Ghent and compressions socks

Ghent Belgium - late in the afternoon.


I recently attended a seminar in Ghent, Belgium. A coworker and I drove together which made the trip more fun. It’s only about 2 ½ hours from here. In the northern half of Belgium, they speak Dutch. In southern Belgium, they speak French and I think the French have had a far greater influence culturally than the Dutch.

Here’s a French joke (don’t worry, it’s clean): What’s the difference between a Dutch breakfast and a Dutch lunch? Answer: 4 hours. Yes, bread and cheese with a glass of milk for both meals.

For the seminar, I was surprised that they served us a full, three-course meal for lunch on the first day. There was wine on the tables, possibly to give us a good excuse for nodding off during the afternoon sessions, but I had to ask for a Diet Coke. The second day, we had a Dutch lunch – cold sandwiches eaten standing up. But they still served wine!

Ghent is a beautiful city with several old cathedrals in the town center – all with working bell towers that ring all night long! There are restaurants and bars along the canals serving typical Belgian fare like mussels, French Fries, and local beer. It was too bad we didn’t have more time to see the city. Dennis and I definitely have to get back here!

So, it’s the weekend and we’re at home. Dennis is on-call and has to be available within 15 minutes to reset the website if it should crash. Fortunately, they take turns being on-call and he gets paid for it, too.

On Saturday, we managed to run out to the farm that we visited last weekend to buy some beef. During the week, we had gone through the price list and translated the cuts of meat into English. I made a list of the cuts that I wanted and how much. Since we have the huge freezer in the garage, I figured we could stock up. The farmer, who doesn’t speak English, was there when we pulled up. He recognized us and seemed very relieved when I handed him the list! He pulled all the meat from the freezer and weighed each type. When he was done tallying the total, he just showed me the slip. We paid with exact change and were happily on our way. I think the farmer was happy, too!

We also went for a long walk on Saturday afternoon. The sun was out and it was mid-50’s so it was nice for walking. We’ve really had a quite a stretch of sunny days. Fall seems to be a nicer time of year than summer here. Summer was rainy and muggy. Yuck! Today, it’s raining again…

I managed to get out for a short run today despite the rain. As some of you know, I stopped running completely last summer. It’s been over a year since I’ve run at all. I was having serious pain in my lower legs. I went to several doctors and made sure that it was nothing serious, but stopped short when they wanted to stick a large needle into my shin muscle while I was exercising to measure the pressure inside. Running is not THAT important to me.

But I recently read MJ’s blog about her compression socks. I was intrigued and read more on-line about how they work and what they are supposed to do. One of my co-workers here also runs with compression socks. So, I asked her where she got them. She gave me the name of a store in Utrecht, the city where Dennis works. So, on Thursday evening, I went to Utrecht and Dennis and I went to the running store. The lady at work had warned me that you have to get measured to determine what size socks you wear so I had even shaved my legs that morning. I wasn’t exactly prepared for the high price of the socks, but I figured I already spent more than that at the doctor’s office. I figure the socks are worth a try!

For my first run in over a year, I went around the block. And I had to walk some of it. I couldn’t tell if the socks were helping or not. I think I was breathing too hard to notice! Since I’m totally not a natural runner, I really have to start slow. This was how I started running in the first place. So, this is how I’m going to start this time. For my second run, I went around the block and was able to keep running the whole way. Maybe by next week I’ll be able to go around twice! I’m still not convinced that the socks are helping, but I’ll keep trying until I know. Wish me luck – this is my last chance to get back into running.

Back to Normal Life

I managed to take a couple of pictures with my cell phone camera. They are not the best quality, but you can still see how pretty it was!

I only have one more post to do to finish the Spain and Portugal vacation series, but I just can’t force myself to do it. If I’m bored with it, I imagine that you guys are too. Here’s the condensed version: We went from Algarve to Lisbon. We saw really cool cork tree plantations. We tried port wine which Dennis likes, but I don’t. There was yet another big church and then we came home.

So, now I’m back to normal life. As you know from the news flash, Dennis started his new job. He seems to like it so far, but he had to work last weekend. Adding salt to the wound, it was a beautiful weekend. We managed to get for a bike ride on Saturday afternoon. It was a gorgeous sunny fall day. I chose the route but unfortunately, most of the trails were unpaved. We actually ran into one of my co-workers on the path. He’s big into mountain biking (that’s some kind of Dutch joke because there are NO mountains in the Netherlands). Anyway, we stopped and chatted for a while. It reminded me of going running at Waterfall Glenn and seeing people from the tri club or the bike club. I really miss everyone!

This weekend, we got super-lucky and the weather was pretty nice again. It’s in the 50’s and a bit cloudy, but the sun comes out every now and then. The trees are really turning colors and there are leaves on the ground that crunch under foot. We went biking yesterday and had a good ride. We stopped by a farm that advertised “rundervlees voor koop” or beef for sale. The farmer didn’t speak enough English to understand our questions, so he called his wife over. She showed us the cuts of meat they do and the price list. But she said they were pretty much out of meat, but another cow just went away to the… (Here she made the throat cutting gesture indicating slaughterhouse). So, next weekend they will have some more beef. That gives us some time to translate the cuts of beef into English and decide what we want. Cool!

Today, Dennis and I drove over to Groenveld Castle for a walk in the park. Groenveld means green field in Dutch. We biked past it yesterday, but the garden looked more suited to walking than biking. The term castle is used pretty loosely in this case. The building was the summer home for a rich family from Amsterdam. It was built in 1710 and includes an English-style garden. We paid 4 euros each to see the main house, but it was very disappointing. They mainly use the building for exhibits – like for school kids. So, it was boring. But the gardens were very pretty. Mostly it was like walking through the woods with a river in the middle. There were cow and horse pastures nearby as well. Tons of people were out enjoying the fall colors with their kids and dogs. Wandering around the park-lands is a pretty typical Sunday activity especially on such a nice day!

The Algarve, Portugal

The cliffs on the coast of Portugal.


The beach in Salema. In the winter, the sand washes out to sea. It comes back in the spring just in time for the tourists.

The view from the boat of the waves crashing on the cliffs. There were also people fishing from the tops of the cliffs!

From Arcos de la Frontera, we moved on to Portugal. For a bit of a breather, we went to the Algarve, which is the resort area on the southern edge of the country that is popular with the German and British tourists. Before you start picturing sun-drenched beaches with topless women frolicking in the surf – let me remind you about the Germans and the British. In England, they don’t buy beach umbrellas to block the sun; they buy wind blocks to keep warm. And the Germans appear to care more about inexpensive beer than smooth sand. For a beach vacation, you might want to follow a more discerning crowd.

With that said, the area was strikingly beautiful. We stopped at one place that used to be considered the end of the world. Beyond this, it was though that you would sail right off the edge. Indeed, you could stand on the cliff overlooking the ocean and believe that it’s true. It was our good friend Christopher Columbus sailing from Spain who finally proved there was something else out there. It would have been cool to post this blog on Oct. 13 in celebration of Columbus Day, but I don’t think you guys want to wait that long. You’re probably tired of this vacation by now and just want to go home!

We actually stayed in the little town of Salema for two nights to give us a little break from all the city tours. It felt nice to relax a little without the sound of motorbikes and jackhammers. Salema is so small that it only has one very small grocery store and no other real shops. There are a few restaurants and some hotels serving the little stretch of beach. The water here was terribly cold and never gets warm. The weather was very cool in the evening and only seemed to warm up after about 2 in the afternoon. We spent the first afternoon just appreciating the ocean and beach. For dinner we ate as a group at the beach-front restaurant. The seafood was pretty fresh. In the morning, we watching the fishing boats being pulled up the beach by a large tractor.

The next day, a lot of us went on a boat tour. Dennis who tends to get sea-sick decided not to go. The boat tour took us out to see the cliffs from the water. It was pretty windy and a bit cold. The ride was not terribly rough, but Dennis would not have appreciated it. The cliffs were stunning. You could see how the cliffs are eroding away in places. One cathedral is now closed to the public because one corner has fallen away. The guides also told us about the fishing industry and how they catch the fish. For the big fish, they string a bunch of hooks on one line and put it in the water with a buoy. Each fisherman has his own color of buoy. The guys who catch octopus use clay pots that they drop to the bottom. The octopi hide in the pots thinking they found a safe spot. The fishermen just pull in the pots and collect the octopi.

Sevilla

One of the cute little squares in the historic quarter of Sevilla.


Our tour guide Amanda with the Alcazar palace in the background. You can also see the palm trees and bright blue sky that helped to create a lovely ambiance.

Part of the cathedral. For those of you who are not familiar with all the old architectural styles, this is a fine example of Gothic.

This is the huge golden alter inside the cathedral. This is apparently the largest alterpiece ever made. The picture is good, but it doesn't do it justice!

The paella that we had for our group dinner. You can see the regular sized dinner plates in the background to give you an idea of how big this pan is!

From Arcos de la Frontera, we got back on our bus to Sevilla. Sevilla is another big city, but after Granada, it seemed very clean and safe. One of the big attractions here are the orange trees all over the city. In the spring when they bloom, the air smells is fragrant with orange blossoms. Unfortunately these oranges are no good for eating. They are very bitter. There is only one use for them – in British orange marmalade. The people of Sevilla shake their heads that anyone would bother with such bitter oranges even as they sell them all to the crazy British people!

Sevilla has a very small historic center, about 1 km square. The streets are impossibly narrow and curvy making maps difficult. As in some of the other cities, the cute little open squares were actually not original. In Sevilla, they were built in 1929 for the Exposition. This ended up being a really bad year for an Exposition with the stock market crash and all. But they tried again in 1992 and the city ended up with some nice infrastructure and a lot of pedestrian-only streets. It all makes for a really pretty and charming city.

The two main sites in Sevilla are the cathedral and the Alcazar palace. The cathedral is the 3rd largest in Europe and it’s impressive. We had a fantastic, local tour guide who told us all the cool details about it. There is a tomb for Christopher Columbus here, but the city of Santo Domingo also claims to have his body. She explained that they ran several DNA tests before they were finally able to conclude that the remains in Sevilla are really Christopher Columbus. But Santo Domingo still claims that they have at least part of his body! The main alter of this cathedral was huge and all gold. I put the picture in, but you have to imagine it 10 times cooler. After we toured the inside of the cathedral, we climbed the bell tower. From the top, we were able to see lots of details on the church itself as well as the whole city. The bells were huge and when one of them rang, we nearly jumped out of our skin it was so loud!

Later that evening, we walked to dinner with the group. This was our paella dinner and they brought us one huge paella for the whole group. Again, I included a picture of the dish as they started to serve it. It was pretty good, but the stuff we ate in Madrid was better. After the meal, our tour guide had a surprise for us. She had arranged horse and carriage rides for the whole group. This was totally cool! We rode around the Cathedral and the palace and stopped for some pictures (sorry, none of mine were very good) before heading back to our hotel.

The next day, Dennis and I went to the Alcazar palace, which was very similar to the Alhambra but not quite as cool. Still it was nice to stroll around the gardens and enjoy the beautiful day. We walked around town quite a bit also and managed to find lunch in a little tapas restaurant. Later, we tried to find dinner, but as usual we struggled to find food before 8:30 pm. Thank goodness for tapas. We would have waited until later, but we had a Flamenco performance to go to at 8:30. The Flamenco was done in a really small theater, about 60 chairs around the center stage. There were only two dancers and the costumes were quite understated – not the huge ruffled dresses that we normally think of. After the performance, one woman asked if the Catholic Church had ever censored Flamenco because it’s so sexy. We were surprised to find out that they had not.

Arcos de la Frontera

This is the city of Ronda, built over the river gorge. It was really hard to choose which picture to put in my blog, because Ronda was so beautiful.


Another view from Ronda. The farm land below is full of orange trees.


This is from Arcos de le Frontera. It's not quite as spectacular as Ronda, but still pretty cool.

In tribute to my brother, I am including this picture taken from the bathroom of our hotel room.

The narrow lanes with the white-washed buildings in Arcos.

From Granada, we rode the bus to Arcos de la Frontera, one of the beautiful white hill-towns. This is the southern part of Spain, the state of Andalucia, and is pretty much what we have in mind when we think of Spain. This is the home of bull-fighting, gazpacho, and flamenco.

As we left Granada, our tour guide warned us to have a very light breakfast because we would be stopping for brunch. As a source of revenue, some of the senoras in one of the small towns started a business serving tourists meals in their homes. We arrived in the small town, broke out into groups of seven, and followed the senoras home. The senoras only speak Spanish, but are very good at pantomiming. It was very good practice for me. I was able to understand most of her rudimentary commands and questions.

She served us a lot of different dishes, but all pretty basic. We had fresh bread, cheese, and some sausages and a meat spread that was like chorizo. The main part of the meal was Spanish tortilla, an egg and potato dish. There was a simple tomato and olive oil salsa to go with it. She tried to get us to drink wine with the meal, but we all thought it was too early. After the meal, she passed around a plate of grapes –these are the local wine grapes and tasted very fragrant. Then we had coffee and cookies (no wonder we were told to eat a light breakfast!). Finally, she started pulling out the brandy and other liquors. She encouraged us to drink some by indicating that we could sleep on the bus. The apple brandy was quite nice and not very strong. It was more like a wine than liquor. After our huge meal, she took us on a house tour. It was a nice house, although not very big. The kitchen and bathrooms were about what we would expect. The bedrooms were fairly small but again, looked pretty normal. The dining room was crammed into a small family room and had all of the important family pictures of Christenings and graduations.

We slept for a while on the bus until we reached our next stop, the city of Ronda. Ronda is built on a huge river gorge and is quite spectacular. We visited a bull-fighting ring, complete with blood still visible on the dirt. We did not actually see any bulls, but we did see some of the beautiful horses. Remember the famous Lipizzaner Stallions in Austria are actually from Spain (the Spanish Riding School). Anyway, we had some time to walk around the city and enjoy the views before we had to go.

Our final destination for the day was Arcos de la Frontera. The Frontera was the front line of the war against the Moors. The hill-tops were strategic locations and the towns were pretty well protected. One feature of all these hill-towns is the white-washed houses. I think white is the only color of paint that they sell. But the sun is so intense that the white probably helps to keep the interiors cool. In Arcos, there are not many sights other than the city itself. We did go into the small cathedral to see the dead dudes. One of them is “the incorruptible body” or St. Felix who miraculously never rots. He really looks like a skeleton dressed in clothes. I couldn’t figure out who the other guy was, but he looked the same. Fortunately they were both behind glass so we couldn’t smell them.

One really cool thing in this city was watching the cars trying to navigate the narrow roads. Virtually all the cars in town had long scratches on both sides and a lot of them had broken outside mirrors dangling off. These were compact cars, too. We stood and watched at one section where the buildings squeezed the road so the cars barely fit through. The drivers had to approach the narrow section and then back up a little bit to make sure that they were exactly straight. At this point, they opened the window and tilted the side mirror in. Then, ever so slowly, they would proceed. Once clear they reached out and pushed the mirror back out. There were tons of motorbikes here, too. Motorbikes would be much more practical than a car. The steep hills would make bicycles nearly impossible. Even walking up some of the hills was difficult!

Granada

The La Mancha countryside with olive groves and vineyards.


The Don Quixote windmills.


The Alhambra as seen from our restaurant.

The gardens at the Alhambra.

The Moorish stucco - see the color?

Every door and room was decorated with the beautiful stucco.

From Toledo, we drove south towards Granada. On the way, we stopped at the Don Quixote windmills in La Mancha. The windmills were up on a hill (where there is a lot of wind) with a view of the surrounding farmland. The local crops are olives and wine grapes. Most of the olive oil in the world comes from Spain – they actually sell olives to the Italians. They are working on switching over from wine grapes to olives. The wine from this region tends to be crappy and the olive oil sells for more money. The windmills were actually used for milling wheat although they don’t grow as much wheat here as they used to.

We arrived in Granada in time for a walking tour and dinner. Granada, in the south of Spain, is the gateway to Morocco. The Moroccan influence was obvious in the restaurants and souvenir stores. The smell of incense poured out of all the little souvenir stores. The streets were narrow and dirty. There were lots of homeless people and weird looking hippies. Lots of them had scraggy-looking dogs. I really did not like this city. But it did have some redeeming factors.

For dinner, Dennis and I went to a wine bar. Granada is one of the last cities to serve tapas free with your drinks. Our tour guide advised us to keep an eye on what other people were getting and make sure you get the same. At our wine bar, we sat right at the bar so we could ask the bar tender about the wines. We ordered a glass each and we got our tapa – a toothpick with a grape and a square of cheese. OK, that’s a bit underwhelming. But we saw the chef deliver a platter with a gorgeous seafood salad (mussels, carrots, red peppers in vinaigrette). With my great high-school Spanish, I asked the bartender, “Que es esto?” With that, he gave us each a small serving of the salad. We ordered a few other tapas off the menu, too. The menu for once was understandable and the prices were listed clearly as well. Another glass of wine got us an even larger portion of the mussels! Yum. The tapas that we ordered were also wonderful. Finally tapas the way we thought they should be!

The next day, most of the group went to a Moroccan restaurant for lunch. They seated us in the upstairs dining room and we had the room to ourselves. The waiter just brought us an assortment of foods to try. It was a great way to sample a lot of dishes, but it was nearly impossible to know the name of the dish. So, there’s no way to order it again. Oh well, it was all fantastic, so it probably doesn’t matter what it’s called.

Finally, the highlight of Granada and the real reason that people come here was the Alhambra. The Alhambra was the Moorish Palace until the Crusaders conquered Spain. Then it became the Palace for Charles V. It’s a huge complex on a hilltop with gorgeous gardens and fresh cool breezes. The Moorish Palace still has the original stucco work complete with the colorful paint. The gardens were built after the Moors and were like an English garden. It’s really hard to describe such a large complex, so if you ever get to Spain, this is one of the places to see. You have to plan ahead, though. Tickets are all sold in advance.

That evening, we had a group dinner at a restaurant with a view of the Alhambra. After dinner, one of the guys in the group provided some entertainment. As a high school student, he played Don Quixote’s sidekick in The Man of La Mancha and he actually remembered one or two of the songs. The whole time he was singing, our tour guide was panicking that we would be kicked out! But our singer was pretty good and everyone was having fun.

So, the bottom line on Granada is great food and the fabulous Alhambra all in a dirty city with bad atmosphere.