Eight Days A Tourist

Our friend Valerie promised she would visit us in Spain.  When she told us she was free to travel in April, we said to come anytime except the week of April 16 –23.  We planned a side trip to Amsterdam to see the tulips, a bucket list item for me, and to also revisit Barcelona.  She said, “I’ve always wanted to see the tulips!  Can I just meet you there?”  And she did. 

The next eight days morphed into a blur.  Near Amsterdam, we saw daffodils and tulips so glorious I don’t even have words.  There were fields of reds, yellows, oranges, deep purple, pinks, double-blossoms, fringed blossoms, and what I like to call, cabbage leaf tulips.  If we had to return home after walking through the tulips that day, I’d say the entire trip was a roaring success.  We then drove on to the amazing Keukenhof Gardens.  We thought, how can that place be better than what we just saw?  Keukenhof is a private park functional only 8 weeks a year when the flowers are in bloom.  It is the place to see the tulips.  Two million visitors are expected to walk its grounds this season alone.  Once the bulb flowers are gone, the park is closed, but growers compete for the honor of having their bulbs planted in one of the many sites in the garden.  The weather that day jumped from warm sunshine to cold, pouring rain.  But like having ice cream while a splinter is being removed, we hardly felt the rain as we strolled paths through mesmerizing gardens and artistic displays of tulip gardens.   

Check! Done!  Our bucket list is growing short. 

Later in the day back in Amsterdam, we engaged in a guided walking tour through the Red Light District and infamous cannabis coffee houses.  Because we are old and don’t like being out late, we took the 6 pm tour.  Because the evening was so young, we only saw three or four windows with draperies open and ready for business.  The ladies in them looked like any healthy, attractive young woman you might see on a beach.  They made me a little sad.  Although the odor of pot was pervasive, our guide took us in and through only one smoky coffeehouse.  Its first floor was for coffee but upstairs is where they smoked.  We did not return to the coffee house to partake; no one even had a brownie that Valerie had been humorously musing about.  The Bulldog is the most famous and oldest coffee house.  Bull Dog has become a brand with five locations, branded clothing stores, a hotel in Amsterdam, and locations in Canada.  Whew!  Why are they called coffee houses? And not pot houses?  Back in the day, hippies here sold what they called “Ethiopian coffee.”  Of course, it was marijuana, but the practice was tolerated then and still is. 

No visit to Holland is complete without seeing the windmills.  Note, most people call this country Holland.  It is not.  Holland is only one of twelve provinces in the country; Amsterdam is its capital.  In 2020, the government officially dropped “Holland” as the name for the country.  The name, “Netherlands” was put in place to encompass and reflect all its provinces, not just the most famous one. 

To see the windmills, we traveled by train to Zaansk Schans with a stop in the colorful city of Zaandam.  We oohed and ahh-ed at its brilliantly painted wooden houses and hotels known as Zaan Houses on the water.  

As if on a fast track, we caught the next train onward to Zaansk Schans and spent the afternoon exploring windmills and eating Dutch pancakes.  These Dutch delicacies are less like pancakes and more like plate-sized crepes – delicious when topped with a thin caramel syrup. 

Except for its exceptional cheeses and stroopwafles (both of which we sampled), the Netherlands is not famous for its cuisine.  I hardly remember what we ate but it was lite, not very healthy, and likely included fries.  I asked what vegetable crops are grown in the Netherlands.  The answer: potatoes. 

The entire next day was spent en route to Barcelona.  Oh, this day was a circus of errors, a perfect storm.   At the last minute, Stan and I had to change flights as our planned stand-by flights were full.  We arrived in Barcelona hours ahead of Valerie and spent our time looking at our phones and being grumpy with each other.  As we greeted her, she said in a panic, “My luggage did not arrive!”  I said, “Let’s go look again” Sure enough, there were her bags, sitting there all lonely.  They had been put on the belt long after the others and popped out after she had given up.  We were thankful but very tired.  It was about 8 pm; we’d been up since dawn; our brains were a bit fried; we were so ready to get to our apartment.  We loaded Valerie’s luggage and ours onto a cart and ordered a car from UBER.  We waited.  Finally, our car arrived but passed us by.  Stan when to flag the driver.  When he returned just a split-second later, his backpack he inadvertently laid atop the baggage cart was gone.  

We have a place for everything.  Traveling as do, we simply must. Routinely we return our passports to their leather covers and store them in Stan’s backpack the minute we are done with them.  But on this day, they were in my purse.  What a relief!  Still, the loss was painful . . . an iPad, Air pods, hidden cash, and an expensive collection of Apple chargers, power banks, and electrical converters.  Sometimes, stuff like this just happens, and it usually occurs when circumstances cause you to be less attentive and less cautious than usual.  Thieves spot these situations at once.  Once we realized we had passports, we dealt with the loss amazingly well.  To get by, we replaced a few necessary phone cables and made a huge Amazon Global order to a nearby Amazon Locker. It is our first time using Amazon internationally.  Hope it works! 

We hit the ground running in Barcelona.  First stop, of course, Sagrada de Familia.  If you ever visit this spot, get a professional guide.  We learned so much about Antoni Gaudi, his Christian deep faith, and his love of nature.  Although the architect designed buildings all over Spain, the Sagrada de Familia is his most famous. The multi-faceted, multi-towered church depicts the birth and death of Jesus Christ in sculptures both inside and on the outside walls of the magnificent church. Its towering spires are decorated with colorful ceramics and Venetian glass often depicting foods grown in Catalonia. The Nativity, above the main entrance, is the primary focal point. Gaudi used morning sunlight to spotlight each sculpture separately. As the sun makes its way across the sky, first Joseph, then Mary, and finally Christ is lighted. Inside the soaring ceilinged church, this highly imaginative Gaudi again spotlights Joseph, Mary, and Christ with sunlight as it enters specially placed windows. He designed and placed stained glass windows to capture sunlight to depict nature, reflecting morning and night and trees and flowers, on the many columns and marble floors. The church, quite a marvel, is still under construction following the detailed architectural plan Gaudi completed before his accidental death in 1926. We would not have grasped any of this without the aid of a passionate guide. 

Enjoying the weather and feeling good about accumulating lots of steps, we walked to Park Guell, another Gaudi design. In the late 1800s the Guell family hired Gaudi to design a planned community with 60 houses, a chapel, a huge covered and columned market place and a grand plaza overlooking Barcelona as a meeting place. While the community never fully developed, the amenities were. It is now a lovely city park with incredible, sometimes bizarre Gaudi architectural and innovative designs. 

A guide took us on a 2.5-hour walking tour of both Old Town and New Town, which by the way, is still old – it is the part of town where the Nuevo riche built their palatial houses – many designed by Antoni Gaudi of course. We walked on to Palau de Musica Catalana, a 1908 concert hall in the heart of Barcelona where we fortunately got to watch a concert rehearsal. Inside the concert hall, floral and musical motifs graced by a huge ceiling stained glass dome.  

Not done yet, we walked to the Palau de Musica de Catalana. As we entered the grand concert hall, we were struck by its beauty. The hall is designed with few straight lines, wall-mounted sculptures, and a large circular balcony but it is crowned with an exquisite and colorful stained glass inverted-dome ceiling. How often good fortune comes to us!!! During our visit there we found seats in the balcony to watch and hear a vocal choir concert rehearsal. How cool it was to hear magnificent singers perform in their street clothes. From there, our walk took us to the Arc de Triomf built as the main gate to the 1888 Barcelona World Fair, and then on to the city’s iconic glass bullet,-building, Torres de las Glories, that marks the gateway to the technological district. Mind you, these attractions are indeed walkable, but certainly not situated near one another. Yes, we could have used public transportation between them but we rationalized that finding bus stops and metro stations often takes more time than walking. Plus walking is better for the body.

Between sites, like the typical tourist, Valerie shopped, She shopped in both Amsterdam and Barcelona, buying souvenirs, a warm hat, gloves, and additional pieces of luggage for her loot. She did her shopping quickly and efficiently, often saying something like, “Oh, isn’t this little purse cute? I’ll buy it.” “I love this shopping bag. I’m buying it.”  Once she went into a store to find warm leggings to wear under jeans only to come out with the leggings in hand but also wearing a new coat. Accustomed to watching for her in a grey and black jacket, I hardly recognized her at our meeting place in her new green one.

Our last day together was reserved for Montserrat. After a bit of bumbling around figuring out buses, stations, and trains, we reached the mountaintop just in time to use our tickets to attend the once-daily 10-minute performance of the boys’ choir in the Basilica. La Escolania, a choir of 50 boys aged 8 to 14, is one of the oldest choirs in Europe. They are educated in Montserrat and perform not only in the Basilica but all over the world. Their voices were like those of angels. After the concert we stood in a long line to walk through the upper chambers of the basilica and to touch the hand of the famous Black Madona – I’m not sure why we did that except to say, we don’t like to miss a thing.

The Montserrat Nature Park complex sits atop a peak of the Montserrat mountain range. It is a place for pilgrimages and prayer. It is also a popular place for mountain hikes and rock climbing. In addition to the Benedictine monastery and the lovely Santa Maria de Montserrat Basilica, there is a museum showcasing leading Catalonian artists as well as original works by masters like Monet, Dali, Picasso, and Degas. While the monastery and the basilica are the focal points of the complex, they compete with the gorgeous views of the green land below and nearby and surrounding cloud-veiled mountain peaks.

Visitors can drive to the complex, or take the Aeri de Montserrat or the rack rail funicular. Since Valerie had never experienced an aerial cable car ride, we took the aerial cable car up. It was not nearly as scary as she thought it might be, and the more efficient but less exciting funicular for our return trip down the mountainside.  

Back in Barcelona, convinced the city is one of the world’s best, we packed and merely fell apart, worn out! We said farewell to Valerie – she’s such a great travel partner and sent her on to Madrid to complete her trip. 

Thankfully, we survived our eight days as tourists. Our trip was exciting, adventurous, educational, a world of fun, and exhausting. We did all the things tourists do . . . saw innumerable sights, got lost, took flights, rode trains, buses, and subways, ate bad food, lost our stuff, clocked five to eight miles afoot each day, and came home with luggage full of dirty laundry. Happy to be back in our little Malaga apartment, we probably will not leave it for days. It is time to recover.