2000: Spain, Portugal & Morocco
by Carl Russo
2.
Future ruffians play after school in the plaza of Sé Cathedral, Oporto, Portugal.
Beginning our counterclockwise route around Iberia, we trained west from Madrid toward Portugal, stopping to spend a day in Salamanca. This gorgeous sandstone town of medieval churches and ancient university buildings glows golden at sunset. The gigantic Plaza Mayor is where we had our first real taste of sangria, which left us feeling our way along the walls of a hotel lobby with a ten-second light timer, laughing like drunken tourists. The very idea!
Anathema to the tourist, of course, is wandering onto the wrong side of the tracks. Welcome to Oporto, Portugal's other big industrial city, with a neo-realist slumminess that spreads over the picturesque historical quarter. No matter your street smarts, when you're lost in a foreign country you look it, and a heightened queasiness sets in when you're being followed by teen boys in dirty clothes.
And I'd return in a second, to stay again in the Grand Hotel de Paris, a fading palace which must have hosted many swinging soirees in its rococo ballroom a hundred years ago. It sits among mysterious old shops (always closed) lining skinny, sloping alleys that suck you into their alcoves so the cars can pass.
[
Italy: Sicily 1
|
Spain, Portugal, Morocco
|
France
|
Greece
|
Italy: Rome
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Italy: Sicily 2
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Italy: Mezzogiorno
|
Italy: Sicily 3
]
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