After lunch we took a taxi back toward the hotel, stopping at the Museo Reina Sofia. While Madrid isn't a standout architecturally, it is overly endowed with art museums. This museum is Madrid's modern art museum, housed in an old hospital that's been appropriately glammed up with elevators in huge glass towers outside the staid exterior. The museum's standout painting is of course Picasso's Guernica, which used to hang at the United Nations in New York until Franco finally bit the dust. Picasso hated the old dictator so much that he wouldn't allow the painting to be exhibited in Spain while he was alive, but his death allowed the painting to return home. In fact, this museum was largely built around this painting, since Madrid wasn't particularly strong in modern art, mirroring the fact that Spain was until recently a very unmodern country. But it's an attractive museum and a fun collection.

We doubled back to the plaza for lunch at the Cafe del Oriente, an old, atmospheric cafe that's popular with tourists during the day and locals at night. We stuffed ourselves with a huge plate of Somchai's favorite food in the whole world, jamon serrano, and another plate of Spanish cheese, washed down with a bottle of Cava, Spain's verison of champagne.

The Palace was built on the site of a small Arab fortress, built while the Arabs ruled almost all of Spain. For seven centuries Spain's history consisted of small Spanish kingdoms fighting to push back the Arab occupiers, culminating in a final victory in 1492 as the last Arab city, Granada, was reconquered. Madrid, sitting smack dab in the middle of the country, was reconquered much earlier, around 1000, and was one of many cities in the Spanish kingdom of Castile. Castile never had a proper capital though, with the Castilian king moving from one town to another with his court. But as Castile gradually grew through war and marriage by annexing the other half dozen Spanish kingdoms and evicting the Arabs, the court finally settled down, declaring Madrid the capital of all Spain in 1561. At the time it was a puny town, generally avoided for its terrible weather, but the king suffered from gout and Madrid's hot dry weather was just what the doctor ordered, so unlikely Madrid was catapulted to capital status. The first royal palace was built over the original Arab fort soon after, but that palace burned down, to be replaced by the current building in 1738.



Only about 30 of the palace's 2800 rooms are open to the public, which is probably enough. In general they're quite stunning in a usual palatial sort of way, but many of the rooms stand out by being completely coated in porcelain, often with a Chinese flavor to them.

We then left the welcoming embrace of the Plaza del Oriente to the forbidding glare of the Plaza de la Armeria, which is the front yard of the palace. The palace was built in the 1730's after the previous palace burned down, and is the largest in Europe, with 2800 rooms. It's facade is pretty severe, which tends to be a Spanish characteristic, since the country spent most of its history and wealth fighting Muslim and Protestant "infidels" on behalf of its strict brand of Catholicism. The arched wall with the menacing clouds forms the right border of the plaza, with views over the great plateau on which Madrid was built, and the more elaborate building sprouting from Somchai's head is the Cathedral, which forms the left border. The truck parked in front of the palace isn't ordinarily there, but it was closing for three months for renovations right after our visit, so we stumbled into some good timing there.

We cleaned up, then headed out in the cold, drizzly weather to the Plaza del Oriente, in front of the Palacio Real (royal palace). Madrid is fairly small as far as capitals go, with the Ritz sitting among the museums and a vast park, Buen Retiro, on one side of the city and the Palacio Real on the other, with Old Madrid in between. The plaza was actually built by Napoleon when he was briefly ruling Spain (and most of the rest of Europe). His plan was to build a Champs Elysees type boulevard through Old Madrid, ripping most of it down in the process, but he didn't get very far before the war turned against him, so this pretty plaza is all that remains of the plan. The smallish Opera House is located here, as are 44 statues of Spanish kings and queens, which were originally meant for the palace roof, but were too heavy so had to be placed around the park instead.

107. Madrid

Service was quite friendly and professional, and our room was large, with old fashioned high ceilings. I guess you would call the room nicely decorated, or at least appropriately decorated, but it's an old, fusty style that I'd never choose. The overall fustiness of the style is ruined by Somchai's weird habit of only photographing rooms when they're messy rather than waiting for housekeeping to tidy up. I don't know if I've made this point before, but in every hotel we've ever stayed at, I don't think we have any photos of a made bed. (Room: 6, Facilities: 6, Service: 8, Overall: 7).

Madrid and Barcelona May '04

Our two weeks in Spain got off to the usual bad start compliments of Thai Airways. Flew first class, which means they must torture customers in economy to justify the first class premium fare. Flight was packed through Rome, then empty for the final Rome to Madrid leg, but overall about a fifteen hour flight, and no movies, which I think is a record, even for Thai.

We're staying at the Ritz in Madrid for about ten days, then spending a few days in Barcelona. The Ritz was opened one hundred years ago when the Spanish king needed someplace suitably grand to house the guests for his upcoming wedding. It has had a fairly stuffy reputation since then, probably since it barred celebrities, bullfighters, men without ties and women without dresses from the hotel until about twenty years ago. But the driver who brought us to the hotel had just dropped Lenny Kravitz off there, so it must have loosened up considerably.

The lobby photographs well, but is unimpressive, far too cramped to be grand. The exterior is nice though, and the location across from the Prado museum is very convenient. And there's a great garden in back for drinks and dinner in good weather, but unfortunately the weather pretty much sucked for most of the trip.

Some more shots of North Vancouver. On our last day, our friends also took us out on a boat one of them owns ( I think John). They are great friends because it was probably the coldest day of the trip, and it's easily twenty degrees colder on an open air boat, the sea breeze peeling the skin off your face, but they endured it because nobody should leave Vancouver without experiencing it from a boat. It does look beautiful from this perspective, and we toured lots of great little harbors dotting the North shore. We even picked out a few houses we might move to if we ever got around to returning to North America. But mostly we were cold, really really cold.

We did manage to leave downtown Vancouver for a couple of days thanks to our friends. We had a great day in North Vancouver, which is beatifully situated along the harbor, but is all houses rather than apartment buildings. It's got great access to the mountains, and we hiked a bit through the awesome pine trees, and played on a famous rickety bridge crossing a ravine, which is I think the oldest bridge in Vancouver, and still working! I also remembered going to some sort of pub for a very local breakfast, and felt just like a lumberjack.

Granville Island is a major tourist attraction, which we quite liked. We had to cross a huge ten lane bridge then walk another twenty minutes to get there, and to make matters worse, when we got there Somchai remembered he had left his wallet and watch on the table in the hotel and was worried someone would steal it. So he walked all the way back to the hotel, then back again, while I lazily waited at Granville Island for a couple of hours while he crisscrossed the city. At its heart it's a farmers market, surrounded by dozens of other shops selling tourist trinkets, and some decent restaurants as well. It looks like there are lots of other harbor activities like cruises etc that depart from here during the summer.

Just some more views from our walk around Stanley Park. The city is smack dab between the mountains and the ocean, so you couldn't ask for a more picturesque location, I think they just need a bit more planning and zoning control since it looks like the developers have run amok here.

The apartment towers come to an abrupt end at Stanley Park, a huge, forested park jutting into the Pacific. It's got a great jogging path circling the park, some totem poles and huge evergreens. It's very tranquil, especially in the dead of winter. It started to rain while we were walking around, so we ducked into the aquarium in the middle of the park. As it turned out that didn't help much since the aquarium is mostly outdoors, but it was still pretty enjoyable. We spent almost one whole day walking around the entire park, and rarely saw anybody, probably because they weren't idiots and stayed indoors.

Continuing on my nasty streak about a nice city (I remember doing this to Vienna too, maybe it's cities starting with a V?) Robson Street is billed as Vancouver's Rodeo Drive, which is a joke. I remember we allocated a full day to explore the shopping district, and ended up spending about twenty minutes. It's just a few blocks, and lined with Gap type shops or worse, nothing interesting at all. This was probably the biggest disconnect between tourist hype and reality I've ever experienced.

Despite having ample free time on this trip, for some reason I didn't write anything in my journal about Vancouver. So I don't have any recollection of the restaurants, except I remember generally being disappointed with them. They were all ok, but never outstanding, and most cities can usually muster up enough effort to produce a few standouts. So, while I wrote hundreds of blog entries for our one week in Venice, the week in Vancouver will occupy a tiny fraction of this blogspace.



I remember generally struggling to find things to occupy our sightseeing time. The surrounding countryside, Victoria Island, the Rockies etc. are undoubtedly beautiful, but the city itself, especially in winter, was nice but not fascinating. The photos are of downtown, which is surprisingly huge, and that white tent thing on the water is the port from which the cruises to Alaska depart.



In addition to having a booming downtown, the residential areas in central Vancouver are also surprisingly tall. It's row after row of new apartment buildings filling almost the whole peninsula. There are plenty of nice housing areas a bit further out, but we didn't have a car and they were too scattered and purely residential to make a nice walk.

Vancouver was pretty much invented by the Canadian Pacific Railroad, which wanted to build a transcontinental railroad but didn't have anywhere to end it, since the West was empty. So they randomly chose this place and a city developed around the railroad terminal. The oldest part of the city is Gastown, which has some old buildings, tourist shops etc. as well as Vancouver's famous drug addicts.



I realize I'm being fairly negative about Vancouver, so I should back up. As you probably know, it's regularly voted one of the top ten cities in the world, and we have lots of friends there so we had a very nice time. But we were there for a week because it was Christmas/New Years and all the Cathay flights back to Asia were full. So we had to stay much longer than needed to see the city, especially because it was of course bitter cold so we didn't really have the stamina for lots of walking around. So we mostly played with our friends or stayed in our hotel room, being warmed by the fire, watching our naked neighbors and waiting for our flight home.

The Opus is at the center of Yaletown, Vancouver's answer to Soho. Yaletown did have a core of post-industrial buildings that housed some cool cafes, galleries and restaurants, it just wasn't very big. And the rest of Yaletown was mostly taken up by new apartment buildings, which really swarm all over Vancouver. It's probably the most densely populated place I've seen, including Hong Kong and Manhattan. So one drawback for the Opus is it's relatively short, and while we had the penthouse, the only views we really had were of the forest of apartment buildings. Actually, the apartment right across from us had a couple in it who were nude all the time, usually having sex, and no curtains anywhere in sight. We're not peeping toms, but it was almost impossible to avoid watching them, like our own version of Big Brother. Despite this, Yaletown was definitely my favorite part of the city.

106. Vancouver

For our final stop on this trip, we spent a week in Vancouver, staying at the Opus Hotel. Vancouver seems to suffer from the same set of bland hotels as Sydney does, so the Opus is a breath of fresh air. The city's only boutique hotel, it's a bit spoiled from the lack of competition. The lobby is a pretty halfhearted attempt at urban cool, some interesting furniture pieces scattered around what looks to be the lobby of a B class office building, with a humdrum reception desk tucked in the back. Amazingly, this furniture in an office lobby does indeed attract a big drinking crowd, but I didn't like the feel of the place at all. It's also got a restaurant tacked onto the lobby, incongrously a traditional French bistro.



We had booked the penthouse, which was a really nice room. Furnishings were witty, and the place felt really spacious, probably because it was spacious and surrounded by floor to ceiling windows. The fireplace in the middle of the room and flat screen tv's on both sides of the centerpiece dividing the bedroom from the living room were nice touches, and overall very happy with the room. (Room: 8, Facilities: 5, Service: 6, Overall: 6)