Top 10 Things to Do in Madrid on a Sunday

Living la Vida Loca

There is so much more to Madrid than El Prado and the bullfights. Here are my top 10 things to do on a sunny Sunday in this fabulous city:

El Retiro Park

1. stroll through El Retiro park with thousands of Madrilenos, watching bands perform, boats on the pond, and clowns making balloon animals,

2. visit the terrace lookout of the Circulo de Bellas Artes building for a view of the city skyline and the Gran Via, Madrid’s main street (admission to the rooftop is 1 Euro),

3. enjoy tapas and beer at one of the sunny outdoor tapas cafés in the La Latina quarter,

Plaza Mayor

4. sip a beer under an incredibly blue Madrid sky at one of several restaurants with tables set up inside the Plaza Mayor, Madrid’s main square,

5. dunk “churros” into a thick, sweet chocolate drink at La Chocolateria de San Gines, one of Madrid’s most popular chocolate bars just off the Calle Arenal pedestrian mall,

6. take in the buskers and musicians along with thousands of Madrilenos on the Puerta del Sol plaza then join them as they amble along the Calle Arenal pedestrian mall towards the Opera House,

7. savour a coffee and watch the elegantly dressed Madrilenos stroll by at the outdoor patio of Café Gijon a few blocks north of El Prado museum on the Passeo de Recoletos,

8. take in the sunset view of Madrid while enjoying a light snack or a glass of wine at the glass enclosed rooftop restaurant on top of the department store El Corte Ingles on Gran Via near the Callao metro stop,

9. stand shoulder to shoulder with the locals drinking draft beer and enjoying inexpensive tapas at the Almeria tapas bar in the La Latina quarter,

Mercado de San Miguel

10. wander around the newly refurbished, glass enclosed Mercado de San Miguel, the oldest in Madrid, and visit the food stalls while sipping wine and sampling thin slivers of Spain’s famous Pata Negra ham.

Belize Time

I confess. Yes, the thought of visiting Belize in December sounded glamorous and exciting. I was expecting old, British colonial elegance and architecture. Of course, sun and white sand beaches were a given.

Our arrival at Belize City international airport is met with a thunderous downpour. The airport is so small (as in most Central American countries) that we deplane on the tarmac and I make a mad dash down the slippery metal stairs to seek the relative dryness of the terminal. It’s hot and sticky.

After a brief and very cursory rush through Customs, we’re rerouted back into the departure area for a short hop flight over to Ambergris Caye, Belize’s largest island and home to the world’s second largest barrier reef after the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

The ticket agent hands out numbered cards. This is odd, I think. What kind of boarding system is this? On previous journeys, we’ve survived the disorganized chaos of boarding a flight in China, where it’s women and children last, as everyone scrambles to fit into one of the undersized seats that seem the norm on Chinese airplanes. But numbered cards are a new twist on the time-honoured system of queuing invented by the British. Oh well, Belize is a former British colony.

But then I see the tiny Tropic Air plane that rolls in front of the departure gate and it starts to make sense. There are only 14 seats on that tiny Cessna puddle jumper, and there doesn’t seem to be any pre-flight seating arrangement. In fact, even though we have our numbered cards in hand, someone else manages to take two of the seats that should have been ours and we’re stopped at the door.

“No worry,” says the ticket agent as he scratches someone else’s name off the passenger list, “there’ll be another one in 5 minutes.” Of course, being that this is Central America, 5 minutes turns into 25 Belizean minutes. But eventually anther tiny Cessna pulls up and he calls out our names.

This time, we rush on ahead, determined to make the flight as we have someone waiting to pick us up at the terminal in San Pedro on Ambergris Caye. This is an important connection because our resort is way up the coast and not easily accessible on the pot-holed road that runs north from San Pedro. We have a water taxi waiting for us and we’re not certain how the whole water taxi system works or even where we’re supposed to be going. So getting there on time is critical.

I can barely squeeze between the rows of seats and as I’m first to board, the pilot beckons me into the co-pilot’s seat beside him in the open cockpit. It’s an even tighter squeeze wedging between the pilot and co-pilot seats and I have trouble swinging my legs over the controls without hitting the throttle to ease into the narrow seat. My camera bag barely fits into the space between my legs and periodically hits some of the pilot’s controls.

The pilot introduces himself as Robert and revs up the engines. We wait for a large American Airlines 747 to clear and then we pop up into the darkening stormy sky. I see several large white egrets and Turkey Vultures near the runway and I’m tempted to ask if he’s ever hit one, but given my fear of bad karma, I decide to wait until we land.

I’m nervous, but Robert is so calm. He does this all day long, making the 20-minute flight over and over again, back and forth between the two airports. I relax and admire the gorgeous view through the front windscreen. I’m flying over a patchwork of turquoise, blue and green shallow waters of the Caribbean, dotted with coral outcroppings, beige sand flats, and large dark fish.

The runway on Ambergris Caye is a short strip of pavement that doesn’t seem long enough from my vantage point at the tip of the plane, but the Cessna doesn’t need a lot of space and with a roar we pull up right in front of the open baggage area at the tiny terminal. Our bags are thrown onto a cart and then unceremoniously dumped onto the floor barely 20 feet away.

It doesn’t take long to retrieve them – there’s no counter or conveyor belt here – but we quickly realize that no one is there to greet us, pick us up or even tell us where to go. Soon we’re the last two standing in the rain as all the other passengers board taxis or are shuttled away into the early darkness.

Another flight arrives and the same evacuation of passengers starts again. I ask to borrow the cell phone of one of the baggage handlers and am about to make a call to our resort, when someone points us out to a shuttle bus driver. He missed us on the first run because we missed the first flight but now we’re whisked off barely 200 metres down the road to a dock where our water taxi awaits.

In the small town of San Pedro people get around in motorized golf carts, but most of the travel on Ambergris Caye between hotels and even restaurants is done by water taxi. In fact, the recent heavy rains have made the bumpy, main dirt road impassable to anything but a Range Rover so water taxis are the way to go.

Twenty minutes later we arrive at the Belizean Cove Resort dock and Michelle, the marketing manager for the resort, is waiting to greet us and show us our suite. It’s gorgeous and large enough to house two whole families. Our private patio area out front has its own bar and the pool is right in front. We face a beach studded with palm trees and a lovely ocean view.

It’s late and because all eight suites have their own kitchens, the resort doesn’t have a restaurant. Michelle tells us, “Normally, you could walk ten minutes along the beach to a restaurant, but it’s dark and you don’t know where to go. So I’ll call over to the restaurant at our sister resort, the Belizean Shores, to have someone come over in a golf cart to pick you up.”

Shortly, Alex picks us up in an electric cart and we soon see why you travel by water taxi on the island. The road is like a war zone with large water filled potholes everywhere. Even the golf cart has a hard time navigating through and around them.

But the Upper Deck restaurant at the Belizean Shores proves to be the perfect spot for us after a long day of travel from Toronto, via Dallas to Belize City, and then San Pedro. It’s a raised, open air tree house-like affair with a 360-degree view of the ocean on one side and the bird filled lagoon on the other. The night is warm with a slight breeze and we quickly tuck into an exceptionally fresh Conch ceviche and a chilled bottle of Chilean Chardonnay. A main course of blackened red Snapper with cilantro rice goes down nicely as well.

The service is on Belizean time, but we soon realize we’re on vacation and it’s time to unwind. After dinner we decide to walk back to the resort along the beach. The path is lit by the moon and lapped at by the surf. The air is warm and soft and soon we get into the rhythm of the island. We’ll sleep well our first night in Belize.

Where's the Beef

We're on the road again -- this time in a quest for the perfect steak and a fine Malbec wine to go with it. Argentina sounded like the best place to start.

We last visited Argentina in December of 2003 at the end of a four-month extended journey that took us to Cuba, Costa Rica, Ecuador, the Galapagos Islands, Peru, Chile and finally Argentina. The food, wine and European-style culture were such a contrast after the previous three months on the road in South America that we were smitten with the country. It impressed us so much that we had to go back.


Recap from our Last Trip
Here's a brief recap of that trip in 2003. Our first venture into Argentina that year was a short drive from Chile, across the Andes, and into the quaint resort town Villa la Angostura where we had our first taste of Argentinian beef. Beef and lamb were cooked whole on long metal skewers in front of an open fire. The plates were huge and the taste was incredible. We then moved on to the lovely Swiss-style ski town of Bariloche. Surrounded by snow-capped peaks and azure blue lakes, Bariloche was charming and had great chocolate, but it was too artificial and touristy.

Twenty years ago, it was quite something, we were told. Sorry we missed it. We didn't stay long in town, but did visit the surrounding mountains and stumbled upon a fabulous, but very expensive, resort called Llao Llao surrounded by azure lakes, snow-capped peaks, and a golf course of all things.

We drove back to Chile after this brief foray into the mountains and then flew to Buenos Aires where we fell in love with "bife", "Malbec" and the colonial architecture of this amazingly modern metropolis, a combination of latin Europe and South American flare.

In addition to great beef and wine, Buenos Aires boasts one of the best opera houses in the world, El Colon, now celebrating it's 100th anniversary. Unfortunately for us, the renovations are taking longer than expected (it's now two years late) and it won't be open when we go there this time.

But on our last visit, this is where Carolann demanded recompense for my subjecting her to eight days in the Amazonian jungle. I had a great time there, observing Spider monkeys, Bullet Ants and deadly wild pigs. But only after we left the Amazon did I learn that she was not quite as fond as I of spiders and snakes and all things "jungly".
So my payment was to take her to see Carmen at the Colon opera house. It wasn't Wagner, but I endured it. Actually it was great and a small price to pay for camping out in the Amazon.

Next we flew up to Iguazu Falls, the largest in the world (sorry Niagara). We stayed at an "estancia", basically a gaucho cattle ranch where we could ride horses and eat home-cooked meals washed down with more Argentinian wine.

That's a very brief overview of our all-too-short stay in Argentina in 2003. We're headed off to Argentina again on November 24, 2008, so stay tuned. This time our focus will be on the Mendoza wine region in the northwest corner, followed by a brief stop in Buenos Aires.

Santiago, Chile, November 25-26, 2008

We left Toronto Monday night as a mix of light snow and cold rain fell over the city. Winter was beginning to tighten its frozen grip on the city, so it was a great time to escape to sunny South America.

Our overnight flight left at 11:55 p.m., scheduled to take 11 hours from Toronto to Santiago, Chile. In the middle of the night, however, we hit a big storm over Panama and, after bouncing us around for a while, the pilot decided to take a 200-mile detour out over the ocean, which added another hour to our already lengthy journey. But it did smooth things out enough to allow us to get a couple of hours of sleep. Not quite enough, however, to prevent total exhaustion upon our arrival at noon on Tuesday.

It’s funny though how visiting a foreign country for the second time is both good and bad. The bad side is that it’s less exotic or foreign. The good side is that it’s less exotic and confusing, especially when you’re completely drained and can’t even think in English, let alone Spanish. When you know you’re way around – and we were quite familiar with the Santiago airport as you’ll see below – you’re less likely to panic, make mistakes, or fall prey to the ever present touts.

So this time, instead of immediately joining the lengthy lines at the Immigration booths, we knew that we had to first find the hidden counter to purchase our “Reciprocity Visas” for $132 US and then join the Immigration queue. And we had our cash ready this time.

The last time, we had arrived in the middle of the night from Lima, Peru, and joined the Immigration queue where they promptly sent us back to start all over again at the visa counter where they demanded $75 US in cash. This was a big problem because the banks were closed at that hour and we hadn’t planned on US currency to manage this unexpected toll. Luckily we had enough US bills hidden about us to just make up the fee.

The delays that night, however, meant we couldn’t make our connecting flight to southern Chile and we had to spend a cold night sleeping on hard, steel benches in the Santiago airport. We reasoned at that time of the morning it made no sense to pay $30 to take a taxi downtown to find a hotel and then turn around and come right back to catch a 7 a.m. flight, for which we would have to line up at 5 a.m. in order to make sure we got seats. So we got to know the airport and all its cleaning, security and food stall staff quite well.

No such problems this time, and even though our flight was delayed we sped quickly through the chaos that surrounds most airports. As an added bonus, we felt quite comfortable hopping on the airport bus for $2.50 Cdn instead of taking an expensive taxi.

At this point, some of you may be wondering what we’re doing in Chile when we were planning to go to Argentina. Quite simple really, Santiago is just across the border from the Mendoza wine region which is our first stop in Argentina. So instead of a $500 flight from Buenos Aires, we can take a $30 bus right across the stunning Andes Mountains that separate the two countries. We have planned this trip during the day to be both awed and terrified by the steep, winding roads and passes through the mountain peaks.

But back to Santiago, the capital of Chile and home to 5.5 million. It’s spring here and the air is full of the sweet scents of flowering trees and fresh fruit at the open air fruit stands. The sky is blue and this very modern city is surrounded by snow-capped mountain peaks. The climate here is very temperate with warm days (around 20 to 28 Celsius) and cool nights. Very comfortable!

Everywhere we walk, and this is a very walkable city, we are surrounded by parks and flowers of all kinds, including purple flowering Jacaranda trees, red Bougainvilleas, and orange Ceibos. Under large trees, the ground is covered with stunning Acanthus mollis, and an incredible array of exotic tropical plants that we struggle to grow back home as houseplants.

The parks are also filled with new sculptures and outdoor works of art. The Chileans are making up for that dreadful period of artistic suppression and violence that marked the Pinochet era, a time when many Chileans fled to Canada, Australia, and Sweden. Like the Renaissance after the Dark Ages, art seems to be springing up all over the city.

Although it’s quite warm here in the city, a short 45-minute ride will take you to some wonderful ski hills in the surrounding mountains. Go the other way towards the ocean and you’re in the middle of lush vineyards growing in an arid desert. A little further on and you come to the beaches of Valparaiso on the Pacific Ocean.

To cap off our first day in Santiago, we connected with Pasi, a friend we met this summer at the wedding of Necla’s son Mark in Toronto. Pasi and her boyfriend Luis treated us to a fabulous dinner at a typical Chilean restaurant called La Casa Vieja, where we enjoyed Pisco sours, fresh fish “a la plancha” and Chilean wine. Her son Alejandro and an exchange student from California joined us for a very pleasant and informative evening. It also gave us a chance to attune our ears to the staccato style of Spanish spoken by the Chilenos.

The next day, Alejandro joined us at the bus station with his recommendations for a long-distance bus company for the seven-hour trip across the Andes. After the exchange, we took him to lunch at a lovely patio restaurant that featured German-style beers and ¨Kuchen¨, a Chilean version of German desserts that you can find all over Chile, especially in the south, which was opened up by German immigrants in the 1800s. We were entertained by the Chilean folk singers and dancers you can see in the first photo (by the way, you can click on the photos to enlarge them).

Tomorrow we’re off to Mendoza.

Across the Andes to Mendoza -- November 27, 2008

The seven-hour bus ride across the Andes was spectacular, one of the best and possibly least hair-raising mountain trips we have taken. That´s not to say it wasn´t without it´s scarry moments or that it wouldn´t make some of our friends sea-sick on the tight switchbacks that took us up over 4,000 meters (note the 2 transports exiting tunel in top photo). But it was so beautiful that the time flew by in a swirl of colourful mountain scenes, snow-capped peaks and flowering cacti. We just kept starring out the windows and jumping from one side of the bus to the other to catch the ever-changing vistas.

The journey started out oddly. Two buskers in top hats and carrying unicycles and backpacks stowed their gear into the belly of the bus and then disappeared like street magicians. At the designated departure time, the bus started pulling out and the co-driver did a head count. Realizing he was short two top hats, he had the driver pull back into the bay and left to track them down.

After 15 minutes, he returned without them and we started to leave again. When he passed by to collect the tickets, Carolann (ever the vigilant and calm traveler) asked him if he wasn´t concerned about security. Planes she explained in broken Spanish would never leave someone´s unclaimed baggage on board (note that the ¨b¨word was never mentioned). His calm reply was simply ¨No, they´ll pick up their stuff at the other end.¨

Half way through the trip on top of the Andes, we stopped at the Argentinian border crossing for customs and luggage inspection. We all had to disembark and walk into this huge dark hangar that looked like something out of the X-Files, dim lights, black booths, armed guards and roving dogs. Presumably it provided shelter from the snow, avalanches and rock slides that seemed to be everywhere (note the crushed shed at right). It took well over a half hour just to get to the inspection stage because of the buses and cars ahead of us. We counted ourselves lucky because in peak season in December this can take three or four hours we were told.

But just as we were closing up our bags, the two Top Hats showed up and claimed their gear. Then, after the inspection, they calmly hopped onto the bus as if nothing had ever happened. Apparently they had gone for a ¨smoke¨ and lost track of time. They took the next bus 45 minutes later and caught up with us at the border. The driver grilled them about this and we continued on.

The bus, it turns out, was not the most comfortable -- the washroom was terrible -- and the packed lunch they provided was barely edible. But there were only five of us on board and we could sit wherever we wanted. A big bonus was that they didn´t play those blaring movies that are so popular on long bus rides in Latin America. Plus we had brought our own lunch and so we fared better than some of the others. We gave our sandwiches to the two Top Hats, who looked like they hadn´t eaten in days. It was either that or give them to the ever present wild dogs that seem to be everywhere in Santiago, Mendoza and even the border crossing.

Even more importantly, the co-drivers were exceptionally good and never took any risks other than passing the occasional convoy of tankers on long, straight stretches (well, most of the time). The only problem we had was when Carolann and I agreed to change sides so that I could photograph a switchback. Unfortunately, our timing was a bit off and we stood just as the bus veered sharply to one side to navigate an especially tight turn. This sent us both flying to opposite sides of the bus in a hilarious Keystone Cops move.

The rest of the trip was all downhill (literally not figuratively) as we followed a chocolate-brown river through ochre red and brown mountain sides until it flattened out into an oasis of lush vineyards and green Eucalyptus trees (imported from Australia and used throughout South America as insect repellent).

On the entire trip we only saw one collision of two transport trucks, two guard rails ripped out, one set of tracks up a gravel escape route and several rock slides that had wiped out train tracks or their protective coverings. Not bad for a mountain trip.

Crossing the Andes -- Carolann’s SNAPSHOT

We are early as usual at the bus station in Santiago and await the other passengers who curiously fail to materialize. When we booked our tickets the day before, the agent turned his computer towards us to show how few seats remained. As it turned out, only six people took the trip this spring day and two of the six failed to finish their smoke in time and missed it all together. They would have to collect their collapsible unicycles in Mendoza since they remained in our luggage compartment. We felt sorry for the two dark haired young men, evidently poor street buskers. Each dressed in zany coloured striped jerseys and one wore a lime green bowler hat, which might have been a Bolivian design by way of Dr. Seuss. As it turned out, when they miraculously caught up to us at the frontier in the faster bus behind us, we found out they were Germans enjoying a gap year abroad.

This trip makes the fourth time we have crossed the Andes. We’ve flown over them to the southern tip of Chile, taxied around them in Peru, and now over the top and through them in tunnels on a long distance, El Rapido bus.

Leaving Santiago with its mildly toxic halo, we now enter the mountains as little as a half hour out of the city. Chile is such a sinuous stretch of land, its capital city as close to the sea as it is close to its neighbour, Argentina. The road follows the unruly brown water of the Mapocho River, which rushes along continuous rapids towards the sea. As we climb higher, the river doesn’t know which way to run, and it crashes every which way, a visual image of this historically disputed frontier. I know that I’ve been afraid before about the winding, severe switchbacks, crowded by belching transport trucks carrying goods in and out of Argentina. Funny though that this time I’m no longer afraid, rather, excited and riveted to the passing scene. Perhaps the recent death of a parent is as liberating as it is tragic, in that a certain amount of fear itself, which so often directs a younger life, passes away too.

Choosing not to take a double decker bus was wise. Drivers who work mountain routes in South America are uniformly oblivious to centrifugal force as applied to hairpin turns. Fortunately the seats across the aisle are unoccupied because either Dan, who had moved into the empty seats ahead, or me, or our respective backpacks and lunchboxes, are thrown sideways across the aisle, then back again, or occasionally rammed into a window, with each completion of at least nine switchbacks. And what I believed were the final turns, took us onto a broad plateau, at which point we began yet another climb. Eventually, we would travel upwards more than 9,000 feet. That is the kind of elevation that hurts should you linger.

The Andes on the Chilean side are not so much beautiful as they are dramatic with gigantic clefts of rock wrenched apart by earthquakes. Until you reach the snow and ice streaked channels of retreating glaciers, the view is monochromatic grey. Of course, rock can be beautiful as we know in northern Ontario. But this rock’s beauty is in its texture, rather than its colour. We are mere mice, scaling the furrowed, tough hide of an elephant. I’m mindful that a single seismic sneeze of the beast is bad for the mouse.

As we approach the border, there are more than fifty transport trucks going into Chile awaiting the processing of their papers and I wonder if talk about us being held up three hours will turn out to be true.

But this is spring in South America and fewer tourists mean we are waved on within half an hour after a cursory search of luggage. From this point, it’s downhill all the way, but with a difference.

We are leaving behind the comparatively sombre and tightly squeezed Chilean side of the Andes. Now, white alpine flowers litter the slopes like confetti. The severely chiselled grey walls of rock have turned into piles of scree, brown and red with strains of white. There are more alpine plants, this time purple and yellow. Perhaps it’s my upbeat mood, or just all these shades of chocolate and cream make me think dairy, always a happy subject. I imagine a triple scoop dish of ice cream, melted caramel topping, chocolate shavings and sprinkles. And when the last of the mountains are behind us, and the broad expanse of land unfolds ahead under an endless sky, I come to exactly the same conclusion about these two countries as I had five years earlier on a similar crossing near Baraloche. Chile holds its breath; Argentina exhales. C. Moisse

November 28, 2008

Mendoza -- Sunny and Hot, November 27

There's nothing to do in Mendoza -- other than eat great steaks, drink fabulous Malbec and enjoy life. Actually, in a break from normal custom, some Argentineans actually drink white wine or beer. Yes, life is slow and mellow here.

Mendoza gets 300 days of sunshine a year and maybe 3 or 4 days of rain. It’s a hot, arid, desert here, perfect for growing grapes and olives, for which Mendoza is famous. But when we stepped off our 7-hour bus from Santiago, we walked into a steambath, hot and muggy – very unusual for Mendoza. Seemingly, we had arrived during that 4-day period of rainy weather.

In fact, that day they were hit by a freak hail storm, with hail the size of lemons. We saw the damage on our guide’s windshield, which sported three larges spider webs, and on the shattered clay tile roofs in a new subdivision. Hail has become a big problem for the wine industry in this area and many now cover their vineyards with expensive netting. Some blame it on global climate change.

It's so hot here that even the parking lots are covered with netting for shade. And drivers lift their windshield wipers off the windshields so that they don't stick.

But downtown Mendoza is a cool oasis in the middle of the desert. Its streets are lined with huge Sycamore and Plane trees that arch over the roadway providing a much needed cooling canopy. A system of canals brings cool snow melt from the mountains, irrigating the trees and acting like a huge natural air conditioner. In other countries these would be foul smelling gutters, but here, in the spring, the water runs clean and fast. People dip in to wash their cars or water their plants.

The meter-deep canals are an extension of the original irrigation channels created by the Incas and expanded by the Spanish. The canals line every street and, at a depth of three feet, they pose a very real hazard to unwary pedestrians, especially in a city where wine consumption is a religion. At street corners, there is a narrow concrete slab bridging the canal, but it’s not always in the same place and the streets are dark because of the overhanging trees. Caution is advisable to late night partiers.

Although there aren’t many major tourist attractions here, the city draws a lot of tourists for wine tours and mountain adventures, horseback riding and hiking.
We toured three wineries, including Lagarde, Trapiche and Trivento, sampled a lot of great wines and even some homemade empanadas at the small family run Lagarde Bodega.

Walking around the city of Mendoza is a real pleasure. Even though it’s very hot here, 35-40 Celsius, you can get around the entire center of town without leaving the cool shade of the broad Plane trees. Sidewalk cafes and restaurants are everywhere and there is even a three-block long pedestrian street that is always crowded with Argentineans enjoying coffee or a meal al fresco at all hours of the day and night.

As for our search for the perfect steak, well after three failed attempts, we finally found it. A thick and juicy steak at an Italian-style restaurant called La Florencia in downtown Mendoza. A fine Malbec wine, a great Argentinean steak and a cool evening under the lush canopy of Mendoza’s tree-lined streets. Could life be any better?