best international flight I've ever taken.

Also, there were the little TVs at every seat with a decent selection of both Hollywood and Bollywood films. I chose to finally watch "Up," and therefore spent the first couple of hours of the flight almost bawling in my seat. (Oh, and marveling at how they totally ripped off Angel Falls and the Gran Sabana in Venezuela for the fictional setting of the movie!)

Anyway, on to Brussels. We spent 7 hours there, and that was quite enough time to see pretty much everything there is to see in the place. Not the most exciting city in Europe, but not a bad place to spend a long layover, either.

We found this guy outside of the comic strip museum. We assume that he is a famous Belgian cartoon character--can anyone confirm this?

The cathedral was free, and it was freezing outside, therefore we visited it. It was stately and, you know, cathedralesque.
Brussels's top tourist attraction is probably Manneken Pis, a statue of a little boy peeing. Or I should say fountain, since the water comes out of his weenie. Andy had been hearing about this statue for a long time and was seriously disappointed at how small it was. I had warned him not to get his hopes up!I had been to Brussels with my sister (hi Brooke!) in 2002, so I had seen a lot of this before, but I don't think Brooke and I ever made it to the EU Congress building. Andy and I did. You can't really tell from this picture, but it's super-modern and looks kind of like a giant space vessels plopped down in the middle of more medeival settings. Also, it has a duck pond out back, probably so that the French have a constant source of fresh foie gras.
So, add in some chocolate and Belgian fries, and that was Brussels. We jumped on our connecting flight that night and arrived in Madrid around 10PM. Then it was off to our couchsurfing hosts, Melanie and Serge, who are awesome. And not just because they had a gourmet dinner on the stove (people eat late in Madrid!) and insisted we partake. We had so much fun getting to know them, that suddenly we realized hours had gone by since we'd arrived, and it was time for bed.

It was raining in Madrid the night we arrived, but the next day was mostly clear. After stopping by the cathedral (free, so we went in) and the Royal Palace (not free, so we passed), we headed for the Retiro, Madrid's huge central park.

Some of its highlights were the Palacio de Cristal, a beautiful glass palace...and the troupe of peacocks that roams in the northern part of the park.
Madrid also has fantastic art museums. Melanie and Serge turned us on to the Caixa Foundation museum. In addition to having an amazing free exhibit of the contemporary Spanish artist Miquel Barcelo, which we loved, it has a neat vertical garden outside. It also afforded us our very first elephant siting of the trip!
Nearby is the Atocha train station, which has a mini botanical garden inside. You can check out the turtles while waiting for your train.
That night, we visited the Prado during its free hours, and went out for tapas at a few different places. More on that in the food post. The next day, we did a day trip to Toledo, a medeival city an hour away from Madrid.

The cathedral cost a whopping 7 euros each to visit, but it was pretty impressive. Note the famous stained glass window.

It also has this very cool structure in the center. We forget what it is called, but it was very fancy.
We also visited a synagogue in Toledo (they had a thriving Jewish population until Spain threw the Jews or forced them to convert out during the Inquisition), went to a couple of museums with lots of El Greco paintings, and I ate marzipan, for which the city is known. Yum.

That night, back in Madrid we hit the Reina Sofia modern art museum during its free hours (we love the free museum evening hours!) I forget the artist, but these were some fun ballet costume concepts on display, along with many Picassos, Dalis, Miros, and other works.
Here we are with our hosts, Serge and Melanie. Their apartment really felt like home for the three nights we were there. Serge is an incredible chef, hence the wooden spoon held aloft. We hope that they will come cook for us...I mean, visit us, one day in America when we have a spare room!

Then we took off for Granada, which I'll have to post about another time, because my time here is up. We are off to Morocco in the morning!

Our vacation from our vacation from our vacation.

Prepare for a marathon post. This one covers all our activities during two weeks in the southwest United States (New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado). We were hit with a lot of snow and rain, but that won't stop us from bringing you some excellent food shots along with a few pictures of us...where we are surely thinking about food.

Regular readers may recall that on the way home for Christmas, we passed through the Dallas airport, where we did everything short of selling a kidney to get to Cousin's BBQ before they closed for the night. Unfortunately, they had closed early and I had some belligerent words for them. Well, we ended up going back through that airport on our way to Albuquerque, so we decided to try them. The food looks nice, but it wasn't actually very good. We've had worse, but it tasted like they use an electric smoker rather than wood (which will mean nothing unless you eat a ton of BBQ like we seem to).

We arrived in Albuquerque, a very funny name for a city, and met Tara's aunt, Judy. We stayed in Albuquerque the first night and ate at a New Mexican restaurant called Little Anita's. This dish is called Carne Adovada, which I suspect translates to "Meat so salty that one serving is enough for a heart attack." Needless to say, it was good.
After a night in Albuquerquequequeque, we were off to Santa Fe, a much easier city to spell. We took a route called the Turquoise Trail between the two cities, mostly because we thought it would be more challenging to spell turquoise when doing this entry than to spell I-25. The route turned out to be very nice in places. Here is a view from Sandia Peak, where there was lots of snow.
After becoming depressed that the Tinkertown Museum was closed for the season, we stopped at a gift shop/museum in Madrid, New Mexico. In addition to lots of turquoise from their own mine, they have apparently crossbred Elvis with a chicken.
As we headed into Santa Fe, we went straight for food. We went to Bobcat's, which is supposed to have some of the best burgers in the area. Mine had green chile peppers on it for a bit of heat. Very good, though not as good as Ray's Hell Burger that Tara wrote about in the last post.
We then thought we should go see something and take a picture so that we could prove we did more than eat. We don't have pictures of our first stop, but I will mention that Judy (Tara's aunt) decided that she wanted to go visit a friend from high school whom she hadn't seen or talked to in 25 years. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, she got his address and we showed up on his doorstep. Fortunately, people in that part of the country don't shoot strangers and he was happy to see her.

Then, off to downtown Santa Fe. It is tiny and looks almost entirely like this. Not really as exciting as I expected.
So, off to the most famous of Santa Fe restaurants: Harry's Roadside Diner. I had the Moroccan tangine in honor of our upcoming trip to Morocco. It was decent for a diner in New Mexico.
Tara and Judy split the turkey meatloaf, which proved wise since this is the amount they each got. They still had leftovers, which Judy ate for breakfast. It sat in the cold car all night since we didn't have a fridge in the room, so the car smelled like meatloaf for several days.
Harry's is most famous for their desserts, and they lived up to that. The banana cream pie was amazing.
Santa Fe has a couple of expensive museums, but we only had time and money for one, so we went to the International Folkart Museum. The special exhibition was on Indonesian shadow puppets, which apparently involve nine hour performances put on by a single puppeteer. Some of the more modern artists use more modern themes. Here's a George Bush puppet.
These are more traditional figures. You can see the shadows they cast, which is all that the audience will ever see. The elaborate decoration of the puppets is purely for the artistic value.
For sale in the gift shop was this handmade item. For only $80 or so, it could be yours. It surprises me that you don't see more skeleton mermaids. They're just so darn cute.
While visiting a local store, Tara discovered that they carried Cascade Fresh, one of her favorite yogurts. I can see why--they make apple pie flavor. Still, yogurt is bad.
On our way from Santa Fe to Phoenix, we went to the Albuquerque Aquarium, which turned out to be very nice. Here is me doing my best impression of the puffer fish.
Here is Aunt Judy thinking about how tasty this fish would be on her dinner plate.
As we drove towards Gallup for the night, Tara took this sunset picture from the car. You can see the mesas in the distance.
On our way to meet the rest of Tara's family in Sedona, we went through the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest National Parks. Both were much nicer than I remembered them being. The colors didn't exactly shimmer in the dingy grayness, but you can still see all the different colors present.
It started to snow as we were getting to the petrified part of the park, but you can still see the petrified logs behind Tara. Minerals replaced the wood millions of years ago when the trees fell and conditions were such that no bacteria or fungus decomposed the wood. Okay, enough school for today.
Sedona is famous for its red rock for a reason. The whole place is surrounded by structures like this one. The red, like nearly all red in rock, is caused by iron oxide, aka rust.
Sedona is also the world center for new age quackery. I find it hard to believe that even the author of this book could keep a straight face when looking at it.
It was rainy while we were in Sedona, but here Tara and I are in front of one of the more famous formations. I think it is called Bell Rock.
With Tara's family, we took a little excursion south of Phoenix and ended up in Saguaro National Park. The area really is remarkable for anyone interested in plant life. Here are Tara and her dad in front of a medium sized cactus.
We also went by an ostrich farm. It was closed to tourists that day, but we took some pictures over the fence. I had never thought about it, but thousands of ostriches together smell really, really bad.
Back in Phoenix, Tara tried In-N-Out Burger for the first time. Verdict: burgers were good, shakes were average, fries were subpar. Very affordable, though.
Tara's sister lives in Phoenix, next to the best dollar store we'd ever been to. I bought two pairs of $1 sunglasses since I can't seem to keep a pair without breaking them. Tara bought mango flavored pineapple. This brand is made in California, but we saw it all over in Latin America. We never saw these, so we had to try them. They aren't bad, though they have a slight buttery aftertaste for me, which is strange.
One of the highlights of this trip, if not my life, was going to a donut factory that Tara's cousin helps manage. They make thousands and thousands of donuts all day long. And he told us that we could eat any of them. The only thing that could have made it closer to heaven is if it were a joint donut/ice cream plant. Here are the cinnamon rolls going through the fryer. One side fries, then a wheel flips them, then the other side fries, then they fall onto a conveyor belt where they are iced, then I eat them as fast as I can. Thanks for taking us, Joe!
Tara has much extended family in Phoenix whom we met a couple years ago when we were in the area. They are really great, and this time we had dinner with all of them that could make it at a place called Chino Bandito's, which is a Mexican-Chinese fusion restaurant. For example, sweet and sour chicken in a burrito with a side of fried rice and beans. Interesting, tasty, affordable, and the staff was extremely nice. We recommend them.
Kathy and Joe, the cousins with whom we spent the most time, introduced us to two excellent restaurants the last time we were in town, so we went back with them this time. The first is Flancer's, a local sandwich shop. They make unique and amazing sandwiches. The one pictured is a prickly pear chicken sandwich (and Tara's favorite).
The second restaurant is called Crackers. Yep, sounds offensive to me, too, but they make french toast from slices of cinnamon roll (pictured below) that is so good I would forgive anything short of genocide. Tara got the yogurt parfait, which she said was good, but it can't have been as good as my french toast. (If Tara were writing this, she would point out that the last time we were there, I ate so much of the french toast that I got sick for much of the day while we were hiking. To the point of asking her to carry our back pack, which means really sick for me. This side story won't surprise anyone who has known for more than five minutes.)
The real reason that we went to Phoenix was to visit Tara's sister, Brooke, who is an up-and-coming Broadway singer/dancer. She is appearing in Gypsy as June in Phoenix, and she was absolutely terrific. We expect her to go from really poor almost-Broadway performer to moderately poor Broadway performer any day!
After Phoenix, we spent a week in Colorado visiting some close friends. I haven't ask if I can put them on the website, so I won't put up pictures of their two very cute kids. However, here is the very cute pie that our friend Laura made for us. It also tasted amazing. I tried to share, but still ate about three-quarters of it...
They also have a Dairy Queen nearby. (We visited several DQs while in the Southwest.) As we entered, they had a sign saying it was 99 cent cone day, so I got two. And then I apparently tried to look as terrible as possible for this picture. Then I found out that it was buy-one-get-one-free waffle cone day, too. So, I got two waffle cones (I gave Tara a bit of one). A very successful trip.
Colorado had about four feet of snow when we arrived. I don't have any pictures that do it justice**, but it was a lot of fun to play in that much snow. It came to my waist when I would take a step. A good trip before we take on the heat of the Sahara in a couple weeks. Thanks to all the people with whom we stayed and who made this a great trip!

(**Note from Tara: How about this one?)