My Library Dilemna

I've spent yesterday and today working at the Biblioteca Nacional.  I'm happy to report that my good luck with Spanish bureaucracy continues unabated.  I arrived with my passport, my letter of introduction from my chair (which I'd asked her to have notarized, just in case), and my certificado de empadronamiento.  Voila!  A Reader ID card, in just a few minutes.

I wrote.  I looked things up.  I consulted reference works.  I requested various books and read about the things I needed to know from them.  All of it while sitting at a wooden table in an elegant but poorly air-conditioned reading room.  In short, the action-packed life of the humanities scholar.  About the most exciting thing I have to report is the thing about the little light.  You see, the BNE is a closed-stack library, where you have to request your books.  You can't go the shelves yourself.  You turn in a little pink slip, and they go look for your book.  The cool thing is there is a little light on your assigned desk that flashes when your book is available.

Oh, another cool thing is the cafeteria.  A mediocre but hearty lunch at a subsidized price.  The really surprising thing – and this continues to astound me even after having worked here before, and knowing it was there – is the bar.  Yes, the BNE has a bar.  With beer on draft.  And in bottles.  And coffee (espresso, always espresso) Now, I don't drink anymore, but I do appreciate the ready availability of a fresh, hot cortadito.  And I just can't believe that, in Spain, they have a bar in their library.

But, dear reader, you may ask yourself, what is the dilemna to which my title refers?  Well, you see, it has to do with another library, the Ateneo de Madrid.  The BNE is the largest library in Spain.  The Ateneo is #2.  To get to the BNE, I have to walk about 15-20 minutes.  Yes, it's a lovely walk, along the park that runs down the middle of Madrid's most prominent boulevard.  There are fountains and flouring plants and statues.  It's shady.  But it's a walk.

"Ricardo," you may say to yourself, "you could use that walk.  It'll help you work off the bread and jamón that you are consuming daily in alarming quantities."  But, dear reader, you don't understand, the Ateneo is only one block from my house!!!!  I leave my front door, walk down the hill a bit and, BANG!, there's the Ateneo.  Another 15 minutes to the BNE, when I could be ensconced in it's old-school reading room, working there. The trouble is . . . the Ateneo is a private club and it would cost me around 200 euros to join for the year.  And I know that paying 200 euros to save myself the only regular exercise I am likely to get is the heart of folly!  

But, but, but . . . I wouldn't go to the Ateneo every day!  You see, the BNE has stuff I have to consult!!  Stuff that the Ateneo doesn't have!!  The Ateneo would just be for those days when I'm writing, and not really doing much research!!!!  Or when it's raining.  Or when it's the evening and it's too late to go to the BNE!!!  What do I do?!?!!?

Toledo, Part II

Welcome to our new location! Several of you wanted to be able to post comments directly to the blog, and Tumblr doesn't make this easy for you, so here we are back on Blogger. You may remember this site from my other blogs like "A Course for Adventure!" and "Open Smile, Friendly Shore!" Never should have left.

So, we were in Toledo. Looking at cool things in the cathedral. And I promised you synagogues and food. I'm going to give you that and more as well.

The "Sinagoga del Tránsito" was especially meaningful to us. It's one of three medieval synagogues left in Spain, and my family really felt the poignancy of being in a place that was, in a sense, a monument to persecution. I was reminded of the Kid's reaction to the synagogue and graveyard in Barbados, where we had cause for the first time to discuss the sufferings of his ancestors on his mother's side. And maybe on his father's side, depending on how you interpret certain mysteries of my family's past.

Also great fun was the Iglesia San Román. When I first visited Toledo sixteen years ago, this was far and away my favorite spot. It's a church that was once a mosque, and that bears some architectural resemblance to one of Toledo's synagogues. Sadly, we couldn't take pics inside, but you can get an idea of what it's like here. A real mixture of artistic and architectural styles that testifies to the multiculturalism of medieval Toledo.

Now, for the food. We are on a mission to dramatically expand our knowledge of Spanish food, and this means paying special attention when we travel to regional specialties. A tough job, but someone's yadda yadda . . . In Toledo, this means, among other things, marzipan and venison. We had venison in a couple for forms, as a picadillo in a sandwich and as a collection of bits cooked up in a pan. We ate marzipan in traditional bite size form, and then in the blessed form of marzipan cake. For you Charlottesvillians, this is what ABC's Princess Cake wishes it were. We also had the best gazpacho we'd ever had. Actually, this was the first gazpacho that Zoë and the Kid had ever liked. The one I made for them was so onion-y that they had sworn off the dish altogether.

Now, I promised something extra. It turned out that we were in Toledo on the last day of a Jazz Festival. After having dinner, the Kid and I caught the concert, which was open-air, free, and right in front of the illuminated front entrance to the cathedral. To top it off, the performers were no slack-jawed yokels, but the extraordinary Benny Golson, with his band of top-notch European musicians. Zoë's knee hurt, so she went to the hotel, while the Kid and I grabbed a couple of the remaining seats and saw the whole thing. The Kid loved it. He even got Golson's autograph afterwards.

Are you looking for pictures? Well, tough. The reason I was using Tumblr in the first place was that Blogger makes it awkward to upload pictures. So those will be up on Facebook.

Readers, post away!!!