Pueblos blancos

I ended up leaving Granada a day early because I wanted to see Ronda and the white villages, and the only day I could arrange a tour was on Saturday.  So after my long day of travel on Wednesday, I had an unnecessarily long one again on Friday.  One of those silly travel problems.  I couldn't buy a train ticket online because you must print it out - you cannot print it at the station - and I had no printer.  I couldn't buy a bus ticket online because they only acceot Spanish credit cards.  So I just went to the bus station at 4 and ... the 4:30 bus was sold out.  I backtracked to the train station and got a ticket for 5:30, but had over an hour wait and the train took a little later than its scheduled three hours.  With the taxi ride to my apartment in Seville, this simple three hour trip took over six hours.  Ah, travel.

It turns out that my apartment is just off the Alameda de Hercules.  An alameda is a tree lined street, but this one is more like a concrete park six blocks long and a block wide.  And by the time I put down my suitcase and went out for a walk at 10 PM, I was just in time for dinner.  All of the restaurants and bars on the Alameda were hopping.  I took this picture a week later when I returned from Cordoba in daylight.

The next morning when I met the driver/guide, it turned out that there were four of us - besides me, a family of three that included fairly large parents and a skinny college girl.  Our vehicle was a teeny tiny European car and since I was alone (and first to be picked up) I got the front seat and the three of them squeezed in the back.  Not the best arrangements for them.

From the guidebooks I understood that white houses hung off the side of the mountain.  Not at all.  The villages are more like Swiss villages nestled at the foot of mountains, but all of the houses are white.  It is beautiful rolling countryside, and then every so often we would come to a pueblo blanco.  The first was Zahara.  But first we stopped at a random castle left over from the war with the Moors.

Zahara from a distance

Zahara up close

Zahara is very small with only a few thousand inhabitants, most of whom are elderly.  The streets are all steep and there are few services - no schools or hospital.  It reminded me of Venice:  absolutely beautiful but impossible to live there.

The guidebooks also said the roads were narrow and winding.  That was another understatement.  Our guide was not a very good guide, but he was an excellent driver, taking us on roads that I could never drive on with simply incredible views.  Hard to tell from the picture, but this is a one lane road with switchback all the way up the mountain, and of course there is two way traffic, but not a lot of it.  There were several bicyclists too.  What a great road for biking and what beautiful views.

After lunch in another pueblo blanco, we went to Ronda, a city built on two sides of a giant gorge.  Needless to say, the Romans got there first and built a bridge.  In the 1600, the Spanish built a bridge across a lower part, but beginning in 1751, they built the New Bridge which crosses at the high point and joins the two sides of the city.  Pretty incredible.

Our guide drove us down a ridiculously steep and twisty gravel road to see the view up.  Then we took a walking tour of the city ending on top of the bridge for the view down.  This is the view from the bottom of the twisty road and those people are walking to a starting point to climb.  The building on the left side is a hotel.

For me, the incredible thing about Ronda is that they built the city on both sides of the ravine with a New Bridge over two hundred years ago.  In our free time, I took a tour of one of the highlights of Ronda, the first bullring.  I'll never go to a bull fight, but the history was pretty interesting.

After a two hour drive back to Seville, I settled into my apartment and will start school tomorrow.

Granada

This was a loooong travel day.  I left DC at 10 at night and arrived in London at 10 in the morning with just over an hour to make my connection to Madrid.  Although the passport control line was very long, they have a special one for people with connections of an hour or less.  What a concept.  I made it to the departure terminal before they even had posted the gate assignment.  Piece of cake.  I had bought a separate ticket to Granada from Madrid with a three hour layover in case there was a problem.  I thought the price of the ticket was pretty cheap, only about $50.  But when I went to print out my boarding pass, they charged me $35 for my luggage.  Not such a deal.  I have a flight from Madrid to Fez next week on Ryanair that cost $24 for me and $35 for my suitcase.  It is a bizarre world.  Anyway, I got to Granada and into my apartment by 9:30 that night.  It was a loooong day.

The next morning I took a walking tour of the sights of central Granada.  Isabella and Ferdinand treated Granada as their home and met with Columbus here.  Obviously, the most famous site in Granada is the Alhambra, but everything else is Isabella, Ferdinand, and those incredible Christians who defeated the Moors finally in 1492 in Granada, the final holdout.  It was a big year for Ferdinand and Isabella; they helped Columbus discover the Caribbean, they ended the two century war with the Moors, and they expelled the Jews.  Go, Christians.

Ok, I'll just say this just once, now.  Every guide in Spain proudly shows off the Juderia, the Jewish quarter, of his city.  Every guide in Spain tells proudly how three religions lived side by side in peace.  I heard this the first time several years ago in Toledo, the "City of Three Religions."  It is a crock.  The Christians fought the Moors for two centuries over the entire southern half of the country before finally getting rid of them.  During that same time period, they persecuted the Jews.  The Crusaders brought the Holy War to Toledo in 1210 (yep, three religions living together in peace).  In 1391 an anti-Jewish mob killed 4,000 Jews in Seville.  A wave of violence spread across the country.  Over 2,000 Jews were murdered in Cordoba.  The first auto da fe (burning at the stake as a test of faith) took place in Seville in 1481.

I am going to enjoy my time in Andalusia (southern Spain), but the only historical sites to visit are leftovers from the Moors or massive and expensive monuments to all those santos and santas and those glorious Catholic rulers.  I'll try to keep my attitude in check and stick to my Spanish lessons.

Back to Granada.  I visited the Alhambra on my first afternoon and it is incredible.  The style is ornate yet peaceful.  I read about stalactite ceilings before I came and didn't know what they were.  They drop down to create a 3-D composition.  It is all amazing.  The rulers took it over for a few centuries and then let it go into disrepair.  (I'm not going to comment on how those Christians couldn't even maintain someone else's perfection.  Not going to do it.)  But it got restored and it is incredible.











I just can't do this justice with pictures.

Granada was a nice enough city to walk around in with narrow lanes and interesting architecture, but once I had seen the Alhambra, I was ready to move on.

Babies

The theme of this year's trip is not warm weather but babies.  First I went to Virginia and stayed with Rachel, Joe, and Baby Bobby.  Needless to say, Baby Bobby (Baby is his first name) is very cute.

 

I call this one a "selfie" not because Baby Bobby took it himself but because Baby Bobby feeds himself his own bottle with his two chubby little fists.  I just hold him.

The next week Beth went back to work and I played nanny for Baby Norah for a week, sending Beth pictures every half hour.  They do look quite similar but I think Beth would have noticed if I repeated a picture.  I won't post them all.  Needless to say, Norah (somehow Baby is not her first name - no alliteration) is very cute.

I made a family dinner one night, so Steve got a chance to double fist the two babies.

Not to leave anyone out, the day before I left, I spent a day with Haley and at one point gave her a bath.

Needless to say, Haley is very cute.















I also attended her holiday concert where she was clearly the star of the show.  She's the one in the striped shirt in the middle making sure everyone else is paying attention.

And that was the first two weeks of my winter trip.  Oh, the week I watched Norah, I took three steps out of the house to take this picture of my car.  Otherwise, I never left the house for a week.

I love my children and grandchildren, but wish they lived someplace warmer.  I may have to visit them at other times of the year.  Now finally, off to Spain.

One night in Bangkok

Really I spent three nights in Bangkok, but no one wrote a song titled Three Nights in Bangkok.

Chiang Mai was a pleasant vacation to end the trip.  Besides reading poolside and my one bike ride, I also attended a cooking class one day.  Both the ingredients and the techniques are quite different, and in the class, you have to make your own curry paste with a mortar and pestle.

On my last night in Chiang Mai, I had dinner with Mike and Barbara Ullman and their friends who live here.  Another small world story.

Then it was on to Bangkok for my final three days.   On Sunday I went to the huge weekend market in the morning, and then did a bike tour.  Although Bangkok is a huge city, there are back alleyways, canals, and paths everywhere.  We rode through the back alleys of Chinatown (the second largest in the world after San Francisco) and then took a canal boat ride followed by more biking along the canals.

On Monday I visited the Royal Palace and several temples and pagodas.  I took one more picture of me with the (born on) Monday Buddha.  I have learned on this trip that you can never have too many buddhas.

Bangkok is known for its street food, but it was too daunting for me.  There are street restaurants and kiosks everywhere, but I can't tell what most of the foods are, much less how to eat them.  So this morning I signed up for a street food tour.   I was the only one on the tour, so I have a wonderful guide all to myself, and I stopped at every kiosk to ask her what the unidentifiable foods were.  All I can say is ... they eat a lot of strange foods here.  I'm sorry I didn't take this tour first so I could have tried more foods on my own.  She also told me where the best pad thai in Bangkok is, so on my last night here, that is what I had for dinner.

I visited one museum in the afternoon and then decided to walk to the pad thai restaurant.  I can't understand anything that is being said, but I think I found the demonstrations.  I saw tent cities in a few locations, a parade of protesters, and some speakers.  I think the demonstrations are an ongoing thing, so no one seems to be very worked up about them.

In Bangkok, I was hot and uncomfortable.  Since I have a really high tolerance for heat, I think it must be really miserable here.

I am flying out tonight at midnight, so this may be my last post.  I have an eleven hour layover in Tokyo tomorrow and hope to spend half the day sightseeing, but I'll be home before I could post anything, so that seems a bit silly.  At least the weather in Tokyo is cooperating; it is not freezing cold.  Now I just have to see if I can get out of the airport, change money, get into the city, not get lost, and get back to the airport.

And that's it for Southeast Asia 2013 - 2014.

Look right

Now I know why all the cars in Burma have the steering wheel on the right even though they drive on the right.  They are acquiring used cars in Thailand where they do drive on the left.  I am now "on vacation" in Chiang Mai, a very pleasant city in northern Thailand.  There are, of course, several temples to see here (they call a temple a wat in Thailand), but mostly Chiang Mai is a center for outdoor activities:  elephant riding, visiting tigers, trekking to native villages, zip lining.  So I am enjoying my favorite outdoor activity:  sitting poolside in my resort hotel and reading books.  My main goal for the week is to not kill myself crossing the street.  So every time I step off a curb, I say out loud, "look right," like a toddler who has to narrate his activities.  Then I sneak a glance back to the left because I can't quite believe that everyone drives on the wrong side of the road.

On Tuesday I tore myself away from the pool long enough to take a bike ride to the sights of Chiang Mai.  I thought I should at least take one day to see the city and orient myself.  Again, my main goal was not to kill myself while riding on the left.  Thailand has more cars than the other places I have been in Southeast Asia, so it was a bit tricky.

My tour was with a company called Mountain Biking Chiang Mai.  It turns out that the tallest mountain in Thailand, over 7,500 feet, is outside of town.  This company drives everyone to the top, drops them off with their bikes, and picks up the pieces at the bottom.  So everyone is getting knee pads and helmets and gloves.  We ask what we need for the city tour and they say, try to stay awake.  Hmm ... even the company was not excited about my tour.  There were just two of us, a Dutch man and me, with the guide.  The Dutch man thought the tour included local villages and the guide was bored with temples, so after a few perfunctory stops at temples in town, we went off script and on a lovely ride outside of town to a lake.

It turns out that the guide, Jay, is a sponsored rider in biking events.  Last week there was a race up the mountain, and he won it, riding forty five kilometers with 6,500 feet of elevation gain in two and a half hours.  Interestingly, the race was not publicized outside of the biking world, so the bikers had to ride around cars and buses on the single road up the mountain.  Eventually, the cars and buses got stopped by the bike traffic and tourists who had gone up for the view got stuck in a jam for hours.  Just another day in Thailand.

Like my son, Steve, Jay trains before work every day and again after work, since the ride he took with us was hardly a workout for him.  Unlike my son, Steve, Jay has no discernible personality, so while the ride was lovely, there wasn't much guiding.  Jay is 28 and unmarried, in large part because, in his own words, his bike is his girlfriend.  She's probably talks as much as he does.  No complaints.  It was a nice ride in rolling countryside on a hot, sunny day to a lake.  We ate lunch at the lake in a restaurant where the tables are in individual cabanas on the water.  And I took my obligatory Claremonster Racing in Thailand picture in front of the Buddha for people who were born on a Monday (which I was).  I also realized that although I rode in both places, I forgot to take pictures of Claremonster Racing in Laos and Claremonster Racing in Myanmar.  I'm debating between going back and Photoshop.

Myanmar sights and oddities

We spent a second day seeing the sights of Mandalay by boat and horse cart.  We visited a beautiful 200 year old monastery made of carved teak wood, built on teak pillars.  But I have to say that the monks there are not very egalitarian.

We also went to an elite modern monastery.  In general, any boy who wants to be a monk can do so, but at this monastery, the boys have to be referred by their teachers.  They study Buddhist texts in the original Pali language but no secular studies (kind of like a yeshivah).  Because they study so much, the boys do not have to go out every day for food.  Instead, the monastery provides some meals.  We were there in the late afternoon and a man was stir frying in the biggest wok I have ever seen with a paddle the size of a boat oar.  Also, there were piles of sliced vegetables that I knew would drive Joe crazy.

From Mandalay we flew to Inle Lake, a huge lake known for its floating gardens and the fishermen's distinctive style of rowing.  They need two hands for fishing, so they row with one leg while perched on the other.

I had already seen a lot of floating villages which usually means houses built on stilts or sometimes houses on pontoons.  But at Inle Lake there are real floating gardens.  There is some plant that has large balls filled with air.  They put down a bamboo frame and cover it with these plants.  Then they can put soil on top of that and grow plants.  The gardens are solid enough for people to walk on.  I saw this but don't believe it.  Also, you wonder where some of the English names come from.

From Inle Lake we flew back to Yangon for one more day to walk around and see the colonial architecture.  It was a very packed nine days in Myanmar.  Here are a few more random things that I saw.

Yangon taxis.  The driver on the right is resting in the passenger's seat.

Me at Bagan

Village children

How you get oil from peanuts.

The final word from the monks.