Spain
I went to Spain last month, and I'm finally getting around to putting up photos and writing up some of what we did. I enjoyed it overall, though after 2 weeks was happy to be back.
We started in Madrid. Madrid is full of tall, 5-15 story apartment buildings surrounded by small parks and playgrounds. There aren't any single family houses, or even any rowhouses or townhouses. We had to go an hour out of the city before we saw things I'd call condos or houses. This leads to a lot more people being on the streets and in the parks and playgrounds instead of private yards, which was kind of interesting.
Our first day we went to El Escorial, which is a royal retreat and monastery. It's full of art. Everywhere in Spain is full of art. Goya especially. They really like Goya. I liked seeing the building. It was clearly built long before electric light, and a lot of thought went into making the most use of the windows. Windows would have a floor in the middle of them so that they could provide light to multiple floors and all sorts of other clever things.
One museum we went to, the Renia Sofia, lets you walk right up to the art. I've never had the chance to stare quite so closely at original Dalis before, or to wander around a corner in a construction zone and find a Picasso in the hallway.
We did another day trip from Madrid to Segovia, which has a large Roman aqueduct. The buildings in Segovia had textured tiles, instead of being painted like Madrid, and the castle there is a touch disney-esque. We wandered alongside a community garden that was planted inside the walls of old stone houses.
After Madrid, we took the high speed train to Sevilla, in the south. The train took us through hours of green fields covered in olive trees.
Everything in Sevilla was on a huge scale. The cathedral there was built on the location of a mosque, and the builders are supposed to have said something like 'we'll build a cathedral so large they'll think we're crazy.' It's crazy. The alcazar is a huge moorish style palace, the Plaza de Espanya (built for the 1929 world's fair, bad year) is gigantic. Everything we saw there was neat but seemed to be on an overwhelming scale. We kept running into catholic processions we didn't understand, like small children pulling white covered wagons, or a group of people carrying a giant figure with candles on it followed by a band.
We stopped in Madrid on our way to Barcelona to go to the Festival san Isidoro. There was some standard street festival stuff, with other completely random things, like a carnival ride where people in costumes were trying to hit the riders with things (it's hard to describe, it was weird.) At night, one of the events was fire on the river. There were thousands of clay garden pots with fire in them in various vaguely steampunk structures on the river and the park around it. You could wander right up to them, there weren't any barriers. I remember thinking that in the US, someone who came to a city with the idea of combining giant mobs of drunk people and thousands of small fires for a public festival would not have gone over so well.
Barcelona was full of tourists and Gaudi architecture. The Gaudi was neat, the tourists I was getting tired of at that point. I would go back to see La Sagrada Familia if I was in Barcelona again, partly to see how it's changing.
We started in Madrid. Madrid is full of tall, 5-15 story apartment buildings surrounded by small parks and playgrounds. There aren't any single family houses, or even any rowhouses or townhouses. We had to go an hour out of the city before we saw things I'd call condos or houses. This leads to a lot more people being on the streets and in the parks and playgrounds instead of private yards, which was kind of interesting.
Our first day we went to El Escorial, which is a royal retreat and monastery. It's full of art. Everywhere in Spain is full of art. Goya especially. They really like Goya. I liked seeing the building. It was clearly built long before electric light, and a lot of thought went into making the most use of the windows. Windows would have a floor in the middle of them so that they could provide light to multiple floors and all sorts of other clever things.
One museum we went to, the Renia Sofia, lets you walk right up to the art. I've never had the chance to stare quite so closely at original Dalis before, or to wander around a corner in a construction zone and find a Picasso in the hallway.
We did another day trip from Madrid to Segovia, which has a large Roman aqueduct. The buildings in Segovia had textured tiles, instead of being painted like Madrid, and the castle there is a touch disney-esque. We wandered alongside a community garden that was planted inside the walls of old stone houses.
After Madrid, we took the high speed train to Sevilla, in the south. The train took us through hours of green fields covered in olive trees.
Everything in Sevilla was on a huge scale. The cathedral there was built on the location of a mosque, and the builders are supposed to have said something like 'we'll build a cathedral so large they'll think we're crazy.' It's crazy. The alcazar is a huge moorish style palace, the Plaza de Espanya (built for the 1929 world's fair, bad year) is gigantic. Everything we saw there was neat but seemed to be on an overwhelming scale. We kept running into catholic processions we didn't understand, like small children pulling white covered wagons, or a group of people carrying a giant figure with candles on it followed by a band.
We stopped in Madrid on our way to Barcelona to go to the Festival san Isidoro. There was some standard street festival stuff, with other completely random things, like a carnival ride where people in costumes were trying to hit the riders with things (it's hard to describe, it was weird.) At night, one of the events was fire on the river. There were thousands of clay garden pots with fire in them in various vaguely steampunk structures on the river and the park around it. You could wander right up to them, there weren't any barriers. I remember thinking that in the US, someone who came to a city with the idea of combining giant mobs of drunk people and thousands of small fires for a public festival would not have gone over so well.
Barcelona was full of tourists and Gaudi architecture. The Gaudi was neat, the tourists I was getting tired of at that point. I would go back to see La Sagrada Familia if I was in Barcelona again, partly to see how it's changing.