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Iberian Spring: Day 17 Singapore Home
Soundtrack: “My Island Home”, Warumpi Band Another holiday comes to an end. In one of the many bookshops in Spain I flicked through a Spanish edition of Sylvia Plath’s Selected Poems, and flicked to my favourite, “Dos amantes y un buscador de conchas junto al Mar Real” so it seems appropriate to finish with the opening in Spanish, “Fría y definitiva, la imaginación Cierra su famosa/legendaria casa de verano; Las vistas azules están cerradas; nuestras dulces vacaciones Se desvanecen en el reloj de arena.” (I’m relying on the internet giving me a good translation here.) In spite of yesterday’s walking, eating, and drinking, I found myself fairly well awake before…
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Iberian Spring: Day 16 Singapore
Soundtrack: “Juice”, Headless Chickens The last full day in Singapore, and the last full day of the trip. Tomorrow I’ve got the morning, then a flight to be back in Perth for the evening, back to work on Monday, back to the other world. (I’m actually writing this on Sunday morning, having been awake since a bit after 4am, trying to doze for hours, before eventually getting up and as yesterday’s t-shirt is still damp from sweating, am doing the laundry.) I took it esay in the morning, trying to decide if I should stay local in Bugis or hop over to Chinatown for some tasty treats there. Chinatown, and…
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Iberian Spring: Day 15 Helsinki to Singapore
Soundtrack: Lady Gaga medley It will come as no surprise to anyone who has taken a flight in the last 30 years that standard economy seats are not designed for comfortable sleeping for any normal sized person. So when I say that the Finnair flight from Helsinki to Singapore was pretty good, it should be read with the above caveat, along with airline food generally not being the best food ever, and stuff like that. Finnair fed me an ok pasta, and an acceptable sweet and sour chicken and rice, enough to break the chicken rice curse before I got to Singapore. The aircrew were among the best I’ve encountered…
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Iberian Spring: Day 14 Barcelona Paris Helsinki
Soundtrack: every song about spending time in airports, but especially “Departure”, R.E.M. So begins the next adventure: getting home. Right now, L and I should have been sitting in Qatar business class, somewhere over the Mediterranean, perusing the champagne and whisky menus, before lying back in our seats and having a nap 36,000 feet up in the air. Maybe I’d be blogging to you over the complimentary wi-fi, maybe I’d be thinking about blogging to you but I’ll have another drink and some canapes first. What fun to pander what might have been. Right now, L has just left Milan on her way to Singapore, after a brief tarmac stop.…
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Iberian Spring: Day 13 Barcelona
Soundtrack: “Barcelona”, Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballe Final day in Barcelona, last day in the Iberian peninsula. Why is it called the Iberian peninsula? I have no idea, I didn’t get around to googling this, I got bogged down in how Portugal and Spain ended up as two separate countries, and how Catalonia considers itself to be a place all of its own. English history is so much simpler than trying to understand European history. England: we had a bunch of tribes, then the Romans came, then other folks came, some king wasn’t ready, then the French conquered, then some flowers fought each other, then Scotland joined with James the…
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Iberian Spring Day 12: Barcelona (Gracia)
Soundtrack: “Red red wine” Neil Diamond A full day in Barcelona. We’d booked a food tour, after looking at several options, that promised to take us to some more local spots. I was a little worried at the 5 hour duration — being honest, no one wants to spend 5 hours trying to keep me entertained, at any amount of money. We met our poor guide P at a placa in Gracia. She gave us a brief run down of how we’d be spending the time, visiting a number of places in the Gracia neighbourhood. As the tour progressed she explained a bit more about Gracia: we’re in Catalonia, a…
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Iberian Spring: Day 11 Madrid to Barcelona
Soundtrack: “Lola”, Spanish cover version A fairly easy travel day, if any day on not quite enough sleep is easy. I didn’t finish writing the last blog entry until around 2am, and we’d forgotten the hostel does breakfasts in assigned shifts, we’d forgotten to change ours so 8.15 to 9am it was. We’d exchanged pleasantries with one of the other guests, who was from Norway. As it was our last day and his last day we had a bit more of a chat, and introduced ourselves. At which point he says his name is Sven. Sven from Norway. Sometimes the cliches just exist. Nice chap. The other amusement breakfast brought…
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Iberian Spring: Day 10 Madrid
Soundtrack: “Vogue”, Madonna Sunday was fashionista day for us. After a hostel breakfast we headed north to the Museo del Traje, which google seems to think “traje” means suit. Maybe it does, but it’s a fashion museum, so it has more than suits. It’s a collection of almost 400 years of Spanish clothing. including what the aristocracy wore as well as regular folks. So there were some wonderfully intricate posh jackets, amazing frocks, and embroidered waistcoats from the 17th and 18th centuries. The path runs chronologically, and highlights other events at the time that had an impact on the fashion, as well as times fashion was at the forefront of…
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Iberian Spring: Day 9 Madrid
Soundtrack: “Spanish Bombs”, The Clash | “Hieronymous”, The Clouds Today is art day. Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado, or The Prado for short, houses some of the world’s most magnificent paintings by white people. It’s amazing how language translation works, here Prado means things of beauty, while in Australia Prado means ugly faux-tank driven by white people. According to google translate, prado actually translates to meadow, which really neither describes a multi-storey building with over 100 rooms full of priceless artworks, nor a metal box that flattens all in its path, plants or otherwise. (Apparently there used to be a meadow where they built the museum, sometimes the truth is…
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Iberian Spring: Day 8 Seville to Madrid
Soundtrack: Hala Madrid y nada mas (the Real Madrid anthem, as they won’t be playing it tonight at Bernabeu) We had a midday train so took the morning fairly easy. My cold turned into the annoying cough so neither of us got the best night’s sleep. So we got up, packed, and trundled our way towards the trainstation, about 2km but this ay we got our steps up. Or something. We found a little place for breakfast, they seemed to specialise in sandwiches so it was looking like L would be left with ham and eggs, but they understood “sin gluten”. They understood very well, the guy taking our order…
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Iberian Sprint: Day 7 Seville
Soundtrack: “La Isla Bonita”, Madonna Our last full day in Seville. We started with a little wandering the local streets, a bit of shopping. As luck would have it, the nearest barbershop to out apartment was the eponymously names The Barber of Seville. I’ve been holding off on the shaving so that I could get a shave here, and when they said they could fit me in at midday it was perfect timing. I just hoped there wouldn’t be any singing, or at least I wouldn’t have to sing. We found a little place for breakfast not too far away, down a side street and while they had an English…
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Iberian Spring: Day 6 Seville
Soundtrack: flamenco clapping and stomping For our first full day in Seville we booked a food tour, a mix of culture, history and hopefully good things to eat. We met our guide P under Seville’s controversial Parasol or Setas (mushrooms), a huge wooden structure that dominates one of the old squares. The square has featured a marketplace for hundreds of years, but about 15-20 years ago the authorities decided to jazz the place up, held a competition that was won by a German architect, and the result was an over budget structure now known as the mushrooms. From here we headed off into the market under the mushrooms for a…
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Iberian Spring: Day 5 Lisbon to Seville
Soundtrack: “Cross the Border”, Icehouse Portuguese trains are confusing. Well not so much the trains themselves, just the systems in place for catching them. Yesterday we had a the adventure of the identical tickets that didn’t work identically (what’s possibly even dafter is these tickets are apparently rechargeable, but it seems that once the get pre-loaded with one type or another that’s it). I may have found the Paris metro annoying from the challenge of finding the right station entry with the ticket machine, but once I had a ticket at least it seemed to work okay everywhere. Portugal, not so much, and that was just an introduction to trying…
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Iberian Spring: Day 4 Lisbon
Soundtrack: “Swimming Horses” Siouxsie and the Banshees Our last full day in Lisbon, and we’d booked a food tour to make sure we got a taste of just about everything that one muse consume in Lisbon. It was a walking tour, a mix of history and culture with stops for food, and we were promised at least 17 different tastes of Lisbon (to be honest I can’t count to 17 in Portuguese, so if I go through listing stuff and you count it as less than 17, please don’t tell me). The tour info said to eat a little something before the start, as the first couple of stops were…
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Iberian Spring: Day 3 Lisbon
Soundtrack: “Six Months in a Leaky Boat” – Split Enz / “Folsom Prison Blues” – Johnny Cash (both preferably sung in portuguese fado style) While our Lisbon bed is a bit firmer, the pillows aren’t great, so I was awake early with a sore neck (and a touch of heartburn, likely from the copious amounts of cheese consumed yesterday). I used the time looking at nearby breakfast options that might have something gluten free on the menu, found a couple of possibles that might do something gf other than a couple of eggs. In the end my research wasn’t required as L had already picked out Chez Bea as they…
