Gettin' Real in Madrid

On Sunday morning, we left our broken bed behind in Barcelona and left for Madrid.
Barcelona to Madrid is about 620 km away, or 385 miles for all you Americans. Luckily for us, Spain has the nicest, newest and fastest trains in Europe and the ride took about 2 and a half hours.
As soon as we checked into our final apartment, we headed straight back out to El Rastro.
El Rastro is a huge outdoor flea market held every Sunday in Madrid, and is a must for anyone visiting. In fact, it's the main reason we left Barcelona early Sunday morning, as the Rastro closes between 3 and 4 pm.
The Rastro has an estimated 3,500 stalls selling clothing, antiques, hand-made shoes, original artwork, live animals and much more.
We had a great time winding down random streets and even bought a few cool items.
We ate lunch and got back on the train to Santiago Bernabeu. Santiago Bernabeu is the name of the stadium of the world famous Real (Ree-Al) Madrid "football" team. Sunday night they were playing their first game of the season, and we figured we'd try and get tickets to the game.
Somewhat surprisingly, for a world class team, the tickets are not that expensive. You can sit front row for about $130, something that you definitely can't pull off at Yankee Stadium or MSG.
We grabbed the cheapest seats we could find, all the way on top, and headed back home to unpack, eat dinner, and head right back out again.
The game started at 9:00 at night, which may seem late for a sports game to start, until you realize that a few nights later Barcelona played a game in Madrid that started at 11 pm. Typical Spain.
A cool feature about Santiago Bernabeu is that there is virtually no parking; everyone either walks or comes by public transportation. As a result, our subway car was packed with kids and adults wearing their Real Madrid jerseys. When we got to the stadium, we immediately spotted our good friend from Israel, Yb ehuda Nathan. This wasn't exactly a coincidence, as we had agreed earlier to meet up at the game, but still kind of surprising how we found each other so easily in the sea of thousands of people.
The stadium holds about 85 and a half thousand people, and was mostly full. Even sitting almost at the top of the stadium, the view was amazing. We were sitting behind one of the corners of the side that Real was attacking towards first.
For me, by far the best part of the game was seeing how quickly and intensely Chaya got into the game. Truthfully, it's very hard to be there and not get swept up with all the excitement. The game was surprisingly thrilling, and when Real Madrid scored a late goal to take a 2-1 lead, the crowd (us included) went nuts.
We all had a really great night, and if you ever get the chance you should definitely try and get to a game.

The next morning we had another free tour booked. Unfortunately, probably due to our amazing guide and tour in Barcelona, mixed with the heat of Madrid, we were left feeling a little underwhelmed.
Still we got to see some beautiful and interesting things, including the world's oldest restaurant (Est. 1725) and the Royal Palace.

The Royal Palace

We ate lunch, and explored Sol, which is Madrid's version of Las Ramblas (kind of) with shops, street performers and restaurants.
We went home for our usual Siesta, but woke up not feeling too well. We decided to go out anyway because the famous Prado museum was free at night and we thought we'd check it out. We left the apartment at around 7 pm, already feeling sick, and passed by a sign which informed us that it was 41 degrees out, which google informed us meant 105.8 in terms we understood.
We decided to walk around Retiro Park, which is an enormous park, but after a few minutes we really weren't feeling well, so we headed home.
We woke up the next morning feeling worse than the night before so we decided to kind of sleep in/hang out around the apartment all day.
Before we started the trip, we'd kind of expected this to happen, and the fact that it only happened once and at the very end of our trip was pretty great.
Once again, at around 6:30 we decided to try and get to the Prado museum. The museum is free starting at 7 pm, and even though the line snaked around the block, it took us around 5 minutes to get inside.
The museum is considered one of the world's finest collection of European art. It was originally the royal families collection which was then expanded.
It also contains the world's best collection of Spanish art, and is one of the world's most visited sites apparently (okay, that last one came straight from wikipedia.)
We really enjoyed the collection, specifically Velazquez, Goya and Peter Paul Reubens.
I'm no art snob, but these guys were pretty good.

We spent a solid 2 hours in the Prado, (obviously not enough, but that's about all you can do in one night for free) and headed to Retiro Park.

National Bank of Spain. Can't imagine there's much in here...

Retiro is kind of like Central Park, but way smaller. There's a large pond in the middle with boats for rent, random tree lined paths to walk around, and all sorts of chugim going on. We watched some amazing dance troupe practice, listened to some bands play, and walked around. The park is seriously beautiful. Go ahead and Google street view it. I won't wait for you, but you're free to do as you please.

On Wednesday we headed out of Madrid to a town called Toledo. Toledo is a small town, with medieval walls still intact, about 40 minutes outside of Madrid. 

Toledo was actually the capital of Spain until the mid 1500's and was a place where Jews, Christians and Muslims got along famously for hundreds of years.

You know, until the Christians kicked most of them out and killed the rest.

Toledo has a really cool Shul/Sephardi museum, which is mostly geared towards non-Jews but is still really interesting.

Ceiling of the Shul

 We really enjoyed walking around Toledo, seeing the famous Cathedral, and visiting the house/museum of El Greco, another famous Spanish artist.

Unimpressed.

 Later that night, back in Madrid, we headed out again to the famous Reina Sofia Museum. The museum boasts an impressive collection of works from all over the world, but we went specifically for the Dali exhibit. Once again the museum was free (from 7 pm to 11 pm,) but this time the demand was so high that we waited on line for 30 minutes, were given a time slot and told to come back in an hour.
So we spent an hour wandering around in the typical 9 pm 100 degree heat, found some cool things like this creepy statue of a baby's head, and came back to the museum.

The exhibit was really great. For those who don't know, Salvador Dalí was a whacked out, flamboyant, impressively mustachio'd artist, who specialised in surrealism. The museum owns many of his most famous works, and luckily for us, the rest of his most famous works were all on loan from museums around the world.
We really enjoyed the exhibit, and headed home for the night.
Thursday was the last day of our honeymoon. Bummer right?
We didn't have too much of a plan, so we headed back out to Sol, peeked our head into some stores, saw tons of ham legs hanging from ceilings, and ate lunch back in Retiro Park.

This is potentially traumatising for a young child

Kind of on a limb, we decided to head out to Las Ventas, the famous bullring in Madrid. When we got there, we couldn't resist and decided to pay the entrance fee and have ourselves a look inside. The building itself is beautiful, and regardless of your feelings on bullfights, it's a very cool and unique tour to do. They give you an audio guide and let you roam around at your own pace.

Growing up, I always thought I knew what a bullfight was. You have the Matador dressed up in a funny costume, waving a red flag, and the bull tries to charge at him, much like during bar mitzvah dancing. Guess I never knew that the whole point of the bullfight is to slaughter the bull. See, every time the bull misses the flag, the Matador stabs him with a spear. When the bull is weak and can't go on fighting anymore, they just slaughter him in the arena. Then, the crowd votes on how bravely the Matador fought, and awards him based on his performance. The highest honor a Matador can receive is 2 bull ears. Now, this might sound barbaric to you, awarding cut off ears as trophies, but don't worry that can't really be what they do, right? What? Oh...Chaya just informed me that that's EXACTLY WHAT THEY DO. They cut off the ears, and the bullfighter gets to keep 'em. They also sometimes cut off the tails and make the delicious sounding "bull-tail stew" out of them.
So ya, we were bummed out that we didn't get to see a bullfight, but the tour was pretty cool too.

We weren't really sure if we could walk onto the actual sand, but we just ducked under some tape that said something like "no entre" and walked on.

We do what we want!

We headed home to pack up, enjoy one last fancy dinner consisting of all the food we still had leftover, and took the train to the airport. Madrid was really great, and we gave it more than enough time. We were both pretty sad to be finishing up this once in a lifetime trip, but were excited to get back to Israel, where the Shawarma is Kosher.

 We wanna thank everyone who read this blog. There are too many of you to name here, but we love all 9 of you. But seriously, we'd like to specifically thank the people in the following countries and ask them to please identify themselves to satiate our curiosity: Switzerland, Netherlands, Siberia and Russia.
Also, to Micah Goldrich, who claims that he reads this blog, but I highly doubt it, so this is a test to see if you actually read them.
And to to all the people who came over to us after we got back and said stuff like "Hey! How was the trip? I read the blog! Well, I didn't actually read all of it. Like, I saw that you had a blog, but I never got around to it..." it's okay. We love you too.
And to set one thing straight, the blog was mostly written by Zvi, and for clarity sake was written entirely from his standpoint, but Chaya contributed immensely, proofread everything and even tried sneaking in a few jokes, which I promptly removed.
Alright, until our next honeymoon
Ciao Ciao Amore, Ciao
Zvi and Chaya

Barcelona: Segunda parte

For Friday, our 3rd day in Barcelona, we had a tour of the city booked for 11 am. But this wasn't just any tour...this was a FREE TOUR!!!
There's this amazing company called Sandeman's which has free tours all over the world. The guides work solely for tips, and thus are supposedly much better tour guides.
We had a British chap named Leon, and he was basically the best tour guide either of us have ever had.
Leon was hilarious, extremely informative, and very helpful. He was just a regular guy living in England 11 years ago, when his girlfriend surprised him with tickets to Barcelona for the weekend. They went, and when he came home, he sold 2/3rds of his stuff, including his recording studio, and moved to Barcelona where he's been living ever since. You could totally see how much he loved the city which is a pretty great feature for a tour guide to have.
One of the things we found fascinating about the tour, and Barcelona in general, is the extreme "national" pride that Barcelonians feel. But not for Spain.
Barcelona is located in Catalonia, one of the regions of Spain. Catalonia used to be independent, and many Catalans are eager for independence from Spain. In fact, their is supposed to be a vote next year that may potentially give Catalan, and Barcelona, independence from Spain.
I'm boring you with the details, but i'll just give a few more interesting tidbits about Catalonia:
1) When we were in Barcelona, we did not see a single Spanish national flag, but saw thousands of Catalan flags
2) In Barcelona, most signs are in Catalan, which is slightly different than the Spanish that they speak in the rest of the country
3) About 7 or 8 years ago, Spain decided to recognize Catalan as a nationality, but not a nation
4) Every year, on September 11th, they commemorate the fall of Barcelona in 1714 with a massive festival (Next year marks 300 years, so definitely be there for that)
5) Apparently, at the 17:14 mark of every Barcelona soccer game, the crowd screams "Independence!"

The tour took us through the various quarters and history of Barcelona, and was really quite fascinating. We also stumbled upon this insane parade, which was never really explained, but apparently there are hundreds of daily festivals in Barcelona every year.

Catalan flag 

After the tour we headed back to the Kosher mini-market to buy some food for Shabbat. We'd arranged to eat Friday night dinner with the Chabad, and they told us that at the kiddush on Shabbat day there would be lots of food and bread to wash, but we figured just to be safe we'd buy some of our own. I don't even wanna admit how much 6 slices of turkey breast, a small container of Chummus and an even smaller container of techina cost us, but we did what needed to be done. After stocking up on some food, we headed back to the Jewish quarter and went to the Shul. The Shul  is mostly underground, and very different from the grand, beautiful shuls that we'd seen in Italy. The cool claim to fame for this shul is that it is the 2nd oldest shul in the world, and one of the oldest buildings in Barcelona. For about 600 years, until the late 20th century, the Shul was many many things, but nobody figured out it was a Shul until about 1987. 

Chaya, delivering an excellent D'var Torah to the group

We hung out for a bit more on Las Ramblas, walked along the beach, and headed home to get ready for Shabbat.

After Shul Friday night, the Chabad Rabbi announced that since their were a larger amount of people than usual, we'd all be splitting up for dinner into 2 groups. We're pretty sure he announced that the younger folks should come with him, while the older people and families should go the other way. We started walking with him and all of the older people (something definitely got lost in translation) when Chaya decided, spur of the moment, that we should switch groups. And it was a great call. We ran to catch up with the other group, whom we walked about 15 minutes with to the outside of a hotel. All 50 of us then proceeded to sit down outside the hotel and wait for someone to walk outside and open the automatic doors. After about 5 minutes, an extremely confused looking couple walked out of their hotel, and were greeted by 50 exuberant people, cheering and shouting "yosharkoyach!" Can't remember ever seeing anyone with such confused looks on their faces.

Anyway, the meal was being run by 2 Chabad rebbes from Israel, who were hilarious, awkward, odd and definitely new at this. They started things off with a bang. After not singing Eishet Chayil, they announced in Hebrew: "Will 2 women please come to the front and help serve?" Needless to say, all the girls were pissed and some fine gentlemen, such as myself, got up to help. (Such as myself, but not actually me.)

Either way, we had a great time and met some really nice people at our table. There was a family from Modiin on vacation, 2 girls who just finished their army service (and thought we were insane for not doing the Barcelona stadium tour - typical Israelis) and our new friend Josh. (He's the new Stevie/Sean!)
Josh was, and still is, a great guy from L.A who's currently learning in the Technion. We hung out after the meal, just the 3 of us and this 45ish year old woman from Barcelona who was hilarious and insisted that we drink a glass of her favorite drink, red wine and 7 UP. It was delicious. (On a side note, we found out that in Spain, a very popular "summer drink" is red wine, a shot of rum and orange fanta. It's all the rage. I will have to try this when I get home...)

The next morning, after davening we feasted on an excellent kiddush (3/3 with those) comprising of 12 or so different salatim, fish, fruit, pizza and bread. 

We invited Josh over to our humble abode where we had a nice seudat shlishit/lunch and hung out for a few hours. 

Shabbat was really beautiful, and thankfully the heat wasn't too bad. 

We were all set to head out to Madrid on a train Sunday morning, and pretty tired, we decided to get a few hours of sleep on Saturday night.
This proved to be a bit difficult however, because when I sat down on the bed, it completely broke. Now, you may assume that as a gentlemen of a larger disposition, this might happen to me fairly often, but no, jerk, it doesn't. 

At this point, it was like 2 a.m so we just dragged the mattress onto the floor and called it a night. The next morning the owner of the apartment came over, and was super apologetic and thankful that nobody got hurt and that we weren't upset. Me and Chaya just looked at each other in disbelief with a real "well, that was a freebie" type look on our faces, and headed out to Madrid. 

It was like an episode of Breaking Bed (I am so sorry for that joke.)

 

Oh Barcelona, Barcelona (Part 1)

On Wednesday morning we left Italy and flew over to Spain. We got to the apartment we were renting, put our stuff down and headed back out for our 1st stop, La Sagrada Familia.
The Sagrada is probably Barcelona's most famous attraction, and as such, there were warnings of lines taking hours to get in, but by the time we'd flown in, unpacked and got to the church it was already 2:30ish and the line didn't take more than half an hour.
The Sagrada Familia is a massive church designed by the famous architect Anton Gaudi. Construction began in 1882 and was completed in....well that's just the thing. They're still building it. So why pay something like 15-18 Euro per person to go inside an unfinished building? Well, it's simple really. I can unequivocally state, in my personal opinion of course, that it is THE most beautiful and breathtaking building I've ever seen and been inside of. The design is majestic, stunning and awesome, in the awe-inspiring sense of the word. It's kind of the feeling we'd been expecting to get when viewing the Sistine Chapel, but didn't exactly get. The stained glass windows on the inside are extremely bright and vivid. (At least the ones that have been installed so far)
La Sagrada Familia is kind of like what Hogwarts might look like if Dr. Seuss designed it. I'd go on describing it, but it's impossible to do it justice. In fact, before we came to Spain, I'd seen pictures of the inside and outside of the building, and I was still completely blown away by it in person.
Amazingly, as huge and beautiful as it currently is, they still have an estimated 26 years of construction left, but 1 tour guide I asked said he thinks it probably won't be finished until the 2060s.

This is only one facade of the church, but the others are partially covered by scaffolding

Those green and orange lights? That's what the ceilings and floors look like when the suns shining through the windows

After spending a few hours walking in and around, we headed towards Park Guell, an enormous park overlooking most of Barcelona which famously has statues, buildings and bridges designed by Gaudi. Best of all, it's totally free!
From the closest metro stop, we actually had to walk up an enormous hill, but pretty awesomely, there are escalators that take you up almost the whole way. The park is really big, full of twisted paths, and with no clear objective in mind we wandered around for a while. We eventually found the house that Gaudi used to live in when he lived in the park, which was the only attraction that cost any money. We had a look inside, but it wasn't really anything to write home about.

We headed from Park Guell to Las Ramblas, which is basically like a much bigger version of Ben Yehudah.
 Before we came to Spain, we were told that Kosher food is even harder to find and buy here than in Italy, so we'd brought extra pasta and other food from Italy hoping it would last. Amazingly, when we landed in the airport and got our bags, the 1st person outside was a lady handing out flyers for a Kosher restaurant and mini-market type situation.
Anyway, the mini-market was right off of Las Ramblas, so we headed over to check it out. We stocked up on some essentials like bread, cheese and Heinz ketchup. We then headed over to a different Kosher restaurant (not connected to the market) also on Las Ramblas. The food was pretty good, Chaya got a big juicy burger with fries, while I went with the more traditionally Spanish dish of "paella."
Paella is very popular dish throughout Spain. Traditionally, paella is rice, vegetables and shrimp or other seafood, served hot in the same frying pan it was cooked in. In this case, my paella was with chicken breast, and it was delicious. The menu also contained a Jewish take on "tapas," which is another famous Spanish dish. Tapas are basically starters, which can be more or less anything.
We learned that originally tapas, or "top/lid/cover" was a piece of stale hard bread that people used to use instead of a cork, to protect their wine from flies. Eventually someone decided to snack on that bread. And then someone else decided to snack on that bread but with a tomato spread, or sausage on top. And so on and so forth. Nowadays tapas can be anything from bruschetta with ham, to roasted potatoes with spicy sauce, to squid on toast to something called "dogfish." Some restaurants have almost 200 tapas on their menu, mostly ranging from 2-5 euro each.
Anyway, the Kosher restaurant we ate at had like 5 tapas to choose from, from 6-8 euro each, so we passed.
We walked home and passed some beautiful fountains and more buildings designed by Gaudi just scattered around.

The plan for Thursday was to spend the morning in the city and head out in the early afternoon to the 2nd biggest water park in Europe, which happens to be in Barcelona. Unfortunately, we both woke up feeling pretty sick, so we quickly scrapped the idea. We decided to stay as local as possible, and given the location of the apartment we were renting, that wasn't too bad of an idea. From the balcony in our apartment we could see Camp Nou, the stadium of Barcelona's famous football team. (That's soccer for all you yanks)
We went over in the morning to walk around, take some pictures and check out their ridiculously large and overpriced gift shop, featuring the usual posters, jerseys, and hats, but also plaques with pieces of turf from the stadium, Barcelona potato chips and Wine.
 

By far the strangest (and in my opinion best bang-for-your-buck) item we found were little statues of each player taking poops.

I uh...kid you not....

This was actually something we saw a lot of in Spain. Apparently, one of the biggest signs of respect that can be afforded to someone is to have a "caganer" made of them. Throughout Spain we saw these statues made of celebrities, artists, the Pope and Darth Vader. Unclear what's going on, but we'll just proceed...

Before things get too Messi...Ey-Yo!

 We didn't do the stadium experience tour (23 euros each) but got a cool experience walking around. After Camp Nou we headed over to the Picasso Museum. Now, you may assume that the Picasso Museum is a museum about the life of Picasso featuring many of his original paintings, but you couldn't be more wrong. No I'm just kidding, that's exactly what it is! We got to see some pretty famous works, and learned a lot of interesting facts about Picasso's life.
After the Picasso museum, we partook in another extremely popular Spanish tradition, the Siesta.
For those who don't necessarily know, a "siesta" is a nap. While we were here we learned that the Spanish have a slightly different daily schedule than what we're used to.
Hearing it from a born and bred Spaniard, the daily schedule of a working adult in most of Spain is as follows.

Light breakfast of coffee or toast with garlic and tomato spread
9:30: Start work
11ish: Snack/beer/wine break
2:30 Leave work, go home, eat a major meal for lunch, and then take a siesta, maybe 15 minutes, maybe 45 minutes.
5:00: head back to work for a few hours
9-11: Eat dinner at some point

It makes for a really interesting society when some stores might be randomly closed from 2-4 p.m, but open until 11 at night and some restaurants won't serve dinner before 9:30 or 10.
 A guy we met in Barcelona told us that he was out the night before in a club. People started slowly streaming in at around 3, the place got full at around 4, and most people went home at around 8 in the morning. And that was just a random Wednesday night.

 Anyway, we pulled a "when in Rome..." and took a nice nap, ate dinner and headed out again.
I had heard that there was a festival that was starting that night in the neighborhood of "Gracia."
It was unclear what exactly the festival was all about, but basically every year there is some theme and the people who live on every block decorate their street in a competition of best decorated street.
This, in addition to random street performers, concerts and shows made for a really fun and interesting night.

After enjoying the festival, we went over to the "Magic Fountain of Montjuic."
We went not really knowing what would be there but were completely blown away. At least 5,000 people were crowded around an enormous fountain, which was beautifully lit up and choreographed to different famous classical pieces. The pictures don't do it any justice, but it was really really cool.

 We finished up our night by stumbling upon what looked like a huge arena, and was called "an arena," but turned out to be a huge mall. Either way, we took the elevator to the roof and got to see a really cool 360 degree view of the city.

All this from less than 2 days in Barcelona. There's way more, but I'm gonna just have to break it up into 2. Hope you're all okay with that!
Grathias!
Chaya and Zvi