Liberty Lyceum Travel

This page is for notes and tidbits that we can’t include in full blog posts.

June 7, 2011, London, England

Billy Elliot – although we saw “Billy Elliot” on Broadway a couple of years ago, we couldn’t resist seeing it again in London, where it started. It’s set in England and it’s very, very British. We loved it all over again, even better than in New York. The young man who played Billy in this production, Ryan Collinson, was fantastic. Miss C and I both had streaked mascara from crying when it was over, but we were so happy.

April 16, 2011, Madrid, Spain

Palacio Real (Royal Palace) – hated the process of being part of a tourist herd to visit this popular site. It was the first time we’ve really experienced that on this trip because everything else we’ve done has been high culture (history and art museums) or eating or shopping in narrow streets with little shops. There were many tour groups and it was crowded and you couldn’t take photos and you couldn’t just look around. That said, we are glad we saw the ornate rooms of Spanish royalty from the 1700s on (an earlier palace burned down). Our favorite thing there was the armería (armory), not least because the tour groups didn’t seem to make it there. In seeing lots of full armor for both men and horses from the 15th and 16th centuries, we talked about how Don Quixote fantasized about those days (when Cervantes was writing in the early 17th century). Size – all the armor was really small! These guys were certainly macho but men are much taller in this century. Wikipedia’s Web page about it and a photo from the armory.

Plaza Mayor – every Spanish city has a major/main plaza. This one is a lot of fun, with a large building surrounding a large square with one of the Carloses on horseback in the center. It has several gates (openings in the buildings to narrow streets outside it) and we took a diagonal through it this way. Hard to explain without pictures. I did take some but haven’t looked at them yet. Will add a link here later. Wikipedia page about it. The outer edges of the square are full of outdoor tables and chairs from the many cafes surrounding the square, and almost all are full of people. A bustling place.

Haagen-Dazs in the theater business – this one just drives Miss C crazy. What is marked on my tourist map as the Teatro Calderon is now (since 2007) the Teatro Haagen-Dazs Calderon. Yes, and they have an ice cream parlor at the entrance of this large, historic theater. We’re seeing a show there tomorrow, and when we went in today, Miss C managed to put her aggravation aside to have a small dish of ice cream. Here’s the theater Web site.

April 15, 2011, Madrid, Spain

Royal Botanic Garden (Real Jardín Botánico) – Lovely gardens right next to the Prado. We especially enjoyed the fruit trees (with labels in Spanish and Latin, the scientific names) and the hothouse for tropical plants from the late 1800s.

Caixa Forum – art and culture museum (Web site) sponsored by the Caixa Bank, based in Barcelona. This is the museum with the amazing “living wall” I photographed earlier and shared here. They had one floor of photograph exhibits and one floor of video illustrating realism – “El Efecto del Cine.” We particularly enjoyed the 15-min film, “Lonely Planet,” by Julian Rosefeldt (2006) – here’s someone else’s perfect description of the film.

Viva La Vida - comida vegeteriana. Great little health food shop and veggie food buffet, with 4 seats only. Calle Huertas, 57 (at Costanilla Desamparados) – yum! Wonderful lunch today!

April 14, 2011, Madrid, Spain

Mucho calor - I have seen a t-shirt in the tourist shops, showing in large type, E=mc^2 (where my typing ^2 here indicates a superscript, so “E equals m times c squared”). Below that, it reads “España es mucho calor (with a superscript 2)” – Spain is very hot. Of course I’m sure it’s meant in two ways, but the temperature sense is certainly true. It’s only mid-April and yesterday was hot. I found out from the hotel’s front desk that they don’t use air conditioning at all until May 1. So I walked to a nearby ferreteria (hardware store) and bought two small fans for our room. Ahh. Today is much cooler so I think we’ll be fine.

April 6, 2011, Seville, Spain

Former Arab Baths – We ate dinner late last night (the usual time for dinner here) at Ristorante San Marco on Meson del Mor0 here in the Santa Cruz neighborhood where we are staying. A flamenco guitarist played at the entrance to the restaurant, so we didn’t mind waiting a short time for a table. The food was very good, but the setting was even more impressive. The arched and tunneled space was the site of Arab baths in the twelfth century, and it felt like it. Seville just reeks of history, in a wonderful way.

Flamenco – We attended a flamenco performance our first night here in Seville. From what I have read, it seems to have been a pretty authentic performance, with usually one guitarist, two singers, and one dancer on the stage at a time. We saw the show at Los Gallos, here in the historic Santa Cruz neighborhood of Seville. We thought the performance was interesting and very good, but we didn’t like being part of what felt like a tightly packed crowd of tourists. (We also had negative reactions to noisy tour groups during the days here; it’s a very popular area.) Here’s a video of the Los Gallos performers.

April 3, 2011, Extremadura Region

Cigueña Blanca – the white stork (Ciconia ciconia) – is very common in the Extremadura region, in the western part of Spain bordering Portugal. We first saw these birds and their huge nests on top of telephone poles, along the railway when we were on the train from Madrid to Merida. Then they were all around Merida itself, on top of churches and other buildings. Here is a page in Spanish about their prevalence in Extremadura. Here is a video of a pair of them moving about their nest atop a building in Merida.

April 2, 2011

Graffiti - The graffiti in Madrid is really terrible, the worst I have ever seen. It’s all over beautiful stone buildings and beautiful wooden doors, with no artistic value whatsoever, like what you’d find in the worst inner-city neighborhood you can imagine in the U.S., maybe Camden or Newark, NJ, but in Madrid, it’s downtown, in historic areas, on nice shopping streets, etc. Here’s a blog post I found with photos and comments afterward that shows and tells the problem well. And here’s a page (with video) that shows what shopkeepers are trying to do about it — have graffiti artists paint their metal doors so they won’t get scribbled on (but the scribblers will still scribble over every other available surface).

March 31, 2011, Madrid

Los Austrias – While waiting for our clothes to wash at the lavandería, I observed a sign on a building outside the window, at the corner of Cervantes and Lope de Vega. It’s the same building I photographed (and posted here) the other day, where Cervantes lived. The triangular sign read, “Este paraje fue en la epoca de los Austrias — Mentidero de Representates — lugar de reunion de las gentes de teatro.” Okay, obviously a place for theater people. But I really puzzled over “los Austrias.” When I got back to our room, I looked it up, and the sign means, “This place was, in the time of the Hapsburgs — Actors Hangout (or Tavern) — a meeting place for theater people.” How cool is that? The Hapsburgs were kings of Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries . The Hapsburg dynasty was based in Austria, but I still wouldn’t have imagined you’d call these royals “los Austrias.”

Heroinas – fantastic exhibit at the Museo Thyssen Bornemisza with a feminist viewpoint. We really enjoyed this.