Tapas for Two Pt. 1 – The Big Europe Photobomb

“Now Coming in Weekly Installments”

Hey, remember when I went to Europe? No, not that time. Or this time. The other time. Yes, we’re finally here. After a very long wait, extreme technical difficulties, lots of missed or delayed blog posts, me moving to an entire new country, and several purposeful misdirects, it’s finally time for The Big Europe Blog. I think it’s going to be split up into, like, five parts? Two for my time in Spain, two for my time in Prague, and one for my time in London, although you already know how that went. Part of the reason for this is practical. Remember those technical difficulties I mentioned? Turns out WordPress can only handle about 50-75 pictures per post while editing, and anything beyond that causes WordPress to, uh, very helpfully shoot itself. That’s actually how I got my first blog post delayed in the first place, and the reason why this is so late in coming. Thanks, WordPress.

The other reason for this is logistical. I am very very busy, somehow even more busy than I was before, but I am also very lazy and do not want to write more blogs than I have to. So I’m going to milk this for as long as its worth, and each week will be another part of this long journey. Not that you should be upset about this, mind you; the alternative is having fewer pictures per blog post, and everyone knows that a high word-to-image ratio is bad for search engine optimization and marketability. Not that those mean anything here, but you get the idea.

I’ve already told you about how my vacation ended in a dramatic and frightening fashion, so what about how the vacation began, hmm? And this is, in fact, The Big Europe trip; a three-week extravaganza tour of European cities with just my sibling Nick and I. We’ve been planning it for years. We were supposed to study abroad in Greece, but Covid canceled that. So we had to put our plans on hold, and Covid lasted longer than I think anyone anticipated (it’s still going on), and then I graduated college and got a job and we both moved to Minnesota but Nick and I waited and bided our time until, finally, this past July, we finally had the chance to travel around Europe together. It’s been a long time coming, and things did not go as smoothly as we had hoped. Best laid plans of mice and men and all that, right? But it was still an adventure I’ll never forget, and an amazing chance to spend time with Nick before I’m half a world away (and now I am half a world away).

So prepare yourself, reader; this is probably going to be the longest continuous series of posts this side of Spectral Crown. Don’t know if the text will be as long, of course, since I can’t necessarily spend all day on this, but strap yourselves in nonetheless. I’m guessing at least 15,000 words by the end of it. That’s a short novella, but it also depends on how much I can remember this far after it all. So, uh, we’re in for a bumpy ride.

A bumpy ride which starts immediately, because I have to acknowledge that, yeah, I lost 99% of my photos from this trip. Of the some 7,000 photos I had on my phone when it was stolen, I got back maybe 150 of them? But it would be a shame for me to just give up and not talk about this adventure of a lifetime, right? I owe it to you the world my OCD need to remember myself? to put this blog together anyway. I want to write this, I really do. But the picture thing stresses me out, so bear with me. The pictures in here are a mix of mostly Nick’s pictures, and a handful of ones that I was able to recover. I’m not going to differentiate, unless it’s important, because despite all the pictures I took, let’s be honest here; they’re mostly just the same. I just took a lot more of them.

Let’s (finally) jump right in. It’s time for Spain.

So, the trip started off to a really chaotic start because it took us an hour and a half to check in at O’Hare airport, since we had booked our flights through, like, three different airline services or something. Then we flew into Cancun, were unexpectedly searched by the Mexican border guard, and got scammed into paying $60 for a shuttle that took five minutes to reach our terminal. This is despite our flight being delayed by about two hours. So things are going well! But that’s to be expected with travel, I guess. Airports are a nightmare anyway. But we eventually did get to Madrid, our jumping-off point for the trip, and it was fucking packed. The airport was so, so crowded. We chalked it up to being summer tourist season, but there was more to it than that; we’ll get to it later.

Just to give you a preview of what this trip is going to be, our overall itinerary was something like this; two days in Madrid, two days in Toledo, four days in Barcelona, one day in Geneva (Switzerland, not Wisconsin), four days in Prague, two days in Berlin, and four days in London. We were supposed to then spend three days in Dublin (and me an extra week in Ireland generally), but, well, you know. Lots of things happened at the end there. This trip somehow ended even more chaotically than it had begun, which I, at the time, didn’t think was possible. It took us almost 24 hours of straight travel to reach our hotel in Madrid, and by the time we got there, it was like 7pm local time. So all we did that first day was walk around the city center (near Puerta del Sol, for those familiar with Madrid).

First thing we come across is this random church, and the doors were open so we said “hey, might as well look around,” and we go in and are immediately faced with one of the most beautiful altars we have ever seen. It’s so much prettier than anything I have seen in the US, and it’s just, like, a random church off a side street. Barely even has a Wikipedia page. And yet, there it was. So Nick and I were stunned by that immediate bit of culture shock.

Madrid’s buildings, at least in the old center of town, were all just beautiful overall. Everything seemed to have that classical flair to it, with intricate stone and ironwork, fancy windows and railings and gold trim and the whole works. Speaking of that immediate culture shock, of feeling the age of the city and the classical detail in everything, I didn’t think it could get more than Madrid, especially after the strange, questionable, cramped qualities of Athens. It did, later, but I won’t jump ahead of myself. There’s a reason Madrid is the capital, though; every building looked stately. I mean, this is just a hotel! Look at it! It’s the Four Seasons and it looks like this:

And this is just a random building on the street somewhere! No clue what it is or what it used to be. Just kind of hanging out. You’d be hard-pressed to find one building in the average United States city that look like this; in Madrid (and most of Europe), every building in the city center looked like this.

We grabbed dinner after walking around for a while, and of course we got tapas, the famous Spanish small dishes where you order like four things and share them. Nick’s kind of a foodie, so they were very excited to try the Spanish cuisine. And we were… actually pretty disappointed, all things considered. I don’t know what it was about the food in Spain, whether it was the fact that we kept accidentally going to Spanish chain restaurants (which we did, several times; our first dinner at Tapa Tapa was, I assume, the Spanish equivalent of an Applebee’s), or if we just got unlucky, or if the food really is just kind of mediocre in Spain, but there was only one, maybe two, meals of Spanish food that we both enjoyed the entire time we were in Spain. Don’t get me wrong, I like Cafe Ba Ba Reeba as much as the next guy, and both Nick and I agreed that the best Spanish food we’d had was back in the US. Weird.

The one thing that I had that was definitely better in Spain, though, was the Jamón ibérico. It’s this crazy cured meat made of pork leg, but the pigs only eat acorns their entire lives or something like that, and it’s super expensive and very flavorful. I liked it a lot. The best way to describe it is smooth, I guess, borrowing a phrase from my friend who recommended it to me. It is a smooth, flavorful meat. I do recommend it if you’ve got the stomach for a slippery, strange meat experience. Hmm.

The next day was our first full day in Europe, then, and the beginning of our month-long excursion properly. We took it a bit easy, overall, and spent our time walking around the city in a leisurely circuit to get to the national palace of art (the Museo Del Prado), and their big fancy park (the Parque de Bien Retiro, I think?).

The Museo Del Prado was a lot. It’s a huge art museum, chock full of some of the most beautiful paintings, sculptures, and lion-supported tables I have ever seen. It was crazy to walk around and see painting after painting after painting of Jesus and Mary and the apostles and the Spanish royalty and the medieval-rennaissance era, and then after a while they all start to look the same. Maybe I’m not the target audience here, but holy cow was there a lot of medieval art. The museum has incredible depth and specificity for a particular three-hundred year span of art, from about the 1500’s to the 1800’s, but not a ton of breadth, so to speak. Which is great, of course, it was still exceptional. But I can only see so much Jesus before it gets overwhelming.

Which is why, of course, seeing the Garden of Earthly Delights was such a highlight for me.

I love this painting. It’s maybe my favorite painting of all time. It’s just ten feet of sheer and utter madness. Birds eating people and shitting them back out, people having sex in a giant clam, massive orgies, cities turned to rubble and smoldering cinder, people sticking flowers up someone’s ass, people making out with birds, giant owls, some guy playing a trumpet with his butt, it’s got the works. Not a single one of those things is a joke. And it’s from the 1500’s! This predates modern surrealism by at least three hundred years! It’s such an anomalous painting compared to everything else in the museum, and I love it. I stared at it for like twenty minutes. It was awesome.

And did you know the back is painted too? It folds up and closes! And I had no idea! Until now!

Technically speaking, we weren’t allowed to take pictures throughout the museum. Madrid as a whole had a weird thing against taking pictures. I guess it’s a way to keep people moving? You know, don’t be on your phone, appreciate the art. Keep the tourists flowing. But you know how I feel about pictures. So I still took some, even if they were against the rules. And these are a few of the pictures I took that did survive, because I sent them to my friend. Thanks, Elise!

After that we went to the Royal Gardens, which had plants from all over the world, including a surprising number from the USA. So it was funny for me to see a plant and go, “hey, we have that at home.” I travel thousands of miles, for twenty-four hours, to a brand new country, brand new continent, across an ocean, and I still can’t escape the box elder tree, apparently. My mom has one in her yard, and it’s covered in bugs for a solid month out of the year. I am not a fan.

The royal botanic gardens lead us to the Parque de Bien Retiro, which is kind of like Madrid’s central park, I guess? It’s just a big park with shade trees for resting in, some nice sculptures and grottoes, a pond for boating in, some sort of big memorial thing smack dab in the middle, that kind of stuff. You know the kind of place, right? It’s a park. You go and hang out. Not sure why I wanted to go there, as opposed to, I don’t know, somewhere else, but it was a cool park! They had neat rocks!

Oh, right! I wanted to see the crystal palace! Which was pretty damn cool, admittedly. It’s a very pretty glass building, with nice columns and ironwork and mosaics on the side and stuff like that. It kind of reminds me of a big green house, I guess. It’s like the Lincoln Park botanic gardens in Chicago. But this one is supposed to have sculptures inside! While we were there, it did not. It was closed for renovations. Go figure.

So that was a tad disappointing, but the rest of the park was very pretty. We walked around there for a while before going back to our hotel and grabbing dinner. After that, though, we partied. Sort of.

Remember when I said that the airport was stupid crowded in Madrid and we didn’t know why? Turns out, it was for Madrid’s annual Pride festival! Which makes sense, we were there in June, which is I guess Pride month internationally? But that was very exciting, because, as it turns out, Madrid Pride is both the oldest and largest pride festival in Europe, dating back to 1979 (only four years after Spain stopped being a fascist dictatorship) and drawing upwards of two to three million people every year (maybe more!). And we, two LGBTQ+ individuals, happened to be there right in the middle of it, just by coincidence. It was a fortuitous move, apparently.

We should have guessed as much, anyway, by the way buildings were dressed up. Hell, the whole city was dressed up for Pride. Everything had pride flags. Every corner had a rainbow hanging from it, legitimately every government building we saw (including the Ministry of Agriculture, an unthinkable heresy in the US) was decked out in rainbows, the Burger King and the KFC were giving away pride-themed hats and flags, it was pride everywhere. Which was, frankly, also it’s own kind of culture shock because you would never see something so total and all-encompassing in the US. Imagine every building in Washington D.C. being lit up gay for the last week of June. It just doesn’t happen here! And what a shame it doesn’t, because later that night we went out and walked around like fifty square blocks of pride stuff.

One of the big activities for Madrid pride is Pride in Chueca (which I pronounced “choo-cha” the entire time), which is just this big neighborhood of Chueca that basically blockages the entire area and turns it into one big street festival. Bars are open, there’s people everywhere, music is blastic and everyone is drinking and having a good time, and it was perhaps the most crowded I have ever felt in my entire life. There are very few times where I have been surrounded by more people, let alone more queer/ally people, than in that moment. Too bad we were too anxious to do much more than people watch. It was still an awesome experience to be able to go out and walk around and not feel like half the country wants you dead, and I am very glad that we did. But it being our first full day, we were still catching up from jet lag. And it didn’t help that everyone, of course, spoke Spanish.

Nick and I both took Spanish in High School, and Nick took it more recently in college, too, but we aren’t fluent. Nick’s better at it than I am, and I was pleasantly surprised at my own ability to remember enough Spanish from six years ago to both hold conversations in Spanish and get around every ticket booth and restaurant with Spanish as my default language. It was very exciting to be able to whip out some phrases in Spanish and then understand what the person is saying to me in return. I’ve never really had that before in the real world. So that was cool! We spoke a lot of Spanish in Spain. But it didn’t make it easy when you’re in a very crowded sea of people to try and meet new friends, though. So we just kind of let it be in Chueca and walked around and drank Vermut, which was fine enough with me.

The next day was our last day in Madrid, already, since we had decided to actually spend that night in Toledo. So we went to the National Palace in Madrid, which is, you know, where the King and Queen of Spain (they still exist! Weird, right?) hang out. We saw the crown jewels and the royal scepter (which I don’t think were real) and we weren’t allowed to take any pictures inside, but it was still a pretty neat building.

We also made a stop at the National Cathedral (I think the Almudena Cathedral?) across from the palace. It was our first cathedral of many, as just about every European city has one, and sometimes several depending on where you are. Of the cathedrals we saw, this one was not one of my favorites. Though you have to take this with the unspoken notion that “it’s still one of the prettiest buildings I’ve ever been inside,” but not my favorite of the prettiest buildings we saw. It had great mosaic work and a pretty excellent view from the top.

After that, we hopped on the train (and missed one train, oops) and made our way to Toledo, just half an hour south of Madrid. Nick and I had bought a month-long EU Rail pass, which was both exceptionally convenient and also an absolute nightmare. See, if you’re going to travel around Europe for an extended period of time, I do highly recommend getting the EU Rail pass. It’s much, much much cheaper than buying tickets individually. It also allows you to hop on and hop off most trains for basically free. You can just kind of grab a train and go wherever you want with this pass.

The one thing I also recommend, and the thing that Nick and I learned the hard way, is that even if you get the EU Rail pass, you also still need to reserve your seats ahead of time. As it turns out, although you have a ticket for the majority of trains, your seat is not guaranteed. Some trains require seat reservations, and the EU Rail app will tell you this. What it will not tell you is that a) making seat reservations is a total crapshoot because none of the websites seem to work, and the station might only let you book tickets two weeks in advance, and b) the trains that don’t require reservations might not have any seats left. This will be relevant later, trust me. Learn from our mistakes: even if you get the pass, plan your route in advance.

Issues with trains will be more prominent later in our travels. Getting to Toledo, and later to Barcelona, was fairly straightforward and easy. But why go to Toledo at all? Well, just look at it:

Toledo is a small, fortified Spanish hill city, and it looks like you just stepped into the past when you get there. This is how I imagined Spain to be when I pictured what we’d be doing there. It is literally like the postcard city for central Spain. It’s beautiful, it’s old, it’s interesting, it’s historic, it’s small enough to see in a day, and my friend had studied abroad in Spain and highly recommended we visit. Her recommendations are two for two now, between the ham and Toledo, because it was absolutely worth the two nights/day and a half we spent there. I mean, you get off the train and walk to the hostel and you have to go across a medieval bridge and climb these crazy stairs to get into the city proper. It’s so cool.

And then the city itself is beautiful! The Toledo Cathedral has probably my favorite interior of all the cathedrals we saw (with the exception of La Sagrada Familia, which is in a class of its own; more on that later). The facade on the outside of the cathedral is very pretty, and picturesque, but for my money the Koln/Cologne Cathedral in Germany still has the best facade. But inside the Toledo Cathedral? Just gorgeous. Overhwmelingly pretty. It is ostentatious in its displays. There is too much going on. It feels almost gaudy and idolatrous to fill a house of worship with the sheer, disgustingly opulent display of wealth that’s at the Toledo Cathedral (and, frankly, most other cathedrals). I get why Martin Luther and the Protestants did away with the interior decoration. But at the same time, what’s the point of collecting all those tithes if you can’t build something pretty? And what’s the point of going if you don’t have something really, really cool to look at? If I already made this joke once before, well it’s because it’s true. Look at this shit!

So I very much liked the Toledo Cathedral. I wish I had more pictures of it, because I took pictures of everything in there. But they are gone now. Oh well.

One thing I still have is, of course, my memories; and a funny thing happened on the way to the cathedral. It was a Sunday when we got there, so service was going on and we couldn’t enter the Cathedral proper yet. So they shoved us into the Chapel of the Cult of Mary (I don’t think my translation was quite accurate…), and we watched the service as it ended. The priest (might have been the bishop, actually) lead the procession out of the cathedral, and they passed right by the cage they stuck us in, so we got the watch the whole procession as it left. But it just kept going. On, and on, and on, more and more of these holy men in white vestments just came out of thin air, it seemed. I couldn’t see where they were coming from up by the altar, but it seemed to be nowhere. It was just a constant train of holy men. Nick and I left before the parade was done, but we came back later and got a proper tour of the place.

Oh, and we saw these nightmares out in the courtyard. Don’t know what they’re for or who they are. Just chilling.

Following the cathedral, we got some lunch and walked around the city more. Speaking of lunch, I didn’t even tell you about the other wacky foods I tried in Spain besides the cured ham! In Madrid, I ate tripe soup, which is like a beef soup except instead of beef, or vegetables, or anything else normal, it’s a soup made with the interior lining of an animal’s stomach. Enticing. Honestly, it wasn’t too bad, and the gut had a soft, meaty texture to it. Like meat jello. Yikes. I don’t like that description. But it was a specialty of Madrid, so I had to try it. I do not need to try it again. I also got a fancy pork stew that Nick was weirded out by for unclear reasons, oxtail croquettes (which is like a fried ball of… liquid… beef? I guess?), and venison stew. The rest of the food I had in Spain was pretty standard. Patatas Bravas (spicy potatoes), fried shishito peppers, the like. But I have an adventurous taste, I suppose, so it was neat to try new things like that. Even if they weren’t always the best.

The rest of the day in Toledo was spent exploring the winding, overlapping, antique streets of the city. We visited the Jewish quarter of the city, and saw a synagogue/church/mosque/Ottoman fort museum that is now just kind of a big empty room with these strange, skin-like windows on the far wall. It’s gone through a lot, this building.

Nick then had to take a call from their girlfriend, and I wandered off while they talked to her for a while. In doing so, I discovered, much by accident, a little walkway path that lead me underneath the main road we had been standing on and into this weird cistern-like area that was directly underneath the very park we had been sitting in. There was this big pool of water, and some supporting pillars and a tree growing up from the floor through the roof, but there was also an old brickwork tunnel that probably at one point connected some of the churches together. It looked really old, and it was super cool to just stumble upon this weird under-level to the city. There weren’t any signs saying I couldn’t be there, so I just hung out for a bit while people literally walked over my head. And I had Nick take these cool pictures of me from the hole where the tree was. Very exciting. A little bit spooky. Definitely memorable. I wish I could show you the inside, but well, shit out of luck.

The rest of Toledo was more exploring, walking around, bothering the locals, accidentally smashing glasses of water at dinner and apologizing in Spanish, the usual activities for tourists in Spain. It was just such an old, pretty city, I’m very glad we spent the extra time there. It was neat.

And that, oddly enough, brings us to the end of our time in Toledo and Madrid, but not the end of our time in Spain! We’ve still got a whole ‘nother city left to get to, and it is (say it with me now)…. coming next week! I promise this time! I swear it will happen! As long as I get my surprise research project on oak trees finished and read a 400-page paper on Tanzanian forest corridors. Then we’ll see how much time I have to write all this nonsense up… But until then, I’ll be seeing you! Or, you know, something. Stay tuned.