For my vacation this year I went on a 17 day hiking and cultural trip to northern Spain. Like all the other trips I've done, this was a great trip in many ways. This is a trip and an area that I would recommend to anyone interested in somewhere different to go. In some places we did see a good number of Spanish tourists but we saw very few foreign tourists and almost no Americans.
I left home on Saturday, 8/22 and got home Wednesday, 9/09. I flew from Indianapolis to Newark to Madrid to Oviedo Spain. Coming back I flew Barcelona to Newark to Indianapolis. The trip officially began in Oviedo and ended in Barcelona.
Everyone has airline stories and this trip added one for me. When leaving on this trip I got to the Indy airport much earlier than my flight so I was able to get on an earlier Newark flight. The lady at the counter mentioned that bad weather was causing Newark to be running behind. Even with the earlier flight I got to Newark just a little earlier than my originally scheduled flight would have. My original delayed flight would not have arrived in time for my Madrid flight. However my Madrid flight was delayed due to equipment problems - the air conditioning was not working and the cabin temperature was 85 or 90 degrees. So it turns out that I still would have made the Madrid flight even with my original Newark flight. And fortunately I had enough of a layover in Madrid that I was able to make my connection to Oviedo even with the Madrid flight delayed several hours.
Most people know of the stage / movie musical "My Fair Lady." One of the better know songs is "The Rain in Spain" or the longer version "The Rain in Spain Falls Mainly on the Plain." There was a time when I was worried that this might make a good trip title. But fortunately we kept dodging bullets as far as the weather. We never had to hike in rain. We had to deal with some serious fog a couple times but that was about it.
It should also be pointed out that the song is wrong. The plains, the central part of the country around Madrid, was very brown when I flew from Madrid to Oviedo. The northern part of the country, where we were, is known as "green Spain" since it gets the most rain.
A Sideria is a place where cider from the region is served. In U.S. terms it is hard cider. The cider is bitter if you drink it straight. But there's a tradition for pouring it that deals with this issue. The "proper" way to pour cider is to hold the bottle above your head and hold the glass below your waist and tilted about 30 or 40 degrees up from horizontal. Then you pour. If you're good, most of the cider goes in the glass. The function of this is to aerate the cider which helps to deal with the bitterness.
Several years ago "60 Minutes" did a piece titled "But Is It Art?" about some of the things that pass for modern art now days. One of the cultural stops of the trip was the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao which had a number of instances of modern art as well as a bunch of the type of paintings you would expect to see in an art museum. This museum was build about 15 years ago and has done a lot to revitalize Bilbao.
One exhibit was a set of figures made with very large steel plates, perhaps 12 - 15 feet high. One of these figures was called "The Snake". There were 3 curved walls running roughly parallel for 80 or 100 feet which meant that you could walk through either of two paths along the length. The first path had the plates leaning inward which meant that it was darker and more enclosed than the other path where the plates leaned outward. This made these pieces more of a physical experience than a visual experience.
There was another major exhibit by the Chinese artist who staged the Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies. He had art pieces that were made by taking a large sheet of paper, covering parts of it, putting something similar to gun power on other parts and igniting it. Doing this many times and with differing amounts of power to create different shades produced the final drawings. This illustrated the dichotomy of creation / destruction - he was creating art by destroying (igniting) powder. He also created pyrotechnic performance pieces which some of his drawings were models for.
I found the museum to be very interesting and well worth the visit. There were some in our group who were blown away by many of the things we saw there. It was interesting to observe how different various people's interests and perceptions are. But to answer the question, yes it is art at least in these cases.
Many people have heard of Pamplona, Spain thanks to Ernst Hemingway who wrote about the running of the bulls there. The bulls need to be moved from the fields outside of town to the bull fighting ring in the heart of town. The bulls are run through town and people run ahead of the bulls.
We learned a number of interesting facts about this event.
This was a bit of an upscale trip. We stayed at many wonderful places. In the major cites we stayed in upscale hotels. The rest of the time we stayed in wonderful, small, family owned and run hotels or in Paradores. Paradores are special or historic buildings which were turned into hotels by the Spanish government to promote tourism. One paradore we stayed in was a former monastery, one a former hunting lodge, one a former hostel for pilgrims (called a hospital) and one a castle in its previous life.
Probably the best known prehistoric cave drawings are at Lascaux in France. But Spain has Altamira which is on the same order and for me was one of the cultural highlights of the trip. Visitors to the cave were causing the conditions which had preserved the drawings to change. Humidity and temperature changed due to all the visitors, 150,000 in one year. So the cave was closed to all but the most recognized experts. But they spent 6 years constructing a replica cave as part of the museum we visited at the site.
The cave was occupied by people around 18,000 years ago. At this time some line drawings of elk and horses were made. Then for about 3000 years the cave was occupied by bears. Then it was again occupied by people around 15,000 years ago when the most impressive drawings were made. After this time part of the cave entrance collapsed which caused it to be abandoned. It wasn't rediscovered until 1879 by the young daughter of the owner of the land when they were out for a walk exploring their land.
The impressive drawings from 15,000 years ago were all of bison of the area at that time. The experts believe that all bison drawings were done by one person. The drawings were based on close observation of bison because many of them showed bison running or twisting in very accurate anatomical detail. Also impressive was that the drawings were done on the cave ceiling and the natural bulges in the ceiling were integrated as part of the drawings. For example a bison's head might be rendered 3 dimensional by drawing it on a bulge.
The actual cave was just a couple hundred yards from the museum. We were able to walk down there and see the entrance from a distance. I asked our guide through the replica if she had ever been in the real cave. She hadn't.
Different countries operate at different times. For example here is the U.S. there are many variations but we usually think of breakfast between 7 and 8, lunch between 12 and 1 and dinner around 6 or 7. In Spain breakfast is usually around 8 or 8:30, lunch around 2 or 2:30 and dinner around 8:30 or 9. We went to one restaurant for dinner arriving at 9 and found they weren't quite ready to open yet. And when we weren't on the trail, the lunches we had were usually about as big as dinner.
While we were there, we learned a lot about Spain and Spanish history, all of which was very interesting. I won't try to reproduce what we learned here but some of the topics included
We spent time in the Basque region of Spain. Those who follow the news are probably aware that Spain has Basque terrorists who are demanding that the Basque regions of Spain be allowed to form a separate country. This new country would include several regions of France also. I was not aware that the Basque language is not related to any known language and especially not Latin like most of the other European languages.
We also spent time in the Catalonian region. I was not as aware that the Catalonian people also want to separate from Spain. The main reason we don't hear more about them is because they do not have a terrorist group like the Basque. But we were informed that they have even stronger feelings about separating than the Basque.
The title of this report "We're SO Out Of Here" refers to the standard call that was issued when it was time to get moving, for example when starting a hike or when starting up after a break. This could be taken a couple of ways but in our case, to me it meant let's get moving and see what lies over the next hill. Rather than indicating a desire to get out of wherever we were, it indicated a desire to see what's coming next. Another standard call was "Vamanos" which is Spanish for "let's go." But that didn't make much of a trip title.
One title that I considered was "The Running of the Cows." Two days after we were in Pamplona we stopped along the trail at a very scenic spot where we spend a good amount of time enjoying the view. While we were there, a number of grazing cows wandered through this spot. A couple people approached the cows to take a few pictures. As they were doing this I asked "Is this a version of the running of the cows?" While it was very funny at the time, there was an aspect of "You had to be there" to fully appreciate it.