Category: Uncategorized

April 21 2019 – Stupid O’Clock at LHR

The Bat Cab arrived at 05.30, driven by Palminder, who has been driving cabs for forty two years. He wasn’t wearing a cowl with pointy ears, Bat Cabs is our local taxi company. There was very little traffic,  it only took twenty minutes to get to T3 Heathrow. Strong coffee was necessary as soon as possible from  Pret. I was surprised to see the Champagne and Oysters stand was open at six AM, to cater for passing oligarchs with the munchies I suppose.

The British Airways flight to Vienna was about two hours and the plane was half empty, that’s a good result! The OBB train from the airport takes about twenty minutes into Hauptbaunhof, a very modern station set in a district of Vienna full of new buildings. It costs about half as much as the CAT train to Wien Mitte station, which is more in the city centre. The Hauptbaunhof is close to the Belvedere.

After depositing our bags in locker at the station, it was a short walk to the Belvedere, which is two palaces (the Upper and Lower) set in beautiful gardens.  They were built for Prince Eugene who had helpfully (for the Austrians) won some battles during the War of Spanish Succession. That was a big squabble between France, Spain, Austria and Britain that began when then last of the in-bred Spanish Hapsburgs (Charles II) died.

The Upper Belvedere was for showing off his wealth and the Lower was for actually living in. Personally I can cleverly combine both these functions in one semi-detached house.

The Upper is an art gallery, where Gustav Klimt’s “Kiss” is displayed. The museum shop has the Kiss on posters, mugs, purses, pencil cases and key rings, so I didn’t feel the need to see the actual painting. There were huge queues to get in, and since  were knackered from getting up at five, we decided to laze around in the lovely formal gardens and the nearby Botanic gardens. 

The Belvedere gardens are huge, and lovely and free, whereas you have to pay to get into all of the galleries and museums in Vienna.

At the other end of the park and down a hill is the Lower Belvedere. between them is a beautiful cascade of waterfalls.

On our return to the station we got some food supplies from Spar at the railway station, and collected our bags from the locker where we had deposited them. I decided to (foolishly) walk to our AirBnB in Lerchenfelder Strasse to see a bit more Vienna, rather than (sensibly) get the 13a bus as suggested by our host.

Unfortunately the GPS on my phone kept dropping out, so we took a bit of a diversion by mistake, quite a big loop. Julie was not happy after dragging her suitcase for an hour.

Eventually we found the flat at 70 -72 Lurchenfelder Strasse and were greeted by a Frau who didn’t speak English, but we managed to communicate. The small flat was quite comfortable and had everything we need. Being a clever dicky, I fixed up my Chromecast device to the huge Samsung TV so we could watch Netflix via my phone. We watched Afterlife with Ricky Gervais, and it was very emotional and funny.

April 22 2019 – Exploring the Old Town

After breakfast we walked down Lerchenfelder Strasse towards the city centre. It doesn’t take long to get to the Ringstrasse and it’s grand Imperial buildings. This ring road replaced the walls of the city, which were demolished by the Emperor Franz Joseph in the middle of the nineteenth century. He didn’t do any of the work personally, since he was busy posing for portraits, or eating twelve course meals. Franz Joseph was Emperor of Austria and is considerable empire for sixty eight years, even longer than our beloved QEII

Franz Joseph had a big building splurge, and wanted to reflect the glory of the Austro – Hungarian Empire in massive stone edifices.They are in Neo Classical or Gothic style, sometimes a blend of both. They replaced the medieval fortifications that once surrounded the city and protected Vienna from attempted Turkish invasions.

It was Easter Monday, so the museums and galleries were all closed, but we could sit on benches in the park to enjoy them from the outside.

Just inside the old city is the Hofburg, an enormous palace and home to the ruling Hapsburg kings and emperors from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries. Every monarch added more to the palace right up to the end of the empire in 1918.

You can walk into some of the inner courtyards and through to a ticket shop to get a tour of the interior. The Hofburg tour consists of three parts, the Royal Silver collection, the Sisi Museum and the Royal Apartments.

The Silver collection is the Hapsburg cutlery and crockery spread over numerous rooms. If you want to have dinner for a hundred people, you are going to need lots of knives and forks. Every course had its own settings, and there were between nine and thirteen courses at a big dinner. They ate off silver, gilt (gold-plated silver) or porcelain; there was literally tons of the stuff. My favourite crockery was the English Minton porcelain, which was more colourfully decorated than the plain silver and gold plates and is English!

I’ve got no photos of this because you aren’t allowed to take photos. Apparently they can steal the souls of the knives and forks.

The Sisi museum was dedicated to the wife of Emperor Franz Joseph, who was Empress from 1854 when she married EFJ (aged sixteen) until her death in 1898. Sisi was the Princess Diana of her day, beautiful but tragic. She was assassinated by an Italian anarchist who stabbed her in the chest with a file in Geneva in 1898. She was athletic and obsessed by her own beauty, dieting to keep her twenty one inch waist. She didn’t enjoy court life much, and spent a lot of time at her place in Corfu. Her fame was only established after her death, and and was cemented by a series of fanciful films about her in the fifties starring Romy Schneider. The museum is full of portraits, dresses and even her personal toilet! It was much more interesting than the spoons and plates that preceded it.

The Royal Apartments are stuffed with portraits, baroque furniture, tapestries and all the usual furnishings of Royal palaces. I have visited numerous palaces in England, Scotland, France, and Italy, and they all into a mess of gold, tapestries and dull portraits in my head. I did like the huge ceramic stoves in the corners of the rooms that were fuelled from the back by servants in hidden corridors.

Nearby is St Stephens Cathedral, which is the main church in the city centre. It’s an old Gothic building, and is rather gloomy and dark inside. If it was painted white and fitted with new IKEA furniture it would be much more attractive. I compare all cathedrals to Lincoln, and sorry Vienna, yours doesn’t come close. This may lose me some of my fans in Vienna (if I have any).

Culture is generally a good thing, but I can only take so much of it before I start haze over. It was Beer O’ Clock, so we found a cafe and had a Budewieser (the proper stuff, not that American wee).

April 23

April 23 2019 – Hidden Vienna Tour

The weather on Tuesday was a bit, well, shitty. We went to the Natural History museum but it is closed on Tuesday. The Kunsthistoriche museum opposite had huge queue, so we didn’t go in there either. I have very little patience for queues, so I don’t do to Theme Parks either.

We wandered round shops the shops in central Vienna, and then over to the Naschmarkt, a lovely semi-covered market of all sort of good stuff to eat. It’s like Borough Market in London, and well worth a visit. I can recommend Dr Falafel as a place to eat, have the Falafel Wrap.

Outside the Ubahn station we met Hannes for the Hidden Vienna tour that Julie booked on AirBnB. Hannes was an excellent guide, a local man who had to study for two years to get his guide qualification.

He us took us on a three hour tour of parts of Vienna we would never have found otherwise. These are some highlights

The 4th best staircase in the world as voted by a panel of architects, probably on a wet Sunday afternoon. Some people live dull lives. It was actually a pretty staircase. For reference purposes, the Spanish Steps in Rome was top of the list.

The Museum Quarter with its cool plastic benches. There are a cluster of museums and galleries housed in the former Imperial Stables.

Two universities, one in old buildings and another in very modern buildings (the Wirtschaftsuniversität) The old Vienna University is very Victoric Gothic, the new one has a bonkers building designed by Zaha Hadid. It has no ninety degree angles makes the users feel sea sick.

The Rathaus (Town Hall), a neo-gothic building like London’s Royal Courts of Justice

The Prater park and funfair, with its famous Ferris wheel as seen in the 1949 film The Third Man with Orson Wells, Trevor Howard and Joseph Cotton. Everyone born in the fifties knows the famous theme tune played on a zither. It is the only tune anyone knows played on a zither. Don’t confuse it with the “Never on a Sunday” theme they used to played in every Greek restaurant, that was a bouzouki.

Did you know that London had its own Great Wheel which was built at Earls Court in 1895, but was demolished in 1906.

It was an excellent tour, even though the weather was cold and wet. I did see a few interesting street art and signs which made me smile.

April 23 2019 – Schonbrunn Palace

On Wednesday the sun came out again and we took the Ubahn (underground train) and tram to Shonbrunn . This was the summer palace for the ruling Hapsburg family until 1918 when they had lost the war and the Republic of Austria began. The transport system in Vienna is operated on trust, there are no barriers, but if you get caught without a validated ticket, the fines are high. We bought our tickets in the Ubahn station, the machines have an English language option.

We purchased the “Imperial Tour” of state apartments, which was sixteen Euros for twenty rooms. For another four Euros we could have had forty rooms, but I have a limited attention span. The tour takes you from room to room, and none of them are homely. No wonder Sisi avoided the place and hid away in Corfu.

The Great Gallery is spectacular, a huge ball room decorated in white and gold and lined with mirrors. I’m sure they had many a good knees up in there. Actually Mozart did play there when he was six, and when he was finished he jumped onto the Empress Maria Theresa’s lap and gave her a kiss.

Schonbrunn gardens has huge parterres, which are formal gardens in geometric patterns divided by hedges. There are plenty of wooded walks, ponds and bowers where courtiers could have dalliances in private.

The palace faces up a hill which is topped by a mock Greek temple called the Gloriette and the Neptune fountain. At the top of the hill there are good views of Vienna, although you can’t see the city centre.

The UBahn took us back to the city centre and we had a beer in the Nashsmarkt, this time in the sunshine. Close by is the Karlskirche (Charles Church) built in gratitude when Vienna had had a plague outbreak. It’s patron Saint Charles, was revered as a healer.

It is a very beautiful Baroque church, with twin pillars outside which look like Trajan’s Column in Rome. Inside the church was a huge silvered globe, like a giant Christmas bauble.

So finally..

This was a short visit to Vienna on a budget, so we didn’t buy one of the Vienna Pass cards, which cost 59 euros for one day and 89 euros for two days. If you want to spend all of your time shuffling around museums and galleries they might be worth while, but then you don’t get the pleasure of the gardens and sitting around in bars drinking beer. You can see where my loyalties lie, not so much of a Culture Vulture as a Culture Pigeon.

You may be wondering why I called this blog Ah Vienna. The British readers will know that it come from the Ultravox pop song from 1981. Ultravox were a popular synth band lead by Midge Ure. He is still slogging around the summer pop festival circuit milking his hit almost forty years later

Zoo Quest

Valencia has the biggest and best indoor market in Spain,  the Merkat Central. It is housed in a beautiful cast-iron building in the middle of the old town. There are hundreds of stalls selling meat, vegetables, fruit, and fish. And brains, and barnacles and other things I couldn’t recognize. It’s the best market I have ever visited for size, quality and variety of unusual foods that I didn’t recognise. I didn’t fancy the weird barnacles or brains very much.

After lunch on our terrace, we took the 95 bus to the Oceanographic, the biggest aquarium in Europe and part of the City of Arts and Sciences. It has zones for different marine environments and is quite awesome. There are several glass tunnels that allow you to walk through huge tanks so you have big sharks swimming overhead. The engineering needed to build them is quite astounding. There is an arctic section with Beluga Whales, Walruses and penguins in an enclosure that drops snow onto them!

The finale to the visit was the Dolphin Show in an outdoor theatre like you see in adverts for holidays in Florida. Six good-looking young trainers were paired up with six good-looking young Dolphins and performed tricks. It was fun and entertaining, and I will never eat a Dolphin steak again. 

Joke! I never have eaten Dolphin steak.

Or have I?

On our final evening we couldn’t be arsed to go out, our terrace was so damn nice and we were tapas’d-out. I bought some really crappy burgers from the supermarket and fried them up. The sunset over the Valencia rooftops and we watched flocks of noisy parakeets fly overhead to their evening roosts.

I would really recommend a tour of Spanish cities by train or coach. If you do so, make sure you get accommodation close to the city center if you can.  It’s fun being where the action is and close to buses and metro stations. Spain has a huge amount of culture to enjoy, as well as beautiful beaches. As long as you can order “dos vino blanco per favor”, you will be fine.

Cycle to the Sea

In Carrer Serrano, just around the corner from our apartment, we hired some bikes and then pedalled gently through the Turia park towards the City of Arts and Science. There are several old stone bridges that we passed beneath, which look very similar to the Roman bridge that we saw in Rimini.

The City of Arts and Science is the most popular destination in Valencia, for good reason. It was designed by Santiago Calatrava and Felix Candela and is a modern masterpiece of architecture and structural engineering. There are eight different structures, including a cable-stayed bridge and L’Umbracle, which is an open structure with a garden inside. It is like a very big conservatory where they forgot to put in the glass. L’Hemisfèric is an Imax cinema and planetarium and El Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía is an Opera house.

The structures are all white and look like giant sculptures. Anyone of them on its own would be impressive, but there are seven different attention-grabbing constructions.

We went into the Science Museum but didn’t visit the exhibition. Reviews that we had read said it more for entertaining children rather than being a serious science museum.

We continue cycling until the park finished,  and continued along cycle paths past the marina to the beach.  A film crew was filming some very saucy sculptures by the marina, and I was asked on camera what I thought of them My response was a diplomatic “Interesting, but they wouldn’t erect them in London” Perhaps erect was a poor choice of words.

The beach is very big, many miles long and hundreds of metres wide. The weather was a little overcast, so good weather for Julie to read while I went for a swim in the Mediterranian. It was wavey and warm, but not as much fun as San Sebastian when I went swimming with my daughter Josie. Spending a long time on the beach is not our thing, so we went on to explore the marina.

At the marina, saw some Super Series 52 racing yachts which had just been racing out in the bay. Valencia is a good place for yacht racing because of it variable winds. Nearby in the marina is the HQ for the Americas Cup, which will next be competed for in 2021.

Also in the marina was Charles Simonyi’s private motor yacht Skat, which is 233 feet long and has a crew of sixteen. Man –  has he got money! Mr. Simonyi headed-up the Microsoft Application Development Group, so when you are slaving over Word, Excel or Powerpoint, he’s the man to blame. Skat is grey, so looks like a naval vessel from a distance. 

In another part of the marina, a wooden ship was moored. It was a replica of the Santa Maria, one of the ships that Christopher Columbus sailed to the Caribbean. The Caribbean was named after the Carib people that Columbus enslaved and ultimately wiped out.

Day 12 – Zoo Quest

Turia Park

About a hundred metres from the flat and just beyond the Serrano Gate is the course of the Turia river. The river would regularly and disastrously flood, so in 1957 the city authorities decided to divert the river away from the city centre. The river bed was turned into a nine kilometre linear park that goes out most of the way to the coast. It has walking, cycling and running tracks, and is a mixture of sports fields and parkland, a great asset to the city and a green lung at its centre.

 We walked west through the park to the  Valencia History Museum. It is housed in a converted Victorian water cistern, constructed with a vaulted brick roof and brick columns, similar to Byzantine cisterns I had seen in Istanbul. The museum is divided into about fifty sections, some containing artifacts and others contain screens where short films are projected. The films have a small cast in costume who act out stories about historical events in Valencian history.  The whole museum is dark, and the signs are only in Spanish and Valencian, so I didn’t find it as accessible as the Madrid history museum.

It was Sunday, so we couldn’t find a cafe that was open for lunch. Using trusty old Google Maps I found a vast Carrefour hypermarket with a cafe, so we had lunch with the shoppers. and bought some food chorizo sausages for our dinner.

Our afternoon was spent relaxing on our lovely terrace in the sunshine, where the only thing higher than us were tourists on the Serrano towers taking pictures. I’m probably in someone’s album by now. I cooked the sausages with salad and potatoes, washed down with Carrefour beer and white wine.

After dinner, we walked through the lovely old town to the Cafe de Lisboa, which our host Francisco recommended for a local cocktail called Agua de Valencia. It should be Orange juice, Cava, gin and vodka. What we were given by the weasels tasted just like orange juice, so I complained. Their second try had some booze in it but was suspiciously unfizzy considering it should have Cava in it. DON’T GO TO THE CAFE DE LISBOA.

Day 11 – Cycle to the Sea

Hola Valencia

It was time to go on the next leg of our trip to Valencia, a city that I knew nothing about, apart from my mate Dave saying that it was “nice”. We had breakfast in the wonderful Roccablanca, and had churros and coffee, a breakfast that is both bad and good at the same time.

The train journey was dull, but I had a great book called “10% human” which is about all the bacteria that live inside of us. It wasn’t a page turner, and will never be made into a film starring Jennifer Lawrence, but it’s the nerdy kind of science book I (and a handful of other geeks) enjoy. I kept saying to Julie “did you know that..” and see her eyes roll ready for the next dull fact about gut bacteria. 

From Sorolla station, we got a 27 bus to the Central Market and then found our way (using Google Maps) to our apartment at 12 Carrer de Naquera. In Madrid, the streets are called “Calle” in Valencia they are called “Carrer” because the local language is Valencian, which is a dialect of Catalan. Francisco, the owner, met us outside the flat and showed us up the ninety five steps up in the loft of a Victorian building. I think the phrase “bloody lovely” would be enough to cover the description. It was furnished tastefully from Ikea, had a big comfy bed, an induction hob in the kitchen and a fabulous roof terrace overlooking the Torres de Serrano, a fortified gate to the old city.

We had a late lunch in a restaurant, an indifferent paella containing chicken legs and sea snails of some sort. Valencia is the home of paella because the rice is grown close by, but it isn’t that great in cheap restaurants. The rest of the afternoon was spent chillin’ on the terrace and watching the mortals below.

Since the flat had a kitchen we decided to dine in and got a pizza in the local Carrefour Express, which is like a Tesco Express with more jamon and fewer biscuits. I made us a nice tomato and leaf salad to go with it, but the discovered a basic flaw, in my plan, there was no oven. So I fried the pizza in a griddle pan, which worked until I had to turn it over and the topping welded to the pan. I scraped it off and put it back on again, but Jamie Oliver would have been outraged. The end result was sort-of OK, but I don’t want to eat it again.

Day 10 – Turia Park

Bandera Day

On Sunday morning we had a lazy breakfast in the flat of scrambled eggs, bread, Serrano ham and yoghurt, very tasty. On our walk to the beach, we saw lots of people heading towards the cathedral. I assumed they were all good Catholics going to the Sunday Mass. But they walked past the cathedral to the seafront, where we joined thousands of people on the promenade. The big event was a regatta for traineras, twelve metre long boats with thirteen rowers and a cox steering with a big oar stood at the back. The coastal towns of the Basque Country compete against each other, and with thirteen oars in a carbon fibre boat, they can really make them shift. The course is 5.5 km long and the prize is a flag called a Bandera. The Kontxaco Bandera in San Sebastián was founded in 1879 and is the most prestigious in the Basque Country. This year the Bandera was won by a crew from Hondarribia.

Weaving our way through the crowds celebrating/ commiserating outside bars, we walked through the old town and took a steep zig-zag path to the top of Mount Urgull. It was fortified against the horrible English and there are several old batteries where cannon would protect the port.

At the top, there are more great views over the beaches and the town, with Mount Igeldo at across the bay. Josie ascended the steep path in her Birkenstock sandals, which are not suited for walking uphill, and she let us know that she wasn’t happy. At all. Not a bit. Fortunately, we found a quicker way down and crossed the bridge over to the Gros district of town behind the Zurriola beach and found somewhere for lunch.

After all that fresh air we were (to quote Monty Python) tired and shagged out after a long squark. So I got some food at the supermarket and made a paella for dinner at our flat. We managed to connect up the TV to my Google Chromecast and watched clips from Withnail and I, one of my favourite films. 

Day 4 – Surfing Beach

Retiro and Sorolla

Our tourist guidebook in Madrid was an excellent Dorling Kindersley, they are beautifully illustrated books that are a pleasure to read. Other guides have lots of information on restaurants and hotels, which is often out of date by the time you visit a city.  The guidebook recommended the Madrid Historical Museum, which was on Calle Fuencarrel near the Tribunal Metro stop.  Conveniently, the Roccablanca cafe was on the way, so we stopped for breakfast.

The museum is in an old Baroque hospice, and is a real gem. It was almost empty when we arrived and was lovely and spacious and cool. It shows the history through paintings and maps and is the highlight is in the basement where there is a huge model of Madrid as it as in the 19th century. It is a fantastic work of art and a historical record of the old city.

Our next stop was the huge Retiro Park, which is behind the Prado gallery was a former hunting ground of the kings. It is now a great municipal park with strollers, cyclists and people on hired electric scooters. African men sell bags and sunglasses from blankets whilst holding onto ropes tied to each corner. If a police van appears they quickly pull on the ropes to pick up their goods and move to a different spot. 

We ate a picnic lunch and watched the world and his wife and children pass by contentedly. The park has its own Crystal Palace, which I guess at one time was a conservatory for plants, but is now empty apart from some glass sculptures which looked like orthopedic splints.

At the far end of the park, we walked to Atocha station, which was the scene of a terrible Islamist bomb campaign in 2004 which killed 197 people and injured around 2,000. We took the Metro from there to Iglesias station and went to the Sorolla Museum.

I had never heard of Joaquin Sorolla, but he is so popular in Spain that they named a railway station in Valencia after him. He painted many portraits of his family, and his love for them pours out of the pictures. The Prado left me unmoved, I couldn’t connect with the religious art. But Sorolla’s paintings of children playing on the beach and his daughters in long white dresses really touched me, I even BOUGHT A PICTURE! I am very careful with my money but wanted a Sorolla so much I paid seven Euros for a print. The frame will cost me another twenty quid, but to hell with the expense.

Our final dinner in Madrid was at Puerta Rico in Chinchilla street, a short walk up the Gran Via It was very busy because it’s good food and “very reasonable”, a winning combination in my books. To be honest, I can’t remember what I had, but it was definitely Spanish and I had some wine with it.

Day 9 – Hola Valencia

Escalators and Swords

Toledo is the old capital of Spain and is about an hour on a coach south of Madrid. It’s known as the frying pan of Spain, and it deserves the title, it was scorchio! The city centre is at the top of a hill in a loop in the river Tagus, which is why the Visigoths chose it for their capital. The Visigoths were a Germanic tribe (the Western Goths)  who took over Spain after the Roman empire collapsed, and in turn, were replaced by the Arabs. To get to the city centre from the coach park there are six escalators to take you up to the top of the hill, otherwise, half the tourists would expire during the ascent.

It is a beautiful ancient city of narrow winding streets and endless cafes and souvenir shops. It reminded me of York, Dubrovnik, and Carcassonne, which are all exceptionally beautiful cities but are a bit spoiled by their success.

The temperature was about 35 degrees, so lunch in the shade with a glass of cold vino Blanco was a very attractive prospect.  We chose the menu del dia at El Cafe de las Monjas, which was a real belt buster.

The Spanish love their potatoes boiled fried and in omelettes, and have bread with everything, yet most of them are slim and fit looking. It must the magical Mediterranean diet, which so far hasn’t worked on me.

The cathedral is the primary one in Spain and is very big and very Gothic. It has twenty-four chapels around the inside and huge columns supporting a massive roof. There are religious paintings everywhere, in the Middle Ages that was just about the only type of painting people wanted. The interior was quiet and cool, a great place to go during the heat of the afternoon.

There are two main souvenirs available in Toledo, Damascus steelwork and swords. The Damascus steel is black plates, jugs, and jewelry inlaid with gold pattern, very pretty. Toledo steel was the best in the world in the Middle Ages, which is how Cortez and Pizarro conquered South America. These days the shops are full of reproduction swords to hang on your walls, of all shapes and sizes: Spanish swords, cutlasses, Orc swords, Elf swords, Game of Thrones swords. Then there are folding knives and sheath knives of every description and size. I found it all very weird that all that lethal hardware was openly on sale, it was like going to a Walmart in Wisconsin.

Back in Madrid in the late afternoon, we explored the area near our accommodation. Calle Fuencarrel was full of young people trying to get bargains in sales at the many fashion shops that line the street. In the middle of the throng was a haven of beer and tortilla, the Rocablanca cafeteria. It is a very good ordinary bar, nothing trendy about it, just perfect at what it does. The three staff work at lightning speed with practiced efficiency, pouring drinks, slicing tortilla and serving tapas. We drank the ubiquitous Mahou beer with some tortilla and fried squid, it was just perfect. Two of the staff were having a good old row while serving customers, it was street theatre of the finest sort!

Day 8 – Retiro and Sorolla

Exploring Old Madrid

Madrid is a much much smaller city than London, the whole of the historic centre is quite walkable. The city only became the capital of Spain in 1561 when Philip II moved from Toledo to what was then a town centred on an old Arab alcazar (fortress) on a hill in central Castille. The city rapidly grew in importance, and the enormous wealth flowing in from the American colonies enabled the Spanish Kings to build lavishly.

In the cetre of the oldest part of Madrid is the Plaza Mayor, a 17th-century square that looks similar to the Place de Voges in Paris and Covent Garden in London. It was used for bullfights and executions during the Inquisition but is now an empty square lined with cafes and tacky souvenir shops. It is well preserved, but not interesting enough to keep me for more than half an hour.

Close by the Plaza Mayor is Mercado San Miguel which is like Borough Market in London. It full of stalls selling all manner of delicious Spanish food and wine, and we could have spent a long time there, but we were on a mission to see the sights of old Madrid. Madrid has a mix of architectural styles that depend on who was ruling at the time. The oldest parts were built during Habsburg rule, so have a Germanic look to them, whereas the eighteenth and nineteenth-century buildings are under Bourbon rule and look more French.

The Almudena Cathedral looks Baroque and constructed in the 17th century, but in fact, was started in 1883 and finished in 1992. It is lovely inside without being over-decorated, which is often the case with Spanish cathedrals. It has a modern painted ceiling and stained glass windows, and is free to get in. 

The Palacio Real is very very big, a fitting centre of power for what was the biggest and richest empire in the world. Spain imported shiploads of gold and silver from their Peruvian mines, and a good proportion was spent by the King. The palace stands on a hill overlooking the Manzanera river where the original Arab alcazar stood. At the front of the palace is a huge plaza, the size of the Horseguards Parade.

The enormous state rooms inside are sumptuous to the extreme, every surface is covered in gold, silk, carved wood or porcelain. There is one room where every square centimeter is covered in elaborate porcelain created in special royal factories. Indeed for hundreds of years, the only factories in Spain were those producing luxury goods for the King. Philip II was married to Queen Mary, daughter of Henry the Eighth. So for a few years, Philip was the King of England – sort of.

During my travels, I have been to more palaces, castles, stately homes and cathedrals than you can shake a stick at. So I feel a bit like the Queen when she is opening her presents on Christmas morning, “not another diamond tiara”. Basically, I’m not so impressed by unlimited riches anymore and enjoy the contrast of clean modern designs. I think Spanish Royalty might enjoy a trip to Ikea to pick up a Billy Bookcase and some Tea Lights for the chandeliers. 

I thought that the Royal Armoury was very impressive, with enough armour, guns and swords to kit out a battle in Game of Thrones. All that heavy metal gave us an appetite, so we had the Menu Del Dia in the Palacio caff, which was very tasty and good value for ten euros.

Over the road from the palace is the Temple of Debod, an actual Egyptian temple given to Spain in gratitude for the help they gave in moving the Aswan temples. There are so many temples in Egypt they can afford to give them away, especially a temple that will end up under a hundred feet of Lake Nasser. It does look like a municipal ice cream kiosk, it isn’t one of the better-looking temples.

After a hot and sweaty walk down Gran Via, we had tapas in the San Anton market, a multi-story building filled with foodie outlets. We shared a table with a retired professor of English from Kansas City, Missouri. He had traveled a huge amount, mostly on cheap cruises without his wife, and recommended the Baltic cities; Riga, Tallin, and St Petersburg. Julie asked if he had been to South East Asia and he hadn’t been to Asia at all!

Twickenham 1,Kansas City 0.

Day 7 – Escalators and Swords