Triathlon!

Okay, so, last Thursday, I'm sitting at my computer working.  My wife comes up to me and says "I want to do a sprint triathlon this Saturday.  For exact reasons unknown to me, I said "Sure, I'll do it with you".  Anna was both surprised and excited, so I knew at that point, there was no backing out.  Well, almost no backing out.  We discovered that the water was going to be around 17.7 C, and we didn't actually know how cold that was (64 F) in terms of comfort level.  Some preliminary googling suggested a wetsuit might be in order, however, after consulting with friends on Facebook, it was determined that a wetsuit was not absolutely necessary (which was good, since getting a wetsuit at the last minute was going to be inconvenient).  So, with no more excuses, we got ready for the sprint triathlon.

What I hadn't realized, was that I was also committing myself to getting TO the triathlon.  We don't have a car.  Well, actually we do, but it's in Minnesota, so it does not do us much good for getting to things here in Germany.  So we took a train part way, and then rode the remaining 10km to the triathlon start.  From there it was just a matter of signing in, and trying to decipher where to go, and what the rules actually were (I'd never actually done one of these before, and it turns out there are all kinds of little details, like what do you actually want to wear for each bit?  Where do you put your stuff?  Do you wear the little chip thingy on your ankle or on your wrist?)

Me running so fast the photo is blurry

It was fun.  I definitely could have done better on the swimming - I managed to get behind some rather slow people, and was a little slow in figuring out the best way to pass them.  In the bike ride, I actually managed to pass someone (okay, so I'm not the fastest out there.  In fact, I got beaten by a 75+ year old.  By 8 minutes).

Someone much fitter than me in the process of leaving me behind

I was consoling myself that when one is in last place (or almost last place), at least there's no one left to pass you.  And then the second wave started passing me.  Near the front of these was my wonderful wife, who said hi as she left me in her dust.

Triathlons in Germany seem to have some distinctive features.  One of these is that you might find beer in the water bottle holders of very expensive bikes post-race (or maybe it was there during the race...)

This was also the first race in which my wife won a sausage.  Literally.

Anna pondering what do do with the sausage

The winners with their sausages

Only the best get the wurst

So, that was my first triathlon experience.  It was a lot of fun, and I think I'll probably do another one sometime.  Actually, given that Anna has already pulled up the schedule of when every other triathlon in the state of Hessen is (our state), I give it really high odds that I will be doing another one in the not too distant future.

 

Actually, there's one more part of the triathlon experience.  And that is that we didn't want to take the train home...  So we biked the 30 km back to Marburg, with all our stuff on our backs.  Which meant we covered a greater distance getting to and from the triathlon (40 km) than we did actually racing it (25.5 km).

 

On the bike ride home.  Note the Pringles can in my right backpack pocket.  If your vehicle is a car, it might not be a bad idea, but when everything you bring is riding home with you on a bike, packing light takes on a new, and previously under-appreciated-by-me level of importance.  The full-sized beach towel will also stay at home next time...

Editor's note (aka Anna): what Sasha is modestly failing to point out is that this is his first race since approximately middle school and a year ago he couldn't run 5km without walking, so I am VERY impressed that he did the running AND swimming and biking and riding home!!  Yay Sasha!!!  And in case that wasn't enough exclamation points, !!!!!!!!!!!

Spanish food is delicious

OK, so I promised my family that I’d write about the food in Spain, and here it is. I’m not going to give you a report of everything we ate in Spain, just some of the highlights.

Probably the most ubiquitous things we ate in Spain were green olives (usually marinated with garlic and/or seasonings and on the table before any other food at every restaurant we ate at) and tortilla.  I don’t mean the flat disks of corn or wheat dough that anyone who has eaten Mexican food is probably thinking of, but instead, what is usually translated on the English versions of the menus as “Spanish omelette”.  They are both simple and delicious, and consist of some sort of fried potato with onion that is then mixed with whipped egg and cooked until it is golden-brown on both sides and solid-ish all the way through. Since I have recently had a tortilla making lesson from Nuria, perhaps I will give you a step-by-step tortilla lesson later on, but for now, you can just take my word for it that tortilla sounds simple from its ingredient list (eggs, potato, onion, olive oil, salt and pepper…that’s it) but is very satisfying to eat.  It is also a staple on tapas menus and we ate them many times during our travels.

Tapas in Madrid, the plate that's mostly empty had held the tortilla, the other things are albondigas (meatballs, left) croquettas (filled with meat and bechamel, middle) and bread (far right) and peach juice. Yum.

I was kind of expecting to eat Tapas most evenings for dinner because they are served earlier and are often cheaper than full-meals, but the problem is that most tapas places at least in the big cities seem to be small hole-in-the-wall places, and it’s just too hard to figure out which ones are “amazing find” holes in the wall, and which are “disappointing and/or sketchy” places, so we mostly were boring and ate at places in our guidebook.  Also, I realized that in a new town, particularly if I can’t read enough of the menu, I tend to pick places by a combination of the number of people eating there and by the look of the food that those people are eating.  That’s an OK strategy (yes, I realize that in tourist towns, the fact that many people use that strategy could lead to weird positive feedback loops on any given night but so be it) but had a problem this trip because most restaurants were empty when we wanted to eat. Yes, the Spanish meal hour could have played a role, but my hypothesis is that given the economic crisis, many people just aren’t eating out very often in Spain.  There’s what, 20% unemployment, and then even many employed people are just not getting paid for their work some months.  I wouldn’t go out to eat often if that were the case for me.

But, back to the food.  We had a delicious dinner in Merida, but the first amusing food story is from the night we were staying in El Rocio.  I voted to go to the Atlantic for dinner, and I wanted fish, so after watching the sun set over the ocean, we found a place that said it did fried fish (not in our book) and then promptly had a problem. I don’t know Spanish, and while Sasha can say many things (including basically everything you need to get hotel rooms, rental cars, etc.) he doesn’t know the Spanish name for most species of fish.  So we ordered non-fried shrimp (no problem, even I knew the word for shrimp) then wanted some fried fish and asked the waitress for a recommendation, and she recommended something that started with a B.  She said they were delicious, so we were excited, but then we got a pile of lightly breaded and fried fish that were maybe two inches long and were gutted but still had heads, tails and skin on…Hmmm… we had to ask how we were supposed to eat them, and (we think) we were told to leave the heads and tails and just eat the skin and meat off the backbone.  Maybe you could eat the whole things, but the tails and spines seemed a bit poke-y and the heads just didn't seem appealing.  They were good, if a bit of work.

How often does dinner require instructions from the waitress?

The fish. Still don't know what they were. Not that I've tried to figure it out.

The shrimp and the olives. We knew how to eat these.

The next night, we ate right at our hotel and the food was fine and the Sangria was also fine.  Mmmm....sangria...

Then came the best meal of the trip.  We ate lunch with Nuria and her family, and I think they were excited to have foreign guests, so served us a whole slew of amazing things.  First, we had slices of jamon (spanish for ham, but it is a different thing from your average US grocery store ham; closer to prosciutto) and sausage and tuna mixed with roasted, olive-oil soaked peppers, and bread and delicious tomatoes.  We could really have stopped there and been satisfied, but then, there was stew called puchero (I think it can also be called cocido) that contained several different types of meat and chickpeas and carrots and potatoes and we first ate a bowl of the soup part. It had the color of chicken noodle soup, maybe a bit more golden, but it had such a complex flavor it was amazing (apparently you need to use 2 very specific types of salt-cured bones to get it to taste right), and the whole thing was cooked in a pressure cooker, so the chick peas were silken almost, which was also delicious.  Then, we took bits of the meat that had been cooking in the soup and mixed in a small amount of pork fat that had been cooking with it (we used just a bit of the fat, but were told that it needed it to be authentic) and the meat was so tender and the fat infused it with richness, etc. that it was also amazing.  OK, that would have also been enough, but THEN Nuria’s sister had made a soup called Salmorejo that is usually tomatoes and garlic and bread that’s then blended to be smooth (like gazpacho but not quite the same) but apparently her sister roasts the garlic and tomatoes first, so the soup was still a creamy smooth pink, but the flavor was, well, more nuanced and rounder like you’d expect from roasted ingredients. Wow.  I love food, and that was an amazing, amazing meal. Yum.  Nuria half-jokes that maybe if she can’t figure out what to do after this post-doc in science, she should open up a restaurant.  I think she’s also a good scientist, but if she goes the restaurant route, I’ll try to be the first in line when it opens!

That evening, we went out to a delicious tapas place.  We had a bunch of things since there were 4 of us, and they were all great, from favas with ham, to these delicious guys:

I think they were cuttlefish, but I know they were delicious, as does Marek (posing in the picture)

The last thing I want to particularly talk about are churros. I remember having churros at the roller rink where we had skating parties in elementary school, and I remember ridged things fried and dipped in cinnamon and sugar.  Maybe those are more like the Mexican verison, but the Spanish ones that we ate were smooth on the outside and are extruded by a fancy machine right into hot oil in long ropes, which are then cut and served to you while still quite hot.  We had them in Tarifa and got them to go, so just emptied a few packs of sugar into the paper bag and shook it to coat them with sugar (and ate them sitting on a stone wall watching a kite surfer playing) 

OK, so we started sampling them before reaching the beach

but then we had them in Madrid in true Madrid fashion, with a cup of hot chocolate (not hot chocolate like you drink, but something that is much thicker, think melted chocolate bar) to dip them in before every bite.  Yum. AND, they had this nifty orange juice machine where they could push a button and the oranges would get automatically cut in half and squeezed.  That was some of the best orange juice, and was the perfect beverage to counteract the intensity of the chocolate and the grease of the churros; I had 2 glasses.  If you are going to Madrid, make sure you have such a meal.  We ate at Chocolateria Valor because our book said it was the best in town, but if you find a better one, please let us know and we’ll have an excuse to go back to Spain.    

Best. Breakfast. Ever. (or at least one of them)

Granada and Madrid

Hi folks!

I have been distracted by 2 more recent trips (posts to follow) so I’ll keep the final report on our Spain travels short.  After leaving Gibraltar, we headed to Granada and then Madrid.  The birding part of our trip was over, and now we were on to cultural experiences.  Our arrival to Granada was a bit traumatic.  We were trying to get to our hotel and just couldn’t figure out how to get to it, despite all indications from the GPS that we were almost there.  Finally, we found a garage and walked to the hotel and then realized our trouble; our hotel was in a pedestrian-only area; there was NO chance of driving within a few blocks of our hotel.  They had a deal with a different garage for parking, so we had to go move the car; here is the map that was drawn for us to get from garage A to garage B….looking somewhat like one of those Family Circus cartoons mapping out Billy’s perambulations.  In fact, maybe the explanation for his lines is that he’s applying the “ancient European city by car” method of navigation…

Try to minimize driving in Granada...unless you want to feel like little Billy

Anyway, that taken care of, we located for ourselves a delicious Lebanese dinner, and then prepared for a very early morning.  There is a UNESCO World Heritage Site fortress in Granada called the Alhambra, and it is very popular, they give out up to 6,000 tickets a day and they often sell out, and since we wanted to tour the whole thing including the most famous (and beautiful) palace, even ordering our tickets on-line in advance, we were stuck with the 8:30am entry time into the palace...which doesn’t sound horribly early, but add in the eating dinner on Spanish time, needing to check out of the hotel in the morning, and needing to figure out how to get up there and into the general fortress area and into the waiting line, it seemed like a ridiculously early morning.  BUT, the Palacio Nazaries (and the rest of the Alhambra) are really spectacular, and it turns out, much less crowded early in the morning, so it was all good, ultimately.  The Alhambra is a huge site, and it’s full of palaces from a variety of periods, mostly Islamic.  The architecture and details on the palace were impressive,  the Alcazaba (another medieval Islamic fort) had some great views and towers to climb up, and then there were gardens and roses everywhere, so I’d definitely recommend it if you are going to be anywhere nearby.  Just figure out somewhere easy to leave your car if you do.  I could spend about 3 posts just describing the palace, but instead, I'll merely tempt you with a few photos that hardly do it justice.

the Nazrid palace was a set of courtyards filled with gardens, fountains, etc.

And each of them was surrounded by intricate architecture and suites of rooms, effectively making up a warren of smaller palaces, each with its own unique style and representing a different time of construction

From the Alcazaba, we could see the snowy Sierra Nevada

And were impressed by Granada's beauty...I think Sasha would go back tomorrow if we could afford it.

By noon, we’d seen about everything we wanted to see at the Alhambra, and the place was getting pretty crowded, so we went back down the hill into town.  We poked our heads into the Cathedral, right near where we’d been staying, picked our luggage up from the hotel, and then spent a very nice hour and a half in an Islamic bath called a Hammam.  That was yet another highlight for the trip.  The bath consists of a set of pools of various temperatures, warm, hot (but not scalding), cold, a sitting area where they keep bringing out fresh pots of sweetened mint tea (which is delicious), and you go from the warm pool to the hot pool, to the cold pool, back to the hot pool, to drink a few glasses of tea, back to the warm pool, to get a massage, etc. and by the end, well, if you are the kind of person who finds warm water nice, you know how relaxed and happy you’d be by the end of that…I would go back to Granada again just to visit another Hammam.

It was steamy, and made my camera lens steam, but I wish every town I live in from here on out has one of these.

But, we had to go return the rental car, so we couldn’t stay all afternoon.  After our experiences in Granada, we decided not to bother with the car in Madrid, so we dropped the car back off, left all of our luggage in lockers right at the airport except for small daypacks.  This is the best thing ever, having locker areas at the airport; I wish this were common in the states, it makes travel SO much easier, although I’m sure with the state-encouraged paranoia in the states, it is probably illegal or something, but anyway, it was nice to be able to travel around Madrid without having to drag our luggage.

We didn’t do much that first evening, but then on our final day in Spain, we spent the morning wandering around Madrid, checking out some of the more famous plazas, and then after lunch, went to the Prado museum to look at art.   

A road leading out of the Plaza Mayor

I have come to realize that as much as any museum, I just love wandering the streets of any city, getting a sense of local life and window shopping...it looked like they make your shoes to order in here, or I would have bought one of each ;-)

There are 3 really famous art museums in Madrid, and the Prado is the one full of mostly Spanish paintings by folks including El Greco, Goya, and other folks that you’d read about in an art history class.  Not everything was from my favorite eras of painting, but there were some really pretty works, as well as some interesting but bizarre ones (including a few bizarrely disturbing ones by Hieronomous Bosch; every time I see his work, it seems even more strange and more odd given how old the paintings are).  After that, we walked through a lovely park on our way back to the airport, getting home to Marburg in a long but uneventful fashion.

I hope we'll make it back to Spain at some point, there are still so many things to do. We could even do exactly the same trip over again and not feel bored.

Spain's southern coast

 I'm not going to continue where I left off because Sasha wants to tell you about Merida and El Rocio and national park Doñana.  So instead, I'm skipping ahead to the Friday evening of our trip, when we hit the coast near Tarifa and saw Africa.  I don't have pictures that does it justice, but the part of Morocco that you can see from Spain is mountainous, and in the evening light with just a touch of mist rising off the Atlantic, the views were pretty awesome.  At first as we were driving in, I told Sasha "I think that those hills/mountains are in Africa" and he didn't believe me.  But I became quite convinced that I was right when I saw a huge cargo ship between those hills and where we were driving, and ultimately Sasha had to admit that was convincing.  After checking into our hotel, we decided that the hotel restaurant food smelled yummy and rather than driving to find a restaurant in town, sat on the hotel patio watching the sun set over the Atlantic. I promise I'll post again later about all the food, but if I talk about the cool stuff we saw and the food at the same time, it will be way too long.

Where do these belong??

Saturday was another busy day.  It was warm and sunny, and we were torn between spending the morning on the beach or looking at Roman ruins, but luckily didn't have to choose, because there are Roman ruins right by a lovely beach in the town of Bolonia. Bolonia is a small town just west of Tarifa on the Atlantic coast of Spain, and although now it is a small tourist/farming/etc. village, it was quite the city back in the days of the Roman empire and was the place to go for salted fish (the town was called Baelo Claudia, in the Latin).  Since the Roman empire's days are rather old history at this point, the town is pretty much just a set of foundations and some columns and a theater that have, I'm sure, all been largely reconstructed.  I liked the pile of carefully numbered stones a short ways away from the excavated foundations.  It was like the archaeologists said "hhmmm...I don't know where these go, so let's just leave them over here for later".  It was also clear that plenty of the roman city is still buried under the grass; there were tantalizing stones poking out here and there.  Still, it is cool seeing things that old. 

Roman ruins and beach.  Sorry to make you jealous.

And, we got to look at them on a nice, warm day on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean.  OK, so this picture is a little deceiving in that you can't walk onto the beach from the ruins; there were some fences, a small road, etc. But still, the ocean was right there. 

We were quite clever actually, and toured the ruins first thing in the morning (by Spanish standards) and we almost had the place to ourselves.  As we had our fill and were headed to the beach, we saw a bunch of tour buses arrive, so we left just in time.

We had an hour or so on the beach (enough to be warm and happy but not enough for either of us pale Northerners to burn) and then we went back to shower and go meet my labmate Nuria, who was visiting her family for a long weekend.  It was fun to hang out with a local, and after meeting her family and seeing their house, we went with Nuria and her boyfriend Marek to the nearby town of Castellar de la Frontera. 

Castellar de la Frontera

Castellar is a cool fortress of a town perched high on a hill.  I little while ago, they built a "new" Castellar down in the valley with more comfortable looking homes, schools, etc. so the upper walled town seems to be more the haunt of non-Spanish ex-pats and is full of hotels and the like, but the town is also a bit off the beaten track, so it didn't really have that tourist town feel. Although there was a donkey giving rides to kids having a birthday party at one of the hotels, and there was a guy with raptors that you could pay to hold...needless to say, we did pay and did hold them.

We wandered around, stopped for drinks in a small cafe, and, since it is so high on a hill, tons of raptors were migrating right over our heads, making my husband happy.

Nuria and Marek at Castellar

White houses in the old town.

We headed down to the new town for a tapas dinner.  Since Nuria likes food as much as me, you can believe it was a good dinner!

We went back to our hotel near Tarifa, and Sunday morning, stopped briefly in Tarifa before heading on.  I was set on getting to the point closest to Africa, but alas, there is this island/peninsula south of Tarifa that looked tantalizingly cool but is partly a military installation or something, so was off limits.  So I had to content myself with the map instead. 

At least it was cool to be on this strip of beach separating the Meditarranean from the Atlantic.  We have pictures by the signs for each, but I'll spare you.  Alas, it was windy and cloudy and hazy, so we couldn't even get a good final view of Africa.  We did see a guy doing some cool stunts while kite surfing, though.

For the rest of the day, we decided to check out Gibraltar.  It was kind of a last minute addition to our itinerary, but it proved irresistible.  Now, you may have heard of the rock of Gibraltar and maybe you are like me and were picturing, I dunno, something like Plymouth rock on a hilly coast.  Not so. Gibraltar is one giant rock with a small bit of town crouching on a strip of beach. Unfortunately, the clouds and fog made it sub-optimal for photographing and for birding (Sasha was hoping to see more migrating raptors) but Gibraltar was cool nonetheless.

The Rock of Gibraltar through the fog.

That's a lot of town crowded into a very small area; I guess a lot of it is even on "reclaimed" land.

Gibraltar is still a British colony, so we had to go through a manned border crossing to get in.  It was pretty prefunctory, though; we just sort of waved our passports at the guards and they waved us through, although that was definitely a blessing given the long line of cars waiting to drive in.  I think there are all sorts of cute Britishy things to do in the town, but we didn't do more than quickly drive through the town to get up onto the rock.  Now here is a moment where what we did and what we should have done diverged.  If you go to Gibraltar and want to wander around seeing all the cool things up on the rock, take the cable car up or figure out how to hike up.  DO NOT  try to drive into the upper rock nature reserve, even if your bird finding guide seems to suggest this is a good idea.  Especially not if your wife is prone to carsickness and your rental car is somewhat lacking in the pick-up department, since you will inevitably need to start your car while it is parked on an exceptionally narrow road on an exceptionally steep hill.  After stop number 2 (a cool if curiously techinicoloredly illuminated cave; stop number one was a closed birding station), I decided that it would be best for all involved if I walked to the next sights on the list and met Sasha there...but that's skipping over the myriad reasons to go up to the upper rock nature reserve. Besides the cool caves, that is.

 Monkeys doing monkey things (or posing for the tourists)

First, there are monkeys. Monkeys are cute; maybe not quite as cute as sheep, but still. Monkeys are not native to Spain (or Gibraltar) but someone decided that Gibraltar needed monkeys and introduced them in the 18th century, and it's clear that they are well loved by the people, as I saw several monkey play stations complete with piles of monkey food (cabbage, potatoes and wedges of various fruits) while hiking about.  It is also clear that they have sharp teeth and nails, so I tried not to get too close, although that can be a bit hard given how narrow the trails are and how much the monkeys like said trails.

Next, there are tunnels.  2 parts of the tunnels are open for tours, some from the "Great Siege" and some from WWII, but the information said that there are 34 miles of tunnels in the rock.  It even said that in WWII, they weren't just for shooting out of, but there was enough space carved out of the rock to house thousands or 10s of thousands of troups for a year.  That's a bit crazy to think about.  We toured the Great Siege tunnel, which was cool, but alas, most of the tunnels are off limits.  We did happen upon all sorts of proof of the military history of the rock, though; giant chains and rings for hoisting heavy things about, structures that looked like ventilation for those tunnels, even this awesome lookout post near the high-point.

Sasha being a look-out.  I don't think he was very effective with all the fog.

 It is clear that parts of the Rock still are used by the military; I know I couldn't pass up the possibilities that all those tunnels offer, not to mention the strategic location, so it's not surprising.  Needless to say, we didn't poke around too much in these areas.

Sasha can tell you some car stories that I missed by walking, one involving a nice Columbian who knew how to unpark a car pointed up a steep hill when one of the tires is off the road...but I'll let him tell you the details.
After touring the siege tunnels (which were cool, even if the mannequins loading cannons and the talking signs were a bit odd) we needed to press on, so we didn't even get so much as a cuppa tea in Gibraltar, and I had so been looking forward to a proper cup of tea.  Alas.  At least I was able to drink a satisfying amount of mint tea that evening once we had reached Grenada, but it is late, so I will save our last two days in Spain (Grenada and Madrid) for another post.

Sunset over the Atlantic, Matalascana