How did I forget to mention the most interesting part of our Asian cabinmate on the trenhotel? When we walked into El Sobrino de Botín there she was, chatting away with someone in a rapid language I could not possibly understand with smiles and drinks abounding. SB stopped in the doorway, pulled me aside, and whispered, “Is that her?”
It was strange to see someone we had only encountered as silent laughing and speaking so animatedly. Then again, I’ve discovered that perceptions in general are quite different in Spain. For example, I am of average height in this country, whereas in the US I am daily made fun of for my lack of stature. Another example: the other night as SB and were walking back to our hotel I saw an attractive young girl leaning against the wall in an extremely short, tight dress. After we passed her I wondered aloud, “A prostitute?”
SB looked back. “Nah,” she said, shaking her head. “People just dress like that here.”
Half a block later I saw another young girl leaning against the wall in a similarly provocative outfit, only this one was particularly unattractive. “I think they’re prostitutes,” I repeated to SB.
We studied the walk in front of us and decided that yes, there was a line of prostitutes standing in the shadows, even along the wall of McDonald’s, which seems to me the most depressing place to decide to pay for sex (excepting maybe a Burger King, since they don’t even have free Wifi). After that we started searching for them at night. They’re really all over the city, and are most recognizable not by their outfits but by the fact that they stand idly by a wall flicking a cigarette between their fingers. Sometimes a normal girl stands against the wall between two prostitutes, but you can usually tell the difference because the normal girl will be on the phone, usually screaming at her boyfriend or telling her mom that she’s just going to the movies with some friends. Also the normal girl always has a purse, and the prostitutes seem to miraculously carry money, phone, lipgloss, ID (maybe not ID, I suppose), and condoms in some easily imaginable location barely covered by the scanty cloth pasted suggestively to a few random areas of skin. Really I’m more impressed by these prostitutes than anything else, because they also appear to stand for hours in heels longer than the length of my forearm.
I hope they get paid well. I was thinking about this as we walked through the Mercado de San Miguel, where among the fresh fruit and hanging legs of pork and intricately designed mini cakes we stopped for a bit of caviar. This sounds more lavish than it really was: an ample amount of caviar was spread onto a small piece of crunchy bread tapas-style and each piece was sold for 1 Euro. Though I realize that 1 Euro equates to roughly $5, the caviar still was lumped on the bread so that a hefty mound accumulated on top, and I felt I was getting much more than my Euro’s worth. I wondered, do prostitutes come to the Mercado de San Miguel during the day and eat 1 Euro caviar tapas? Or do they spend all their money on nicer shoes so that they are more comfortable when standing up? I asked SB and she made a face and said, “Who cares?”
This was actually a valid point. I am not in the habit of wondering such things about people of other professions. However, though I have seen only few prostitutes in my time, these seemed better groomed and more secure than the ones I’ve encountered in the US or Africa. Most of the ones here in Madrid are even attractive and almost indistinguishable from the other girls around. This makes me wonder about their lives – are they choosing to be prostitutes? If so, why? And is prostitution legal in Spain?
This is just one example of how traveling opens your mind.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Chariothotels of Fire - and the Old Madrid of Daddy's Map
As expected, the trenhotel from Lisbon to Madrid was both cramped and oddly entertaining. SB and I arrived at the train station in our Mercedes cab half an hour early, so we sat at the Telepizza (the only restaurant or café around) and worked on our computers in sweltering heat while we waited. We could see where our train would pull in, and about ten minutes before we were to depart I got a bit concerned that the train appeared to not yet be there and wondered whether it had been delayed. I handed SB her ticket as we gathered up our luggage and left the Telepizza, and upon approaching the platform we realized the train had actually stopped quite a ways back but that everyone was boarding. As our car was at the very end of the train, we had to drag our luggage for several minutes until we reached the compartment and boarded.
“What bed are you?” I asked my sister.
“I don’t know,” she answered.
I rolled my eyes. “Look at your ticket,” I said.
“You have my ticket,” she said.
I have this instinct where I start panicking as soon as a situation looks like it might merit said panic. “No, I handed it to you in the pizza place. Are you sure you don’t have it?” We were in the door of the train and people were starting to line up behind us. When SB shook her head and started trying to explain, I shoved my bag into our compartment and yelled at her to get on the train and look for the ticket as I started a sprint back to the Telepizza.
“Four minutes!” a train conductor called cheerfully at me as I blazed past.
I had two things on my side for this sprint: I had chosen to wear my Pumas that night instead of flip-flops and I had been training for a half-marathon. The train really was quite far away from the beginning of the platform – probably about a fifth of a mile – and when I neared Telepizza and considered slowing down for entrance to the restaurant I thought about the train pulling away without me. I would be stranded in Lisbon without my passport, ID, money, clothes – I pushed people to the side and bounded to our table, where SB had absent-mindedly put down her ticket while trying to get all of her luggage together. Even in my crazed state I was surprised it was still there, but I lunged across the table and spun back into a sprint to our train, ticket balled up in one hand and phone clutched to my chest with the other. The train conductor smiled at me as I passed him and I wished “Chariots of Fire” were playing.
As soon as I stepped into the compartment, dripping with sweat and holding the ticket aloft victoriously, the train lurched to a start. Three minutes later I was still wiping myself down and reveling in my awesomeness when a conductor came by to take our tickets. “What would have happened if I didn’t have mine?” SB asked, wide-eyed.
“They would have kicked you off,” I joked.
“In the middle of nowhere?” she wondered, aghast.
I looked out the window to find we were at Lisbon’s second-largest international train station and blinked at her before opening my computer to upload my pictures.
Our bunkmates were interesting. One was a pretty Asian girl who knew very little English and looked more uncomfortable when we tried to communicate with her than when we left her alone. This made me a little sad because she seemed cool – once we had all settled down she pulled a beer out of her bag and sat back on her bed reading a guidebook in Chinese and drinking.
In what must have been an attempt to make up for the Asian girl’s lack of speaking, our other bunkmate, a newlywed Australian woman who was half Portuguese and half East-Timorese, told us her entire life story. We even learned how much she weighed and how much weight she lost before her maid of honor (and best friend for 17 years) and she had a falling-out and the maid of honor decided not to be in the wedding. Then we learned how much she gained back and how she planned to lose it again. This was only a small portion of her life into which we were privileged to have insight.
At last we reached Madrid. Upon arriving at our hotel we were thrilled to discover that we could go ahead and check in to our room, which meant showers before exploring the city. As we had traipsed around Lisbon the day before in the heat and then been rather warm in our pods on the trenhotel, we really were in dire need of showers. Refreshed, we headed to the nearest café to look over the various maps we’d been given and figure out how to reach “Old Madrid.”
While delayed due to his plane’s altercation with a large bird, our father actually spent an afternoon in Madrid about two months ago, and before I left for the old country he gave it to me. He also gave me a notebook with his notes on the entire fiasco. My sister and I had read the notebook the night before at a restaurant in Lisbon and laughed so loudly at his descriptions that the waiters thought something was wrong; at the café we unfolded his map and were delighted to find that he had actually seen all the major sites of Old Madrid and helpfully circled each one and drawn an arrow between them. In fact, he had created a perfect itinerary for us. We finished our coffee and smoothies and headed out.
Madrid turned out to be quite temperate in spite of what everyone told us – I suppose because it is already the end of August and so really the heat of the summer has already passed. We hit all the major tourist sites and collapsed exhausted in a Mexican restaurant before a quick siesta, then headed back out to see the Reina Sofia. Neither of us is much for modern art, but we wanted to see the Picassos and Dalis there, and we ended up walking around the museum for more than two hours before our next food stop at the oldest restaurant in the world.
Though we had trouble finding it, El Sobrino del Botín turned out to be everything we hoped. It was a bit expensive, but luckily due to our late Mexican lunch we weren’t too hungry and ended up splitting the suckling pig (the restaurant’s specialty). The inside was old-timey and charming, the menus had the history of the place, the waiters were kind and attentive, and there was even a Mariachi band that tried to play “Waka-Waka” when we requested it (yes, we were those people).
The weird thing about Madrid is that you walk to these historic buildings and look at them and take pictures of them, but they seem less beautiful than they would be anywhere else because all the buildings in Madrid are historic and beautiful. Even the farmacias and cinemas and our hotel are in intricately carved stone buildings. It kind of makes being a tourist more difficult.
Today we ran through Parque del Retiro and are about to go to the Prado, which everyone tells us is the Louvre of Spain. If this is the case we’re going to need more than just today, but as we only have tomorrow left we will just have to be efficient art observers. Hopefully the coffee from the McCafé, Europe’s answer to McDonald’s (we are here because of the free McWifi and free McRestrooms), will aid us in our endeavors.
“What bed are you?” I asked my sister.
“I don’t know,” she answered.
I rolled my eyes. “Look at your ticket,” I said.
“You have my ticket,” she said.
I have this instinct where I start panicking as soon as a situation looks like it might merit said panic. “No, I handed it to you in the pizza place. Are you sure you don’t have it?” We were in the door of the train and people were starting to line up behind us. When SB shook her head and started trying to explain, I shoved my bag into our compartment and yelled at her to get on the train and look for the ticket as I started a sprint back to the Telepizza.
“Four minutes!” a train conductor called cheerfully at me as I blazed past.
I had two things on my side for this sprint: I had chosen to wear my Pumas that night instead of flip-flops and I had been training for a half-marathon. The train really was quite far away from the beginning of the platform – probably about a fifth of a mile – and when I neared Telepizza and considered slowing down for entrance to the restaurant I thought about the train pulling away without me. I would be stranded in Lisbon without my passport, ID, money, clothes – I pushed people to the side and bounded to our table, where SB had absent-mindedly put down her ticket while trying to get all of her luggage together. Even in my crazed state I was surprised it was still there, but I lunged across the table and spun back into a sprint to our train, ticket balled up in one hand and phone clutched to my chest with the other. The train conductor smiled at me as I passed him and I wished “Chariots of Fire” were playing.
As soon as I stepped into the compartment, dripping with sweat and holding the ticket aloft victoriously, the train lurched to a start. Three minutes later I was still wiping myself down and reveling in my awesomeness when a conductor came by to take our tickets. “What would have happened if I didn’t have mine?” SB asked, wide-eyed.
“They would have kicked you off,” I joked.
“In the middle of nowhere?” she wondered, aghast.
I looked out the window to find we were at Lisbon’s second-largest international train station and blinked at her before opening my computer to upload my pictures.
Our bunkmates were interesting. One was a pretty Asian girl who knew very little English and looked more uncomfortable when we tried to communicate with her than when we left her alone. This made me a little sad because she seemed cool – once we had all settled down she pulled a beer out of her bag and sat back on her bed reading a guidebook in Chinese and drinking.
In what must have been an attempt to make up for the Asian girl’s lack of speaking, our other bunkmate, a newlywed Australian woman who was half Portuguese and half East-Timorese, told us her entire life story. We even learned how much she weighed and how much weight she lost before her maid of honor (and best friend for 17 years) and she had a falling-out and the maid of honor decided not to be in the wedding. Then we learned how much she gained back and how she planned to lose it again. This was only a small portion of her life into which we were privileged to have insight.
At last we reached Madrid. Upon arriving at our hotel we were thrilled to discover that we could go ahead and check in to our room, which meant showers before exploring the city. As we had traipsed around Lisbon the day before in the heat and then been rather warm in our pods on the trenhotel, we really were in dire need of showers. Refreshed, we headed to the nearest café to look over the various maps we’d been given and figure out how to reach “Old Madrid.”
While delayed due to his plane’s altercation with a large bird, our father actually spent an afternoon in Madrid about two months ago, and before I left for the old country he gave it to me. He also gave me a notebook with his notes on the entire fiasco. My sister and I had read the notebook the night before at a restaurant in Lisbon and laughed so loudly at his descriptions that the waiters thought something was wrong; at the café we unfolded his map and were delighted to find that he had actually seen all the major sites of Old Madrid and helpfully circled each one and drawn an arrow between them. In fact, he had created a perfect itinerary for us. We finished our coffee and smoothies and headed out.
Madrid turned out to be quite temperate in spite of what everyone told us – I suppose because it is already the end of August and so really the heat of the summer has already passed. We hit all the major tourist sites and collapsed exhausted in a Mexican restaurant before a quick siesta, then headed back out to see the Reina Sofia. Neither of us is much for modern art, but we wanted to see the Picassos and Dalis there, and we ended up walking around the museum for more than two hours before our next food stop at the oldest restaurant in the world.
Though we had trouble finding it, El Sobrino del Botín turned out to be everything we hoped. It was a bit expensive, but luckily due to our late Mexican lunch we weren’t too hungry and ended up splitting the suckling pig (the restaurant’s specialty). The inside was old-timey and charming, the menus had the history of the place, the waiters were kind and attentive, and there was even a Mariachi band that tried to play “Waka-Waka” when we requested it (yes, we were those people).
The weird thing about Madrid is that you walk to these historic buildings and look at them and take pictures of them, but they seem less beautiful than they would be anywhere else because all the buildings in Madrid are historic and beautiful. Even the farmacias and cinemas and our hotel are in intricately carved stone buildings. It kind of makes being a tourist more difficult.
Today we ran through Parque del Retiro and are about to go to the Prado, which everyone tells us is the Louvre of Spain. If this is the case we’re going to need more than just today, but as we only have tomorrow left we will just have to be efficient art observers. Hopefully the coffee from the McCafé, Europe’s answer to McDonald’s (we are here because of the free McWifi and free McRestrooms), will aid us in our endeavors.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Drive My Car
One of the first things I noticed about Portugal is that all the taxicabs are Mercedes. In general the cars here are much nicer – and bigger – than I’ve seen in other major European cities. In the three days we’ve been here in Lisbon we’ve even seen Range Rovers and both BMW and Porches SUVs. Maybe this is just a drastic change from Vermont, but I don’t remember these types of cars in Paris or Florence or Valencia.
I’ve been trying to reconcile Portugal with the stereotypes I learned at Portuguese camp, but so far not many fit. The Portuguese are supposed to be a depressed people who wear lots of black and only listen to sad, slow songs, and even if their team is in the semi-finals of the World Cup they’ll not get excited because they know in their hearts they’ll just lose. This is what I learned as the stereotype. I haven’t noticed people wearing much black, they listen to a lot of techno (at least the cab drivers and shop owners do), and I really don’t know their views on the country soccer team. But they drive nice cars and the waiters are mean.
SB and I were at a restaurant the other day and the waiter stood impatiently by the table while we looked over the menu. “How’s the swordfish?” SB asked.
He grimaced. “Okay,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. “Well, what’s good here? What would you recommend?”
He shrugged. “The swordfish, I guess,” he said.
We looked at each other across the table and SB raised her eyebrows. She confirmed later that her thoughts mirrored mine: If the swordfish is the best thing on the menu and it’s only okay, should we go to a different restaurant?
That’s just the way most of the waiters are here, though. It’s honestly what I expected when I first visited Barcelona in 2003 – I figured if a waiter is not tipped he has no incentive to be nice. Pleasantly, I’ve found throughout Spain, France, Italy, and Scotland that the waiters were friendly and helpful on the whole. However, this is certainly not the norm in Portugal, where a snarl is more likely than a smile from your local garçon.
Today we lunched close to the Castelo at a café in the shade on a steep hill. Inevitably we take too long to decide on our food for even the friendliest Portuguese waiter, and today he stood beside our table tapping our pen until we sent him away – four times. Despite him we had a wonderful midday meal and got to watch the tourists with enough leg muscle to make their way up the hill to the Castle as we ate.
Afterward we took a boat tour around the coast of the city and saw all the sites we’d already seen – but from the water. Though not informative it was relaxing and entirely breathtaking to see the monument and tower across the Tagas, and with our free cokes and waters and our student tickets we felt we were getting a great deal. SB got to talking with the woman at the bar for a while and ended up with an extra coke, so she sat awkwardly with it as we tried to decide to which tourist we should offer it. I wanted to try the pregnant woman first, but then an argument ensued over whether pregnant women could have caffeine. As I do not study science I deferred to SB, who said they cannot, and we offered the coke to a different woman sitting close to us. She shook her head but pointed to the pregnant woman, who eagerly stretched out her arm for the beverage. This, of course, does not resolve our debate, as European women no doubt do lots of things while pregnant that Americans find abominable.
Tonight begins my second (and last?) journey by overnight train. We arrive at Madrid a little after 9am tomorrow and will start the museum section of our great sisterly European adventure. It promises to be less exciting to write about (WOW, the Picasso was just really really cool to see in person and descriptions or photographs just don’t do it justice!). Até logo...
I’ve been trying to reconcile Portugal with the stereotypes I learned at Portuguese camp, but so far not many fit. The Portuguese are supposed to be a depressed people who wear lots of black and only listen to sad, slow songs, and even if their team is in the semi-finals of the World Cup they’ll not get excited because they know in their hearts they’ll just lose. This is what I learned as the stereotype. I haven’t noticed people wearing much black, they listen to a lot of techno (at least the cab drivers and shop owners do), and I really don’t know their views on the country soccer team. But they drive nice cars and the waiters are mean.
SB and I were at a restaurant the other day and the waiter stood impatiently by the table while we looked over the menu. “How’s the swordfish?” SB asked.
He grimaced. “Okay,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. “Well, what’s good here? What would you recommend?”
He shrugged. “The swordfish, I guess,” he said.
We looked at each other across the table and SB raised her eyebrows. She confirmed later that her thoughts mirrored mine: If the swordfish is the best thing on the menu and it’s only okay, should we go to a different restaurant?
That’s just the way most of the waiters are here, though. It’s honestly what I expected when I first visited Barcelona in 2003 – I figured if a waiter is not tipped he has no incentive to be nice. Pleasantly, I’ve found throughout Spain, France, Italy, and Scotland that the waiters were friendly and helpful on the whole. However, this is certainly not the norm in Portugal, where a snarl is more likely than a smile from your local garçon.
Today we lunched close to the Castelo at a café in the shade on a steep hill. Inevitably we take too long to decide on our food for even the friendliest Portuguese waiter, and today he stood beside our table tapping our pen until we sent him away – four times. Despite him we had a wonderful midday meal and got to watch the tourists with enough leg muscle to make their way up the hill to the Castle as we ate.
Afterward we took a boat tour around the coast of the city and saw all the sites we’d already seen – but from the water. Though not informative it was relaxing and entirely breathtaking to see the monument and tower across the Tagas, and with our free cokes and waters and our student tickets we felt we were getting a great deal. SB got to talking with the woman at the bar for a while and ended up with an extra coke, so she sat awkwardly with it as we tried to decide to which tourist we should offer it. I wanted to try the pregnant woman first, but then an argument ensued over whether pregnant women could have caffeine. As I do not study science I deferred to SB, who said they cannot, and we offered the coke to a different woman sitting close to us. She shook her head but pointed to the pregnant woman, who eagerly stretched out her arm for the beverage. This, of course, does not resolve our debate, as European women no doubt do lots of things while pregnant that Americans find abominable.
Tonight begins my second (and last?) journey by overnight train. We arrive at Madrid a little after 9am tomorrow and will start the museum section of our great sisterly European adventure. It promises to be less exciting to write about (WOW, the Picasso was just really really cool to see in person and descriptions or photographs just don’t do it justice!). Até logo...
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