From Swords to Bayonets

So, alone again, naturally.

Travelling alone had a bumpy takeoff, before, in fact, I was even parted from the gang. Having planned for a hour or so bus trip from Toledo to Madrid (like the way down), the crazy commuter bus on the way back took more like two hours! So I was much stressing about missing my train, which would have given me an eight-hour wait. But, with the help of a nice Madrid taxi man, I got to Chamartin with minutes to spare - enough time to pick up a nice bottle of drinking yoghourt for brekkie.

So then a few hours through the centre and north of Spain, on a comfortable Renfe train, with a window seat and noone next to me. I broke out the iRiver, for its first real use of the trip, and Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins sang me through the dry plains of central spain. Very suitable for the grassland with occasional cows.

Bayonne. It gets a lot greener before long, and we're in France. (The change at Hendaye is trouble-free.) Bayonne is an old town, just for something different, and I'm once again in the Basque Country, though it's the Pays Basque here. It's not actually on the coast but is not far from Anglet and Biarritz, a gaudy Gold Coast-style resort. I've got a single room in a hotel which turns out to have three beds but at a very cheap 20 or so euros.

What did I do there? Not heaps. Wandered town a bit, it's nice and there are some rivers with nice views, and a fairly lively town centre. Unfortunately, I'm there a few days early - August 2nd is the start of les Fêtes de Bayonne, their huge annual festival. The town is obviuosly ramping up; every available space is being fitted out with tables and chairs and makeshift bar apparatus. So my Rough Guide has let me down there.

But anyway, I eat some food, including a pretty traditional Basque meal. Bayonne ham, bacon, and a scary black Basque sausage which tastes pretty good, actually. Served with crappy pommes frites, as is traditional in France. And apart from that, do little - it's a time for relaxation and thinking and trying to read and understand my Asterix book. Which is much much easier than talking and listening.

On the TGV, to Paris!

Full o' Killing

So it's apparent by this point that Europe is in fact undergoing some sort of horrific heatwave - Vic tells me it's even made the papers back in Australia. So in order to avoid the heat, we head towards the equator! And, sadly, we've lost Rach as she's off on the hectic last bit of her trip before it's back to Station St. So just Ange, Cath, Nick and I.

Toledo was once capital of Spain but now it's just an ancient stone city, of narrow winding paved streets, on a big hill, with (unsurprisingly) a huge ornate cathedral. It's less than an hour from Madrid on the bus, so most do it as a day trip, but we stay a few days, in a tiny hotel run by Ma and Pa, who sit up worrying, waiting for us to scrape home, every night just before the 2am curfew.

Cause, even more than the rest of Spain, nothing starts here until very late, especially when it's as hot as this. But it's such a dry heat, and we have so little to do that sauntering down the street and siesting and eating late make it pretty bearable.

Though we do see the inside of the huge cathedral, which is wonderful and terrific and really quite ridiculous, considering Toledo now has about 80,000 people. I get the feeling they could all fit into this church, it's that big. And also, separately, there's a pretty good museum with everything from giant elephant fossils to roman relics to middle ages religious art to, well, a shedload more religious art. El Greco, despite being Greek, seems to have been adopted by Toledo, lived there for a while and has bits of art all over the shop. I'm sure it's all very impressive but at this point I'm kinda arted out, I must say. Especially after seeing five Last Suppers, ten Sagrada Familias and about a hundred crucifixions.

Also in Toledo, some more real true Spanish food experiences. I especially enjoyed the red partridge casserole (I think it's the bird that's red). And there was some sort of meat stew which was really good, but I've forgotten all the other details about it so that's not so helpful... Hopefully someone else remembers this. We found a restaurant that we liked so much that we ate there two nights in a row, in fact! And also partly because a lot of the rest of the city seemed to be closed to us.

Oh yeah, and Cath ate the biggest meringue the world has ever seen. Well, some of it. With help from us. And we avoided the marzipan. And, harking to the title of the post, there seem to be hundreds of shops selling swords and knives and armour and other big metal things - and even, bizarrely, real live working guns! Of which we don't partake, this time. But we know where to go now.

And then, wistfully, it's all over for the group. Nick's to Oz, Ange and Cath to Granada and I'm heading for cooler climes; Bayonne next stop. Though not without some sort of horribly stressful bus trip.

Greatest City Ever

Pain on arriving in Madrid. Some sort of ugly bus station with concrete and some very sore legs from the cramped bus. And my bag had never felt heavier.

But without too many problems we found the Opera Metro stop and located the hostel, Los Amigos. (Well, Ange and Rach did while the rest of us sat around looking grumpy.) They also found us somewhere for a nice breakfast, one of those egg+ham+cheese sandwiches where the egg pokes out through the top of the bread. Though this one had lettuce and white asparagus in it, for some reason.

Good hostel, too, so it all became all right after a nice siesta.

Madrid was nasty hot as well, but so much drier than the coast that it seemed more bearable. It seems a really nice city, another good metro and very pleasing old buildings, at least around the Palace where we were. (The outskirts are pretty arid and featureless but that's probably true of everywhere.)

The shape of the city is plazas with small, winding streets linking them. Easy to get lost even with a map, and without - well, even a Spanish Madrid resident guiding us around at one point seemed to get a bit lost. But that's all part of the charm. The main point of Madrid is the nightlife; sure, there are some sights but not like some other cities. The Prado especially, which I saw only the outside of, cause it's free on Sundays and the line was immense and worse, in the sun.

Actually, a fun sight was the Bernabeu, the stadium housing Real Madrid, the greatest football team in the world. This is probably agreed but boy do they tell you, throughout the tour and especially in the museum. You get to go to the top of the ground, then sit on the bench and have a look at the visitors' dressing room, and have a seat in the corporate box. Just another stadium, really, at this point, cause until you fill it up it can't really impress. But the museum, full of the hundreds of trophies Real have won over the years, is where the history of the club hits home. They've been around a long time and won everything, had the greatest player ever, Alfredo di Stefano, and the greatest president ever (!), Santiago Bernabeu. Though Pele might put up a case against Di Stefano, it's probably pretty close to the mark. So that just fired my resolve to get to at least one game somewhere, maybe France...

What else of Madrid? Some of us did a bit of shopping, some of us saw the Prado, we did a walking tour of some of Madrid's important and seriously old buildings. This was good, interesting history about Madrid becoming the capital and the enormously rich families who shaped the city. And the convent where, once you enter, there's no contact with the outside world, though you do make envelopes for banks to pay the bills. Don't ask me. The only sour note was his pimping of the "oldest restaurant in the world" which, while it may have been true, looked a little like a tourist trap. But hey, I guess we're tourists even if we don't want to be.

And we met some nice Spanish people, including an especially nice boy... though that's really not my story to tell. And we were introduced to some summery drink where you mix vino tinto (red wine) with a light lemonade. Very good for post 40 degree temperatures. Which we got in Toledo.

Australia on the Atlantic

San Sebastian is a beautiful little town in the heart of the Basque Country, yet another of Spain's innumerate regions, one shared with France. It's also on the Atlantic coast and that means real beaches!

That was the first thing we did. (Ange, Cath, Rach, Nick, me.) Well, after almost getting washed away while sitting on our bags outside the closed tourist information office at 7am. Some parts of Spain are in drought, but in the north they sluice the streets with water regularly. Anyway, we dumped our bags at our still fast-asleep hostel at about 10am (a portent of things to come) and straight to the beach, to wash out some of the kinks of the overnight bus.

San Sebastian's heat was a little drier but no less mad than that of Barcelona, but this was eased by the beaches. These are reputed to be some of the best in Europe and I think we agreed, though we swam mainly on the "surf" beach. Nothing like Bells but much better than the Mediterranean, and pretty friendly waves for body-surfing. Beautiful sand, and packed full of peopl but rarely too full.

The other part of the story of San Sebastian is the Australians. A guide in Madrid was to tell us that this year, for the first time, many tourists in Spain are Australian. In San Sebastian, we felt in the majority - so many Oz accents, probably because it's on the infamous Busabout tour route. So the story of the hostel was partying late at night and not much movement in the mornings; not that we partook of much. Seemed a little too much like being in college again, really, as most of the Busabout kiddies seemed just out of school.

We did lie on the beach and swim a lot. But we also journeyed to Bilbao, to the Guggenheim; apparently some sort of famous modern art museum. I really liked the Richard Serra installation, though less when I heard him talking about it on the audio guide. But most bestest for me was Russia!, an exhibition of art from and inspired by and even just collected in Russia. Along with a good dollop of Russian history, it inspired me to get up there on a trip soon. The Socialist Realism works were especially memorable - so many lies! And the work of people like Kandinsky and Malevich is great. And it's all so well-presented; having been to a few big galleries this trip, this was probably the best run and easiest.

On the flipside, we took an organised trip to see a museum of work by Ernesto Chillida, one of the premier Basque artists. He does big bits of metal and rock in the same way many people seem to; I don't reckon I quite appreciated them fully but it was a really nice rolling green setting and a great traditional Basque farmhouse housing most of the works. And we played traditional Basque games after, tug-o-war was fun. And heard traditional Basque music played acoustic live, though he soon segued into Chilli Peppers and Dylan covers.

Other non-swimming related activities included tapas, tapas and more tapas. It is really good, you do it the traditional way and have a small drink and one signature dish at each of many bars. And in the Old Quarter, surrounding our hostel, were probably hundreds of tapas bars. Lots of seafood and creamy sauces and patatas bravas and tortillas. That said, I haven't been able to look at another tapa since.

Also, the best ice-cream we've tried so far. It's required when it's that damn hot.

And then another dang overnight bus, to Madrid.

City of Ronaldinho

Barcelona, the capital of Catalunya.

The two-euro-cent history lesson is that Spain is actually made up of 15 autonomous communities, each with their own people, history and often language. The most separatist of these are Catalunya, the Basque Country and Galicia. There's a whole militant history with the central Spanish government which at the moment is a little more amicable.

The cheap flights out of Paris are, unsurprisingly, at a horrible hour of the night. We flew Vueling this time and were pleasantly surprised by the quality, especially of the plane, a new A320. And we had a spare seat next to us which gave us more space for Nick to beat me at German Whist. Pretty sure he cheated.

However, arriving in Barcelona, it was far hotter than it had any right to be - all of 33 just after midnight! So lugging packs in search of Jo's apartment was a little wearying. Jo, who's a seriously great friend of Ange's, had been ridiculously generous in the offer of the floor of her apartment for the duration of our Barca time. How ridiculous became obvious as we finished the three-storey climb; with five people in the tiny aparment already (Ange, Dave, Rach, Cath, Jo) it was real squashy and ten degrees hotter than outside. Adding two of us, overheated from pack-backing, made it no better.

But we survived the night. And the next night, on the beach, we were to meet another horribly generous expat Barcelonian, Fred the American, a friend of Jo's. His apartment was not a lot bigger (though air-conditioned) - but he took in three of us for the rest of the stay, easing the squeeze somewhat. He slept on the couch, too!

Barcelona beaches are actually kinda crap, the sand is dirty and the Mediterranean water is lukewarm and wimpy. But the sun pounds down and the water gives you at least some respite. Plenty of nudity as well, but it's all very normal and becomes comfortable. Not that I actually did it.

Ahead of myself, first we saw some Gaudi. They love him, his buildings are everywhere. We saw the Gaudi Park, a nice oasis of green in a dusty city, and the Sagrada Familia, his magnum opus, a cathedral still being built from the great man's plans. It will be an amazing building when finished, so baroque and ornate, with bits which are frankly nuts. But it's nowhere near done yet, and if they keep letting tourists in like this, it'll never get done.

Next day, Rach and I went to Montserrat - a bite-size mountain an hour from Barça. There's a monastery up there, which is OK (though how many pretty churches can an atheist seriously appreciate?), but it's more about the views. Some amazing rock formations and peaks, and a pretty nice walk to the top, through varying vegetation. We took a cable-car and a funicular as well. A fun day, though pretty tiring. (For me, obviously, not so much for Rach because she's superhuman.)

Went to Figueras one day, this small town a couple of hours away was Dali's hood and remains dedicated to the man. The guided tour around the town and through the museum was pretty good, as there are plenty of stories behind him (date paste in his moustache, for instance?). And because he designed and outfitted the museum over the second half of his life, it's almost as weird as he was.

And there was tapas, paella, mojitos, pollo, all very Spanish. But more of those to come next - San Sebastian.

LATER:

Oh, yeah, there was that bar with the multiple rounds of mojitos. For those who don't know, it's all about the fresh mint. I thought it was funny as well when the guy went all Cocktail-style and started juggling bottles. Luckily, it bounced. And then later, on realising that we were Australian, he somehow comped us a tray of evil shots, free. The ones where you have to do the shot then put your hand over the glass, so you can suck up the gases with a straw. Quite dangerous.

The City of Lurve

The first real fiasco of the trip was Copenhagen Airport, when flying out to Paris at an ungodly hour of the morning. Nick and I arrived to a - I'm not kidding - four hundred metre long queue leading to our checkin desk. And this in silky-smooth Scandinavia!

So we pushed in at the very front of the queue, as you do. (Thanks Pa for the years of lessons.) It turned out that the baggage handling system was broken and, coincidentally, it started working seconds after we pushed in. Most enjoyable. Of course, this did mean that we sat on the tarmac for almost two hours - waiting for the baggage and people who hadn't pushed in. But it was far less stressful than waiting in a boiling terminal with twenty-kilo packs, queueing blindly.

Paris!

We were staying at Nick's aunt's apartment, which she had vacated for her yearly vacation, as Parisiens do in June-July-August. Collecting the key presented some difficulty, because we were to meet the Gardienne, but she was closed for siesta until 4pm. So we sat in a park in Javel (15th arrondissment) and waited, played some cards, attempted to buy things from people. When we glanced idly up and saw the Eiffel Tower, appearing from behind a building then we were in Paris.

My French vaguely sufficed for tickets from CDG to the city, and to obtain la clé from Mme. Ferrandinho, the Portugese gardienne. And then we were in an apartment in Paris and could finally rest! After sleeping about three hours the night before, we both collapsed unconscious for about four hours, getting up at 10pm with the vague threat of illogical jetlag.

We were near the Seine, south of la Tour Eiffel, easy access to Javel Metro. Pretty damn good location. Nick's aunt was to come for one night on the Wednesday so we contented ourselves with laziness for a large part of the time until then. French MTV (they still play Gnarls Barkley just as much), French sport TV (everyone talking about the World Cup), wandering around Paris. We did see Notre Dame in this time, quite impressive, another big church to add to the collection.

Dinner with Nick's aunt on Wednesday at a nice steak restaurant in St Etienne, Relais Entrecôte. All they ask you is "How do you want your steak?" - none of these namby-pamby other meats or even other cuts. There's a decent lettuce salad to start and then great steak with magnificent sauce and good pommes frites. (The only good chips we had in Paris.) Then home to watch France v Portugal, with a lot of happy French noise after the win.

We decided to actually see some things. The train to Versailles was very near so that was the next day. This interested me because Louis XIV is one of the most storied monarchs in history, and Versailles was effectively his baby.

It's an enormous building dwarfed by the surrounding gardens and grounds. Apparently they've been damaged by the great storm of Boxing Day, '99, and they do look the worse for wear in places. But they're expansive and peopled with pretty fair statues. Despite the enormous numbers of people, it was easily possible to find no-one in sight when wandering through the winding paths. It was, however, a shame that all the fountains were off, and though we asked for our money back, we didn't get it.

Marie Antoinette's house has recently been opened, a cottage (compared to the main palace) filled with impressive works of art. The grounds are smaller but more manicured than the main acres. This was a good warmup to the the main building.

Which is ridiculous. There's a decent audio tour, which we did, but even without that you'd get the majestic scale of the place. Everything's ornate, there's a glorious chapel, a pretty cool theatre, hall of mirrors. And everything's filled with art, even the ceilings and floors need to be looked at. Most of all, I got the impression that there was so much we hadn't seen, though much of it must be in a state of disrepair. The Dauphin's chambers, which we also saw, were much more sparse and had been restored only to a skeleton level.

Next on the list, Eiffel. Yeah, we climbed it, none of this two-hour elevator queue crap. Though it did mean we couldn't get right to the summit, as that queue was ridiculous. But it's an impressive construction and offers astounding views of the city. Only slightly damped by the flash storm which came through for ten minutes while we were up there - then disappeared.

La Musée du Quai Branly is Chirac's baby, and will apparently be La Musée Chirac when he kicks le bucket. It's been open for only a few months, full of "tribal art" (I hope that's close to the correct term, Vic) which emanated from tribal cultures around the world. Everything from Asian to African to American to Australian. There was some excellent Aboriginal work there, and the ceiling of the gift shop was a work which had been commissioned specially for that space. Quite a good museum but lacking polish at this point - it's a bit of a mish-mash, many of the signs have no English and the crowds aren't dealt with especially well. But some of the work is amazing for its level of technical excellence and symbolism.

Le Centre Georges-Pompidou, on the other hand, is polished to the nth degree. I don't quite get the architecture but the Modern Art Museum is very impressive. We saw the collection and some exhibitions. One was of David Smith, a sculptor in the mid-to-late twentieth century, who worked with metal and welding. I quite liked his work, which was technically brilliant. Also, one about LA as an artistic centre, which was vast and very accessible. Almost too vast, though, taking up quite a few hours of the day, especially because there was quite a lot of video work. Another exhibition was of Jean-Luc Godard which was almost impenetrable but quite fun despite that.

A couple of other exhibitions were relatively old-school modern painters which I didn't get as much, and whose names aren't coming to me right now. And a lot of the collection was made up of classics by Picasso and all those other painting kiddies. The other exhibition which we almost completely failed to see was huge, made up of video art, and we just didn't have the time or inclination to start that. The Pompidou really takes at least two days.

And on our last day, we went up to charming Montmartre and saw Sacre Coeur. Nice place for a church, and we got to go up to the roof, which presents amazing views of the city. Not to mention the inside of the church and crypt, which can only impress with the glory they embody.

Then - Barcelona.

Roskilde - The Festival

Camping for four nights initially looked a little imposing but in the end it was pretty straightforward. These guys have had practice at marshalling 120000 people and it shows - anyone Australia festival of that size would be much worse, considering the Big Day Out or Falls.

Toilets? Smelly but generally clean. Food? Plenty of range and decent prices. Showers? Not many but quite usable. Queues? Generally not too long, except for ATMs. Stages? A bit squashy at times but with a bit of forethought it wasn't hard to get a good spot for most. Bands? Good length sets of more than an hour and possibly encores. Crowd? Extremely good-natured for the most part, despite all the metal fans. Also heaps of free water up the front of stages which is great.

My highlight was probably the last band I saw, Animal Collective. They do a visceral, almost primitve set which strays a bit from the records and violates a few norms. I was right up the front on the rail and while the crowd wasn't huge, most were in some mood judging from the amounts of pot smoke. Best was the end of the set when they went off after an hour of energetic freak-folk. The crowd cheered, chanted, clapped, whistled, went ape. The announcer came out after two minutes to close the stage and was drowned out by the crowd, expecting more Animals. She tried again, and again, to quiet the frenzied masses but to no avail. Eventually one of the Animal Collective kids had to come back out and say "We can't play any more, it's over, thank you so much but this is it". Easily the best crowd reaction I've ever seen, from a crowd who just didn't want the festival to end.

Then, walking back to the tent with Nick, the strains of Roger Waters on the main stage, doing Pink Floyd's classic Wish You Were Here, as the pinkish northern evening light washed over the shattered remains of tents and beer and people and crushed grass. It couldn't have been scripted better - we felt like we were in a movie.

Other highlights. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah were good fun, hello to those in Australia who'll see them soon. Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins were great, a really energetic, heartfelt, charming set of alt-country ballads. Tool were maybe not quite as good as I was expecting but still pretty great, as the only thing I really watched on the main stage. Editors started the festival off with a bang, and I walked away a bigger fan than I started.

Also fun was watching England v Portugal on the big screen overlooking the skate park. It was packed with predominantly English fans, but noone was too surprised at the result, after Rooney was sent off and it went to penalties.

Also good - chocolate crepes. More of them to come in France. And banana smoothies, just the thing in the pale but still hot northern sun.