The Alcazar, like the Cathedral, is another building that's impossible to photograph from within the city. There has been a fort here, at Toledo's highest point, since Roman times, but it's been destroyed and rebuilt so many times that very little remains of the older versions. The fort took on its present shape in the sixteenth century, but that only meant that subsequent versions kept the same design. Its most recent destruction took place in the Spanish Civil War, in 1936. The city of Toledo sided with the Republican government, but the local army supported the rebel Fascists and barricaded themselves in the Alcazar. The city tried for many months to capture the rebels by destroying the building, eventually reducing it to rubble. But the army stayed lodged in tunnels below the rubble, until the Fascists sent additional troops to occupy Toledo and free the remaining Alcazar defenders. The Alcazar was rebuilt by Franco as an exact replica of the destroyed building, and dedicated as a museum to the glory of Fascism. Understandably the fort no longer serves that function in these post-fascist days, but I'm not sure what function it does serve since it was closed for renovation during our visit.

Here are a few photos of Toledo we took from somewhere elevated obviously, and that's usually a cathedral. I don't remember climbing up this cathedral, but I can't remember any other place where these could have been taken. So I'll include them here, but I can't guarantee it's right. Sorry for any disappointment this may cause.

The interior of the cathedral is stunning, among the world's best in my opinion. There's plenty to keep you occupied here, with a couple dozen chapels off the main church, each wildly decorated and with lots of history. There are lots of kings and cardinals buried here, an intricately carved choir (pictured) and a gothic extravaganza behind the altar, telling the entire story of the New Testament if you have the patience to read the story that stretches all the way to the ceiling.



One historical oddity is the Capilla Mozarabe. After the Roman empire fell, the various barbarian tribes began to develop their own versions of Christianity and way of worshipping in church. In 1086, the popes decided to stamp out all these variations and force everyone to adopt one standard church service. Toledo had just been reconquered from the Moors, and its citizens were in no mood to jettison their "Visigoth mass" in favor of the new Roman variety. They revolted, and the church decided to settle the matter the old fashioned way, through the two types of bibles in a fire and see what happens. As it turned out, the Roman bible was carried out of the fire by a gust of wind, while the Visigoth bible stayed in the fire but never burned. So the contest was declared a tie, and both rites were allowed to be conducted, but only in Toledo Cathedral.

The Capilla Mozarabe in a small corner of the cathedral still conducts this Visigoth mass, the only service other than the Roman rite still allowed by the Catholic church. Pretty much nobody attends other than the priest, but in general today's Spain has one of the lowest church attendance rates in the world, pretty surprising considering its hyperreligious history.

Returning to my earlier post about The Great Escape, this is Toledo's Cathedral, one of Spain's greatest religious buildings. Even though Toledo has long ceased to have any political significance, it's still the seat of Spain's Catholic Church, presumably because the cardinal isn't blind and realizes this church is many times more beautiful than its Madrid counterpart. Construction started in 1227, and took 250 years to complete. One difficulty with this building is it's completely embedded in the city, with other buildings pushing right up against the cathedral's walls. There's a small plaza in front of the facade that gives a bit of room for a photo, but we're still working with our old camera, which couldn't handle the challenge, hence the internet photos here.

Just some photos of the center of town. These came from different parts of the day and different parts of the city, but I'm just collecting them all here in random fashion. There are no straight streets in Toledo, which makes it a very confusing place to get around. The tourist office provides walking maps, but they're pretty much impossible to follow, so you'll spend most of the day wandering up and down the crooked streets looking for some church or mosque. But the streets are pretty, so that's half the fun.

Jose (the driver) was a very nice guy, but we definitely got off on the wrong foot with him. Like all tourist drivers and guides the world over, he suffers from an obsession with getting kickbacks from souvenir sellers. Even though you're paying a ridiculous fee, then giving a huge tip, every driver and guide devotes most of their time figuring out how they can get you into a souvenir shop, carpet store, jeweler etc so they can get a commission. Jose was no exception, so the minute we arrived in this beautiful city he drove right up to a shop selling steel swords and other metal stuff. Apparently that's a special skill of Toledo, but it still doesn't mean I want it, and it's certainly not the first thing I want to do when I get to a new place. So we ducked into the shop, wandered around then fled, whereupon Jose tried to take us to another sword store, not understanding that we weren't unhappy with the sword selection at the first store, but rather with the whole idea of buying swords. We convinced Jose that we wanted to see the cathedral first, which conveniently has eight different entrances, so we were able to sneak out and lose him for the rest of the day.

108. Toledo

On Wednesday, we met our driver Jose and drove to Toledo, about ninety minutes south of Madrid. The drive anywhere around Madrid is pretty boring, suburban sprawl and traffic jams, followed by desolate landscape, since Madrid is in the center of a vast, arid plateau. So the sight of Toledo is a welcome reason, since it's on a hill, which is rare, and surrounded by water, even rarer. With these geographical advantages, it's immediately clear why this city has been a major center of civilization since the time of the Roman Empire. The two buildings that dominate the skyline are, as usual in Spain, the cathedral and the alcazar (fortress). The city tumbles down the hill toward the river from there, in a distinctive architectural style called Mudejar, which combines Moorish and Christian styles.

We had dinner at Santceloni, located in the modern part of the city, about a twenty minute cab ride from our hotel. It's in the Hotel Hesperia, which looks like a pretty nice boutique hotel, at least from the thirty seconds we spent walking through it to the restaurant. Santceloni has two Michelin stars, and is the Madrid outpost of Can Fabes, one of the world's most famous restaurants outside of Barcelona. The restaurant is remarkably spacious, beautifully lit and really quite a different atmosphere from any other place we went to in Madrid. Service was fantastic, friendly but extremely knowledgeable and enthusiastic about their jobs. We had the special market menu, which was course after course of really interesting, tasty dishes. It also meant that we had no idea what was coming, since it was dependent on whatever the chef found in the market that day. Spain's cuisine is very much in the spotlight now, and well known for all sorts of avant garde experimentation. Santceloni's not about that, but nor is it traditional Spanish food either. It's just very inventive food combinations, skillfully prepared and presented. The restaurant's signature dish is a cold poached egg with caviar and cauliflower puree, which I actually found a bit dull. But there was a great lobster dish, some nice frogs legs, which I usually resist but Somchai devours whenever he can, and sweetbreads, which I ate for the first time and really enjoyed. I feel a bit gross about it now since as I'm writing this I just had glands taken out of my throat, which is what sweetbreads are, but at the time, I was really pleasantly surprised. An even bigger surprise though, was Somchai's violent reaction when he learned what he was eating, since I thought he would pretty much eat anything. So after the sweetbreads encounter he pretty much hated the restaurant, but I ignored his feelings because they're biased. (Food-18, Decor-17, Service-19). Also we had a great bottle of Priorat with our dinner. That's a pretty well known wine now but at the time, was more of a cult wine, totally overshadowed by Spain's most famous wine, Rioja. It was my first bottle from that region, and really enjoyed it, much more mellow and balanced than Rioja, so we ended up drinking lots of it during the rest of our visit.

We decided that if we returned to the hotel, we'd just fall asleep and be sluggish for dinner, so instead we stopped at Plaza Santa Ana for some drinks. The plaza is a big open space, not particularly attractive, but it's lined with interesting old bars with lots of outdoor seating. So we sat and drank some wine in the square in a successful effort to stay awake for our late night dinner.

While I had assumed I'd have to be carried back to the room after the Prado, since the museum visit was such a comparative success, we decided to press our luck and visit the adjacent Botanical Gardens. I enjoyed this, because it was very small so it only took about twenty minutes to visit. If I were alone it would have taken about five minutes, but Somchai loves this sort of thing. Actually as we walked past pretty much any plant, Somchai would lovingly observe that if his mother were here, she'd be stealing the plant to use in some special Thai dish.

On my high school trip to Madrid, we took an overnight flight from New York. The flight probably lasted seven hours, but it was by far the longest flight I'd ever taken and it felt like twelve days. Needless to say I was completely exhausted, but Mrs. Young had different plans for us. We went straight from the airport to the Prado Museum, where we were met by a museum guide and embarked on a three hour tour of the museum. My previous museum experience was limited to the Barnum Circus Museum in Bridgeport, Connecticut, so I was wholly unprepared for this double whammy of jet lag and lengthy docent-led art museum tour. It was every bit the nightmare you'd expect it to be, so I was pretty impressed with myself that I voluntarily returned to the museum this time around. Of course it helped that there was no guide this time to hold me hostage, and the museum was 45 steps from the hotel (I counted beforehand.) This time around, it was entirely painless, and in fact even a bit enjoyable. The museum is one of the top five art museums in the world, and, as you'd expect, has an amazing collection of the key Spanish artists El Greco, Goya and Velasquez. These artists aren't particularly well represented in museums outside Spain, so seeing so many of their works together was quite interesting. Having said that, the Prado doesn't go out of its way to entertain, with none of the architectural grandeur of the Louvre, or captivating exhibition spaces like the Met or MoMA in New York. It's just many smallish rooms of great paintings, not particularly well organized. The brown and white classical building is the side entrance of the Prado, as seen from our room, while the longer, more columned building in the other photo is the main entrance. Also shot from our room is the third photo, showing a church and a big brick building. This whole area is a huge construction site, and will eventually be combined with the Prado in a massive museum expansion project, so hopefully they'll be able to use the extra space to enliven the museumgoing experience.

After lunch we visited one of the most beautiful and inconveniently located parks in the world, the Campo del Moro. It's a huge expanse of greenery, with well manicured lawns and beautiful flowers, as well as a fair amount of ornamental statuary and nice walking paths. It's directly behind the royal palace, as you can see, and is connected to the palace by a graceful set of steps and patios. Unfortunately the powers that be have for some reason made it impossible to get from the park to the palace, and located the only entrance to this park as far as possible from any people. It's a few miles' walk from the palace, as you walk around the endless walls surrounding the park, continually expecting an entrance that finally emerges once you've left the city behind. The only upside to this is, if you manage to get there, you'll have the park to yourself.

Considering Spain was almost singularly devoted to defending Catholicism and rooting out heretics around the world, it's surprising that it's capital has such a sucky cathedral. In the blog about the royal palace you saw a photo of the side entrance to the cathedral, which is right next to the palace. But the cathedral looks much more dramatic from afar. Up close, however, it's obvious that it's a recent creation, built on what looks to be a limited budget. The cathedral was designed around 1600, but somehow the country was so busy rooting out heretics that it never got around to building it. Construction went slowly over the intervening centuries, then the building suffered severe damage during the civil war in the 1930's. Construction continued after the war, and the church finally opened in 1992, about 400 years behind schedule. While the exterior is at least entertaining, the interior is very reminiscent of St. Jude's church in Monroe, before there was an actual church and mass was held in the gym hall.



It is nicely located though, and we had a nice lunch at an outdoor cafe on las Vistillas, with great views outside the city, to the distant mountains surrounding Madrid.

Old Madrid branches more or less surrounds the Plaza Mayor until it, and the city, come to an abrupt end at the royal palace. We walked around the area for a couple of hours, which is a fun place to explore, although for Europe it's not particularly old and has lots of new development mixed in, which ruins the effect. One sight that occupied a huge part of our day is pictured here, the Monasterio de Descalzas Reales, or Convent of the Barefoot Royals. It was founded by the sister of the Spanish emperor Carlos V, the most powerful man in Europe at the time. His sister was married to the crown prince of Portugal, who died almost immediately after the wedding. She then became a nun but in very luxurious fashion, by founding a convent for royals. Each of the new royal nuns brought with them a huge fortune, which was used to kit out the place in splendor. The public spaces, such as the staircase pictured here, are very over the top, while the individual sleeping quarters of the nuns are equally interesting, each decorated in a highly individual style, often by very famous artists. The tour ends in the famous Treasury, where the convent threw all the various holy relics and treasures that invariably came with the nuns. Unfortunately they didn't care enough to track any of these gifts, so nobody knows which bones, teeth, jewels etc came from which saint. It's all just sort of a big mess, which is surprising given the extremely strict way the convent runs its tours. You have to go on a ninety minute organized tour, and be lectured at by a very strict Spanish lady, in Spanish. I tried translating some of the tour in whispers to Somchai, but she gave me such dirty looks that I gave up. Somchai further aggravated the woman when he sat down on the stairs at one point rather than pretend to understand what she was saying, and she acted like he had just urinated on a holy relic. It's an interesting place to visit, but probably not worth the hassle, and definitely not if you don't speak Spanish.

My first trip to Europe was to Madrid, with Sra. Young's eleventh grade Spanish class. And I fell in love with travel when I saw the Plaza Mayor, the most beautiful place I'd ever seen (with admittedly only things like the Amish country and Catskill Game Farm as points of comparison.) But for the next couple of decades, Madrid's Plaza Mayor retained its special place in my heart, so it was all but inevitable that it would come crashing down off its pedestal on this visit. It's not like it got uglier, I've just seen alot more and become a lot more jaded. It's still a very nice square, although not as sensorily overwhelming as the Grand Place in Brussels, for example. It's fairly staid and symmetric, and at least this morning, very peaceful as well.



Completed in 1620, it was designed as Madrid's outdoor theatre, with royalty and other onlookers observing events in the square from the hundreds of balconies covering all four sides of the square. The trials of the Inquisition and the burning of heretics took place here, as did the crowning of kings. It was also used for general entertainment, such as bullfights and plays.



I also remembered from my earlier trip that there are lots of cavernous bars under the square, and in particular we hung out at one bar that looked like a series of caves, with Flintstones cartoons on them. And I remember drinking sangria there, which seems pretty progressive for an eleventh grade field trip.

Woke up Tuesday to a beautiful sight, the sun. Since the forecast had predicted rain nonstop for our whole trip, we were very happy with the blue sky, and decided to celebrate by going to the Puerta del Sol, or Gate of the Sun. (Actually that would be pretty stupid, so to protect our honor I should stress it was just a coincidence.) The Puerta del Sol used to be the main gate in the wall surrounding Madrid when it was a walled city, but it has moved from being on the periphery of the wall to the very heart of present-day Madrid. Ten roads start from here and emanate in all directions, which understandably makes this a pretty congested place. It also houses two of Madrid's biggest department stores, and serves as Madrid's Times Square on New Year's Eve. With all that buildup, there's really not much to see here, although it's not as unpleasant as you'd think.

After the museum we hopped over to the Atocha train station, an odd choice since last month hundreds of people were killed by a terrorist bomb on the trains a couple miles before they pulled into this station. The station is a grand industrial revolution sort of space, made very funky by a huge rain forest planted in the middle of the platform. We stopped here for a coffee, then made our way back to the hotel.

We could barely keep our eyes open, so we ended up eating at the hotel, which was about the only place in Madrid that opened at the "early" 8.30 pm time we requested in order to avoid falling asleep in our paella. The room was suitably grand and the service very professional, although the food was pretty hit or miss. I had a nice foie gras starter, but my main, three somewhat smelly scallops smothered in a sour sauce, misfired on all cylinders. (It did, however, allow me to impress you with my alliteration abilities.)