Castles, Chalkboards & Medusas

September 11th – September 15th, 2024

In classic Hughie tradition, I’ve left it until day 37 of our trip to make a start on typing up my thoughts on our trip. I do have a few notes scribbled down in a little notebook, but they’re overwhelmingly focused on food, so I guess it’s time to try to go through a recount of some of the highlights and interesting insights from our three weeks in Spain. Luckily Rachael has made a habit of documenting just about all the facts around where we’ve been and the stuff we’ve been spending our time doing, so all I have to do is refer to that and reminisce, wishing that I was back in Spain instead of being stuck here at the bottom of the South American continent with bugger all to do!

I think I should make a note that I really didn’t have too many expectations coming into Spain, the only real thought I’d put into this first leg of our journey was, again, completely focused on food. I’ll dedicate an entire piece to my thoughts on the edible aspect of the Iberian Peninsula at a later date, so we can all look forward to my thoughts on Spanish ham and why all other ham around the world should be immediately thrown in the bin because it doesn’t even come close to how good this stuff is. 

How friggen far away is Europe? We had a stopover in Hong Kong in the middle of the night, so heading to Spain I witnessed the world’s longest sunrise. Due to me not being able to sleep on planes I had the great fortune of looking out the window and watching the world try desperately to turn to day for hours and hours on end. I think I was watching what I thought was Deadpool 3, only to realise at the final boss battle that I’d actually seen this movie before and it was in fact Deadpool 2. I know you can’t really be that productive on a flight but that has to be one of the least productive experiences of my life, at least the food on the plane was good. All jokes aside, I’ve never been happier to welcome the start of a new day after nearly 30 odd hours of no sleep. We’d finally collected our bags and Rachael’s wedding dress and made our way to the exit of the airport, only to be stopped mere metres from the door and asked what was in the bag obviously containing a wedding dress. “A wedding dress!” I cheerfully replied, which was a mistake. “Welcome to Spain Señor, that’ll be $650AUD for tax on that dress because it only has a single time use or some bullshit and I’m from customs, and because I’m feeling nice I won’t charge you two or three times that amount!”. Now I can think of a few different ways to wriggle out of this conundrum, but at the time I was caught so off guard that I had no English words, let alone Spanish words to try and help, so we paid up and walked out. I can also see now that this was in some way a bit of foreshadowing regarding the financial aspect of our three weeks in this lovely country, we’ll get to that.

The next challenge came a few steps out the door when we couldn’t figure out where to go for our bus that was supposed to take us to our rental car. It was only after my very first interaction with a man who spoke zero English who was directing the crowd to different buses did I realise that my 800+ day Duolingo streak amounted to absolutely shit all because I literally understood not half a word of what he was saying to me. Let’s fast forward a few hours to me sitting in my rental car in the bottom of some dingy as underground parking and trying to wrap my head around the gear stick being on the opposite side. Despite my pure embarrassment, I had to walk back into the crowded rental office to ask the bloke behind the counter how on earth you put the car into reverse. Let’s fast forward again to Rachael directing me through five lane roundabouts in Madrid with traffic lights at each exit. The lanes in city centres here seem to be more of a suggestion than a strict rule, and the same can be said for blinkers. I’m genuinely amazed that I didn’t cry at any point of our half hour trip from the car rental to our accommodation. Another tear inducing aspect of driving in Spain is that a lot of the roads are one way and extremely narrow. Here’s a photo of our car and the driveway we had to enter to get to our parking at the first place we stayed. 

I was more than happy to leave the car in the underground parking for a few days and cruise around Madrid on foot. This first stint in Madrid mostly consisted of walking around for hours and hours on end looking for the cheapest/best places to eat and drink at. We found a few really good coffee shops, which I definitely wasn’t expecting, and found that the overwhelming majority of places that we ate or drank at were very, very expensive. Overpriced, underwhelming food I’ll delve into later. Here’s a great photo of me, very jet lagged in front of the oldest restaurant in the world, which opened in 1725!

Madrid definitely had a very magical charm about it. We both loved being in this city, there’s just something about it. The smaller plazas (squares) dotted around the city serve as great little meeting spots for locals to laugh over cervezas at all hours of the day, and the bigger plazas are full of tourists taking photos of giant monuments of famous Spaniards on horseback. It was annoying, but I kind of liked the bloke on the street outside our window yelling four hours on end “Oro! Oro! Compramos, vendemos oro!” (Gold! Gold! We buy, we sell gold!”). 

It was here in Madrid I fell in love with chalkboards. My newest passion is walking around cities reading each and every chalkboard we stumble across to see which deals on food and drinks are on offer. Love me a chalkboard. The next chalkboards in our trip would be found in Valencia, a four hour drive East of Madrid.

Leaving Madrid we were both surprised by just how dry the landscape here is. Madrid is literally in the middle of a desert, and it’s very, very flat, with the majority of vegetation being made up of olive trees. It made me question why Madrid is even the capital if it’s in such a random spot without any natural waterways like pretty much every other big city all over the world.

Some quick googling taught me that Madrid was only declared the capital in 1561, and at the time it was only the 10th most populated city in all of Spain. It turns out, at the height of the Spanish Empire, when Spain controlled most of the Americas, the Caribbean, half of Italy, many North African cities, the Philipines, Portugal and parts of France, Germany and the Netherlands, the country had no capital. What better place to stick your capital than the centre of the motherland, where attacks from the Mediterranean or the Atlantic were less of a worry, and where there is already a major waterway to allow for easier internal trade and transportation – Toledo?! Toledo was the fifth most populated Spanish city at the time, but due to Toledo’s ancient power centres of noble houses and religious leaders, King Phillip II decided that a smaller city with fewer rivals vying for power would be better suited as Spain’s capital. That and his father, Emperor Charles V (who spoke no Spanish. At least I learnt a couple words before coming here.), was faced with a revolt from a powerful Toledo house. I’m sure there’s a lot more to it, but that satisfies my brief hunger for knowledge while I instead turn my attention to what I’ll be eating for dinner in about 6 hours.

My favourite part of driving between cities in Spain, is that no matter where you are, you can usually look off into the distance at a hill, or closer to the coast a mountain, and see old ruins of watch towers and castles built during the Islamic rule of Spain between the years 700 and 1500. Something about the fact that the Iberian Peninsula was at least partially occupied by Muslims for nearly 800 years completely baffles me, and looking up at those crumbling structures really made me realise that I was in a place with such a rich, long history.

I love it. I love old shit. I certainly wasn’t prepared to be so awestruck by old buildings and architecture, but our few weeks here finished with me longing for more time to wander old cobblestone streets (in search of a good chalkboard) and gaze into the distance from the top of old castle walls, like this here in Cuenca.

Valencia definitely satisfied my thirst for the old, and while our time here was short, it definitely exceeded my expectations. While there were a LOT of tourists, Rachael and myself included, that didn’t take away from the magic of hearing the church bells ring all over the city, in unison as we stepped into Plaza de la Reina.

Beers and tapas in Valencia were fun, and walking through the massive park that wraps around the northern part of the city centre was great. There were even kids training for rugby which I found very cool, as well as some sort of African drum group, people doing zumba, and a generous smattering of very nice dogs. It was here in Valencia that I’d made my first proper Spanish speaking interaction with locals while buying ingredients for the Bocadillos (sandwiches for the uncultured) I’d be making for lunch from Mercat de Russafa. This definitely helped to boost my confidence, and made me realise that as long as I’m making an effort to speak the language, I’ll be warmly received with a smile, and not shrugged off as some moron who can’t string half a sentence together.

After this market, we thought we’d walk through the main touristy market, Mercat Central, to see what all the fuss is about. Do not go. Chalk and cheese, mí amigos. Just by walking an extra 20 minutes out of our way we were able to have a super positive, and what felt like a very authentic market experience in Mercat de Russafa, compared to the absolute atrocity that was the Mercat Central, where every five minutes the loudspeakers would remind people in three different languages not to touch anything. It was overwhelmingly congested, and it felt like I was more in a museum than a market. Half tempted to pick up an apple to bite into and see if it was even real, we decided to make a bee line through to the opposite exit, and tick that one off the list. Nice looking building though.

On our last morning in Valencia we turned a corner into a nice old square in front of an old church, and there was a chick playing a steel tongue drum. I don’t think I’d ever heard a steel tongue drum before, but listening to it reverberate off the stone walls all around us was magic and really made me fall in love with the instrument. It’s definitely very high on my list for the first thing to purchase when I have my own address again.

Overall, Valencia was somehow both a very chill and very lively city, and, keeping in theme with most of our Spain trip, I really wish we could have spent longer here. Next stop, Tarragona!

We definitely jagged this one, turning up to Tarragona in the middle of its Santa Tecla festival, the biggest festival of the year. We had accommodation in a beautiful little apartment right in the centre of town, and although it was quite a walk from the closest car park, it was prime position for the festivities that were to come later that night. One of the main attractions to Tarragona are the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre down by the beach, which was built nearly 1800 years ago! It could seat nearly 15,000 people and was home to gladiator fights, as well as fights with wild animals who’s cages would be hoisted up from the lower floors with a pulley system.

On the way back from the amphitheatre we walked through an enormous crowd of people singing folk songs to beating drums while downing beers. There was a definite big energy in anticipation of the night to come. After we’d eaten our delicious dinner in our apartment we walked towards the sound of music and people, without really knowing what we were in for.

We rounded a corner to see a giant, two man hippogriff costume type thing with firecrackers all over it, ready to be set alight. Pyrotechnic looking blokes would walk up and light the fuses and the hippogriff would dance around in circles while the firecrackers whizzed and cracked. As cool as this was, it was about to get better as we followed the crowd down a narrow alleyway that was filled with more curious creatures. Among which included a giant prawn, a knight riding a dragon and a grasshopper, just to name a few, which all had firecrackers going off all over them, whizzing around in circles and throwing sparks everywhere. This was ridiculously loud in the alleyway, but by the time we got down to the main street I no longer felt like my eardrums were about to burst. It was hilarious watching the local kids with cowboy hats stand in a line in front of whichever creature’s turn it was to let off the firecrackers, because they’d stand directly in the sparks and dance the can-can! Some sort of weird tradition, I’m all for it. 

We rounded off the night watching a Catalonian folk band play in another square, who were really good despite the fact I understood literally no words of what they were singing or talking about. Which brings me to another couple of important parts of Spain which I was completely unaware of before coming here, brace yourselves – war, civil unrest and conflicting cultural identities!

Catalonia is an autonomous region of Spain in the north-east, that borders France and Andorra, and stretches down as far as Valencia to the south. It originally formed in 810 as the country of Barcelona, and grew to encompass Aragon to the West and, eventually through marriage, became part of Castille (most of modern day Spain) in 1469. After which comes a history of conflict during the Franco-Spanish war in the mid 1600’s, and more wars of Spanish succession in the early 1700’s. During most of this time, Catalonia wanted nothing to do with greater Spain, and sought protection under the French, thus briefly becoming their own republic. In 1713 however, the crown of Aragon sided against Catalonia at the end of the War of Spanish Succession, and it was swallowed by the rest of Spain. During the Franco dictatorship between 1936 and 1975, Catalan self-government and the use of the Catalan language was banned, until Franco’s death in 1975 when Spain transitioned to become a democracy. In 2017, the Catalan parliament declared independence following a referendum which the Spanish State would have none of, instead locking politicians up and exiling many more. It’s pretty sad that this part of the world that has historically felt so strongly about their ancestry and their place in Europe has to suppress their identity because some big bois in the desert want their taxes. It makes me mad but also Madrid rules and I was only here for a couple of weeks, wait till we get to South America, then we can talk atrocities. Jokes aside, this is quite a hot topic in modern day Spain, understandably, and I wish I knew more about this prior to visiting Catalonia. Instead of apologising to people in Spanish that I was only learning the language, and to asking them to talk slower, I should have been trying to communicate in Catalan, which probably would have been better received. Next time!

On a lighter note, there are a lot of jellyfish in the mediterranean! I finally had my first swim in a town called Tossa de Mar, about an hour north of Barcelona. The water here is warm, like bath warm, which is quite nice but it gets more gross the longer you think about it. A kind gentleman told us in Spanish that there were plenty of ‘Medusas’ in the water and we shouldn’t swim. Not understanding most of what he was saying to us, he drew a nice jellyfish in the sand. I thanked him for his advice and proceeded to walk 10 metres up the beach where I was sure there would be no Medusas, turns out I was right! 

Tossa de Mar was home to the Romans during the 1st century, and during the 12th century a big castle and castle wall was put up which served as protection from pirates. Although very touristy, this town was cool. It was a great combination of beach town and very old history, with plenty of bars and restaurants.

It was around this time that I finally started taking advantage of the insanely cheap cans of beer in the fridges at the small general stores, instead of buying ridiculously priced pints while out and about. Tucking a couple (6) cans under my wing and heading up to the rooftop of our accommodation, we watched the bay welcome the night and had a few laughs, ate some olives, and limbered up for yet another lengthy walk around town in search of chalkboards and the best food with the optimal flavour to price ratio. 

This first week in Spain went insanely fast. By this point we’ve definitely realised that we’re trying to see too much too quickly, but these next three days were far more relaxing as we stayed in one spot which not only had a Michelin star restaurant, but it was itself a resort with a Michelin key. In the small country town of Torrent, about an hour and a half north of Barcelona, was our wedding accommodation – Mas de Torrent. More on our wedding and the rest of our time in Spain and Mallorca in the next instalment, which will hopefully be sooner than 37 days from now.

Hughie.