Views from Crestmont Drive

Monday, 10 October, on our Oceania cruise: Barcelona

The largest of our cruise ports since Lisbon. We did a 4-hour “highlights” bus excursion, part of which was a walking tour, yet saw only a handful of landmarks, beginning with the famous Gaudi basilica, known as Sagrada Familia. (It’s not a cathedral, because Barcelona already had a cathedral when Gaudi started, and there’s only one cathedral per city.) Sagrada Familia is still under construction, after nearly a century, but apparently the pace has accelerated and work on the main structure is expected to be complete by 2026, including a central tower that will be twice the height of any of the existing towers! The structure shows Gaudi’s well-known, primitive grotesque style (which some Americans find resemble Flintstones architecture), and the news for anyone already familiar with it is that a portion on the front, the “Passion façade”, has just been completed in the past couple years — four huge angled pillars, which represent, according to a tour guide we overheard, the tendons of Jesus as he was torn apart by his crucifixion. (How charming.) The entire basilica is a vast instantiation of every religious tradition and belief about Jesus — the birth, the death, the glory — in excruciating detail. To view it is to swing between admiration for its ambition, and disgust for its obsession, to a nonbeliever like me.

Barcelona, we were told, is the fourth largest cruise ship port in the world, the top three being in Florida. It’s also a huge cargo port. And the city and its adjacent environs form a huge view from the hilltop where our bus tour ended, Montjuic. The bus tour took us to the Sagrada Familia, but only for 20 minutes, not long enough to go inside. As it turned out, there are so many tourists anxious to see the inside, that you need to reserve tickets in advance, via the internet, days in advance. (The cruise ship folks might have advised us of that…)

The bus tour took us down the major shopping street, Pg. de Gracia, which was much like the Avenida in Lisbon, but even more grand, wide and lined with shops. We passed by two other well-known Gaudi buildings, one apartments, another commericial. We disembarked from the bus for a walk through the old-town district, one of narrow streets and ancient buildings, as in all these cities, and which took us into the city’s cathedral. Our tour guide was a character; a man who’d grown up in Oklahoma, of a Spanish mother, but who learned the language only after moving the Barcelona as an adult. He spoke fluent Spanish, but in what even I could tell was a flat manner, without the intonation of vowels distinctive of that language. He had an Oklahoma accent.

Our bus tour ending in time for us to lunch on our cruise ship, we returned to shore mid-afternoon, taking a taxi back to Sagrada Familia, only then to discover the ticket situation. We then walked all the way back through the city, down that shopping avenue and through the old town, to the shuttle bus pickup. (We’re getting 15,000 – 20,000 steps each day on this vacation.)

Also notable: a statue of Christopher Columbus, in a large square along the waterfront, famously pointing in the wrong direction.

(Running two days behind.)

Sunday, 9 October: Palma de Mallorca. This is the city of Palma on the island of Mallorca, a largish island south of Spain and west of the better known islands of Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily. Palma, we’re told, expanded considerably in the 1960s, and we saw dozens of high-rise apartment buildings resembling those in Malaga and Alicante; while the rest of the island, which we didn’t see, is apparently traditional and rural. We didn’t take an excursion, though one of those available was a train ride, across the mountains, to an ancient monastery, so we saw only the town.

We took a shuttle bus from the port to a city landmark near the cathedral. Like our previous stops, Palma has a cathedral, a castle on a hill, and an old-town with many tiny narrow streets. A difference here is that the streets aren’t windy, just straight — but intersecting at so many odd angles, we got lost a couple times, even with a map and iPhone, before we got our orientation and found our way to the city center. We had lunch at a sidewalk cafe, an open-faced sandwich and tapas, where the service was slow because there was a lone waiter for the many tourists needing service.

The cathedral in Palma is the largest of any we’ve seen — an enormous structure complete with a rack of flying buttresses — though, alas, closed on Sunday, so we didn’t see the inside. We also visited an “Arabian Baths”, a lone remaining structure dating from when the Muslims dominated the city. It was illuminating: it consists of three rooms, one a circular domed room, with holes in the ceiling, that served as a steam room; and two adjacent rooms, one where you would be soaped down and scrubbed, and a final one where you would take a cold shower to close your pores. It was a facility owned by a wealthy family, and those services were available only to the family and their guests.

Which reminds me of a comment by our guide in Alicante, as we walked through the busy town hall square where two or three wedding parties were gathering: until recent times, residents of the city might take only three baths in their lives: at birth, at death, and for their wedding.

Times change.

We walked the shopping street in the rain, searching souvenir and shoe shops for a particular type of slip-on shoe that Michael’s girlfriend asked us to look for.

Our final stop was the Almudaina Palace, immediately adjacent to the cathedral. Built as an Arab fortress 1000 some years ago, it became a Spanish royal palace in the 14th century. I got a good photo of the interior archways in one of the main rooms.

Palma is apparently a busy tourist destination; the flight path into the airport was over the bay where we docked, and there was an incoming plane roughly every two minutes.

More general notes:

• Tourism is now a major industry of many of these cities, and I wonder how far this trend will go. We visit these many towns and cities, and think how charming it might be to live there — until realizing, your neighborhood would be overrun by tourists most of the year. Is this the future of all unique places around the globe? On the other hand, perhaps most people live in the suburbs, which might be just as pleasant as the downtowns, and never see the tourists. That’s our situation back in California.
• In Palma, many of the shops and cafes were indeed closed on Sundays, as we were advised might be true. But not all, at least not in the tourist areas, which meant the entire old town area of the city.
• There are indeed American fast food restaurants in all these cities — especially McDonald’s and Burger King, and less frequently KFC and Domino’s; and there seems to be one Hard Rock Cafe in each city, at the center of the tourist area.
• I was going to mention how unexpectedly warm it had been on this trip, October in Europe; we brought mostly long-sleeved shirts and worried about inclement weather. Instead, it was unseasonably warm and sunny the first several days of our trip — until Palma, and again Monday in Barcelona, when it was mostly overcast and sprinkled a bit both days. We even broke out our umbrella in Palma.

Monday we were in Barcelona; today, Tuesday, in Marseille. Notes on those to come.

Saturday, 8 October–

The Spanish port city of Alicante. Short version: another port city, another castle, another cathedral, more old-town narrow streets filled with cafe tables, another bullfighting ring.

We did an excursion here, i.e. a bus tour, and the first stop was the castle on the hill, up a narrow road originally designed for donkeys, as the guide pointed out, and which allows for only one bus at a time, alternating uphill and downhill. This castle isn’t as old as the two we saw in Lisbon and Málaga; its famous moment in history was that it was severely damaged during the Spanish civil war in the 1930s, and sections of it have only been partially rebuilt. We spent over an hour there, then the bus took us through parts of town, the shopping district, past the bullfighting ring (they’re like football stadiums but circular, and increasingly used for other things than bullfights, our guide explained), and then let us off for a walking tour, past the city’s rather plain cathedral, the town center plaza full of wedding ceremonies in preparation and some kind of handball tournament, then leaving us at the esplanade along the waterfront, a palm tree lined walkway decorated with two million tiles in curved patterns, for an hour of free time. We found a cafe on a side street to eat paella and fried sardines. We’ve noticed that on the one hand, the cliche that Europeans don’t do ice in drinks (as Americans do) seems no longer an issue, in our experience so far; they provide ice with soda or cold tea without being asked. On the other hand, we still have to beg for the bill (check), even when we’re on a deadline to catch our tour bus; you’d think the local vendors, especially in tourist areas, would be a bit more attentive in that regard.

Now I have several observations about our whole trip that I’ve neglected to mention so far — I’ve been collecting them in my iPhones notes.

• I should have mentioned that the historical significance of our first two ports, Cádiz and Málaga, is that they were the westernmost settlements of the Phoenicians, the first great civilization to sail the Mediterranean and establish an empire, albeit commercial rather than militaristic; and this hundreds of years before the Romans came along and took over those settlements and renamed them. Alicante, in contrast, has no pre-Roman history.
• Cod is everywhere on the Portuguese menus but, one waiter explained to us, it is not a local fish. It’s all imported from Norway.
• The cars they drive: In Portugal and in Spain, they’re mostly German and French. Lots of VWs, lots of BMWs (though smaller models, nothing larger than a 3 series), quite a few Mercedes, even a few Audis. Then the French: Citroen and Peugeot. Japanese cars, Toyotas and Hondas, though usually models you don’t see in the US. Virtually no American cars, though I have seen a couple Fords, again models you don’t see in the US. And then makes and models unfamiliar to me: Toledo, Clio, Ibiza, Skoda. I could look them up.
• In Portugal, there’s an item on every restaurant tab for “couvert”. It’s a charge for the bread, olives, and whatnot that would be ‘complementary’ anywhere else.
• In Málaga, but no other city we’ve been to, the stoplight pedestrian signals display an animated walking man when it first turns green. There’s also a count-down counter in seconds. As the counter passes 30 or so, the walking man animation starts running. When it gets down to 10 seconds or so, the animation runs really fast. When it turns red, the counter resets and counts down the red light.
• Especially in Málaga, all the young men have beards.
• Tapas, we’ve been told, is a term that originally described complementary pastries set on a plate that covered your drink.
• The sommelier’s story: Anyone who’s been on a cruise probably knows about the work conditions of the staff — working round the clock for months or years without a break. On our ship, the first night we had dinner in the Grand Dining Room, and ordered wine, a sommelier came to help us choose. He’s a young man with a red beard, a maroon vest, and big chain around his neck that signifies his status. I asked casually about how long he’d been with the ship, and he explained that he’s on his third contract, how each contract is for six months, and how he never has a chance to leave the boat — like living in a prison, he explained cheerfully, and then went on to service other guests.
   
  We saw him again two nights later, and he remembered our stateroom number and the bottle of wine we hadn’t finished (a Spanish white) and had saved for our next meal there. (A useful function of cruise ships!) We’d also noticed how the dining room hostess had remembered us, and complemented him on his memory. He explained that he had trained as a classical pianist, and was good at memorizing scores.

I’m posting this Sunday morning, local time, while we do our own laundry in the provided laundry room. We’re in Palma, on the island of Mallorca, and will head out in an hour or two to explore on our own.

Tuesday 4 October. We had an extensive breakfast buffet at the hotel to get started. I mentioned last time the cocktail stand at the giant food court– We’ve also seen various cocktail kiosks along the riverfront and the avenue near our hotel. Gin and tonic to go! Never seen such things in other European cities, let alone in the US. At the breakfast buffet in the hotel, there was a bottle of sparkling wine, and champagne flutes, for the taking, along with the usual spread of cold cuts, scrambled eggs, pastries, and juices.

It’s a tourism cliche, but taking a bus tour is actually a decent way to get an idea of the layout of an unfamiliar city, I think. We took a Yellow Bus tour, the kind where your ticket is good for 48 hours and you can get off and on any bus along a particular route as often as you like. Our route took us north of the Avenida where we’re staying, past various museums, department stores, government facilities, and parks, then eventually westward along the river to the Belém Tower, a 16th century tower built as a fortification at the mouth of the Tagus River. We climbed narrow spiral staircases to the top level.

Leaving the tour bus around 4pm, we headed up into the windy streets of the Alfama district, in search of the brown castle we could see from the avenue below. It was tricky to find, since the iPhone maps failed in the hills; eventually we just followed the other tourists. The Castelo de São Jorge was built in the 11th century during a time when the city was run by the Moors, or Arabs (depending on which plaque you read), and the site has been occupied as far back as 600 BC. It’s the most castly castle I ever remember being in, complete with turrets and ramparts and steep stone steps and inner, now empty, courtyards. There is also a museum of artifacts there, some gardens, and a closed archaeological site.

The final highlight of the day was to venture west from our avenue back into the Bairro Alto, another older area of tiny narrow streets (though not so windy as in Alfama), packed with dozens of bars and restaurants with seating outside on the cobblestones. We tracked down a place called Põe-Te Na Bicha, a tiny place with red walls in a building whose interior stone arches suggested a long history. The place was still half empty, but apparently reserved, when we finished at 9:30, which reminds me of another general observation about Lisbon: late to rise, late to lunch, late to dine, apparently.

A two-day start considering only a couple hours fitful sleep on the plane overnight. We flew out of SFO Sunday morning, changed in Philadelphia, and landed Lisbon about 9am local time (1am West Coast time) on Monday. (I read Ian McEwan’s NUTSHELL on the plane; clever and trenchant. Parts I’ll quote here later.) Clear and sunny. Disembarked down steps on the tarmac; a tram ride; an hour’s lengthy line through passport control; then a taxi into the crowded city center. We’re in a Bessa Hotel on the main avenue, Liberdade, a hotel recently remodeled, very chic and high-tech past the point of convenience — it took us repeated attempts to figure out how to control the temperature in the room.

Lisbon impressions: cobblestone streets and sidewalks everywhere. Sunny and warm. This broad avenue, to the NW of city center, is a transition from tourist places to the south and high-end shopping to the north (Gucci, Versace, Prada, etc. shops a few blocks from our hotel). Pedestrian traffic a mix of office workers, lady shoppers, and tourists, where the heavyset ones in shorts with cameras around their necks seem to be the Americans. French, German tourists; only a few Asians. The locals smoke a lot. Most everyone understands at least a little English.

Restaurants near the hotel didn’t open for lunch until 12:30. We had a nice meal at Ad Lib — including Entrecôte, a cut of beef that seems to be on every menu here, along with cod.

Then a one-hour nap, to tide us over.

Then walking to the river, through the tourist streets, to the recently renovated riverfront, where the cruise ships dock, and alongside the huge Praça do Comércio (Wikipedia has a good overhead photo), a city square with a huge memorial statue in the middle, surrounded by government buildings.

From there we strolled west, into the setting sun, views of a Golden Gate-like bridge in the distance, and the Cristo-Rei monument on the southern bank of the Tagus River (resembling the iconic Rio de Janeiro monument), until we reached the Mercado da Ribeira, a huge indoor market/food court, full of booths selling seafood and Portuguese specialties and sweets, and even cocktails from a central stand. We had tapas and oysters and a glass of wine.

Then back north, up the Rua do Alecrim, topping a hill and skirting the trendy Bairro Alto district (maybe we’ll get back there tonight), until we walked down a descending tram path back to our Avenida. Another little rest, then out again, determined to stay awake to the current day/night schedule, to hunt down a power converter (the hotel was out), and dine at a tourist place for clams and octopus.

21442 steps on the pedometer from our first full day.

Then we went to sleep at 8:30 and slept nearly 12 hours.

Today there is a castle looming on a nearby hill I think we need to check out.