Andalusia Dispatch

FLAMENCO

The clapping rarely stops…cupped hands with interlaced thumbs, barely audible, yet there’s a subtle texture added to the piercing stares and the sound of shoes striking the floor; then it builds, and eventually shoes pound in staccato or stomp and hesitate, the guitar expands, the singer wails, the clapping is steady, very strong now, yet retaining that slightly muffled quality. I’ve been practicing.

Museo del Baile Flamenco, Seville:

Imagine the mathematical splendor of the long fringe on the señora’s shawl flung into the same helix pattern as the sweat that flew off the señor! It was all fiercely thrilling.

   

SOMEONE’S HEAD WAS ON KINDA STRAIGHT

My romantic notion of Andalusia (Al Andalus) under 800 years of Moorish rule began some years ago when Newton and I watched a television documentary about that era. For six hundred years Moslems, Jews and Christians lived in harmony. The Catholic Church made victorious encroachments and eventually Jews and Moslems were expelled or forced to convert under the torturous methods of the Spanish Inquisition, presided over by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. Granada was the last hold out, falling to the Catholic Monarchs (as the two are called) in 1492 – that familiar year that Isabella sent Columbus off “to India” for new trade routes. Some scholars surmise that Columbus was a Sephardic Jew seeking refuge from the Inquisition, but then I also discovered there are scholars who surmise that he was Polish!

 

Statue of Queen Isabella and Columbus in Granada.           

 

 

 

 

 

 

Turning a mosque into a cathedral; Seville:

The Moorish house design concentrated on the peaceful presence of softly flowing water from fountains centered in rooms, courtyards and gardens. Standing inside the exquisite palaces and gardens, I imagined that the deep serenity of the setting and the harmony of the architecture were reflected in the tolerant society under the Islamic kings. Who knows? I could imagine myself spending hours there pouring over Rumi’s Sufi verses to the beloved. My romantic notions of middle eastern culture were also fed by admiration for Saladin’s more honorable butchering during the Crusades, my appreciation for the advanced learning that persisted through the West’s “dark ages” - math (Arabic numbers!), science, astronomy, mysticism from the holy land  - that made their way west with returning Crusaders. The resulting Gothic cathedrals marked an enlightening that was to inevitably grow. But before I get carried away, my romance falls short abruptly when in front of deadly fundamentalism or the notion that I would be one of many wives! Hats off to you, Moorish kings, anyway.

 

ALCAZAR PALACE, Seville:

 

GEOMETRY:

ALHAMBRA, Granada:

Feeling like Lord Byron; “Pass me an ink pen before the clouds pass!”

TAPAS

We lucked out on our first night in Seville on this hoppin’ little street: tapas of our first “jamon serrano,” sublime thin-sliced ham from acorn-fed pigs, and “pescaditos fritos,” tiny fried fish in a delicate batter made of garbanzo beans. WOW.

Another night we had dinner at this tapas bar – one of the oldest in Seville: El Rinconcillo. I think standing around the bar is the way to go…we sat down and were accosted by a waiter who had perfected the crashing of plates and glasses down on the table that seems to be an Andalusian trademark! In his case, he was clearly hostile and never hesitated to roll his eyes with every request, not to mention the horrid imposition of a question. It was funny and interesting and delicious and rowdy and clangy, noisy fun. Note the jamon serrano hanging typically from the ceiling. We had divine spicy spinach with garbanzo beans and more pescaditos fritos.

Our favorite night in Seville was at a wonderful bar and restaurant where more clanging and crashing of glasses and dishes by the swashbuckling, yet benevolent bartenders was the best entertainment around. One food prep guy who spent a lot of time cutting the exquisite jamon and cheeses for orders did, in fact, smash a wine glass down too hard and it shattered in front of us. Then a waitress came over from the section with tables and threw a plate complete with food angrily into the garbage behind the bar! There were lovely folks to talk to standing around the bar, including a young couple from London who had just moved to Seville that day to seek their fortunes as English instructors. Newton had the best paella of his life.

 

 

A perfect sardine in Ronda, eaten at this wondrous place:                          

  

We also had the best fresh tuna ever in Ronda.

In Granada, where the tapas are famous for being free, we opted instead for Arabic food on the exotic streets of Calderería Veja and Calderería Nueva. These were filled with wonderful markets and tea/hookah houses/restaurants. After we finished our second night’s Arabic dinner we discovered that just a bit further down the street was a place serving free Arabic tapas…the same dishes we had paid for twice. Next time!

 

Let me wind this dispatch up with scenes from Cadiz on the coast, where we just stopped for lunch; the breathtaking Ronda, inland, where we splurged on a “parador” – a hotel in an historic building; and Malaga, where we spent one very late night before flying away.

CADIZ

RONDA

That’s our hotel peeking over the gorge from the left!

MALAGA

Unlike the ‘centro” of many European cities where one wedges oneself on mere inches of sidewalk on narrow streets when the cars and motorcycles go by, Malaga’s centro is completely closed to traffic. Here is the pedestrian-friendly city at 3:00am:

Andalucía, te amamos.

 

Love,

Sandy

Brasília Dispatch

Newton had a professional trade show in Brasília over a long weekend. I had never been there, so off we flew.

Brazil had a president from 1956 to 1961, Juscelino Kubitschek, known as “JK,” who believed that the southern states of Brazil were benefitting disproportionately from the seat of the federal government being located in Rio de Janeiro. He was determined to build a new capital in the middle of the country and spread economic development more equitably into the northern states.

The chosen site for the Federal District was in the state of Goiás. It was a dessert, a rough savannah. Lúcio Costa won a contest to design the city plan, and famous Brazilian architect, Oscar Niemeyer, designed the government buildings and monuments. Lúcio Costa’s layout was based on a bird with outspread wings, with specific sectors for specific purposes. The government buildings are along the ‘axis’ of the bird, as are the hotel sectors and public spaces. The wings are residential. Kubitschek knew that with some strong opposition to his plan he had to move swiftly and complete the city before his term ran out; otherwise, the project could potentially end up abandoned by a subsequent administration. Sixty thousand workers worked day and night to complete the project in less than four years.

Kubitschek was the third generation of an immigrant family from Czechoslovakia. His presidential term was considered a prosperous time of optimism and economic expansion in the country.

After Kubitschek’s single five-year term, as was the law at that time, he returned to being a senator. In 1964, the USA clandestinely participated in the military coup that took over Brazil to both fight “Communism” and install a regime offering Brazil up to American corporations. When congress was dissolved, Kubitschek went into self-exile in Europe and the US. He returned to Brazil and died in a car accident in 1976. Some consider his death and that of his democratic successor suspicious, as the USA-aided Operation Condor carried out numerous assassinations in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia (later Peru and Ecuador) to minimize opposition to the right-wing dictatorships. This is why South Americans think more highly of American citizens than they do of the American government, complicit in those decades of repression, torture, and disappearances.

 

As Newton and I drove from the airport, we saw a sixties’ style city that seemed somewhat crumbling. There was graffiti everywhere and buildings in disrepair. We swerved into town on the quite interesting thoroughfares that have no traffic signals – just exit ramps and cloverleaf’s. Fortunately, we finally got our GPS to register the truly strange address system and found our way to our hotel at SHS QD 05 BLC! (Hotel Sector South, quadrant D, #5, block C). Our friend told us that after a week’s use this address system is truly efficient, but I have to admit to some nascent affection for the GPS as our few days in Brasília were not sufficient to assuage our utter address confusion. You can see here that this is the dry season – four months without rain and everything brown. We even saw a section of a park being blackened by spontaneous fire.

While Newton worked, I took a marvelous tour of the city with some Brazilians, Germans, an Argentine and a Uruguayan. We had a lot of fun sharing impressions and comments. The axis area of the city’s lay-out is much more attractive and maintained.

Many of Niemeyer’s buildings here, while elegant, seem to say “the sixties” more than evoking lasting grandeur. They better serve to represent a moment in modernism, as does Lincoln Center in New York in my opinion. Here are the Palácio do Planalto (like the White House, except the president’s residence on the right is located elsewhere) and the Supremo Tribunal Federal (the supreme court) in the ‘Plaza of the Three Powers:’

But the plaza’s third building transcends sixties’ architecture and becomes sculptural art: the Congresso Nacional, which is timeless in its beauty and thrilling to see from any angle:

Here is Oscar Niemeyer’s Catedral Metropolitano, modeled on the crown of thorns. I am not fond of the architecture, though the engineering feat is very impressive. My favorite detail in Brasília is front and center in this cathedral: an egg. With a yoke. Clearly, this is the pre-Christian symbol of birth, co-opted as Easter eggs, but I have seen few featured as this one is in church design. But better still, these stained glass ‘waves’ of clouds and sea culminate in the blue fallopian tubes and green uterus under the egg. Oscar Niemeyer worked female anatomy into the central symbol of a Catholic church! I checked with the tour guide about Niemeyer’s religious affiliation, which is atheist/communist (he was forced into exile under the military dictatorship, returning only when democracy was restored in the mid-eighties). I considered the egg detail at least a wink from Oscar, who is still with us at age 105.

Newton and I went out on our first night to Beirute, a place Wikipedia describes as the spot for local intellectuals, journalists, gays, and students. It definitely looked like nothing had physically changed since its opening in ’66, but the crowd was a refreshing mix of generations, and short on tourists. The Arabic food was so-so, the draught beer very cold.

A gigantic manmade lake surrounds this bird-in-flight layout to the southeast. It was created to supply much needed humidity to the city. Newton and I went to Pontão, a beautiful area on the lake full of bars and restaurants. While exploring we came upon some live jazz and were hooked (being jazz-starved in Natal). We returned the following night for a different piano trio, equally adept as the first. Sheer heaven.

We struck out on a walk one morning, literally and figuratively, despite having read that this is no city for pedestrians. The “central park” of Brasília is just around the corner from our hotel. Whether the difficulty of crossing that flowing traffic without any crosswalks or the scorched brown color of the park under a sweltering sun was the determining factor, we decided to return to the hotel and drive 50 kilometers to an ecotourism spot with waterfalls. We didn’t anticipate that the route had its percentage of dirt roads. Even with the car closed up with A/C we could taste the dry red dirt in our mouths. If a car passed us, our visibility was completely obliterated. Alas, when we arrived at our destination the guided tours to the waterfalls were over. We were just grateful for shade, food and liquid at that point. Thank goodness the camp-like place was serving a great home cooked meal to the day’s hikers. Our senses were well served by the vibrant colors of the resident macaws:

Because Brasília is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, expansion is not allowed. A modest residence now costs almost $1,000,000. As the government settled in there, much more space was required for the workers and the growing population. Four satellite cities resulted. These accommodate everyone above the 600,000 that Brasília can house. There is a limit of 23 stories for buildings in Brasília, so it was quite a shock to see this mirage of a high-rise metropolis appear on our drive – one of the satellite cities:

 

Buildings and houses are allowed some refurbishment in Brasília. A new stadium for the upcoming 2014 Soccer World Cup is underway on the site of the old stadium:

Our hotel rooftop afforded the view of the stadium next door, as well as this dramatic sunset and glorious moonrise. It was also a good spot to check e-mail.

On our last day we returned to the Pontão for lunch next to the lake. One craves water in Brasilia this time of year however one can find it! Unfortunately, while there was sometimes a pay-off for near-New York City prices all over town, the sophisticated looking lakeside restaurant, ‘Soho,’ was a disappointment. Our hotel room, as well, was way overpriced, though the hotel had begun updating on the lower floors and rooftop. We had all the original battered ‘60’s furnishings, including faucets that came apart in your hand. The shower was absolutely Bates Motel! The truth is, I oftentimes find living in the third world romantic, apart from bureaucratic nonsense, which is just infuriating. As Brazil enjoys its economic progress and many are moving into the middle class, I find romance in the transition, as well…something I’m not feeling about the United States’ current bent towards third worldom as our middle class shrinks.

We are now planning our annual fall business trip to Europe. This year we are adding a week in Andalusia and briefer stays in Dublin and Rome to the business itinerary. I know, I know without a doubt: I’m a very lucky woman.

Love,

Sandy