Across Europe Fall 04

We are in Madrid now, but I forgot one thing about Barcelona. there was this
street market on the main street that sells pets. Mostly birds and reptiles
and rodents becuase the people of Barcelona live in apartments mostly. What
was interesting though is the variety of these things they had, there were a
ton of different kinds of turtles - seth said most of them would be illegal
in the US becuase of salmonella or something - and there were every kind of
bird including turkeys and chickens and pigeons and peacocks I think. I dont
think any of them were for eating either, they each had their own little
cage and there werent more than like 2 of any kind of bird. And there were
chipmunks. It was really interesting.

Ok so now we are in Madrid. the train ride here was pretty awful, 5 hours
and we were in a very crowded cramped second class becuase the reservation
for first class would have been 22 euro each - at the end of the trip we
decided it would have been worth it. And they didnt even give us seats next
to each other. We sat in other seats until the people came back for them,
then the woman next to seth offered to switch so we were able to sit next to
each other, but it was still pretty annoying.

Madrid is pretty bland compared to Barcelona. It is just a big city really.
Our hotel is nice and in a good location, we get our own room and our own
shower, but not our own toilet. Yesterday we went to the three main musuems
in Madrid, the Prado - which has a ton of art by famous artists like 100
paintings by Rubens and a bunch by El Greco and Velazquez and we liked some
by the Dutch painter Bosch, it is only art up until like the 17th century
though - then we went to the thyssen gallery which is described as major
works by minor artists and minor works by major artists, it is a collection
of art that was collected all by one family, and the musuem is huge. there
were all different genres. It was interesting to us becuase we didnt have a
guide or anything, we just wandered and looked at the paintings and it was
apparent how much we learned about art on this trip that we could make
comments and compare styles and stuff. The musuem was also set up to
facilitate that becuase they had
it divided into rooms like 17th century Italian art, 17th century German
art, ect. and you could really compare how the different countries evolved
over time. Like 17th century German art looks practically medieval compared
to the 17th century Italians who were getting ready for the Renaissance.
Also this musuem had a good collection of impressionism and more modern art
that we enjoy. We have found that we like the art from the 19th century like
late 1800s to early 1900s the most, but after that it starts to get too
modern with just the dots and lines.

The final musuem was the modern art sofia musuem, where Picasso Guernica is.
We found that three art musuems in one day is too much, we kind of skimmed
this musuem, but that is ok because it was mostly really modern art that we
arent into anyway. Guernica and the other Picassos were interesting, as were
some of the Dali and other surrealist works.

After that it was about 8pm so we went for tapas at a place that was
recommended by the easy jet airline magazine for being cheap and tasty. It
really was good. It was crowded with locals by the time we left, but we had
gotten there early enough to get a spot at the counter. We tried practically
every tapa that wasnt ham or fish. We had this really good pig in a blanket
type thing, and a stuffed red pepper, and some sort of shrimp and cheese
thing that was really tasty, and a beef empanada that wasnt so good becuase
they dont serve them hot around here, and a stuffed mussel, and the free
appetizer that came with our drinks was tuna fish pizza. Seth had some beer
and I had some really good house wine and it only cost like 12 euros, which
is really good becuase the dollar is continuing to fall against the euro so
now we have even less money than we did before. Oh and we had to make our
train reservations to Paris and Seville and those were NOT cheap. even with
the eurail pass. It seems
that the eurail pass is most useful in like Germany and austria and even
italy, but spain and france have all these high speed premium trains that
you have to pay extra for.

Today we were going to go for a day trip to Toledo but decided to sleep in
and run errands and see the rest of the city that we missed so far, like the
palace and a statue of the fallen angel - or satan on his way down before he
was totally satan. We saw that this morning, it was a really cool statue, he
still has wings and looks like an angel for the most part, but tiny little
horns are starting and a serpent is grabbing him and pulling him down toward
the demons at the base. Now we are doing laundry. Tommorrow we will go to
Toledo.

Hope everyone had a good thanksgiving.

Meg and Seth