2000: Spain, Portugal & Morocco
by Carl Russo
1.
This small 14th-century castle guards the old Roman bridge leading to Córdoba. It's easier
to storm its walls and squat than to find a hotel room inside the stunning Andalusian town.
Rat that I am, I left my girlfriend at home in San Francisco while I gallivanted across beautiful Sicily in 1999. So when we scraped up enough loose change for a trip to Europe the following year, Vanessa chose the destinations: Spain and Portugal. Who could argue?
I pushed to add Morocco to the itinerary, knowing it would be a cheap jaunt across the African border with exotic thrills. Just how thrilling we couldn't imagine.
Madrid is a fine city to land in, as we all must, and a damn good introduction to the Spanish and the only language they know. A sad by-product of Franco's isolationist España por España policies, I suppose. While I happily struggle with Italian and French, common root words in Spanish (a.k.a. the widely-spoken Castillian Spanish of "olé!" fame) are often at odds with those of her sister tongues. Communication can be nerve-wracking, but the city throbs and our two-star hotel in the Huertas district was smack between the Prado Museum with its parks, and a plaza full of bars in varying states of hip. (Our reduced scale of preference runs from chill to boho.)
The treasures of the Prado were there for the plundering, so we devoured a lifetime's supply of Velásquezes, Goyas, and chunky Rubens hoochies. Pondering on the bewildering goings-on in Heronymous Bosch's preter-surreal Garden of Earthly Delights, images etched into my brain since I could first lift an art book, made me feel like I was meeting an idol of my youth, like Woody Allen or something. Likewise Picasso's wall-sized Guernica at the Reina Sofiá museum, his celebrated protest of the Spanish Civil War.
From the notebook: the women of Madrid are as tall, dark and beautiful as the women of Rome, only more abundant. Buxom with slender limbs, impossibly chic. We noticed that their husbands invariably were short, bald and dumpy. A slob's paradise. And there's a street in old Toledo named "Toledo Ohio."
[
Italy: Sicily 1
|
Spain, Portugal, Morocco
|
France
|
Greece
|
Italy: Rome
|
Italy: Sicily 2
|
Italy: Mezzogiorno
|
Italy: Sicily 3
]
© 2004 A Rat's Ass Production. All rats reserved.