Pictures of Trip

I have posted some of the photos to Flickr.   Patti (if your name ain't Patti then you don't need to read this part) look at the huge 18th century pipe organ photos. There is a person playing the organ to give you some indication of its size.

This concludes the broadcast for this trip. We have another trip pending in mid-December to California for a couple months. So, stay tuned for that that trip.

Hogs and kittens,
Al and Deb

Raleigh, NC Home

We are home. We arrived Sunday afternoon late. I will post some more about the trip later today. I just wanted to say we are home.

London Airport

I had to get up at 3 am this morning. That's right I said 3 am.  We walked outside the hotel and drunks were everywhere. It seems the kids come out in masses after dark and drink in the bars as well as the streets. Yep, I said in the streets. The plazas and streets always smell of urine and many of the streets are full of can, bottles, and trash from the nightly drinking matches. When we walked out some of the patrons were deeply in the throws of a full blown drunk and the street was surrealistic. The scene reminded me of a zombie movie but instead of the zombies drunks are walking around screaming and falling down.  I am getting old.

Here are the pictures I promised yesterday.

Winston Churchill playing the pig-o-phone

Aqueduct in Segovia

Deb picking the nose of King What's His Name IX.

Madrid, Spain Last Day.

Today was fun. We took a out-of-town trip to Segovia and Avila Spain. Avila is one of the oldest cities in Spain and is the birthplace of Saint Teresa.  Segovia has a huge castle and a cool 2000 year old aqueduct. You  can guess which I'm going to talk about the most. Wrong guess.

Saint Teresa is not Mother Teresa.  But she was a nun that ruled a monastery that she bought with her own money and ruled it with an iron hand  Now you know that there  isn't going to be a Catholic lesson via me. The reason I mentioned her at all is because they have a "most important of all her relics" located conveniently in the gift shop next door to where her "house" is located. Before I tell you about the relic I should tell you what a relic is. Catholics believe that prayers are conducted via a priest to heaven. Prayers can also be channeled through a holy person like a saint to God and a relic of a holy person "supercharges" (my words) a prayer and brings special status to the prayer. You Catholics that read this shouldn't get all bent out of shape over what I just said and throw sticks and stones at me. Sticks and stones may break my bones but please don't throw sticks and stones. Okay let's kiss and make up Catholics. Great. Anyway, a relic is a piece of a holy person's  body. That's right, they used to bury them in shallow graves and distribute the bones later to wealthy or holy people. We saw many human bones today of different people used as decoration  in a Catholic church.  Well, I said bury them didn't I? Well they didn't do quite that to Saint Teresa. Instead after she died they hacked her up and distributed the pieces intact or so I am told. She was more popular that calamine lotion at a poison ivy convention. It seems every town she lived in, worked, or whizzed in wanted a piece of Saint Teresa when she croaked off. Now Avila was high up in the pecking order and "got the most best relic". Can you guess which piece? Head, foot, ear, eyeball, butt cheek, or what?  Get this, Avila got her ring finger.  Avila "got the most best relic" of a ring finger. Yep in the gift shop they had the find in a glass cage behind the wax Sister Teresa dolls. The finger is mummified and stuff not a bone. Dude that is nasty and super, super, super creepy. Nasty.

Segovia didn't have any nasty fingers but it did have a really cool old aqueduct that the Romans built of course you already know that. Yep, the pictures are below. The aqueduct was mostly underground but this thing was constructed with no mortar at all just precision cut stone blocks. Too cool. It was almost so cool that it erased the creepiness of the mummy finger but not enough. Anyway this thing was cool.

I have to get up in 3 hours to get to the airport for a 6:45am flight. Time for bed. I'll see Yall soon.

Hogs and kittens,
Al

P.S. The photo is taking too long to upload. I'll post it from home.

Madrid, Spain

We went to the Royal Palace (Real Palacio) today.  It was huge and divided into four main sections, of which I found the armory, apothecary, and bedroom area worthy of discussing here.  The armory was full of stuff you would  see in a 17th century armory (I guess) like a couple dozen suits of armor and swords out the ying yang, and armor for horses and a dog. How the horses moved at all with its armor and a short guy (all of them were short) with armor on, and the short dude was carrying something heavy like a sword or jousting pole.  I'll bet the horses topped out their speed at about 1mph. 

The other notable area of the palace was the apothecary with lots of urns with cool stuff in it or rather I imagined it was cool stuff like eye of newt, grasshopper knees, and blond hair of Abba. I was disappointed to read a few labels with titles like (translated here naturally) carbolic acid, carbon, acid, etc. I thought kings' apothecaries were supposed to do spells and incantations. But noooooo, it had to be regular chemistry. Boring.

The bedrooms or whatever they called the private areas were pretty kingish as a person would expect. The throne room was garish to the point it was funny. Somebody has been watching The Game of Thrones too much around here. Anyway, the drawing room and other areas were pretty much straight forward king crap.  What I did notice was the paintings of the people in this area.  There was a painting of King What's His Name, King What's His Name V, and Duke What's His Name dressed in drag to look like Queen What's Her Name. Oh man the women in these painting were not happy at all. I guess having to sit still with all that hot (temperature wise) dress on and makeup applied with a shovel would not have been comfy. All of the women in the  paintings looked like they had crabs or too tight underwear or something.  They all kind of snarled at me as most women I've known did. Stupid paintings.

We went to The Prado Museum. The Prado is a Spanish version of The Louvre in Paris.  The artist Goya was pretty interesting in his Dark Period where he was going stark raving loony while dying of syphilis.  It seems he painted these really weird things on the wall of his house and when he croaked off the folks that bought his stuff removed them from the wall using some technique by renaissance rocket scientists and  framed them.Now if this had been somebody in my family I would have gotten out the Wagner Sprayer and went to town on nutty boy's paintings. But nnnooooo, they framed them and now the whole world knows Goya was loony tunes while dying of a sexually transmitted disease. That must have been some friends he had.

The rest of the Prado was full of painting depicting Christ in some form either crucified, baby, last supper, etc. I'll bet over half the paintings were of Christ in some fashion. You would think that these geniuses could have picked something to paint like a kid's birthday party, dogs playing poker, or velvet Elvis.  But nnnoooooo they picked Christ. What gets me is how they copied each other too.

Tomorrow we are touring a couple cities nearby. I wont talk about them until tomorrow. The day after tomorrow (Sunday) we head home. See Ya.

Madrid, Spain

Hmmm, let's start with our walking tour of the Plaza Mayor area. Yep, we walked around , up, down, and around Plaza Major today. Some of the walking was from a tour and some was not. The tour started with the history of the plaza then progressed around the area. Each place we stopped we could just about predict what was going to be said. I made a chart so you can play too. Okay, first pick a building around Madrid then decide who lived there and what happened to them. Okay, let's play.

1) Pick a building from this map
2) Who built the building?

1. King What's His Name
2. King What's His Name III
3. Earl Poopy Pants
4. Moors (now called The Muslim Brotherhood)

 3) Why did they build it?

1. Tribute to God.
2. Tribute to themself.
3. Tribute to themself.
4. Tribute to themself 

4) What happened to the building?

1. The Moors burned it to the ground then  built a mosque on it then the Christians burned it down and built a church on it.
2. Captain Krunch burned it down for the King of Boogey Woogeyland.
3. Duke of Earl burned it down and built a statue of himself on it.
4. Dukes of Hazard burned it down to put up a statue of Queen Latifah on it.

5) What happened to the person that built it?

1. He/she was beheaded.
2. He/she was exiled to Bora Bora (meaning booted out) then executed later.
3. He/she died of athlete's foot and was buried in the front room under the statue of themself.
4. He/she died from domestic violence and didn't get a statue for 400 years.

Now wasn't that fun. Now you don't need to tour Madrid.

King What's His Name III Gets His Head Squished

Barcelona, Spain

Well, today was more laid back than  most. We went to the Picasso Museum and I can positively say that Picasso was mentally disturbed. His "blue period" was troubling.  But because he painted pictures he was a genius and not disturbed or so I've heard. After the Alice in Wonderland Picasso Museum, we went to Montjuic which is an fortress overlooking Barcelona. I got some neat photos that I will post later.

Tonight we went to a flamenco show. It was spectacular. The band and dancers did a nice job. As most of my friends know I love flamenco.

I wish I could elaborate more but I need to go to bed. We leave for Madrid very early in the morning. I'll elaborate tomorrow.