Madrid

I'm getting kinda burned out on blogging about this trip. So, first, I'll give you some thoughts on totally random things. Then I'll short change you on the Madrid stories because I'm lazy.

First random thing: Anita and I made mayonnaise this weekend! Turns out it's a little tricky, but totally doable. It's basically made from two egg yolks and 1.5 cups of oil. You beat the oil into the egg yolks a tiny bit at a time... Go too fast and you have an puddle of oil with some funk in it, which is what happened to our first batch. But the second batch was awesome.

Next random thing: I took a tour of the Boeing manufacturing plant in Everett as part of a VIP group from our UW Aeronautics and Astronautics Department. Huge place. The main assembly building is 40 acres with 115 foot ceilings. Huge cranes and equipment strowed everywhere. They were building 767s 777s and 787s (the Dreamliner). The 787 is definitely looking pretty cool. There are three that are painted for All Nippon Airlines, rolling down the line. ASA has 55 of them on order. If you were to place an order now, the plane wouldn't be delivered until 2020. Was fun to see the plant.

Madrid

Last entry, we had just arrived in Madrid. Adam and Maria made us a home cooked meal. We just stayed in that evening...

Days 9, 10, and 11 -- Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, Sunday, April 22, 23, 24, and 25th.

Anita and I went to the Prado in the morning. It is a top-notch place with lots of European paintings and statues. The focus seemed to be on Spanish works. A few of the paintings were being copied. My dad and I were talking the other day about how small details make a big difference. For example, when dry fly fishing, subtle differences in fly presentation can make all the difference. This rule surely holds true for painting too.

This guy was doing a pretty good job copying this naked chick. But I think the fine details on the original make it significantly better.

This Goya painting show the Spanish royal family around 1800. The old lady third from left has a big black spot on her face. Turns out this was is an artificial mark thought to be beautiful in that day. Almost like Cindy Crawford, but slightly witchier. (I stole this picture from Wikipedia.)

We also walked around a large pleasant park in central Madrid. That evening, we went out to several different tapas places. The first place was kinda cool because they just served mushrooms cooked in various different ways. Exciting if you're into mushrooms :) I do think they're pretty cool after reading Omnivore's Dilemma which describes the biology of mushrooms in some detail. The rest of the evening was nice .. just socializing with Anita's friends and their friends there in Madrid. There was this really funny German kid who worked with Adam. (Adam is a programmer.)

The next day, we first headed off on a mission to find saffron and buy a bunch of it for Anita's parents if it was a good deal. We found it and it is NOT a good deal. That stuff is amazingly expensive! In fact, I'm thinking of becoming a saffron farmer at some point. There was some hope it would be cheap in Spain because it is grown there. We wandered by a fancy palace upon which the Spanish royalty squandered the sweat and blood of Spanish peasants on hundreds of rooms full of trinkets. We passed through the main Madrid plaza and saw some interesting and unusual street performers. My favorite was the fat, middle-aged Spiderman. I thought he was so funny I tossed 50 cents in his hat. He then insisted on a thorough photography session. Interestingly, he spoke very good english. Almost like he had had money at some point and a good education, then just decided playing Spiderman was the most fun he could have.

Spidey even convinced Anita to take a picture with him.

Nothing too special left to report. We enjoyed the rest of the day, had a special dinner Adam cooked up for us. Then went out for a beer or two on the town.

Saturday morning, we embarked on our return trip which was quite a fiasco. The volcanic eruption in Iceland had clogged European airways. But Madrid was a good place to be because we'd fly south of the mess. Unfortunately, the Delta airplane broke down. Some kind of hose problem in the nosegear. We waited 3 hrs at the gate before they finally gave up and cancelled the flight. Anita and I split up so she could get us on another flight while I retrieved our bags. It was quite an affair, but the plan worked. I got our bags. Anita got us booked on Air Europa. The Air Europa line was incredible. Took over 2 hrs there... Enjoyed talking to some Harley rider dude who had a twisted mustache like Salvador Dali. Finally made it into New York. No flights until the next morning. Delta was so kind as to put us up for the night. After waiting in 2 or 3 more hours of lines, we landed in a room. The next day, Sunday, we got back without any more trouble. It was tough to get up and get back to work Monday morning, but not too bad. finally, back in the routine, we could get some rest...

¡hasta luego Barcelona, ola Madrid

Day 8 -- Weds. April 21

We hit a couple more sights in Barcelona before we took off for Madrid. First, we stopped at the Statue of Columbus (Monument a Colom). Apparently, this is where Columbus first set foot on the ground again after seeing America. His big bronze head is covered with birdshit. But it's still pretty cool. Then we headed on a tour of the Gothic quarter of Madrid (which is where a lot of the Shadow of the Wind is set). We considered seeing the Picasso museum, but saw Dali instead. It didn't disappoint. If you know, Dali, you can imagine the kind of wild stuff we saw there... It was full of stuff he did throughout his life plus lots of photographs of him. He was a weird sonuvagun. I like him.

I'm not doing a very good imitation of Chris... and I'm not sure why he's pointing anyway...

Salvadore was an unusual individual.

He did illustrations for a fancy edition of Cervantes' Don Quixote.

The train ride to Madrid in the afternoon went smoothly, literally speaking -- the train, even at 180 mph, rides silky smooth. Amazing.

Here's the high speed Barcelona-Madrid train. Fancy.

Upon arrival in Madrid, Anita's friend Adam met us at the station and we went back to their place where we stayed a couple of nights with he and his gf, Maria. It was nice to have somewhere to stay and Adam and Maria were very generous with food, etc. Their place was quite tight with four of us there! Madrid stories in the next entry...

Waterfront, Barcelona Open, Montjuic

At the end of the day Monday, we did a long trek along the Barcelona waterfront. Got some ice cream at a little stand. The chick working the stand only let me have a taste of one kind of ice cream. I was pissed. I mean, how in the hell do you *choose* when you've only tasted one?! Our destination was the Frank Gehry fish. (Gehry is the same the architect who designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.) On the way there, we saw some funny things like a little kid climbing up a high rope ladder structure (like monkey bars with ropes) and yelling at his parents from the top. Also we were accosted by a beach salesman who wanted to sell me a beach towel thingy (sarong?) for like 2 euros. He started at 10 and I said "nah". He said "OK, how much?" (He knew plenty of English to sell stuff to Americans.) He said 5 euros and I got interested but still refused. He shadowed us for a few minutes basically begging me to buy it. I might have gotten it (we could've used a beach towel...) but Anita talked me out of it since she (and she says every other woman) has been given about 10 as a gift at one time or another. We made it to the fish and it started to rain and we retreated to the our hotel (the Atlas).

Carp are everywhere including the Mediterranean.

It was nice and sunny early in the afternoon.

Here is the kid perched high on the rope structure, yelling at his parents.

Anita on cool concrete lounge chairs with Gehry fish in background.

We went to an excellent restaurant this night. It was a French place called Les 15 Nits. Don't recall exactly what we had -- some tasty salads. Also had a good dose of tasty sangria, which was quite refreshing.

Day 7 -- Tuesday April 20

The next morning, we took the metro to the Universidad polytecnica de Catalunya. Adjacent to campus is the tennis club where the Barcelona Open was held. I'd been pretty stoked about this for a while and we planned to watch a half day before heading elsewhere. Nadal had backed out (worn out from winning too many tourneys), but plenty of the heavy hitters were there. This was one of the first days of action and the big players had byes. The most exciting match was Lleyton Hewitt who plays quality tennis and usually has some entertaining on-court antics. It was nice just to hang out in the nice weather and watch a few hours of tennis. He played a youngster from Turkey named Ilhan who seems to have potential...

Hewitt in characteristic stretch ... this is how he hurt his hip I suppose.

(See all pics at http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20100413SpainLoRes#)

Next, we headed to a place called Montjuic, a name derived from mountain of the Jews.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montjuïc

You take a tram halfway up. Then you can hike the rest of the way up to the Castle which has awesome views of Barcelona. We really enjoyed going to the upper deck of the castle.

On the hike to the castle on top of Montjuic, there were lots of parrots! (Or I guess they were some kind of parrot.)

View along castle walls.

Anita and I on top of the castle with clouds on the Mediterranean in the bg.

Me and Anita with Barcelona sprawling below.

The only funny thing about Montjuic was the smell. Once we topped the hill, we looked down and saw this smoking, steaming industrial shitpile. This explained the odor.

I'm sure we found some Spanish restaurant that stuffed us with bread and cheese, but I've forgotten... We hung it up. The next day, we'd spend the morning in Barcelona and then head to Madrid on their newly (as of 2008) installed high speed rail (nearly 200 mph!).

space fix

Let's take a brief siesta from Spain blogging.

I am a bit of a space fanatic and, lately, I've been letting it show a bit. I attended a conference on National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges that included a big session on space stuff. A big hot shot from NASA was there and I really enjoyed hearing him talk and talking to him some afterwards. Then Anita and I went to see Hubble 3D. It showed great footage from the recent space walk to fix the Hubble and showed some great deep space images including a (CGI-enhanced) fly through of the Orion Nebula. The 3D effects were cool, but I'm not really sold that it was that much better than a high definition 2D movie.

At the conference on Grand Challenges, they only addressed a couple of the challenges. I attended sessions related to the challenge, "Engineer the tools of discovery", into which they shoehorned both space exploration and biological research. Relevant web links are,
Grand Challenges website: http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/challenges.aspx
The challenge involving space: http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/8996/8965.aspx

At the conference, they also discussed computer technology issues (apparently just because this is Seattle and people around here know computers). Nowadays, I do supercomputing, so it was interesting to me to learn about the giant cross-country data pipelines they're working on.

Mike Griffin was NASA chief from 2005 to 2009. His resignation was accepted by Obama. (NASA chiefs always resign. If the new president wants them, he rejects their resignation. Unless they write another resignation saying, "no, really, I quit!", they stay on.) Recently, Obama has shaken up the space program by rejecting the Bush-era plan called Constellation which had set NASA's sights on the Moon. Griffin is, not surprisingly, pissed about this. IMHO, Obama is screwing up cancelling yet another NASA program. NASA is plagued by programs in which billions are spent and then the program is scrapped. Let the poor agency have some continuity!

Griffin's talk was about "systems engineering". Some of the things he hit on in the talk or in the Q/A afterwards were
- A book by a guy named Pirro (sp.?) called Normal Accidents. In systems engineering, you shouldn't focus on what is going to go right. You should focus on what can go wrong. Some accidents/errors can be predicted.
- He said: "All these damned requirements are causing high costs ... But desire to control costs has driven requirements." Requirements were something that drove me crazy as an engineer at Aerojet. So many requirements. You can hardly look at the hardware without getting a form signed. Certainly you can't make a common-sense change to a test procedure without running the gauntlet.
- Related to the concern about requirements, he related an anecdote in which a banker is talking to his son and says, "Son, sometimes you have to rise above principles."
- At Aerojet, we used to talk about Rube Goldberg designs which are overcomplicated contraptions put together of many disparate parts that end up doing some simple thing. Griffin cited it and mentioned that the saying comes fro Boy's Life. Wonder if any readers have heard of it before...
- "The only way to make complex decisions efficiently is by benign dictatorship." Yes, this is what we need for NASA. And the benign dictator must not be replaceable by each new president! Think we should choose head of NASA like we do supreme court justices.
- 2 million people died of scurvy until captain Cooke gave crew sourkraut. Exploration is dangerous. Griffin brought this up in response to a question about the danger of going to Mars. Everybody these days is afraid of the tiniest bit of radiation. There might be some radiation danger in going to Mars, but the danger is insignificant compared to the risk taken by millions of sailors in the age of ocean exploration.
- NASA has gotten more money in the last 15 years than the 15 years of Apollo in inflation adjusted dollars. This is an impressive figure. We (the US via NASA) have done some pretty cool stuff in space. But this fact does hint at the inefficiency of big, bureaucratic, "failure is not an option" NASA.

Now for the 3D Hubble IMAX show. Robots cannot possibly replace people in space when it comes to doing complex jobs. These astronauts depicted in Hubble3D were doing things that regular mechanics might do: leaning into funky positions and stretching to extract resistant bolts. They had to resort to brute force sometimes, breaking parts off when they just wouldn't come off by usual means. (The near-earth space environment isn't easy on machinery.) Imagine trying to design and program a robot to fix your car. That kind of robotics is not in sight. Anyway, the 2009 mission improved Hubble's resolution dramatically. It has a fancier wide field camera than before, and several other failed components were replaced.

In a breathtaking sequence, the viewer is taken from the Solar System through the light-years of space into the Orion nebula.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_Nebula
There, viewers were shown a giant star at the center of the nebula. The star blasts the surrounding matter with interstellar wind, and often triggers star formation from clumps of gas. The clumps of gas, called proplyds can look like teardrop shapes in the wind.

This clump of gas in the Orion Nebula, imaged by the recently upgraded Hubble, is called a proplyd. It is described as a protoplanetary disk.

Hubble3D tried to engage J.Q. Public by harping on the theme that our space program (including NASA hardware like Hubble) is unlocking the secrets of the universe and, specifically, helping us home in on other life in the universe. I think it would be cool to find other life, don't get me wrong. But I think that our space program should be about using space to directly benefit humanity somehow. Granted, it's hard to see how ... just like it was hard to see how exploring the ocean would impact humanity. Further granted, discovering other life might benefit humanity in various ways. (E.g., we can ask them how to pull our heads out of our ass.)

My next space fix will be next Tuesday when Anita and I go to another lecture in the Seattle National Geographic Lecture series called Exploring Mars: Rovers of the Red Planet.

Barcelona -- Gaudi

Day 6 -- Monday April 19th

We made friends with the guy at the desk at the Atlas Hotel, where we stayed while in Barcelona. He was an Indian transplant to Spain. Seems like Indians run a lot of businesses there. Anyway, this guy was very friendly and gave us lots of good directions and asked us to be safe, etc.

It was a very happy moment when we handed off the keys to the rental car. The line was incredibly long. When it was finally our turn, I realized we hadn't filled up for a hundred km or so. The guy said I could go fill it up and come back. No thanks... Turns out it was full enough anyway. Renting the car turned out to be a pretty good deal. Less than 40 euros/day.

One of the first things we saw (or heard, really) was a guy running down La Rambla screaming, apparently hot on the trail of somebody who'd just stolen something of his. "Policia! Policia!" he yelled. I couldn't tell exactly what happened, but it seems like he tackled the robber. Nice.

This day would be a big walking tour of Barcelona. We stopped and saw the Gaudi Museum from the outside. We hardly paid a single museum entry fee -- partly, we are cheap, but also, one could spend an awful lot of time in boring museums :) This guy, Gaudi, is a famous architect around these parts. He was an eccentric character and his architecture style fits with that.

Casa Battlo. Locally called House of Bones. Gaudy tended to design things with a bit of a spooky skeletal nature. Gaudi also famous for using no straight lines. Didn't use blueprints. Only sketches.

Stopped in a high-end cosmetics store called Kiehls which Anita likes and is cool because it has a Harley parked inside. They were nice enough to give us some free sample sunscreen. I could've bought some but the 40 euros seemed a little steep. On we went to the Sagrada Familia, which is a cathedral largely designed by Gaudi. His lack of blueprints was a tiny bit problematic for them on this complex structure. Gaudi died in 1926, but they're still trying to straighten it out.

Gaudi's Sagrada Familia cathedral, still under construction. Good place for ping pong.

An interesting story about Gaudi is that he ended his life in penury, begging every rich person he knew for more money to finish his cathedral. He was hospitalized when he was hit by a streetcar. He was wearing ragged clothes, so, not recognizing the famous architect, they put him in the paupers' hospital. His friends found him the next day, but he insisted on staying in the poor people's hospital where he died a few days later. His primary benefactor, a guy named Guell, had died in 1918. The next place we visited required a few miles walk -- the Parc Guell. You can read about this and all of Gaudi's other stuff on the Wikipedia page about him

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoni_Gaudí

where there are links to his major works including Parc Guell, Sagrada Familia, and Casa Batllo. Briefly, the Parc was designed initially to be a garden-oriented housing development for rich people. Didn't work out, so Barcelona made it a municipal garden.

Anita photgraphing the famous multicolored mosaic dragon. ("Mosaic" refers to the thousands of tiles that it's made from. This mosaic style is classic Gaudi.)

By the way, later, when we got to Madrid, Anita's friend Adam reminded me that Barcelona is the location of the story The Shadow of the Wind (Momma and Tess, you've read this...). Might've been fun to keep an eye out for some of the specific places in the book.

Next, we got lazy and took the metro back down to the waterfront where we walked another 5 miles. More on that later!

on the road to Barcelona part dos

So now we're in Day 5 -- Sunday April 18th. We've left Pamplona and are on the way to Zaragoza. Lots of wind farms in the Spanish countryside here. Also some big solar arrays the likes of which I've never seen in the US.

When we arrived, we stopped into a place that sold good old pizza. Wow, was it nice to get something that was exactly what we expected. Plus, the place was showing the Monte Carlo tennis tournament final in which Rafael Nadal was finishing up his devastation of the competition there. (Unfortunately, because Nadal played so damned well in Monte Carlo and in his previous tournament or two, he was too tired to attend the Barcelona which I'll describe in a later entry.)

Zaragoza is a medium-sized city. Seemed to be a lot of large, unused infrastructure. (Wikipedia: Zaragoza hosted Expo 2008 in the summer of 2008, a World's Fair on water and sustainable development.) The thing that attracted our attention is the Aljafería Palace, built in the 11th century by the Moors. Christians took it over early in the 12th century.

Me standing under a pretty old Moorish arch

A courtyard with orange trees. Note the mathematical patterns in the architecture which is a hallmark of Muslim architecture in general.

Prior to and during the trip, I boned up on Spanish history some by reading the generous history section in my book, "National Geographic Traveler: Spain" which I think is a great guide.

Charlemagne (b. 742, d. 814) did a lot of fighting in NE Spain and established Catalunya as a buffer zone between Moslem Spain and Christian Europe. My dad pointed out to me an interesting bit of history that I hadn't heard or read before: Charlemagne attempted to conquer Zaragoza, but failed. Apparently, as he was heading, tail between legs, back to France, his rearguard took a lot of heat from Moslem/Moorish fighters. This event inspired the song of Roland which you can read about on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chanson_de_Roland
One of the stranger parts of this epic poem/song, in which Roland is the hero, is that Roland, after his forces are demolished, blows an olifant (named after elephant .. it's made of an elephant's tusk) horn so hard that his head explodes and he dies.. Yikes!

A few hours later, we rolled into Barcelona. We drove up the main strip in Barcelona called La Rambla. With amazing ease, found a place to temporarily park and check in to our hotel. Parking at the hotel was interesting. For one thing, we had to drive around the block and a couple of crazy drivers nearly squashed our poor little Seat (and poor little us) when 3 lanes suddenly became only 2. I hit the brakes and the two vehicles on left and right came within inches of taking off the left and right side-view mirrors. Navigated onto the pedestrian-dominated side streets and went down the exit ramp into the parking area. They parked the car New York style -- that is, put it on a lift and moved it into an overhead car slot somewhere out of view. Barcelona is a very crowded place. After going out for a not very exciting dinner (we got stuck in a tourist trap type place), we hung it up for the night.

On the road to Barcelona (+more Picos)

First, let's have a look at a few of Anita's pictures from the Picos / Casa La Xerra.

The flock of sheep that we rumbled on the way to the middle of nowhere destination that the iPhone picked.

Milo, the cute puppy, while he's waiting patiently at the door for somebody to throw him some scraps. He also likes to chase balls as if his life depended on it.

Our amazing breakfast.

Now. Continuing where we left off in the last entry, we headed to cave, Cueva de Tito Bustillo. We joined the tour group in the nick of time as they headed into the cave. As we headed into the bowels of the earth, it dawned on us that nobody on the tour, including the guide, spoke a word of English. We did glean a little bit: the guide showed everyone how to view the 25k year old paintings from various different angles, such that the relief allowed various different images to emerge. The cave walls were not flat like a usual canvas and the prehistoric people took advantage of that. There were also big painted stalagmites -- some of the earliest known phallic symbols present in the cave.

On we went to Bilbao. I've mentioned the roadways before and and Anita had a picture of a viaduct that I'll include now. Pretty serious infrastructure. No wonder Spain is doing almost as badly as Greece these days...

Viaduct going up in N. Spain

We got there and parked in "libre" parking. I looked up this word and it means "free". Great! Well, I had my doubts... We walked out to see the main attraction in Bilbao: the Guggenheim Museum which was designed by the famous starchitect (star architect), Frank Gehry. Surrounding the Museum itself are various cool pieces of artwork.

Anita with a flower dog

A scary spider outside the Museum

Anita and I with the Guggenheim in the background

We basically got thrown out when I started photographing the inside of the building which is against the rules (apparently .. hey, I can't read Spanish). Arriving at our car, we realized that, indeed, "libre" didn't mean "free". It meant "available" .. but it was only a few Euros.

Having knocked out the Guggenheim by late afternoon, we headed on to Pamplona, a city about 1/3 the way to Barcelona from Bilbao. From Pamplona, we'd only have another 4 or 5 hrs driving to reach Barcelona. The guidebook said that Pamplona was kind of a sleepy little town. So we picked a cheap hotel in the middle of the city. Once we arrived, we realized that the guidebook had lied. It was Saturday night and Pamplona was happening. This wasn't what we needed that particular Saturday night. After being stuck in a people-jam (and people are harder to rumble than sheep) for 15+ minutes, and hunting for a parking spot for half an hour, we managed to bring our little Seat (the car make as you'll recall) to a halt. Then we headed into the thick of things to look at the cheap hotel. Well, it turns out that it was too cheap. Like Prabaker said in Shantaram, one can find "a cheap hotel, a very cheap hotel, a too much cheap hotel, and even such a cheap hotel that nobody in a right minds is ever staying there also." With its grungy single bed, shared bathrooms, and flophouse appearance, this was one of the latter. We went back and stayed at a 75 Euro/night place near where we'd parked. We also got a fine dinner at a place I noticed right by the parking spot we found. For the first time in Spain, I think, the service was fantastic. There was this 18 year old kid who was a service enthusiast and treated us very well. We hit the sack happy that night if a little wasted.

The next morning, we woke up and got breakfast at a cafe where Ernest Hemingway used to write in the main Plaza in Pamplona. In his book, The Sun Also Rises, an annual Pamplona fiesta is the backdrop. After breakfast, on we went. Our next (brief) stop before reaching Barcelona would be Zaragoza, named after Caesar Augusta. Say Caesar Augusta really fast with a Spanish accent and you hear "zaragoza"... ¡hasta luego!