Fall in Reus

    It's not quite cold when the sun goes down these days but the temperature does drop to a point at which a sweater is advisable - not mandatory but advisable.
    Welcome to fall in Reus.
    I've lived in some reasonably cold places in my life: Ogdensburg, NY was one such. My brothers and I could literally (and did) ice skate to school on the side streets back in the days when Ike was President and I had this gigantic crush on Susan Amo (but never told her that...) Buffalo could also get pretty cold starting in November... so cold that we used to joke that if summer came on a weekend we'd hold a barbecue.
    Reus, however, is not like that. Could be that the nearby mountains block the coldest winds from here or maybe the fact we're just a few miles from the Mediterranean has something to do with it. I'm not sure why Reus isn't a cold place and, to be truthful, I don't really care. I just know that it's a pretty pleasant place to live and I'm good with that.
    Fall here does come with its own traditions. All over the city, for example, you'll find men - often dressed in traditional costumes - roasting chestnuts that they cook over flaming barrels and sell for a couple Euros a bag. The pastry shops also feature different kinds of delights - one, for example, makes marzipan mushrooms. I'm told there's a reason for that, something about mushrooms being particularly good at this time of year when combined with certain types of food. I'm not a particular fan of marzipan, but the mushrooms they fashion out of it are really beautiful.
    Fall here also means a change in fashion and footwear: Shorts are replaced with long pants and skirts, sandals with boots. Not so very different from anywhere else in the world with the possible exception that, because it never really does get cold here, there's an absence of fur - both fake and real.
    The cooler weather doesn't seem to bother the street performers, who are out in force every evening and on into the night although I have noticed that folks who watch them are now holding cups of coffee instead of soft drinks and bottles of beer.
    I like fall here but I'm going to miss some of it. I'm leaving Monday for a few days, going back to Florida to take care of some business and visit with friends then heading on up to Ohio and Buffalo to visit with family and more friends. My flight takes me through Frankfort and Charlotte before I land in Sarasota. Not sure about the return flight yet: Aeroflot will get me back to Barcelona cheaper than any other airline but I have to first land in Moscow in late November... maybe not. I mean, upstate New York was cold but Moscow might be at a whole other level of frigid.

It's fall in Reus and that means hot roasted chestnuts are on sale all over the city.

They look like mushrooms but they're actually made of marzipan.

Madrid: A few final notes (and pictures)

    Madrid is a great place to spend a long weekend.
    It's probably also a great place to live; I have friends who live there and love it but, as for me, I prefer Reus. Don't get me wrong, Madrid has a lot to offer but it's a capital city and in that respect it's not a whole lot different from Washington, London or Paris in my opinion.
    My preferences aside, it's a wonderful city with a lot to offer the casual traveler as well as those who choose to live there.
    For instance, the renovated San Miguel Market, not far from the Plaza Mayor, is a place where you can buy fresh food for the dinner table or stand around and eat. (I had some great oysters there but passed on the jellied eel.) On a Friday night it is one of THE places in Madrid to go for something quick to eat, meet other folks, do a little networking and drink as much wine as you can without falling down. It's crowded, noisy and fun.
    If you're an art lover the Prado is one of the world's finest museums, but don't pass up the Reina Sofia, which is fairly new and often overlooked.
    Feel like taking your sweetheart for a rowboat ride? You can do that on the lake at Buon Retiro Park and at other parks as well. Just want to take a stroll? Madrid is a wonderful place for those who want to walk around and just absorb the sights and sounds of one of the world's great cities.
    Like I said, a great place to spend a long weekend...

Madrid is Spain's capital city so, of course, there are an awful lot of granite and marble buildings and that can make it pretty gray... however, there are some folks who have opted to put a little color in their lives. 

This statue is famous in Madrid as a place where men and women meet when they are going out on their first date. I'm not sure why that is but it's supposed to be good luck to meet there.

These folks couldn't paint their building lavender but they did what they could to add a little color to their lives.

This sculpture is in the middle of a restaurant. Art, apparently, is where you find it.

This little girl volunteered to dance with some performers at Buon Retiro Park and she did pretty well but she needed a little help doing a handstand.

A dad and mom took their daughters for an afternoon ride in a rowboat at Casa de Campo Park.

The Royal Palace... it's huge (I couldn't fit the whole thing in my lens...)

Want a souvenir photo? There are a lot of guys walking around in matador costumes who will pose with you for a Euro or two.

The Prado is one of the world's great museum but don't overlook the Reina Sofia.

A street performer who did a slow motion act as though he were playing tennis.

Apartment balconies tend to be small in Madrid but that doesn't stop some people from taking full advantage of what space they have.

One of the fountains in Buon Retiro Park.

The Plaza Mayor has one of the most beautiful buildings in Madrid making up one side of it.

You can also take your sweetheart for a rowboat ride on the lake at Buon Retiro Park.

I'm not sure what this guy (I think it was a guy) was supposed to be but if you dropped some change into his cup he began shaking and doing this really incredible whistling thing... sounded a lot like a very musical, but very demented, bird...

Madrid 2.0

    One of the things I used to enjoy most about going to Barcelona was strolling down the ramblas to watch what seemed to be literally dozens of street performers hard at work.
    Some juggled.
    Some posed as living statues.
    Some sang, a few danced, and now and then I'd run across a magician.
    Sadly, the politicians who run Barcelona have banned them from the ramblas for reasons that are still not very clear to me. I can only assume that, like politicians everywhere, they felt they had to do something to justify their salaries... even if it was something stupid.
    Happily, however, Madrid's political leaders have not done that and in every park, major plaza and along some of the more traveled side streets you can find street performers of almost every description hard at work earning a few Euros a day.
    Take, for example, the guy in the Plaza Mayor who looked like he was barely holding onto a motorcycle during a cross-country race. His makeup made it look like he and his motorcycle were covered in mud and he was holding onto the handlebars while his legs and body looked as though they were floating in mid-air. I can't imagine the muscle control that took.
    He was not the only impressive performer out on the streets of Madrid, however.
    Far from it.
    One of my favorites was the scrub woman. I honestly mistook her for a statue as she knelt on a gray street corner and it wasn't until, as I was taking her picture, I saw the very slightest movement in one of her hands that I knew she was, well, real. When you dropped a coin in her bucket, she dutifully scrubbed the floor in front of her. It was so cool that even Josep was impressed, and not much impresses your average 13-year-old boy these days.
    Another favorite was the guy who played wineglasses that were filled to varying degrees with water. I listened to him play "La Vie en Rose" and a few other classics while enjoying a cup of coffee and a croissant one morning. You wouldn't think that rubbing the rims of glasses could make such beautiful music but when you go to Madrid and hear him, you'll know that it's a fact.
    There were many traditional musicians as well, of course. One accordion player outside the Royal Palace entertained a long line of people waiting to get in to see a special exhibit of paintings, for example. His repertoire was truly amazing. Then there were the two women in Buon Retiro Park who played classical music on a violin and a harp, assorted percussionists playing everything from African drums to overturned plastic buckets of different sizes, a couple of saxophone players, at least one trumpeter, several collections of strolling woodwind players as well as guitarists.
    There were also invisible men and guys who seemed - like the motorcyclist - to be floating in midair.
    And there were dancers.
    Some really amazing dancers, in fact, including a trio in Buon Retiro who enticed a little girl to dance with them.
    (She did pretty well though when the guy she was dancing with did a handstand she needed a little help...)
    A weekend's worth of entertainment cost me about 20 Euros in coins that I dropped in cans, buckets and hats along the way.
    You can't beat that.
 

Saw this guy in the Plaza Mayor...

... how he managed this I have no idea.

This accordion player entertained people waiting in line to see a special exhibit of paintings at the Royal Palace.

Okay, this just seems to be impossible... these guys were in the Buon Retiro Park.

This guy was doing a brisk business in the park designing and then painting people's names for a couple Euros each.

These dancers were pretty amazing...

... and this little girl was able to keep up with them until one of them did a handstand (she needed a little help with that.)

Saw this guy in the Plaza Oriente putting on his makeup before going to work.

This guy played amazing music on wine glasses.

My friend Elena with an invisible man.

These women played classical music in Buon Retiro Park.

These puppeteers were incredible... right at this moment the puppet at the piano was playing "Imagine."

This scrub woman I honestly mistook for a statue... when you drop a coin in her bucket she scrubs the floor in front of her.

Madrid1.0

    The last time I was in Madrid Francisco Franco was still alive, my passport got checked by seedy little men in ill-fitting jackets every time I  turned around (or so it seemed) and I fell asleep on a park bench one afternoon after consuming what I thought was a jug of fruit punch but which turned out to be some pretty potent sangria.
    So it might be understandable when I say that going to Madrid for a long weekend was something I looked forward to with a certain degree of wariness.
    I shouldn't have worried. The city is still as beautiful as it ever was - maybe even more so these days - and now that the last Fascist dictator is long dead and safely in the ground I didn't feel as though I was being watched everywhere I went while I was there.
    Madrid is, in large measure, an artificial place. Phillip II (he of Spanish Armada fame) created it practically from scratch because he wanted Spain's capital to be in the center of his empire's home country. In addition, he reasoned, had the capital been located in Barcelona (which was the choice of many), Valencia, Girona or any of a dozen other major cities that could well have led to bad feelings among those populations that were passed over and he definitely didn't want that. That was important politically then because Spain was only newly - and loosely - tied together. Those loose bonds are still apparent today, in fact: Catalunya wants its independence, for example, and has for more than 300 years; the Andalusians have also agitated for their independence as have the Basques.
    There was a small village on the site where the capital now stands but that didn't trouble Phillip, his architects or his engineers. In the way of kings and their retainers, they simply built where they wanted to and the old village was, as a result, virtually consumed by massive public works projects that included the construction of Phillip's palace, assorted churches and cathedrals, bridges, parks, bureaucratic offices and those businesses that did business with the government.
    As a result, Madrid is a city of contrasts. In old Madrid the streets are narrow and they shoot off in all directions. As you leave that part of the city you encounter broad streets and even broader avenues. In old Madrid the buildings are narrow, five or six stories tall. In the rest of Madrid the buildings tend to be massive and there are modern skyscrapers that give the city an impressive skyline.
    The trip to Madrid by train from Reus means taking AVE - the Alta Velocidad Espanola. Roughly translated, that means "pretty freaking fast."
    (Okay, it really means Spanish High Speed but I like my translation better.)
    AVE is also a play on words... "ave" is the Spanish word for "bird" and it suggests that you're going to have not only a fast but also a smooth ride.
    There is a hitch, however: To take AVE to Madrid you have to leave Reus, which has a perfectly good train station, and go to Camp Tarragona. The reason: Reus and Tarragona both wanted the AVE station and so the government, rather than make a difficult decision, put a beautiful, modern, high-speed rail station in the middle of nowhere.
    Trust a politician to take the easy way out, whether he's a member of the U.S. Congress or the Spanish government.
    Anyway, the trip to the station isn't a hardship - only about 30 minutes by car - and the train itself is a beauty: Bullet-shaped with comfortable seats that offer passengers plenty of leg room. (After spending too many hours crammed into Hobbit-sized airplane seats going to New Zealand in June and then flying back to Spain in late August I REALLY appreciated that leg room...)
    The trip to Madrid takes 2-1/2 hours at speeds of about 200 mph on average. At the end of the line is the thoroughly modernized Madrid-Atocha station, which is itself a work of art complete with its own forest, resident bird population and a giant pond filled with koi and turtles.
    Pretty darn impressive.
    (Stay tuned for Madrid 2.0.)

The AVE pulling into the station at Camp Tarragona on Friday afternoon...

... and getting ready to leave Madrid-Atocha station Sunday night.

In Madrid government officials seem to have fallen in love with the concept of  bigness, an example of which is this sculpture of a giant head just outside the train station...

... and this fortress-like building with gigantic statues on the roof. It's the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture but it could just as easily be the Ministry of Defense.

   

Late night in Reus

    One of the reasons I decided to move to Reus is the fact that, for a city of only about 100,000 people, it has a very vibrant cultural life.
    Take Thursday night for example: I went for my usual evening stroll around 5:30 p.m. and after about a half hour stopped at a small cafe for a cappucinno in Placa Mercadal. I nursed my coffee for another 20 or 30 minutes while reading (I should probably say re-reading)  Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot" collection of novels. (It's one of my favorite old books for a lot of reasons but chief among them is the fact that I find it absolutely amazing how many of his casual predictions about life in the far future have already come true.)
    As I was reading, I saw a man across the placa start setting up some speakers and before long some weird music started playing. (I say "weird" because it was a sort of techno-punk-Asian blend... turned out to be entirely appropriate for what he would later do.) Curious, I wandered over to join a small crowd that had surrounded him as he talked in rapid Catalan. My grasp of the language is still tenuous but I got the drift: He was telling jokes while arranging a series of props on the placa and people were laughing at his observations of the current political scene. The more he talked the more people gathered until he had a good-sized crowd watching him.
    For the next 45 minutes he told jokes, juggled, rode a unicycle (while juggling flaming torches) and flirted with a number of pretty women in outrageous fashion. It was great fun and when it was over and he passed the hat people gave generously.
    From there I wandered down the Calle Major (despite its name - which translates to Main Street - it's a narrow thoroughfare with a few hundred brightly colored umbrellas suspended over it) to the Centre de Lectura. The center is something of a cultural icon in Reus. It's 150 years old and contains a small library, a movie theater, a lecture hall and assorted exhibition rooms. I went there to see a free exhibit of paintings by Polish artists and sculptors from Gdansk and I wasn't disappointed.
    Contemporary art in this part of Spain tends toward the fantastic with bright colors and surreal images. Of course, there is also a lot of classical art on display around the city (it is the home of Fortuny, after all) but it, too, is very colorful.
    The paintings and sculptures by the Polish artists were much different: The paintings, for example, were darker; the colors muted, the themes more primal. One sculpture of dark metal and dark wood was particularly powerful depicting the torsos of two men in obvious agony.
    As I was leaving the exhibit my friend Elena and her friend Manuela came down from the second-floor lecture hall where they had been listening to a talk about Fortuny. They were heading for a small jazz bar across town called The Keynote where, on the last Thursday of every month, poets gather to read their works on stage so I tagged along.
    The poetry was, as you might expect, varied. A young poet with requisite long hair and pale complexion, for example, wrote about death, suicide and torment. An older poet, solid through the middle with close cropped hair and glasses, commented on the political situation and wrote about the kind of mature love that you, if you're lucky, grow into over the years.
    The scotch was excellent.
    Just an ordinary Thursday night in Reus... the kind of night that makes me glad I moved here.

This street performer, who went by the name Frankie, entertained a good-sized crowd Thursday night with his juggling and jokes.

One of his tricks was mounting a unicycle... which he got a volunteer from the crowd to hold while he pretended that he was going to run and jump onto it.

Instead of jumping, however, he climbed up the volunteer's body and eventually wound up on his shoulders where he told a few more jokes before actually getting onto his unicycle.

Once on it he did a pretty impressive juggling routine with flaming torches.

Bogart

    When I was in middle school and high school we lived in a trailer.
    (I know, I know... we like to call them "mobile homes" now and, if we're really being politically correct we call them "manufactured housing." That's all very nice but the simple fact is we lived in a trailer that we hooked up to a semi and pulled from place to place when my father took a new engineering job somewhere.)
    Because we did, and because there were a lot of us crammed into a 60-foot-long by 12-foot-wide space, I slept on the couch in the living room. Why? Simple: I had more brothers than we had beds and since the alternative was sharing a narrow bunk with one of them sleeping on the couch seemed like a good idea at the time.
   In fact, it was a very good idea because bedding down on the couch led to what has been a lifelong love affair with old movies. The reason: Sleeping in the living room meant I had unfettered access to the television in those dark days before cable when television stations, stuck for something cheap to fill in the late-night hours, showed old black-and-white movies.
    It was while using the couch as a bed that I first saw Gable and Colbert in "It Happened One Night" and first watched John Wayne fight his way across the Pacific. It was there that I watched "The Thin Man" and "The Invisible Man" and "The Wrong Man" on a screen that wasn't much larger than the one on my laptop.
    I enjoyed them all but, by far, my favorite late-night flicks were old Bogart movies.
    "The Maltese Falcon" was my first Bogart movie and something about his portrayal of Sam Spade struck a chord with me. I saw him in "The Petrified Forest" next and even though Bette Davis and Leslie Howard were the stars of that flick, Bogart's portrayal of gangster Duke Mantee stole the show as far as I was concerned. So many more great films followed: "To Have and Have Not" with Bacall, "Key Largo" and "The Big Sleep" and, of course, "Casablanca."
    Flash forward to a few days ago when, while I was maneuvering my way along a crowded sidewalk here in Reus, I looked up and there, staring me in the face, was Bogart.
    Well, anyway, it was a life-sized photo of Bogart wearing a classic trench coat and snap brim hat. I glanced at the store that posted the photo on its wall: Of course it's named "Casablanca."
    All of which explains why I'm now planning a Bogart marathon: I've got seven of his movies on DVD and all I need now is some popcorn, maybe some nachos and salsa, a generous amount of ice cream, some soda and a weekend when I'm not doing anything else.
    Oh yeah, and a couch.
    Gotta have a couch...

Bogart... here's looking at you  kid...

Zombies among us...

    Okay, so I'm sort of a fan of the whole Zombie thing (is it a subculture? A movement? I'm not sure, exactly, so that's why I called it a "thing.") I've got all the "Resident Evil" movies, for example, and I've gotta confess that the "Castle" episode a couple years ago featuring the living dead was one of my all-time favorites.
    So when Josep, who thinks Zombies are very cool even though he regularly blows them to pieces on his X-Box, said that he wanted to go to Sitges because folks there are holding a week-long Zombie festival I was pretty much in.
    We got there around 8 p.m. on opening night, (yeah, his mom drove... I felt so junior high) and discovered that we were just in time for the Zombie Walk... about 350 folks paraded through the town's very crowded streets in their makeup and costumes much to the delight - and the occasional screaming horror - of people lined up to watch them. Some of the Zombies really got into the roles: Staggering walk, drooling, guttural sounds, eyes rolled up into the top of their sockets, lunges at unsuspecting watchers... others not so much; they were busy taking pictures of the crowd with their phones and cameras.
    After the parade we went down to the beachfront - Sitges is a little more than halfway to Barcelona and it has a great beach, an old castle and a lot of really fine restaurants - where Elena was attacked (sort of) by a Zombie and we wound up eating sushi.
    Pretty good night, all things considered, and we even managed to get home with our brains intact.

A Zombie casts a baleful eye on Elena.

Hey, I might be dead but that doesn't mean I can't check in on Tumblr and Twitter and update my Facebook page...

The Zombies were cool but the little kid in the back was priceless.

Cool makeup by the parade people and some of the watchers.

More cool Zombie makeup.

I liked this guy... and apparently so did the woman watching him so intently.

These folks weren't in the parade, but with those demonic red eyes maybe they should have been.

Yeah, there's more than a couple Zombie fans in this part of Spain.

More cool Zombie make-up.

   

Building castles in the air...

    Catalunya is famous for many things from art and architecture to poetry and even paella.
    Oh yeah, and castles.
    Human castles.
    A few days ago one of the organizations in Reus that makes human castles celebrated its 30th anniversary by - what else - building a human castle. Other organizations from around Catalunya showed up to build their own castles as part of the celebration, which took place in the plaza in front of city hall. Several thousand people gathered in the plaza to watch the festivities, which went on for a couple of hours starting at around 8 p.m.
    The castles are remarkable for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that this is a uniquely Catalunyan pastime. I don't know when this castle-building tradition began but I do know that it requires not only strength but an incredible amount of teamwork to build one that is several stories tall. It requires pride as well, enough pride in yourself and your mates that you will not, no matter what, let your teammates down.
    It also requires you to trust everyone in the group.
    If you are one of the people on the upper levels of a human castle you have to trust that the people below you are not going to let you fall 40 or 50 feet to the pavement. If you are the person who climbs to the very top, usually a very young and very lightweight boy or girl, that trust has to be absolute.
    It's breathtaking to watch the castles being built, and I mean that literally. All around me people were holding their breath as the members of the organizations scrambled from the base of the castle to the various levels, going higher and higher. When someone slipped, even for an instant, there was a collective gasp from the crowd. When the last person reached the top and waved the traditional white handkerchief to show that he or she had done so, you could hear people in the crowd finally starting to breathe normally again.
    Truly, it's an exciting thing to watch.
    My only complaint about that night: The plaza was so crowded that I couldn't get as close as I wanted to in order to get some good photos of the castle building but I managed to get a few to give you an idea of what it was like.

This castle was made by the organization celebrating its 30th anniversary.

As you can see, they kept building it higher and higher.

These guys are members of another castle-building organization.

And this is a castle built by yet another group.

Building a castle takes strength, coordination, teamwork, pride and a lot of trust...

...especially if you are the one climbing to the very top.