Steve Haas Travel

Category: 2015: Luxembourg, Trier, Barcelona, Helsinki, Tallinn

Summer 2015

  • The Way Home

    The Way Home

    It was a long trip home. We left the Helsinki hotel at 5:30am Saturday morning, got home Sunday around 2:30pm – with a 10hour time difference. It was about 16 hours in the air – 3 hours to London, a very long layover; about 7 hours to JFK with an overnight in a hotel (which was shorter than our London layover); 6 hours to SFO; 2.5 hours home with a stop for lunch and groceries.

    Always good to be home. Always.

    Because Dan travels so much he racks up lots of miles and hotel points, and his flyer status with British Airways gives him access to airport lounges in most major airports. It’s a different experience than traveling economy to be sure, and I got my first taste of it on our Europe trip last year. On our way home we had breakfast in one in Helsinki and JFK, and switched back and forth between two different lounges in London. All of them have free food and drink, but the British Airways lounges in London were the best. A few lounge pics below.

    Helsinki
     One of the British Airways lounges. We were in this one several times last year but I kept forgetting to take pictures of it.

     

      This particular lounge is huge with about 6 different sections. This is Dan’s favorite area because it’s so sunny. When he has layovers here between SF and Dusseldorf on the way over, he hangs out here to help manage jet lag.

    The dining area in the first class lounge.

     

    Dan was able to use an upgrade voucher for my trip home and book me in a first class seat. I’d flown first class domestically before, but it’s a whole different ball game on an international flight. Let’s just say it was very comfortable :) A definite treat, and the food was amazing. Ironically, he sat in business class (which is still darn nice compared to economy) because it was a ticket paid by Bayer and he couldn’t use an upgrade on it. However, when we got to the gate this morning at JFK, they comped him an upgrade to first class without him even asking. That happens to him a lot. We were across the aisle from each other. (And at that point it’s just one seat on each side – vs 3 on each side in economy back yonder…)

    Final thoughts:
    1. I said this in my last post but it’s worth repeating: I’m amazed on every trip what a non-issue language is in Europe. Once we venture out of that continent I’m sure we’ll experience something different. That said, it is helpful to have some basics down for the country your visiting. We’ve picked up little pieces of German, French and Spanish that was helpful enough; oddly never attempted to learn any Finnish or Estonian! The website/app Duolingo has been very helpful and learning introductory things. Check it out if you haven’t and are interested in picking up some additional foreign language skills – for free.

    2. We love how great the public transportation is. We enjoy not driving when we’re there, and the transit option on Google maps is amazing, even showing you connections between trains/subways and buses. We literally couldn’t function without it.

    3. I think we’ve finally learned our lesson on Modern Art museums. Helsinki had one and we never even considered it, despite the current Mappelthorpe exhibit. (And we’ve seen an exhibit of his before but couldn’t remember where.) But we do love the history and learning about what others have struggled with and what they’re up to now. The Estonian folks we talked to were just so great, and so excited that this 24 year period of independence is the longest they’ve had in their over 800 year history. And they’re doing some great things – especially with using technology. Skype came out of Estonia. And some cool things with voting online from your home using their national ID card. And all of their medical records are standardized and online, something we’ve been talking about for decades.

    4. In January we’re doing something radical: a trip to Europe that’s not attached to a business trip for Dan. Shorter – just 9 days – but all Italy. We’ll spend New Year’s Even in Milan, then Venice, Florence, Rome. Time to change my language setting on Duolingo….

    And a bit of a PS:

    While we were sitting in London on Saturday we were catching up on all the reactions about the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage across the country. We got the news Friday evening when we were at dinner in Tallinn but hadn’t read much beyond the headlines and the high points of the decision. It was great to see so many people so happy about it, regardless of their sexual orientation. And of course a few not so happy but nothing you can do about that. It’s a historical moment. Up until maybe 2013 when DOMA was overturned, I wasn’t sure I’d live to see it. I wonder if this kind of validation and acceptance will finally drag everyone out of the closet. Back in the 90’s sometime I’d read “Queer in America” by Michelangelo Signorile, a history of gay culture in the US. I may not have even been out yet, I don’t remember the timing now. But I do remember his plea at the end of the book, begging all LGBT folks to come out of the closet – that if everyone would do it, the world would be so shocked by the numbers that they would have no choice but to accept. As we were driving home from SFO today we were listening to NPR, and one of the commentators was sharing a perspective that part of the reason this happened so fast – from the Lawrence decision in 2003 to this – is in fact because more and more people were coming out and it becomes an easier thing for the general public to accept when they realize it’s their neighbor/co-worker/son/cousin/teacher, etc., who’s gay, and it starts to become more normal because they realize we’re everywhere. I know members of the LGBT community who still struggle with this; for all the good this Supreme Court decision can accomplish, I hope it also helps those who are still struggling to be able to be more authentic in their daily life. I know it’s made the world of difference in mine.
  • Day 12: Tallinn, Estonia

    Day 12: Tallinn, Estonia

    Dan really enjoyed the hotel we stayed at in Helsinki, especially the view from our room and the sunsets (or lack of them probably more on point). This was a series he took that later showed this bright white light appearing, disappearing, appearing again. Never did figure out what it was.

    On the last day of our trip, we got up early and left the room about 6:40am. We caught an early tram to get to the ferry by 7:20 for a 7:40 ride to Tallinn, Estonia. Under the heading of things I should probably keep to myself, Estonia is one of those places so not on my radar I wasn’t even sure it was a country when Dan said “we could go to Estonia!” when he first introduced the idea of Helsinki. (I later felt much better when many of my friends weren’t even sure where Helsinki was…) He says “it’s one of the Baltics!” like that’s supposed to mean something. I’ll admit I’ve heard news references to “the Baltic States” but couldn’t tell you which ones they were. (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, if you were wondering.) I get real shaky on European geography once I’m east of Germany, although I can pinpoint Russia and Turkey. Everything in between is a crap shoot.

     

    So suffice it to say, I knew nothing about Estonia other than is was less than a 2 hour ferry ride from HELsinki, because Dan told me that. (All of the locals put the emphasis on the first syllable, as opposed to helSINKi which is how we’ve always said it.)

     There are several ferry systems between these two port cities.
     This was way more comfortable than I was anticipating. We had breakfast on the ferry, hot ham and cheese on baguette.
    The view behind us once we got on the water, crossing the Gulf of Finland. The flag on the left is the Estonia flag. Finland’s is a blue cross on a white field.
    We knew Estonia was part of the EU, but thought, like Britain, they had maintained their own currency. We learned when we got there that they’d converted to the Euro in 2011 (although admitted to EU in 2004), so that made it easy. We also understood their language was pretty complex, so were very pleased when this was about the first sign we came upon as we were entering Old Town Tallinn.

     

    Every trip I realize more and more how lucky we are to be English-speaking travelers because, at least in every place we’ve visited in Europe in the last 3 years, we’ve never experienced a real language barrier. We learned that, like we experienced in Netherlands and Belgium, Finland and Estonia both have English taught in school early, and their American entertainment is presented in English with subtitles in their language. Unless you’re spending time in rural areas, it’s unlikely to meet people you can’t communicate with. At least we haven’t experienced that.

    There is evidence of inhabitants in this region going back 11,000 years, with the first mention of a civilized Estonia dating back to 3000BC. We really enjoyed learning about the history which was similar to Finland in many ways, although we felt more tragic. Like Finland, Estonia was taken over during the crusades of the 1100’s, only by the Germans where Finland was Swedes. For the next 800 years, there were 10 different foreign rulers of Estonia. They managed to win independence from Russia in 1920, only to lose it again in 1939. Germany took over again from 1941-1944, then back to Russia, who ruled until the Iron Curtain fell and they gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. So in over 800 years, only 40+ years of independence. Can you imagine?

    In 1997, UNESCO designated Old Town Tallin – the entire thing – as a World Heritage Site. We really enjoyed spending the day in this incredibly charming little town. It reminded us a lot of Brugges, Belgium, which we had visited in 2013, although we liked this a lot more. This is the Town Hall and main square.

    We went to a history museum first where we got a good overview after spending about an hour there. We had a quick lunch at a cute cafe, then went to the Visitors Information Center at Noon for a free 2 hour walking tour. Meet Mart, our tour guide. He grew up here, got an undergraduate degree in political science from Tarvu University, an Estonian school older than Harvard. He did 8 months in the military – a requirement of all males – and is preparing to go on to graduate school. He was incredibly knowledge and very funny.

     The memorial of their first independence. He had a lot of funny stories about how the current population feel about this (they mostly don’t like it) but I’ll move on for now…
     Old town is mostly surrounded by a fortress of wall and towers dating back 700 years or more. This is still in pretty good shape, from the 1300’s.
    This is just to the left of the photo above, a better shot of the wall.

     

     A Russian orthodox church from the 1800s as I recall – relatively young compared to everything else.
    Parliament building from the 1700’s, across the building from the church above.

     

     We do love these narrow, curvy streets.
     Much of the old wall visible here; the building at the top is government, where the Prime Minister offices area.
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    This might be my favorite shot of the entire trip.
    Just as the walking tour was ended it started to rain. We were prepared with umbrellas so got them out and walked out of Old Town and over to a much newer area of town. There’s a hotel, Viru, completed in 1972 and currently houses a KGB museum because they did some work in that building for a couple of decades. The tour guide was a Tallinn native, certainly older than Mart – maybe my age or older – spoke OK English with a heavy accent and, like Mart, was pretty funny but Very Dry. At the beginning of the tour – which started on the 22nd floor of the hotel – she was showing us these photos from the late 60’s/early 70’s on the wall. One of them was of a fire of the hotel when it was under construction. Without with slightest smile she says in her thick accent something like “of course there’s no record of it because there are no fires in Soviet Union” and Dan, me and one other kid in his early 20’s cracked up. but everyone else just looked at her. I didn’t quite know what to think of everyone else’s non-reaction – it was weird – but as the tour went on more and more were laughing at her Extremely Dry jokes so they must’ve figured it out.
    This was written on a window, that’s Old Town you’re seeing through it.
    Her name was Tiia and she had many interesting stories about what life in the Communist state of the Soviet Union was like. One little piece that I found fascinating was Tallin in particular had a different viewpoint of the world because they were close enough to receive television broadcasts from Helsinki, so they weren’t that shut out from the rest of the world, and knew that there was more to life than what they were experiencing. They had all kinds of secret things that happened in homes – like celebrating Christmas – because the arm of the KGB only reached so far unless they had reason to suspect you.
     These were Communist propaganda papers, each announcing the death of leaders a couple of years apart – the top one Brezhnev in 1982 (above) and Andropov in 1984 (below). She pointed out how, if you look closely, you’ll see it’s essentially the same paper, only the names have been changed. They could get away with it of course “because no one ever reads them” she said dryly. Finally, everyone laughed.

     

    About 60 rooms in the hotel were bugged, and this was the listening room the KGB monitored from. They worked closely with hotel management to get guests they wanted to monitor – celebrities, journalists, politicians – in rooms where they could monitor.

    IMG_1010.JPG
     A view onto Old Town from the 23rd floor. That spire to the left is St. Olaf’s, where we were headed next.
    St. Olaf’s was built in the 1100’s and had an incredible steep (and narrow) spiral staircase up to the bell tower. Good thing we did this at the end of the day because it was quite the workout. Great views though.
     The Viru “KGB” hotel from St. Olaf’s.

     

    IMG_1026
     Charming, charming, charming.
     “St. Catherine’s Passage” was all the rage on TripAdvisor, but a little lost on us. The Katerina Guild was housed there with lots of little arts and crafts shops. Not our thing. It was cute though.
     We were pretty tired by 5pm – had been on our feet the better part of 7 hours – so stopped for an early dinner. Dan had the chicken (above), I had the fish, at a cute little place called Pegasus. The waitress’s name was Kroot and was very friendly. We chatted with her quite a bit.
     We caught an 8pm ferry back to Helsinki. These were a couple of shots Dan caught from the ferry as we approached the mainland.

     

    The last official picture of the trip. Boy, I do look tired! It was about 10pm.
    I’m writing this on Saturday in a British Airways lounge in Heathrow. We have a about a 10 hour layover, of which about 90 minutes was used up just in getting from one terminal to another and security. Will do one more post with final thoughts about this trip.
  • Day 11: Helsinki, Part 3

    Day 11: Helsinki, Part 3

    Who knew you could find 3 days of stuff to do in Helsinki? We really weren’t sure when we booked this, but wanted to stay 5 nights because of the deal we got at the hotel. In the end we decided it didn’t matter, that it might actually be nice to have a slower pace for once. We tend to push pretty hard when we travel. Yet we’ve still had pretty full days.

    We were up early and made it down to the sauna by about 7:30. That has been a great addition to this trip. It’s only open from 6am-10am and 5pm-10pm so we’ve been trying to make it down there once in the morning and evening. Finnish saunas are not like you may be used to at home. They are a serious part of the culture here; some estimates say there’s enough saunas in this country to get all 5.4million Finns into them at one time. Most homes have their own.

    First off, they’re hot. The one we’ve been using has ranged from 75-82 Celsius. That’s 167-179 Fahrenheit. Secondly, and my favorite part, they’re not as dry as you’ve probably experienced. A Finnish sauna has a pail of water in it with a ladle, and you’re encouraged to spoon as much water as you like onto the hot stones to create steam. We learned that 2-3 is great for Dan, I preferred 3-4, maybe 5. 6 ladles of water was definitely Too Much. The steam moistens the air, increases the heat, and makes you sweat more. When you’ve had enough, you take a cold shower right outside, or jump into the pool down the hall, and go back in. We’d do several rounds of this (using the shower because it was less hassle) each time we went down. There’s a resting area with a couple of couches and a deck that looks onto the lake just outside. It felt great to cool down in 55 degree weather after you’ve heated up like that. It’s been a real treat. For those of you who know my love for Harbin Hot Springs: sort of like that, but not as wet!

    After the sauna, breakfast again in the hotel, and we took our time getting moving. We were out about 10:30. The tram was there when we got to the stop. The hotel is at the last stop of this line so it usually sits for a few minutes before it starts its next round. And it was empty, as you’ll see below. These suckers are long.

     

    Our first stop was the Kamppi Chapel of Silence. What a great concept. It’s just across from the central train/bus station, and is operated by a collective of churches and the Social Services department of the city. It is non-denominational and no services are held. It is intended to be a place for silent prayer and mediation for anyone who wants to take advantage of it. It’s a very modern design with a variety of kinds of wood. We really didn’t know what to expect.

     This outer wood is spruce.

    If any of you are serious meditators, you might be familiar with “the hum of the universe.” I’ve heard it many times before but usually only after supplying some consciousness. When I walked into this room the silence was so pure all I could hear was that hum, without trying. It was pretty cool. There was only one other woman in there when we got there, but as other people came in a few minutes later, of course the silence weakens and then we were ready to go. But it was sweet while it lasted.

    The inner walls are made of alder, and furniture is ash. All of the wood comes from Finland. Those items to the right are pillows, I think meant to look like rocks.

     

     That’s light coming in through skylights that edge the entire ceiling.
     
    This was the Kamppi shopping center just outside of it.

     

     A cute little park we came across as we continued our walk that at one time was apparently a cemetery. The engraving on the headstones was so worn you couldn’t read it really, but the dates of death were in the 1800’s.
     We went through a public market that had lots of cute little stands for the locals to their stuff, mostly food items. Lots and lots of salmon.
     St. Henry’s Catholic Church. He is Finland’s patron saint. It was locked so we couldn’t go in.
     There was another good sized park with various playgrounds for kids that bordered the water, and a large hill to climb, which gave great views of a sailing harbor beyond.
    We were thinking of eating lunch near a nature area on the opposite side of town, but realized after we boarded the bus that there wasn’t much to pick from over there. Yesterday we had walked through a department store, Stockmans, that was 8 stories and had a great cafeteria on the top floor. Dan had mentioned then we should try to come back for lunch at some point. No time like the present since our bus happened to be approaching it. We jumped off and made our way to floor 8. Dan was in the fish line, got his food first and found a great table in the corner. This place was full of locals, lots of business people and retired folk at lunch. We loved that.
     Dan thinks it was trout, with lots of dill, and potatoes, and an interesting salad of snow peas, soy beans, black beans, chick peas, sun dried tomatoes, other stuff.
    I got a creamy pasta mushroom dish topped with parmesan cheese and arugula, made fresh there right in front of you. It was excellent. (It probably was more photogenic before I stirred everything up!)
    Just as Dan started to take this I got a fit of the giggles reading something silly on Reddit. He took like 10 of these in a row, most of them unsuitable for public consumption, so this is highly edited!
    Next we went to Seurasaari, a recreational island for hiking and other activities, with an open-air museum. “The island is a tranquil oasis in the midst of the city and a museum of the traditional Finnish way of life is displayed in the cottages, farmsteads and manors of the past four centuries that have been relocated from all around Finland.” We were just interested in the walking around part and didn’t get the ticket to go into any of the buildings. And that was enough. It was chilly weather – hovered around 60 most of the day and usually cloudy, but at least it wasn’t raining. We spent about an hour here and enjoyed it.
     The bridge to the island.
     We had read about the friendliness of the squirrels but didn’t think we’d experience that since we didn’t have any food. He didn’t seem to care. This isn’t a zoomed photo – he was that close, climbing the branch towards the camera.
     There were ducks and pigeons all around our feet as we were watching this family feed the squirrels, who were literally eating out of their hands.
     A restaurant towards the end of the island. It’s about a kilometer long.
     Cute squirrel eating a tiny pine cone.
    A church.
     A building associate with the church.
    It was about a 25 minute walk back to the hotel from here. On our way we came across a park we’d walked by yesterday, but not in, so we took a different path and discovered this.

     

     As we looked at all the names and birth/death dates of the stones we realized this was a World War II memorial of some kind. But there were no signs or markers of any kind to tell you that. Again, an oddness around their attitude re: WWII. Is it embarrassment? If we hadn’t walked right into it we would never have known it was here.

     

    We got back to the room about 4:15pm, a nice easy day. I worked on the blog from yesterday while Dan did some planning for our day tomorrow and went down to the sauna. I finished the blog  and got down there just as he was coming back up about 6:15. I didn’t stay long; we had 7:30 reservations at a Japanese restaurant. We got sushi; some of it was great, but mostly it was just OK.

    Dan caught more photos of folks on surfer boards from out window. Remember: it’s 60 degrees outside. I can only imagine how cold that water must be.

    Tomorrow we end our trip with a day in Tallinn, Estonia.
  • Day 10: Helsinki, Part 2

    Day 10: Helsinki, Part 2

    I’m writing this just about a day late. We got in pretty late last night, at least for us – after 11pm sometime – and I was so tired I went straight to bed. Usually I start putting the blog together about 9 or 10pm and it takes at least 2 hours typically; there was no way it was happening last night.

    And as I sit here it hits me why I try to be so disciplined about doing it every night: I forget easily! Each day is so full sometimes we can barely remember the day before, much less last week. Trier seems like a hundred years ago. But the pictures help. So let’s see how this goes.

    We ate breakfast in the hotel again and headed out about 10 or 10:30. We’ve been watching the weather forecast carefully and it’s been fairly accurate. We knew Tuesday would be the best day to go to the island and it was beautiful until the very end. We anticipated Wednesday being pretty wet, and it was. We weren’t going far, just going to be doing things around the center of town, so would be using public transportation and would be in and out of buildings a lot. It worked well, we managed to stay pretty dry, and of course umbrellas helped.

    This is Uspenski, the largest Russian Orthodox cathedral in Western Europe. Built in 1868. Finland was under Russian rule for over 100 years between 1809 and 1917, and there is still a decent amount of Russian culture about.
    We both agreed we prefer this level of ornateness to the simple decor of the Lutheran church from yesterday. Old-fashioned I guess.
    It’s interesting to me that you had to really look to find the crucifixion reference – in this picture, off to the far left bottom. It seemed like it was very much an afterthought, and not very well done – looked like a cardboard cut-out from a distance, and that whole section around the altar was roped off so you couldn’t get to it to see what it was made of. Just very different from traditional Catholic churches.
    The Lutheran Cathedral we were in on Monday, seen in the background from the steps of the Russian Orthodox church. We learned later that huge square in front of the white cathedral (see Monday’s entry) is Senate Square, and considered to the be center of Helsinki, where all big public events take place, including ceremonies and demonstrations.
    Next we went to the City of Helsinki museum. It was free and we figured it would be small and quaint and we were right. But it’s always good to get a little local perspective on what’s important to them and we enjoyed it.
    We were the only recent visitors from California.

    After that museum we walked around a bit, then took the tram to the National Museum of Finland. It has an interesting history but left us a little wanting. Like most countries, humans have occupied this part of the world for about 10,000 years. Unlike much of the rest or Europe, folks from this region weren’t organized in any way until they were taken over by Sweden during the First Crusade around 1150AD. They were a part of Sweden for roughly 700 years. As Napoleon of France and Alexander I of Russia were essentially trying to take over the world, they agreed that Finland would go to Russia and the Swedes would just have to get over it. Which apparently they did (losing a war helped), and Finland became the Grand Duchy of Finland within the Russian empire in 1807. Finland remained part of Russia until it gained independence in 1917.

     National Museum of Finland

     

    We were hoping to see some interesting WWII history in this museum but it was oddly silent about it. We did a little research afterwards and confirmed our suspicions: we think the Finns are embarrassed about their involvement in WWII because they were on the losing side. Not because they were supportive of the Nazis so much as they were anti-Russia. They were the only democratic nation to fight against the Allies; interestingly, they only fought the Russians. Understandable, I guess, considering they had only won independence from them a couple of decades before.

    This was in “The Catholic Room”, lots of interesting items from old Finnish churches, roughly 500 years old.
    A pulpit sort of shaped like a boat.
    Very decorative room.
    One of the Russian Emperor’s thrones.
    To the right of the throne was a series of portraits of Russian Empresses, four or five very beautiful and feminine women. And then there was this one. We thought: the Emperor was gay and this was his lover in drag? We later learned that Alexander I was largely believed to be gay, so who knows…
    We had lunch in the museum cafe, where, like the day before, they had a buffet of traditional Finnish food. Not nearly as good as what we had at Suomenlinna, but we were hungry and it worked.
    Speaking of which: at one point during our day – it must’ve been between the Russian church and the Helsinki museum – we found ourselves in the open air market again. One of the little stands was selling reindeer meatballs. I said to Dan, “See, I bet that mystery meat in the cabbage [from Tuesday] WAS reindeer.” As we passed the girl offered us a sample. “Of course!” Dan didn’t want to at first but he caved and ate the other half. We both looked at each other and went “yep, it was reindeer!” It was actually pretty tasty. One of the reasons we thought it might be “cow” as they told us then was that it wasn’t gamey at all, and we expected it to be. But the meatball wasn’t either. Dan says “great, you just got me to eat Bambi.” I said “Wrong cartoon, try Rudolf.” We get to a booth a few down and it’s selling reindeer pelts (that were incredibly soft) with little stuffed toy reindeer – sans the red nose – sitting all around. Pretty cute and somehow disturbing all at the same time.
    By this time it was about 3:30pm. It had rained pretty hard while we were in the museum so we’d timed that pretty good. The Weather Channel app on our phones has had a freakishly accurate by-the-hour forecast. Next was Temppeliaukio Church, AKA “the rock church.” This was built in 1969 and quarried out of natural bedrock. Apparently it’s a huge attraction in Helsinki but we were underwhelmed.

     

    We went back to the room to rest a bit before dinner, and get some sauna time in. By this time it had stopped raining, there was a bit of sun, and Dan caught a photo of some guys – what’s that called, board surfing? – on the lake, which we could see from our window.

     

    For a variety of reasons we managed to do much of this trip at really reasonable prices, so we decided we would splurge a little on food, which we haven’t really done in prior trips. The 9 course meal in Barcelona was one of those. Last night was another, only this time it was 20 courses. It took 4 hours – we were there from 6:30 – 10:30, which is partly why I was so tired when we got back to the hotel finally. Dan took pictures of everything, but I’m only posting the ones that we really liked, or were at least really interesting.

    The restaurant was called Olo, and they call this meal “The Journey.”

    Every table had this crock of dough rising on it. You’ll see it again later.
    This was the first course. We thought it was mostly weird, but I decided to post it because it certainly looked different, and several dishes had aspects to the presentation that you couldn’t eat. The only thing you ate was the egg looking thing. It was a shell of some kind that started to melt as soon as you put it in your mouth, releasing yogurt/berry mixture inside.
    And, we got to dress up a little again, something we haven’t done before this trip.
    This was the 2nd course and there was nothing all that special about it, but I did like the presentation. Very fresh vegetables – red carrots, radish, and some other greenery I couldn’t identify, in a bed of yogurt sauce, served in this broken dish thing. It tasted really good, but anybody could do it.
    I believe this was the 3rd course and it was special. A very thin and crispy rye chip with sour cream and cured egg yolk. It was incredibly good.
    I’m not a big herring lover, but Dan is and he really liked this. Baltic herring; the red stick is like a malt cracker. The greens were edible but couldn’t tell you what they were. (Not the green stuff at the bottom though under the rocks – not sure what that was but it wasn’t natural!)
    This was Amazing. A semolina porridge with mushroom stock hiding underneath, and topped with roasted quinoa and something else. Great flavors and mix of textures, it was our favorite thing for awhile.
    Norwegian king crab with cauliflower.
    Maybe because we had early reservations, but we literally got the best seat in the house, the corner of the room but it was at an angle to the street corner. We got to watch the rain come and go, which it did a lot all evening. Never got dark though of course!
    There’s the bread, now baked, with 2 kinds of butter and a creamy cheese. Awesome.
    OMG does this town LOVE salmon – never seen so much salmon in my life. This was good – with salmon roe (the orange eggs) and cucumber.
    Note to Carla B.: this is the dish that changed my mind about lamb! Lamb tartar on an onion foam with spruce sprouts and some kind of sauce which I don’t remember. We both loved it. Surpassed the porridge as our #1.

     

     
    We both love peas, these were fresh and al dente, with perfectly cooked perch, and potatoes.
     Sea buckthorne berry sauce with dill and buttermilk ice. Loved it.

     

    Dan liked this one more than I did: rhubarb ice cream with goat milk yogurt and licorice. It definitely worked better with all the flavors together.
    When they set this down we were like “what the hell?” It looked like steamed cauliflower – which would be odd for a dessert course. Turned out to maybe be our most favorite thing of the entire meal. White currant with honey, whey and goat cheese ice cream. Three very different textures, everything worked well together. It was incredible.
    Caramel ice cream in cookies (don’t remember the flavor), standing in chocolate cookie crumbs.
    We took this on our way out by the way – so it’s like 10:45pm. Thankfully it had stopped raining.
    The window we sat at from the outside.
    The view from our room about 11:30pm. It had clouded up again.
    I guess we did a fair amount and I had a right to be tired! I can tell it’s getting to be towards the end of the trip, too. Very glad we only have a couple more days. This is a shorter trip compared to the last two, which were 19 and 18 days respectively. This one will only be 13, and we like that much better.

  • Day 9: Helsinki, Part 1 (and mostly Suomenlinna)

    If you read yesterday’s entry, we talked about this fascination we had with the idea that there wouldn’t really be a nightfall. Not completely anyway. And it doesn’t look like that happened. I went to bed about 1am and slept through until about 6:30am. Dan happened to be up at 2am and took the following picture. Still not completely down.

    Then he woke up again at 4am and took this one – it was morning already.
    Dan was definitely still asleep when I got up at 6:30am. I went down to the sauna area for a bit and then came up and had some coffee in the room. He got up eventually and we went over to breakfast about 9am. Breakfast was good, nothing we haven’t seen really food-wise. Pork-n-beans again. We cooked up a conspiracy that maybe they really aren’t a European breakfast food, it’s just every time we’ve seen them (best we can recall) for breakfast it’s been in a Hilton. Later I googled “pork n beans breakfast” and no conspiracy – saw references to England, Italy, Spain, and we’ve had them in Germany, Luxembourg, Finland. So definitely a Europe thing. Not sure what that’s about.
     We thought we had a little time to kill before the tram came so walked around a bit around the hotel. This is the backside. As we got to the stop the tram left – it was 4 minutes early. Thankfully, only 8 minutes until the next one.
    The big event today was a visit to the old fortress of Suomenlinna. It is a short ferry ride away, a series of 5 islands that Sweden built a fortress on starting in 1748 when Finland was still part of that country. Over the centuries it’s been in a variety of hands, including the British and then Russia. Finland didn’t become an independent country until 1917, finally breaking from Russian rule.
    Most of the pictures that follow are of the ferry ride and our visit to the islands. All in all it took about 5 hours of our day, including an incredible buffet lunch on the islands of Finnish comfort food.  (Which we keep joking contained reindeer because they were very sheepish about telling us what the “meat” was in the “cabbage leaf with meat” dish, which we happened to like very much. They did eventually tell us it was “cow” after having to check with someone in the back. It wasn’t so much that they didn’t want to tell me, I think they didn’t know what I was asking – confused them somehow. When we got back to the mainland we cruised through an open market and, sure enough – one stand was selling reindeer pelts, another “lapland food” which included reindeer.)
    It was a Beautiful Day for the vast majority – high of about 65 with a nice breeze. It started to cloud up about 4pm and by 6pm it was raining.
     Just after the ferry left. Those tarps are they outdoor market I referred to above. They were there all day.
    Seagulls trailing us for awhile, flying creepily close to our heads. Like something out of Hitchcock.
    Dan zoomed this when we were pretty far out, and the resolution got weak; made it look a little like an impressionist painting!
     Commander Ehrensvard’s tomb, the guy behind managing the construction of this place. It has an interesting history. At one point it had 4500 residents – when Helsinki only had 1500. Currently, it still has 800 residents. Some are workers on the island, others commute to Helsinki. When there’s an apartment available, there are generally about 50 applicants.
     It also served as a naval base and shipyard. It’s still active, and while it hasn’t built a ship since 1975, it does still do repairs and storage.
    Just a gorgeous day.
     On our way back. You can see how the sky changed.
     We were going to try to hit the churches on our way back to the hotel, but 2 out of the 3 on the list were closed, including this one.
     This is a Lutheran church, the ones in the earlier pictures scene from a distance. Those steps are pretty steep.
     The guy of the statue is Alexander II of Russia.
     Looking back from the stop of the steps.
     We saw this on our walk back – cracked me up. And it’s wrong on so many levels. Dan and I are always shocked at how often we see “Asian” restaurants in Europe. You know, because all Asian food tastes alike…
    After walking around the city center a bit, we made it to the 3rd church, whose doors closed at 5:30 just seconds before we got there. Oh well. It would have taken about an hour to walk to the hotel from that spot so we decided to go for it since it was still early, and went different routes than the tram had taken us before.
     We were fascinated by this: subway like terrain for bikes and pedestrians.
    Couldn’t tell ya. We came across this in a park on our way home.
    About 30 minutes into this walk it started to rain. We hadn’t taken our umbrellas so changed course to land back at a stop for a tram. We definitely stayed dryer than if we had walked all the way. We were still pretty full for lunch, but left about 7:15pm for a cafe next door-ish to the hotel for coffee and dessert. I had a Napoleon, Dan had a chocolate mousse cake of sorts. Both pretty good.
    We spent some time in the sauna area once we got back. We are really enjoying that experience.
    And that was the day! Not much to it but we are really enjoying our time here.

     

     

     

  • Day 8: Barcelona to Helsinki

    We really enjoyed our time in Barcelona. And, 3 days was enough. We were ready to go. We loved the scenery and really loved the food, and the history was pretty interesting. But it was hot, humid, loud, and had a frenetic party kind of vibe that just wasn’t us. And I swear they smoke more than the Germans :) But I can see why lots of people like it.

    So when morning came we were happy to move on. We were out of the apartment by 7:45 for a 10:15 direct flight to Helsinki. We took the airport bus there – the same one that dropped us on Thursday – hung out in the lounge for a bit. By the time we got to the gate they were almost done boarding. We had a lovely, uneventful 4 hour flight, landing in Helsinki at 3:15 local time.

    We took a bus from the airport. I don’t think I’ve seen so many languages used on one sign before: Finnish, Swedish, English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Japanese. Dan was surprised to see so many Asians in the airport. Turns out his guess was right: Helsinki is used as a major transfer hub. As the crow flies over the Arctic Circle, it’s one of the most direct routes there is to Tokyo.
    Just outside of the central station where we picked up our tram (streetcar).
    It took us about 20 minutes to get to the Hilton we’re staying it from the center of town. It’s a nice place on the water. a lake of sorts we can’t pronounce!, which eventually leads to the Gulf of Finland, which flows into the Baltic Sea. Here are a couple of shots from our room.
     There’s a little beach area we went walking around before we headed into town for dinner.
    Here are a few pictures from us walking around to decide where we were going to eat. Looks like a nice little town, and much less hustle and bustle than Barcelona. Works for us! It’s not exactly a small town though: 1.4 million people in the metro area, about the same size of Cologne. (Barcelona was 4.5 million, so quite a bit smaller in comparison…)
     When we came upon this we were like “hey, this looks familiar!” It’s the front of the central train station where the airport bus dropped us off.
     Just a little park where some live music was playing.
    Say them 5 times real fast! (PS: Helsinki hosted the Olympics in 1952.)
     These were the 2nd and 3rd embassies we randomly came across. The first one was Rhodesia (or Indonesia?) right by our hotel.
     A pretty little square. Most of the buildings in Helsinki are in the beige/yellow/orange sort of family it seems. Our restaurant is bottom left.
     And a pretty empty square at that, except for Dan all by himself in the middle fiddling with his phone.
     The menu looked fun (dinner and ping pong!), and it was full of locals, not another tourist in sight. We were in. The name? Cock. Seriously.
    It was cute though! Very lively, played great American music.
     Now it claimed to be a French restaurant, but our appetizer was Italian – arancini – Dan got the jerk chicken and my “cock wings” had a definite Asian flavor to them – soy sauce and sesame seed. Everything was cooked perfectly, we enjoyed every bite.
    Only one other capitol city is further north than Helsinki, and that’s Reykjavik, Iceland. We have never been this far north or east before, with a 10 hour time difference between us and home. (Dan has been to Korea so he’s been further away time zone wise – but that was west, and just about 200 miles farther than this.)
    Anyway, that north thing is interesting this time of year – summer equinox and all that. And we’re fascinated by the lack of night. It’s now 12:30am and it is not completely dark yet. We’re told it ain’t gonna happen. So I guess we’ll find out. Here are some pretty pictures though of a lovely sunset from our room.
     About 9:30pm.
     9:30pm.
    Finland is the land of saunas, and our hotel has a nice setup for that, so we took advantage of that after we got back to our rooms. They’re only open from 6am – 10am and 5pm – 10pm so may have to go back down in the morning, especially since breakfast isn’t open until 7am.
     11:00pm.
    11:30pm.
    12:45am

     

    We are looking forward to our day tomorrow!

  • Day 7: Barcelona, Part 3 – Gaudi and the Sea

    Barcelona is a Gaudi town, as in Antoni Gaudi, an architect known for something called Catalan Modernism. You see his influence all throughout the city and, unless you’ve studied his work in depth (we didn’t), it’s hard to know which buildings are really him and which are merely influenced by him. And boy does this town love him – as much as Picasso (Part 1) and Miro (from Part 2), probably more.

    But because his work was often done for private owners, you can’t really see it all in one place, and certainly not all on one pass. It took me awhile to figure that out. None of the Gaudi stuff is on ANY of the passes; meaning, no discounts for the frugal traveler. If you want to see it all, you’re going to have to pay full price each time. We rarely like anything that much :)

    The picture below was actually taken last night on our walk home from dinner. It’s Casa Batllo, and is a Gaudi museum of sorts in the form of one of his most famous buildings. When we were finalizing what we were going to do today this morning, we decided to put this last on the list and see how the rest of the day went. It’s maybe 1/2 a mile from our apartment and is open late, so if we were still up for it and thought it would be worth it, we could easily do it at the end. (We didn’t.)

     

    This morning we left around 10:30am and walked over to the Arc de Triomphe, which is just a few blocks away from our apartment. It’s the exact same concept as the one in Paris, just not as big.

     

     

     

    The Arc sits at the end of the panhandle of a good sized park that essentially goes to the beach. This is the same park we were in on Friday, just the very north end. There was a race of some kind going on today.

    Next on the list was La Sagrada Familia, Gaudi’s most famous work. Construction began in 1882 and is still going; it’s current projected completion date is 2041. Gaudi’s original plan had 18 towers in it and I think only 8 or 10 have been built. There is a €15 admission fee to fund its ongoing construction.

     

    In a rookie move, I had neglected to buy tickets online, and if I had I would have known they limit how many people can go in at once and assign you a time. When we got there at 11:15, 1:15 was the earliest they were letting people in. So we bought our tickets and mosied around for awhile.

     

     These guys were playing in a little park across the street….
    …and there were 4 or 5 circles of folks all over the park doing these cute little dances to their music.
     This was taken from the park on the other side of the church from the one above.
     This pretty thing is actually a hospital.
    The view when I turned around, with La Sagrada Familia at the end of the parkway.
    The two hours went fast (gelato helped) and we were back at the church. In 2010, the pope consecrated it, and it’s been a World Heritage Site since 1984 with six other Gaudi properties in Barcelona, including Casa Batllo. We got an audio guide and started making our way around the property.

     

     

    There’s no doubt about it, it’s beautiful and amazing in a lot of ways. The audio guide gave lots of information of how Gaudi wove in certain elements intended to represent nature – such as the columns supporting the arches designed to look more like trees. Lots of little details like that throughout. It’s well thought out and executed.

    But in the end we think it’s over-hyped. It’s probably just us. If this was your first big church in Europe, it would absolutely blow you away, guaranteed. But something felt manipulative about the way the money was collected – 15 to get in, another 4.50 for the audio guide, another 3.50 if you wanted to go in the towers – all under this heading of contributing to the glory of God by building it by the people for the people. Or something like that. This probably felt weird to us because we’ve never paid to just enter a church before. They were blatant about “you’re helping us continue construction,” so at least they were honest about that. But rather than building for the people and the glory to God, it really felt like it was glory to Gaudi. And that’s fine, just call it what it is. So being under-whelmed by quality relative to other stuff we’ve seen and feeling manipulated to pay a relatively large entry fee just left us with a bad taste in our mouth. If it’s really “for the people, by the people”, which was repeated several times, then let it be driven by contributions only – the way every other Catholic Cathedral in Europe was built. We in particular didn’t care for the hypocrisy: it’s everyone’s church, but really only if you can pay €15 to see it…

    After that, we walked about 1.5 miles – mostly up – to Park Guell, a park heavily influenced by Gaudi. There was a museum section to this piece as well – that we would have to wait 2 hours for again because we didn’t buy in advance. We were just like “no way” and just walked around the park some. It was pretty.

    From there we took about a 30 minute bus ride to Platja de la Nova Icaria – a beach. Although it was warm – 84 – there was a nice breeze and it was lovely in the shade. We walked around for about an hour and then had a really nice dinner at a restaurant on the pier.

     This is the first time I’m seeing the Mediterranean Sea. It’s So Blue!
    Can you tell the difference between the one above and below?
    We were back in the apartment “early”, about 8:30pm. We joke about this now because it’s when most folks in this region begin to think about dinner; 10pm is actually a more typical time. But we had been out for 10 hours and were tired, plus needed to pack: tomorrow we leave for Helsinki.

     

  • Day 6: Barcelona, Part 2 – Parc de Montjuic

    Parc de Montjuic is more of district than an actual park, although there’s a lot of park-like terrain in the district. It has played a central role in major events in Barcelona, especially the 1929 International Exposition and the 1992 Summer Olympics.

    We had a simple breakfast in the apartment, including yogurt, ham and soft-boiled eggs, and headed out a little after 10am. We caught the metro (subway) just outside our apartment and took that for several stops, then walked a bit through a nice neighborhood. As we were approaching our first stop, the National Museum of Art, I was focused on this statue in the middle of his intersection (which I deleted the picture of because I couldn’t get a good shot), and when I looked up I gasped. Dan was like “I was wondering when you were going to notice.”

    On the hill in front of us sat this amazingly beautiful building, with a series of fountains leading up to it easily the length of a football field, and it took me longer than it should have to realize that’s where we were going. The first layer of fountains weren’t turned on so we skipped those for picture taking. As we kept moving up we kept going “wow” – we agreed this is the best fountain presentation we’ve seen. And the sound was incredible.



    God knows what I was saying but I decided to have a sense of humor and leave it in.

     This building was originally constructed in 1929 for the International Exposition; it has been the National Museum of art since 1934.
     The view looking back.
    This museum has the largest collection of Romanesque art in the world, much of it discovered in the surrounding area, all of it dating back to 1100-1300 or so. They specialize in restoring art from pieces of churches and monasteries and putting them back together into their original layout. Room after room of stuff that looks a lot like this.

     

    Religious art from this period is usually not our thing, but both of us independently took a picture of this so we must’ve liked it! It was massive – like 14×16 feet.
     

     

     This building had an auditorium. There was a high school orchestra setting up and practicing for a performance they would be giving later in the evening. We sat and listened to them practice for awhile. The acoustics were incredible. I snapped a photo of Dan as he was preparing to take one of his own.
     This is the one he took from that spot.

     

    This is a mural by Joan Miro, another artistic son of Barcelona and a mostly-contemporary of Picasso; 8-10 years apart in age as I recall. We visited a museum dedicated to his work later in the day but that museum wouldn’t let you take any pictures.
    The dome of the palace; Dan pretty much just looked up from where he was standing when he took the Joan Miro picture just above.

     

    Creepy but we liked it.

     

    There was a rooftop trail that gave you 360 degree views of the city if you walked around it.
    Another shot that requires a sense of humor: Dan kept saying “make sure your eyes are open!” No Way that was going to happen with the sun shining Directly into them.

     

     If you look closely you can see the Mediterranean Sea in the background….
    After much discussion we decided to have lunch here. They had a one price Tapas tasting menu so we did that of course. This was the appetizer selection, from left to right starting at 12:00: a very simple but incredibly good calamari, an eggplant something on crispy bread, potatoes similar to the ones we had last night sans the spicy sauce, really good sausage, a tuna salad of sorts, some Iberian ham on a toasted pastry.
    The main dish was seafood paella again; I thought it was better than the one we had yesterday, more saucier. It had mussels, just not the shells.
    The dessert was Catalan Cream, sort of like creme brulee but not exactly. I may like it better. (And creme brulee is one of my favorite desserts so that’s saying something.) It was more custardy and just a hint of that burnt sugar, nothing you had to break through.
    This was our view.
    We spent easily 4 hours in the museum total, probably closer to 4.5. Next we walked 15-20 minutes to the last museum we would use the pass for: the Joan Miro Foundation. You saw one piece from the earlier museum, the mural. This museum was 90% his work and it was all modern, and you know how we feel about that :) (Assuming you read yesterday’s entry!) So we didn’t stay that long. That museum didn’t allow pictures, so Dan took this on our way out, which was at the entrance.

     

    Next we took a “funicular” ride (think gondola) up the Castle Montjuic. Here are some photos on the way up.

     

     

     This was the castle. We had no intention of going in, we just wanted the views in the walk back down.

     

    We walked a good mile and then took the subway the rest of the way. We were back at the apartment by about 6pm. That would give us plenty of time to rest a bit. For dinner, we made reservations for 8:30pm – the earliest we could get them! This would be our one very nice jackets-required kinda dinner while we were here. We packed’em, we were going to make sure they got used!
    So the rest of these pics are for the foodies out there. Dan has done this several times before, but this was my first: a nine course tasting menu for a set price per person. So you know what’s coming, but you don’t get to pick. It was a fun way to try things I may not have tried before. Just about all of it was pretty amazing, some better than others. The restaurant was called Hisop, a very small place practically down an alley. Very simple decor and beyond attentive service. Dan was very good about reminding me to take photos before I dug into something.
    Burnt white asparagus with lime and tea on an aioli, served cold. An interesting way to start. I’ve seen white asparagus every time I’ve been in Europe now but never got around to eating it. It was good, milder than what we’re used to.
    Artichokes omelet with salmon roe (eggs) and sherry; the mousse stuff on top burned at the table with one of those torch thingys. This was the only miss for both of us. I wouldn’t eat it again.
    Chanterelles with thai curry and cockles (clams). This was just about my favorite and was in Dan’s top 3. I’m normally not a big clam person but these worked. The sauce had some spicy coconut thing going on with lime, and the snow peas added great texture. Up until the very end, it remained my favorite thing the rest of the meal.
     Vilanova prawn with chocolate. The chocolate are those little dark things, dissolved in your mouth. This was Dan’s favorite thing, I didn’t care for it too much.
    Grilled torbut (fish) with tomatoes and oyster sorbet. This grew on me. The oyster sorbet by itself was a bit much, but with the tomato and the clean taste of the white fish it worked.
    Oxtail with almonds and fennel. It was definitely in my top half – hard to know how to count dessert, which will make more sense later. If you count dessert as 1 thing, this was #3 for me.
    A cheese course that, starting on the left, got progressively more mild. That red rectangle thing on the left is a jelly to use as a palate cleanser. The only one I didn’t like really was the 2nd one on the right, because I don’t like goat cheese; it was Dan’s favorite.
    Lychee ice cream, lemon ice, and fresh mangos. It was shocking how good this was. The only possible word you can use to describe this is “refreshing.” (And not in a cucumber kimchi sort of way…a joke only Dan will understand…)
    Fresh strawberries in a syrup, strawberry sorbet on a black olive cake, and pepper foam. Wow. This was amazing. We were both like “hmm, how bad is it to say the dessert was our favorite thing? and then which do you pick?” They were both great.
     Yes, I know you know what espresso looks like, but this was part of it so I included it. I almost didn’t get it because at this point it was 10:30pm, but I was yawning a bunch and knew I’d want to stay up tonight to put the blog together. It did it’s job. (It’s approaching 2am now…)
    This was a surprise at the end: a chocolate truffle, candied carrot, and pickle. The chocolate we ate last and holy cow, may have been the best bite of the evening. Very rich, very smooth.
    So a funny story and then good night. There was this salt on the table in this tiny bowl so you could pinch your own dash as needed. It was a nice rock salt and tasted great. We asked the waiter if we could take some with us, just a very small amount in a piece of foil or something. We wanted it for our eggs in the morning in the apartment! The kitchen wasn’t stocked very well and had no food items of any kind, and we didn’t want to have to buy a bunch of stuff. This is what he comes back with. We both broke out laughing going “no, no we just wanted like a teaspoon.” He shrugs his shoulders like “this is what you’re getting.” When the gal brought the check (there were like 3 people waiting on us, including changing the silverware after every course), we told her what we wanted it for and we literally heard her laughing all the way to the back of the restaurant. Oh well, we’ll take it home with us and it will definitely get used!

     

     

     

     

  • Day 5: Barcelona, Part 1 – Gothic Quarter

    Today was the first official day of Dan’s vacation (we’ll just ignore that he’s on a conference call at this moment…approaching 10pm….) so he slept in since we weren’t on any kind of real schedule. I got up about 7am and planned the details of the day. He got up about 8:30. We took our time eating breakfast in and headed out about 10:15.

    The apartment we’re in is very centrally located, so today would be a walking day for sure. We went to the Placa de Catalunya first to stop at the visitor’s center to pick up the museum pass we’d purchased in advance. That’s where the bus dropped us off yesterday so we knew where we were going. It also sits at the edge of the Gothic Quarter, the neighborhood we would spend the day in, so it all flowed pretty easily.

     

     The fountain at the entrance. It’s actually a big shopping area but we were in and out; not really big shoppers.
     There were pigeons all over this plaza and this woman was creating a little feeding frenzy.
     Next we started to walk La Rambla, a tree-lined pedestrian mall that runs about 3/4 of a mile from Placa de Catalunya to the ports at the Mediterranean. Everything we wanted to do sort of criss-crossed this so we figured we might as well use it.
    All of it runs through the Gothic Quarter, a neighborhood that contains the old city of Barcelona, some of it dating back to the Middle Ages.

     

     

    Our first stop was the Museum of Contemporary Art. If you were with us last year, you might remember my little diatribe about modern art after my visit to the Ludwig in Cologne. When I told Dan where we were going first he was like “what??” I said “I know, I know – we’re not going for the art, I understand the building is worth seeing and since it’s on the pass we might as well take a look.” The building was interesting and modern – although very, Very white, inside and out. The art, well, let’s just say it was modern. There were only a few pieces we liked,  but we still managed to stay there about an hour.

     This piece is a great example of Dan’s first rule of what belongs in a museum: “If I could do it, it shouldn’t be here.” This is made of fragments of wood from old ships that ended up in a ship graveyard. It is supposed to “bring to mind the remains of illegal vessels bearing people from Africa who have tried, successfully or otherwise, to fulfill their dream of entering European territory.” Of course it does – that was the first thing I thought when I saw it!
     The building was just OK.
     This was only about 2.5 feet high. Dan said “it looks like monkey bars.”
    No clue.

     

    As we continued back down La Rambla, we discovered one of Dan’s favorite things: a local outdoor market. This was an interesting combination of produce, meats, fish and full on restaurant food. And it was crowded. We spent about 45 minutes in the the first time, then made our way back for some lunch a little while later.

     The entrance to the market.
     Lots of stands with very fresh fish.
     Good looking fruits and vegetables, much better than what we saw in the grocery store last night.
     Dried fruit and nuts.
     We had never seen this before. I took the picture to remember to look it up later. Finally saw a translation in another stand: barnacles. Specifically a Spain thing according to the article in the link. Seems like a lot of work!
     A stand where they sold, among other things, paella. This is where we ended up coming back for lunch.
     The seafood paella. We shared one of those and a black rice paella we both thought was excellent and better than the seafood one. Dan thought the black came from black beans. The real answer: Squid ink.
    Conejo = rabbit
     All it needs is an apple.
     These lobsters and crabs were very fresh, many of them still alive.
    More kinds of lobster than we knew existed.
     A Christopher Columbus statue at the end of La Rambla, with him supposedly pointing to the New World he discovered under the financing of Spain.

     

     This is Placa Reial, a large square with nothing but restaurants in it. We walked around and looked at the menus of just about every one, and then decided to go back to the market.
     See, I’m really not on this vacation by myself.
     We love these narrow streets and saw a lot of them today.
    Random pretty administration building we passed on the way to the Picasso museum.
     The very humble entrance to the Picasso museum, off a small side street. We actually passed it twice. I think we were expecting it to be something more obvious. You had to pay attention to where you were going.

     

     One of several nice courtyards in this building.
     What I enjoyed about this museum the most was Picasso’s early works. His father was essentially an art teacher so he was exposed early on and showed a talent at a young age. He was 14 when he did this.
     He was 15 when he did this.
    About that time I saw the “no cameras” symbol everywhere and stopped taking them. I’m surprised I didn’t get caught, there were plenty of docents around.
     Dan managed to sneak this one in. Probably more along the lines of what you think of when you think Picasso.
    What the other side of that courtyard looks like.
    Another cute little plaza we passed on the way to the next stop.
     This is the Basilica de Santa Maria del Mar.
     It is not on the main drag and there are buildings close to it all around so it was impossible to get a decent shot of the outside.
     The inside was respectable. There was something charming and satisfying with how old it felt. And with good reason: it was built between 1329 and 1383.

     

     Last church of the day: the Barcelona Cathedral.
    Built primarily in the 1300’s, it has a distinct look about it, despite definitely fitting the overall Gothic style of the period.

     

     

     

    There were LOTS of side altars, most of them decked in gold like this. But they were hard to get photos of because there were high wrought iron fences in front of every single one. This was the best I could do with one of them, just pointing my camera through the bars and getting what I could in the shot.
     You could go up to the roof and get some pretty decent views of the city.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     That’s La Sagrada Familia to the right, the most famous work by the architect Gaudi. We’ll be going there on Sunday.
     We stopped at a little cafe for some coffee, and used Yelp to figure out where we were going to do dinner.
    There was a nice view of the back of the Cathedral from there.
     This we passed on the way to dinner. Never could figure out what it was, but it’s very Gaudi-ish.
     We went to a tapas place called El Bitxo. One of the criteria for choosing a restaurant was, oddly enough, that it be open. MANY of them close after lunch and don’t open for dinner until 8:30pm. This was open, but we got there at about 7:20. That it’s otherwise empty is just because these people eat really late!
    We shared a nice salad with some cod and a great vinaigrette, some cerviche, and this really nice potato dish that we both agreed was the best of the evening. Really interesting sauces layered on top of underling potatoes – first layer was goat cheese based, 2nd was spicy and red/orange but we’re not sure what it was and forgot to ask. And sorry, foodies, we forgot to take pictures, too!
     Search lights for some reason in the distance from our terrace tonight.
    It was a good first day!

  • Day 4: Cologne to Barcelona

    I slept a pretty good 7 hours; Dan only about 5; we were both up before 7am. We went down for breakfast in the hotel about 8 and he was off to work by 8:30am. I literally had no plans for the morning, other than to stop by a bank for cash which was my big agenda item for the day. Beyond that, meet Dan at the Dusseldorf airport, taking no later than the 1:30pm train. So a few hours to kill. What to do?

    I looked through TripAdvisor for ideas. This is my 3rd time in Cologne and have already done what was important to me. As I continued to scroll through the list, something surprising caught my eye: Sukon Thai Massage. For much of yesterday during the stalled train episode I kept thinking “what I could really use is a massage.” And there it was in TripAdvisor’s top 25 with rave reviews, including great prices. I mapped it and it was just a block or two on the other side of the cathedral. That was the only thing I had definitely decided on: to drop in on the cathedral, just on principle, and then walk around and go deeper into some neighborhoods, out of the touristy area. The massage place didn’t open until 11am so I would still have plenty of time to do both if they weren’t already booked.

    It had rained some last night and was supposed to continue through mid-morning so I took an umbrella just in case. But it was warm enough to not need a jacket. I walked the 3 blocks or so to the cathedral. It was just 9am and it was still pretty quiet out.

     

    It still takes my breath away every time. Maybe it’s just because it was the first major cathedral I saw in Europe, but this one will always be special to me. I was glad there weren’t many people about; it’s usually a zoo out front. I went in and there was a mass going on in the front side altar, behind a gate to keep the tourists out. And there weren’t too many of us roaming around either. I just sat for a few minutes and took it all in. It’s still miraculous to me that it’s still standing when I think of all the damage that occurred all around it during WW2 – especially with the train bridge maybe 500 yards away being totally destroyed as a significant strategic target of the Allies. The ground must have been shaking all around and these arches and pillars are still standing – the foundation is nearly 800 years old. One of the things that struck me this time in comparison to other churches I’ve been in since is the size of the pillars. It was too dark to get good pictures, but they are massive – maybe 12 feet or more in diameter. Maybe that has something to do with it. At any rate, I hadn’t paid homage yet on this trip so was glad I stopped by. This place does something to me.
    Sure enough, the massage place was just a couple of blocks away. The sign on the door confirmed it didn’t open until 11am, so I look a right and spent the next hour playing “let’s turn here and see what happens.” That’s one of my favorite things to do when I’m traveling – just meander and try to get a feel for local life. You have to get far enough away from the tourist area, and/or one or two blocks off the main drag. Since we tie these annual trips to Dan’s work, Cologne is the likely starting place each time, so I wanted to get to know the neighborhoods better. I found myself back at Neumarkt where we had been Sunday evening, but approached it from a completely different direction and was happy I recognized as I came up to it. I stopped at a bank in that area, then went and found some new paths to work my way back to hotel.
     
     You can’t read the sign in this picture, but it’s a South African restaurant. We’ll have to try it when we’re here next year!
    Another place that looked interesting – Buddha’e Eye, Nepalese & Tibetan food.
    It was about 10:20 by this point; I decided I would just pack and take my bags with me to the massage place, then go to the train station from there. Simpler than all the back and forth.
    The massage was actually pretty good: typical Thai, done on the floor, very little oil used, it’s mostly about pressure and stretching, which was exactly what I needed. They could only accommodate an hour which worked perfectly for my schedule, and it was only €45, a very decent price as this stuff goes. As I made my way back to the train station, I decided to snap a shot of it, still our favorite one!

     

     I stopped for some coffee at Kamp’s, right behind that 2nd umbrella – another activity that’s becoming ritual.
     I wanted to see if I could recreate the shot I took last year sitting on the steps of the cathedral, where everyone said it looked like I had a crown on my head. Apparently it’s easier to do by accident!, but this is pretty close.
     This is the view from that spot.
    No train problems today, everything was on time. Security at Dusseldorf airport was surpisingly lax; I never even had to show my passport. You can’t get 10 feet in Heathrow it seems without whipping out your passport again. I kept waiting to be asked for it but nothing. Weird.
    I met Dan at the lounge, which he has access to because of his frequent flyer status. It’s free nibblies for lunch so can’t beat that. It was about a 2 hour flight to Barcelona and there were no problems.
    We took the airport express bus, and the last stop happened to be a couple of blocks from the apartment we rented. At first when we were on the bus I was saying to Dan how I expected this to look very different somehow, but so far it was all looking pretty normal. He said – maybe it changes the closer you get to the center. By the time we got there I was like: this is like Paris, but warmer. It has that kind of feel to me – very lively, very cosmopolitan, but fun and hip somehow. And all of the buildings seem to be that same 5-7 stories high with wrought iron balconies on every apartment – like Paris. I like the feel of it so far, a lot.
    Anna, the landlord, met us there. She lives upstairs, and manages a couple of units for the owner who lives in Ecuador. She was delightful, and very helpful. She’s lived in Barcelona all her life except for a few years she lived in London and Paris. Her English is great just with a heavy Spanish accent. Dan quizzed her about places to eat: authentic Spanish and/or Catalonian food, preferably that don’t cater to tourists. Where do the locals go that tourists don’t know about? She gave us several recommendations, including one just around the corner.

    So we had tapas at Casa Alfonso, an appropriate first meal in Barcelona I think.

    The bread was like bruschetta with a crispy bottom, and olive oil and fresh like pureed tomatoes on top. That’s spicy Iberian chorizo next to it, made almost like a jerky.  On either side of that is the Casa Alfonso Bomb: think croquet – a mash of meat and potatoes, breaded and deep fried, with a spicy mayonaise based sauce on top. Dan really, really liked this one. We also got a cannelloni that was pretty special, and creme brulee for dessert.

    After that we stopped by a grocery store a couple of blocks in the other direction and picked up a few things for breakfast while we’re here.

     I was pretty excited about this apartment when we found it on AirBnB and it did not disappoint. We loved that is has a terrace, and it’s great weather for it. You see my laptop? That’s where I’m sitting as I type. (Dan’s been asleep over an hour already…)
     Teeny kitchen but they always are. It’s enough for what we need. We typically only do breakfast in, and buy stuff you don’t actually have to cook.
     The bedroom is not exactly a separate room but it’s close enough. This apartment had our non-negotiable items: a place for me to be comfortable while writing, a kitchen space, a washer, and wi-fi (which by the way is wicked fast). The terrace was the cherry on top.
     It will be great to have coffee out here in the morning.

    Tomorrow the Barcelona fun begins. And Dan is finally officially on vacation. Excited!