La Valvanerada

Cruisin'

Marseille

The next stop on our cruise brought us to the French Riviera, or Côte d'Azur. Marseille is the France's largest port city and third largest metro behind Lyon and Paris.

The center of Marseille is really beautiful, with views of the Old Roman Port and the hills surrounding it, like the one with the famous basilica Notre-Dame de la Garde on top, visible for miles around.

This is the inside of Notre-Dame de la Garde. The church was finished in 1864 and was done in a Neo-Byzantine style.

The inside of the basilica is really ornate with gold, marble, and porphyry, and mosaics and murals adorn all the walls. There are many decorations dedicated to football teams, soldiers, captains, pilots, etc. That's why you seen the model planes and ships hanging from the ceiling.


Here's the view over Marseille from its tallest point, right next to the basilica. You can see the Old Port in the center.

Here we are with a few of our friends we met on the cruise. They are Venus and Arturo from Puerto Rico. They were really nice people, and it was great to hang out with them. I even got to practice my Spanish a bit while I was out of Spain.


Just off the coast of the city is the little island of If. If is famous for its castle-fortress later turned prison the Château d'If. This was one of the settings for Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. In the 1844 adventure novel, the Count is sentenced to prison on If. After a daredevil plan gets him off the island, he is the first prisoner ever to escape.

In reality no one is known to have escaped. It's France's version of Alcatraz in California.

Here we are at the municipal park Palais Longchamp. There are several big museums there, as well as the large spectacular fountain staircase monument we're standing in front of.

Big Vacation with Mom and Rae!

Oh man, it's time to write about pictures... here we go.

This was the first part of my big nearly four week long vacation with my mom and sister Rachel. They came into Spain via Madrid and managed to catch the bus up north to Logroño. Since both of them had been in Logroño before, we took advantage of the first part of the vacation to visit some places in the northern autonomous community of the Basque Country. The Basque Country, or Pais Vasco, is divided into three provinces known in English as Biscay, Guipuscoa, and Alava.

The Basque Country has a different climate than La Rioja, as the latter where I live is much drier and hotter in summer. The Basque Country gets quite a lot of precipitation as it borders the sea to the north. It's a fairly mountainness or hilly region with a lot of vegetation and forests in the north. There are also a lot of nice beaches along the coast that are completely different from the more famous Spanish beaches on the Mediterranean. The northern beaches are more natural, with hills, trees, rocks, and a more temperate climate, than those more well known beaches like around Barcelona, Valencia, Malaga, Cadiz, etc. that tend to be flatter, larger, and more artificial.

This is Mundaka; it's not too far from Bilbao in the province of Biscay, or Vizcaya. The tide goes up, creating a river running inland, and down, revealing an expansive beach for surfers, sailboats, and suntanners alike.

This is a church outside of Mundaka called San Juan. It can only be accessed through the skinny stairwell that winds out from the shore to its peninsula location. The tide comes up and the stairs go away.

This is the castle of Butron located in Gatica of the Biscay province. The fairytale like castle dates back to the Middle Ages.

We owe many thanks to my flatmate Juan for taking us in his car to the many places we visited in the Basque Country. Here we are on the beach of Bakio, very near Bilbao in Biscay. Its close location to the metropolitan city leads it to be a very fashionable place for people to relax and catch a tan.


Here we are in front of the monumental vineyard hotel Marques de Riscal in Elciego of southern Basque Country in the province of Alava. The architect is Frank Gehry, the same man who designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and the similarity between the two buildings is quite clear.

My mom is eating a pincho in Logroño with our friend Tony.

Laguardia: medieval village just north of Logroño in Alava, known for its hilltop location, vineyards, wineries, and beautiful narrow stonepaved streets.


Juan and the girls in the main square of Laguardia.


Lastly, here's Juan strolling through a portal in the center of lovely Gernika in the Biscay province. Gernika is most famous for being bombed by the Nazi Germany during the Spanish Civil War in an effort to overthrow the Basque and Spanish Republican governments. Pablo Picasso painted perhaps his most famous painting 'Guernica' in commemoration to the bombing.

Porto, Portugal

Porto (Oporto in English) is the second largest city in Portugal. It's located in the north, and it's a very important port city. Porto is named for the famous port wine that is produced there. The city itself is not that big, though the metro area is nearly two million people. That being said, Porto is very important both culturally and economically, and there are many churches and beautiful old buildings in the center of the city to remind us of this.

Here's the Igreja do Carmo (Portuguese is cool)... (that means church, by the way) with its large azulejo adorned walls. Azulejo is the name given the style of using these blue and white porceline tiles. They're quite beautiful, and very shiny on sunny days. Porto was full of them, especially the churches.

Another street leading up one of Porto's many hills, also featuring several nice buildings with azulejos. They are really a unique feature, and most of them that I saw were wonderfully preserved.

Here I am standing in front of the main square in the city, Avenida dos Aliados (aliados are allies). I think it's referring to the relationship between Portugal and England, which historically has been quite close since the defeat of Napolean.

My experience in Porto wouldn't have been the same had it not been for Fernando and Maria, two lovely Portuguese people I met there. I stayed with Fernando at his apartment for the three nights I was there. I didn't know him before.

I contacted him (or better said he contacted me) through an internet travelers network called Couchsurfing. Basically it's a type of network that puts you in contact with other people so that you can stay at their places for free. Many places have sofas you can sleep on, but others have beds too. I stayed on Fernando's pull-out couch for three nights, and he took me around the city in his car to show me around. He gave me a map and we went out for meals together and he introduced me to some really cool people.

In the picture we're having dinner with his friend and fellow 'couchsurfer' Maria. She had just gotten back from a trip to see her family in central Portugal and she brought back some traditional food from their farm. I can't tell you exactly what everything was called, but it was all wonderful. Portuguese cuisine is quite different from Spanish, and it's very very good.

We had a dish of rice and meat, some special sweet bread, fresh goat's cheese, fresh salads and oil, a delicious cake with fig and tomato salsas, and also some wines and teas. It was quite amazing.

When I wasn't hanging out with Fernando and Maria, I was out touring the city. Here's a view of the center of town from one of the hilltops. The tower, called Igreja e Torre dos Clerigos (or Church and Tower of the Clerics), is the tallest in Porto.

In the oldest district or neighborhood of the city, called Ribeira, is the cathedral, or Se. Inside the cathedral is an incredible cloister complete with azulejos on all the walls.

There are several large bridges crossing the river Douro that lies next to Porto's historic center. Pictured is one of the funiculars that brings you up the steep hill and all that's left of an old castle wall.

On the other side of the river is Vila Nova de Gaia, another town that is basically part of Porto. It's very important because that is where all of the famous port wine cellars and caverns are located. The wine is actually shipped in via the river on little boats. The vineyards are all farther inland where the temperature is better to grow the grapes. It's too hot to store and ferment the wine though, and it would be far to expensive to construct proper wineries there, and so the wine is brought to Vila Nova de Gaia where there are many caverns and the climate is temperate, being right next to the ocean.

Fernando took me to a tour of one of the wineries, called Taylor's. Many of the wineries have English surnames because they were the ones who invested so much in the businesses. Port wine is very different from the wine I'm used to, since during the fermentation process they add brandy. Port wine is a dessert wine, and it's sweet sweet joy in a glass. There are many different types of port wine, including tawnies, rubies, reserves, and several other red and white wines.

The old Ribeira part of town is the densest part to my right toward the center of the city. It's buildings are protected by UNESCO, so it's a World Heritage Site. I guess that means that you can't change anything there without special permission, and that doing so would also be very very expensive. Therefore not too many people live there or have businesses there I've been told.

On the left you can see the little boats that are used to haul the port wine from the Douro Valley region east of Porto closer to the Spanish border. Interestingly enough, the Douro River runs through Spain as well, and there's a valley that provides a very comfortable location to grow exquisite Spanish wines.

The bridge of Luis I, from the top of which I took the last pictures.

We went out with friends one of the nights to watch a local football (soccer) match on television and we had a typical Portuguese treat for dinner. It's called the francesinha, which is Portuguese for 'Frenchy'. It's a style of sandwich, accompanied by french fries, that's got a couple different types of meat (sausage, steak, ham...) and then it's covered in cheese and a spicy sauce. Altogether filling and fabulous with a good beer or two.

Later I went out with a few of the friends we met at the dinner. It was a 'couchsurfers' dinner, which meant that those involved with the internet group went and invited any guest that they had at the time. Fernando invited me, and other Portuguese people invited their guests as well. The guy to my left is Dutch living and working in Porto, the blonde girl was from Boston and really got a kick out of the Kevin Garnett Celtics shirt I was wearing, the guy behind is Portuguese, from Germany maybe?, another Portuguese girl, and two Chinese girls were our group.

We were at a fun little jazz bar-cafe listening to live music and drinking port wine. Not bad at 2 Euros a glass (Portugal is among the cheaper countries to visit in Europe; so my Euros went a lot further there than they usually do in Spain).

The next afternoon I took a walk over to one of Porto's modern architectural marvels, the Casa da Musica, or literally House of Music. It's funky shape on the outside is reflected by many different colored geometric rooms inside. It's also a world class concert hall. A famous Dutch architect by the name of Rem Koolhaas designed it; and it was more or less finished in 2005. Koolhaas has done many famous projects throughout the world, including the Seattle Central Library.

A cool little stairway inside the Casa da Musica.

Special care was taken to ensure that the sound that emminated from the orquestras and bands playing the main concert hall was perfectly, or near perfectly, audible to every member of the seated audience. It's said to be one of the best constructed concert halls on the planet, actually, which every person in the audience, from the front row to the back, hearing the exact same sound (at least to the human ear it seems so).

The photo shows a view of the main concert hall through special waved glass, capable of reflecting sound waves and keeping out noise from outside. The glass is transparent, of course, and there are giant windows of this variety behind the stage and also behind the audience that kind be covered or left open depending on the time and arrangement of the concert. Pretty cool.

I was greeted when I arrived in Fernando's apartment by a his chess set, adorned with both the Portuguese and United States flags. He does this for everyone who comes to stay with him. On the third night he added the flag of Thailand because a Thai girl studying in Holland came to stay with us.

Fernando, in fact, is what I would call a couchsurfer all-star. He's retired, and he's basically hosting people in his apartment and showing them around the city fulltime. In about a year-and-a-half since he's joined the internet program, he's hosted over 160 people from over 60 countries all over the world. It's extremely ambitious, but I also learned that he's been working with people all his life, and so this is something he's very good at.

Though this is something obviously wouldn't suit just anyone, having to put up with tourists in your house all the time, but I find it fascinating that he's learning all about the world and people from different places without leaving his own city.

On the last night, Fernando, Maria, the Thai girl Ayedriana, and I went to a restaurant near the ocean harbour for some fresh caught fish. These are grilled sardines, and they were particularly splendid.

Potatoes, salad, and onions accompanied this cuttlefish, garlic roasted to perfection.

The evening concluded with some card games back at Fernando's place. We played a variety of gin (no, it wasn't rummy).

I'll tell you something that I've learned about traveling: the best memories you'll have of any place you ever visit will be the people, not the monuments. As a tourist, I'd say the best thing you could do would be to meet some local people. This is maybe easier said that done, but I think that internet programs like Couchsurfing make traveling cheaper, more affordable, and even more enjoyable.