Wine and Laundry

A few days ago we went to the Museo de Historia de la Ciudad, which means the Museum of History of the City (of Barcelona). The museum is in the Barrri Gotti district. It is in the building that used to be the Palace of the Inquisition, but they never talk about that... We got up really late, had breakfast, and went straight to the museum. It was almost noon by the time we got there. We got audiotour speakers and started the tour.

In the first room there were Visigoth sculptures from the old cathedral. The Visigoths were barbarians that invaded Spain after the Romans. The second room also had old Roman sculptures and artifacts. The third room had artifacts from the Celtiberian and Roman times, and had an old iron chariot wheel from the Celtiberian times before the Romans.

Then we went underground, which is where a lot of the old Roman city is. The excavated the old Roman city underneath the rest of the existing buildings, for example the cathedral, and then they opened it up as a museum. First we saw the old fortress walls and we were able to go into one of the thirty six towers. Then we walked into a street that was between the fortress wall and the houses. Then we saw a big laundry place, and a place where they dyed clothes. One disgusting thing was to dye clothes they sometimes used urine. Then we saw a garum factory. Garum is a kind a fish sauce that was very expensive in Rome. Then we saw a place that dried fish and sold them.

Then we saw an old Roman house. Roman houses had a big area with columns and a fountain called a peristyle that was a very big room. In the center of the house was the atrium which was like a big living room that had all the other rooms going off of it. Next we went to an old Roman church shaped like a cross. They showed a video of how the church was built. Then we saw a huge place where the Romans made wine. There were big bowls that were half way into the ground,and where they put flavors in with the wines, to mix them. There was also a big press that spun around to mash the grapes.

After that we saw a little wood model of the whole Roman city, with a model for each house, and it showed the wharves and some ships too. My brother wanted to play with it very badly, but here was a woman who was hogging it... There were a lot of other rooms, but it was closing so we had to leave without seeing all. The last thing we saw was a small chapel that was not very good because it had almost nothing in it and the things it did have looked really ugly.

I think it was really cool to go underground and see a whole part of the old city.

Note

Sorry I am still catching up with my old blogs from Andalucia, so might not be able to write a new one for a few days - of course I might but who knows? A few people have written some e-mails and comments to me, but I have so much homework and things that I have to do at home that I don't think I will be able to answer them all any time soon. With all my homework, my blogs and things, I have been staying up late most nights, so don't kill me if I don't answer you right away. I'll try to answer you soon.

I Love Mazes (that's a fact)

In the morning we woke up in Arcos de la Frontera. My parents went off on a little walk so my dad could show the city to my mom. Then we went straight to Sevilla, so as to see the Alcazar which was going to be closed the next day. The Alcazar is a humongous palace. We just parked our car and walked straight there because we did not have much time to visit it. We walked through the mudejar rooms that are like Moorish rooms but a bit different because they were built by Moorish people for the Spanish kings. We did not go to the other parts of the palaces.

Instead we went into the gardens. The gardens were awesome!!! They were humongous. It took me about five minutes to get lost in them! There was even a really really cool that was squashed but long and big. I played hide and seek with my mom The first time she found me. The second time I found her. But the third time she did not find me and she had to give up. By then it had been a really long time, so we had to come back and look for everybody else. We found them by the gift shop right at the exit. Then the Alcazar was closing so we had to leave. But I could have spent my whole life in that maze!

We had a late lunch in a super good restaurant near the cathedral, and also got some really good desserts. Then we got our luggage from the car and went to the hotel. My mom had to go on a business trip so my dad took her to the airport and came back. We stayed in the hotel for a while. In the evening, we took a taxi to a tapas bar to have a quick meal, then walked straight to a flamenco dancing place that we heard was really good. It was OK, but I got really bored half way through. Then we returned to the hotel and went to bed.

The next morning we walked around the barrio Santa Cruz, which is an old Jewish neighborhood. We stopped at a bar to go to the bathroom and get something to drink. Then we went to the cathedral. On the way I climbed up street poles, and I timed myself: my best time was 6 seconds. You don't need to know that but I felt like saying it:-) The line for the cathedral was really long, so we left and came back, and finally visited it. I personally thought it was quite boring but my dad thought it was cool. One thing that I thought was really cool was that we got to go all the way up the Giralda, which is a super tall tower from which you can see the whole city. Unfortunately, we had to go up 37 steep ramps to get there.

Then we walked to a very small palace, called Palacio de Pilatos, that is also a mudejar palace. Right as we went in, it had a very big area with nothing in it. On the right, there was a large patio with a fountain in the middle, and columns on all sides with rooms going off of them. There was one other patio that had a bunch of really nice sculptures. Most mudejar walls have azulejos on them, which are little colored tiles. And this palace had lots of them. Most of the rooms off the main patio led to gardens that I did not really like. One thing that was in the bathroom was a sculpture of the bust of Julius Cesar. I don't know why the heck it was in the bathroom, but it just was...

We went back to the hotel, got our bags, and had to get really quickly to the bus. We made it to the bus just in time, then went to the airport, and flew back home to Barcelona.

The Devil for a Guard

After leaving Cordoba we drove to Medina Azahara, which is the old palace of the calife, that is the old Moorish king. I thought the palace was really cool, but what was even more fun was that the palace was like a maze and I lost my dad in it. The only two times that I did bad things the guard happened to be watching me, and he yelled at me twice. He almost kicked us out. What's wrong with running and not having parents with you every second, really? You'd think he likes getting kids in trouble!!! Then I needed to go to the bathroom again, but there was an enormous line ahead of us of older people jeering and telling each other to go into the same bathroom with another person of different sex. It was absolutely disgusting. And, I was desperate.

Then we left, and kept on driving until we found a room in Osuna. We walked around town and saw a pretty plaza. For dinner the hotel that we went to had a restaurant, but we did not want to eat there. My dad asked at the hotel for directions to the area of another restaurant, the lady asked why, so my dad said we were visiting a friend, then she asked for his name, and my dad said Fernando Rodriguez Marquez. Of course that was all made up because we don't have any friends named Fernando Rodriguez Marquez. It was not actually very useful though, because when we walked over to the other restaurant it was closed. So we went back to the hotel and ate dinner there. The dinner was actually super good. In the morning we also had a really good breakfast there.

The next morning we went to Ronda. When we got to Ronda, we walked around for a bit and had lunch at a parador (don't ask me what that means) that had a really good view of the cliffs, which Lindsay and I call the Cliffs of Insanity II because we already saw the Cliffs of Insanity I in Arcos. Ronda is built at the top of a ludicrously high cliff. Because of the cliffs, there are two parts two the city, and a very big bridge connecting them. And there is at least a thousand foot drop in the middle. At the bottom we could see a really old water mill. There was also a dried up lake. Then we walked around for a really long time, planning to go to a museum, but when we got there it was closed. On the way back we stopped to two ice cream places. I did not get anything at the first place, and at the second place I got some banana ice cream with nuts on it that I was just trying out for the sake of it, and that I thought was really horrible.

After that, we decided to spend the rest of the day into the white pueblos. I wanted to get out and do something so we stopped at some rocks. Behind them, in the middle of nowhere, we found a really old Roman road, and we also found big slabs of granite and marble. We could not find any place to stay for the night so we drove all the way to Arcos de la Frontera and stayed there, so my mom could see the town since she was not with us the first time around.

Nose Spray

We left Granada right after lunch on our way to Cordoba. First we stopped at Alcala la Reale, which has a nice castle, but the castle was closed. Then we went to Almedinilla to visit a Roman villa which was also closed. Then we went to Priego de Cordoba just to look at the nice Renaissance buildings but everything there was also closed at the time when we were there, and we could not wait long enough. Finally, when we got to Cordoba, we just had a nice dinner at a restaurant and went to sleep.

In the morning the first thing we did was go to the Mezquita, which is an old Moorish mosque that is really pretty. It has at least one hundred arches on the inside. The Mezquita has a very very large patio with trees, and also a lot of pigeons. My brother and I started to throw bread for them, then we started throwing bread at them, then I unleashed the beast (that's my brother) to chase them away. As you can see from the picture, he can even hunt them with his eyes closed...

We walked around the Juderia, which is the old district around the Mezquita. We went to an old Jewish synagogue that was very small. We went to a very old Jewish house that had been turned into a museum, and I almost fell into the well, because I thought it was only a pot and I bent into it all the way until I discovered it was a very deep well. I was so surprised I almost fell into it. Then we went into another old Jewish mansion with two wells and an old passage around the back with a pretty fountain. It also had paintings of people who had lived in the Juderia long ago.

Then we rented a horse and carriage and drove around in it. My ear was still hurting a lot and had not gotten better, so we went to the hospital to see what was wrong with it. We found out that I had an ear infection, and I had to take a bunch of medication every day for over a week. But the worst of it was a kind of watery spray I had to put up my nose five times a day for a week. And because I loved it in Andalucia another bad thing was that I was still probably good enough to take the plane back and go to school the following Tuesday.

We went to lunch in a really good tapas bar. Then we got our bags from the hotel and left because we couldn't find a room for another night in Cordoba.

Pastry Nuns

Finally we were in Grenada. My dad woke up early to pick up my mom from the airport. Then when they came back we had a super good breakfast at the hotel. Then we walked around the Albaicin, that is the only Moorish quarter in Europe, which was right around our hotel. In the Moorish district, there were all kinds of very old doors and houses. You can recognize Moorish doors because most of them are in the shape of a keyhole. The streets were all very small, and all the house houses were white, or red in brick. And every single Moorish house has an inside Moorish patio. We went into a little square that had a market. Then we went into some little side streets, where we found the best clementines in the world. We finally found a very high plaza that had a very good view of almost the whole city and of the palace of the sultan on the other side, the Alhambra. Then we had lunch at an incredibly restaurant that had Moorish recipes, right below the plaza, that also had a really good view.

Then we went to the Alhambra. First we went to a huge garden that was really cool, called the Generalife, that had a bunch of hedges. Also my dad kept taking pictures of a tree, and my Mom kept asking why, so my dad told her that this was where the sultana met somebody she liked, but then the sultan found out and cut off all the heads of all the men in that family. Kind of disgusting, I know.

Then we got into a palace, called the Nasrid Palace, that was really pretty and that had Moorish writing all over the walls. Unfortunately, in the line for the palace, I had to go to the bathroom. We asked the guard where the bathrooms where, but he said there were none. I had to go so badly I almost decided to pee in my brother's diaper. Finally my "heroic" mom agreed to leave the palace with me to find a bathroom, which meant she could not see more of the palace. Then we found out at the end that there was a bathroom hidden right next to the line that I could have gone to at the very beginning.

After that we went to the Alcazaba, that is, part of the fortress. My dad and I went running everywhere in there. My dad made it look like he was hanging me off the walls even though he was not really and Lindsay took a picture of me like that.

When we were done with the Alhambra we walked back down to the Albaicin on the main street and went to a pharmacy because my ear had been hurting since the plane and we could not figure out what it was. They told us that it was probably just pressure from the plane and gave us some ear drops that were useless and some other syrup. After dinner we got some super good gelato ice cream at the Plaza Nueva.

The next day, we walked more around the Albaicin. We spent an hour looking for shoes for my Mom. We went to an old Moorish bath, which was not very interesting in my opinion. My brother had a tantrum and could not come with us to get some pastries, so we went to a place where my dad said nuns made very good pastries for the community. They had secret recipes like Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It was a convent of nuns. Because the nuns did not like anybody seeing into their convent, they had two wooden doors in the wall where they would put the pastries through the first one, then they would shut it, then they would yell that it was ready, and then we would open the second and take the pastries out without us seeing the nuns. We went home and tried them: they were super super good, and they were all gone in a few days.

After that we took our luggage, went to a little bar for a snack, and left for Cordoba.

Senor Matador

We woke up in Arcos and did not have breakfast at the hotel. We went to the pool, to see how warm it was, but it was too cold to swim. While we were there, we had a really good view of the city, because we were at the very bottom and we could see everything up to the top. Arcos de la Frontera is at the top of a very big hill, so that's why we could see it so well. Then we drove into the very old part of the city and got lost. We parked in a very small parking lot and walked through the city. It had all narrow streets and white houses. We also saw a really big church. We were almost at the very top of Arcos then, and could see all the way down the cliffs. Lindsay and I thought that they looked like the Cliffs of Insanity in the movie "Princess Bride"!

We found a really, really good breakfast place that made "REAL" hot chocolate, in other words, melted chocolate with milk. We also found the mercado, which is the market. There, we got mandarines, and pestinos, which are little cookies shaped like a bowtie and covered in honey. They are very old Moorish cookies. We went into a church that was supposed to be very nice, but ended up being very bad, and it had real mummies with bones that had a little bit of skin on them. It almost made me throw up. Then we got our luggage from the hotel and drove to Ubrique. We were going to spend the whole day driving through very old white villages called pueblos blancos. They are all white because that way it does not get too hot. Most of them have big walls and were protected by hills. They have very very narrow streets.

Ubrique turned out to be very boring so we took a few pictures and left. We drove to Benaocas, then to Villaluenga del Rosario, where we walked around. We went into the plaza de toros, which is the bullfighting arena. Nobody was there, so I jumped from the stands and went into the middle. It was really cool and you could still see bull footprints. I took the pose of a matador, which is the person who takes place in the bullfight. To get back out, I had to climb over a fence then jump back into the stands. We also got some really good cheese and meat, and a knife to go with it. Then we went to Grazalema and got lost. One guy who we asked directions to we saw about five more times, for instance when we were going through the high mountain pass called Puerto de las Palomas.

Then we drove to Zahara de la Sierra. We stopped and walked around, and saw a very big tower and castle at the very top of the hill, above the town. Then, for the whole rest of the time, we were trying to get to Grenada. On the way we got lost into Algodonales. Then, when we finally found our way, we raced the evening light to the freeway, and lost. We arrived in Granada, and got lost walking. It took half an hour of walking to finally get to our hotel. My dad went out to eat while everybody else went to sleep.