Madrid, Part 1

Let's just keep the Spain train of pictures going, shall we?  Our first full day in Madrid, Bennet and Missy were off with their official tour group most of the day for a trip to Toledo (Holy Toledo, Batman!  I couldn't resist) so Lee and I wandered around on our own for a bit.  Did you know there's an Egyptian temple in the middle of Madrid?

This is the Temple of Debod.  In the 1960s, lots of ancient Egyptian temples and monuments along the Nile were in danger of flooding from the Aswan Dam, so an international group of archaeologists worked to remove the buildings from their original sites and save them from destruction.  The countries who helped out the most were gifted with temples, so there's this one in Spain and that's also why there's an Egyptian temple in New York.

Note to self:  don't wear a shirt that is almost the same color as your jacket.  It's bugging me in the pics :p

It's free to go in the temple, though they have some guard dudes who mostly make sure that there aren't too many people in there at one time, 'cause it's pretty small inside.  Lots of hieroglyphs, though they're a bit hard to see in the pics.

You could press buttons to illuminate the hieroglyphs on the walls but I don't think it necessarily helped with taking the pictures.

On one of the upper floors, they've got a scale model of what the whole temple complex looked like on its original site.  The inner part of the temple was the oldest, from the second century BC, and further bits and pieces and decorations were added for another four centuries so it was completed under Roman emperors.

Another model (sorry this picture is pretty terrible) of the Nile and where the temples originally stood along its banks.

So we left the Temple of Debod and kept on truckin' around Madrid.  I have no idea where we were or what this statue is, but thank Lee for a nice picture.

Couldn't figure out which one I liked best :)

And here is the Royal Palace of Madrid.

This is actually the side of it, which faces a large plaza where we saw a dude making giant bubbles, to the delight of several children.

I took about a dozen pictures of the group trying to make sure I got a good one.

Looks like fun, but I wouldn't want to get bubble soap all over me.  Guess I really am a grown-up.  (Sort of.)

And there's the front of the palace.  We did a tour of it but of course you're not allowed to take pictures inside.  It was okay, parts of it were pretty impressive, but after a while it kind of feels like they're beating you over the head with gold leaf and statues, ya know?

Lee's picture of a cool lamppost in the courtyard.

After we left the palace, we saw this aggressively purple building, so I got Lee to take a picture of it for me.

We ended up eating a snack at this place.  It's a pretty big building and it's full of little stalls, mostly food, with about everything under the sun--several sushi places (ick), lots of tapas, frozen yogurt, candies, cakes, and on and on.  It was really crowded too, but the food was good.

And here is Madrid's Plaza Mayor.  And out front of the buildings are a couple characters I'm sure were not authorized by Nickelodeon or Disney--Sponge Bob and an Americana Mickey Mouse.  Seems like there were some other weird ones too but I don't remember what exactly now.  This was like six weeks ago, I've slept since then.

And there's a closeup of the one building.  Kind of interesting...but I don't think I'd like to have my house decorated like that.

Well, Lee and I have to go get ready for a fancy-dancy dinner at Parliament.  (Yeah, we're going to Parliament!)  So I'd better go try to make myself presentable.  Adios, amigos!

Segovia, Part 6

Ok wow, Amber and Vicki took me by surprise and both ran in ninja-fast with comments on my last post, so here I am already back again with the last of the Segovia pictures.  These were all taken on our last morning in Segovia; we packed up the suitcases and then set out on foot to check out the city walls, which somehow we'd missed in our previous ramblings about town.

It's a tree branch shot for Miss Vicki!

And there are the walls.  There was a plaque somewhere talking about the walls and the different gates in them but I didn't take a picture of it, which is odd because usually I do photograph the signage.

Some form of moss/lichen/unidentified plant matter on the walls that Lee thought was cool.

We found a gate!  Watch out though, it is still a street...we were trying to take pics and had to move out of the way for cars several times.

Here's a butt shot for Mom!  And you can kinda tell how my jacket is good for spotting me from a distance.

See, you can just barely see that teensy dot of teal waaaaaayyyy back there near the gate!  That's me :)

And my honey pie, who of course eschews bright colors because he likes to dress in ninja stealth mode.

Missy!  I thought all the different textures behind her were pretty cool.

Don'tcha hate it when your hair goes flat on one side?  I think Shania Twain sang about that in a song once.  No wait, she just said all her hair went flat; I must be special to have it only do that one one side and not the other.

Umm, I don't know.

Explanation for this photograph:  After our Charlie's Angels/kung fu photo that I shared last time, Bennet complained he couldn't get his martial arts on since Missy and I blocked him in and he claimed he could do a 360 flying roundhouse kick.  So then of course we had to see THAT and then he had to take a bunch of aspirin.

Walked by the back side of the cathedral on the way to pick up our bags at the hotel and I just thought this was a cool pic of the crenelations.

And there's a pic of our hotel, which I would recommend to anyone else staying in Segovia.  The rooms were hot as blue blazes but since it was pretty cold outside, we were able to mitigate the heat with open windows.  The accommodations were really nice other than the heat, and the water pressure in the shower was pretty phenomenal (we hate it when we have a hotel room with really low water pressure, it's a pet peeve).

After this, we cabbed it to the train station and sat there for probably at least an hour playing UNO and I drove everyone else crazy in one game where I called UNO like six times in a row.  They'd try to block me or make me draw cards and I'd still get down to UNO, but it took me that six rounds to actually go out of cards.  I did the math on our Spain UNO tournament and it turns out Missy and I tied as the winners.  Yay girls!

Ya know what, I've used lots of big words today.  I was out with the Karens the other day and they were kind of laughing about the words I use...I think it was after I said something about being conversant with Star Trek lore.  What can I say, I'm a word nerd.

Segovia, Part 5

So I finally figured that if I was going to get through the Spain pictures before the Zombie Apocalypse happens, I can't wait for people to comment on the blog.  So I'll just continue talking to myself here :p

Aaaand let's continue with the Segovia pics, because I still have tons of pics from the Netherlands and we leave for Germany on Friday.  Does that sound like I'm bragging?  Sorry.  But it IS awesome.

We found a little church with cherry trees in front of it on our way to the castle.

And I took a few pics of the cherry blossoms.  Reminds me of Japan!

I could have stayed there taking pics of the flowers for a while, but we had a castle to go see.

Another one of the narrow twisty streets of Segovia.  This is right next to where we found a cute little shop of handmade items; we stopped in there and I got my mom a necklace with a pendant that was a peacock feather pattern painted on a capiz shell; Bennet and Missy got some really cool clear glass decorative plates with kind of watercolor-esque patterns on them of the aqueduct.  The lady who ran the shop had some really neat plates with flowers on them too but alas, I didn't get any of them.

So the castle is downhill from the tourist quarter of the town (?? Don't castles normally go on the HIGH ground?) but it's built on a cliff so I guess that makes it more defensible?  This is a view from the wall near the front entrance to the castle.

I don't know why but this picture makes me want to sing "The hilllllllls are aliiiiiiiiiive with the sound of muuuuuusic!" and it's not even the right country for that song.

There's my sweetie pie!  It's funny, both of us when we were walking up to that wall said the landscape looked so picturesque and beautiful, it was as if it were a painting.  Hard to believe it was real.

Entrance to the castle.

There it is!  And there are we!  Lee set the camera on the wall and set the timer for the pic.  I think both of us would have been really ticked had the camera fallen off the wall, but happily that did not occur.

So we did the tour of the castle, and I'm not real great on Spanish history so I can't really tell you anything specific about it.  But it did have some nice stained glass windows:

And if you look closely, his horse is totally trampling people.

Check out that ceiling!

Or this one!  Here's a closeup:

Lee didn't take a lot of pics inside, partially because our camera doesn't do that great in low light and really, we've been to so many castles and palaces and manor houses they're all starting to blur together.  (Yes, it's a tough life, this European traveling thing.)

The last thing we did was climb a gazillion stairs (duh, we were with Missy, of *course* there are stairs involved) up the tower to get a view of the town.

So yeah, the stairs were worth it.  (Don't tell Missy I said that.)

Kinda cold up on top of the tower but the scenery was worth it!

My favorite person.  Though I think that spider hat is slightly creeptastic...ask Lee about me and my arachnophobia.  It's not funny, no matter what he says.

Picked up the peace sign habit in Japan and we may never lose it!  We were laughing because Lee pointed the camera at us and we both threw up the peace sign at the same time like we planned it.  Guess we just share a brain sometimes.

While we were taking pics from atop the tower, Lee noticed these birds flying in with food for the baby birds (I think there were baby birds?  I could be making that up) and he took pics of their treetop nests.

Pretty cool.  I don't think we could see the nests at all from ground level.

Not sure why but I think the architecture in this shot looks cool?

There's the courtyard where we started out.  It was a lot of stairs down.

After the castle, we had lunch and then took some more pics at the big cathedral and before you ask, the blue, blue sky in this photo is totally not Photoshopped or digitally enhanced in any way.

It was just that pretty when we took these pics.

And we managed a shot of all four of us...

And one kung fu style because we're like that.  Except for Bennet, who complained that Missy and I (a.k.a. Charlie's Angels) totally boxed him in.

Until next time, adios amigos!