A Date with Spain...Days 4 & 5

To start with...I forgot to mention some more exciting things I had done in Amsterdam on Day 3...we went to a place called Madurodam This place is also better known as 'mini Holland' and is the smallest city in the Netherlands...and when I say small...I mean small! Madurodam is an entire miniature city based out of real Dutch buildings on a 1:25 scale. The town has everything...the Schipol airport, the canals, the railway stations, stadiums with people going into the airport, citizens waiting for the train, walking about town, planes awaiting take off and anything you can think of in Amsterdam. The entire mini city actually has it's own real human Mayor! This was awesome and if at this age I loved it...I can imagine how kids must be feeling when they see it. Check out a picture here

On Day 3, we also visited a wooden show factory where Dutch wooden shoes are made. Also, nearby there was a diary where cheese made and not only just cheese but 100% vegetarian cheese. Now anywhere in the world, cheese would technically be considered non-vegetarian as it is made with renee (visit the link for more details). In India, cheese is not made with renee as cows are considered sacred and there are religious sentiments (along with legal restrictions) in place, therefore to give the cheese it's taste, all companies use chemicals for the same. There are alternatives to renee for making cheese but it's extremely time consuming, high in labour costs and would mean that if 100% natural, chemical free vegetarian cheese were to be produced, the end product sold to aconsumer would be very expensive (as this method cannot be done on a large scale). So at this farm we went through how 100% vegetarian cheese can be made and got to taste the same and this cheese was the best cheese I have ever had. I now at least know how cheese is really supposed to be taste.

Day 4

Contrary to my previous email, day 4 was spent in Barcelona again and not Madrid. We left in the morning to see the Camp Noustadium which is the home stadium of the football team FC Barcelona. Not only is this this the largest stadium in Spain, but it is also the largest in all of Europe with a capacity of over 98,000. It used to be 120,000 once upon a time but as the premium seating area was increased, the overall capacity came down. 

We then had to drive quite a bit to reach the Codorníu Winery. Codorníu is today the world's largest producer of sparkling wine and it makes all it's wine using the traditional champagne method. We had an entire tour of the winery, how it is fermented, stored and manufacturered. We were taken 20 metres below the land to check out the original dug out areas which were used for fermenting and manufacturing the wine. Codorníu is a family wine business and goes back to the middle of the 16th century. The underground areas shown to us are still in use today. The capacity of this underground area today is 125 million bottles...the area was huge withhundreds of thousands of bottles undergoing the fermentation process...if could get lost in here...you might as well say goodbye to seeing daylight again. It made me realise why certain wines are so expensive and the amount of work that goes into producing that one perfect bottle. The more expensive variants are kept in storage as long as 9 months to a couple of years even. Of course at the end of the tour we given the different types of wine to taste and though I don't know heads or tails about wine and wine tasting...all I can say is that most of the wines tasted great...some of these wines can cost as much as 3000 Euros for a bottle!

We then headed to Montserrat which is a mountain Catalonia. Montserrat contains a monastery known as the Santa Maria de Montserrat and this is what we went to visit. The altitude of the area is 1236 meters (4055 ft). The monastery is well known for a statue of the Virgin Mary known as the Virgin of Montserrat. As with most monasteries and churches in Europe, the monastery was very well maintained and restored. Oh and just like how we stand for hours in Tirupati for a blessing of the Lord, a lot of people have faith in this statue of the Virgin Mary and people come from all over Europe and stand in line to wish or thank the Virgin Mary here. Never seen so much faith in a particular God here so figured it was worth a mention.

We also had lunch in the monastery and I had the best lasagna ever. No restaurant can beat the taste. Also, it was after 4 days that I got good, decent vegetarian food after living on bread and fruit.

We then headed out for the beaches in a place called Sitges which is near Barcelona. I am not too fond of beaches but my brother loves to swim and since this is away from Barcelona, the crowd is far less. The water was great...deep blue and spotless clean (even the beach). Spent around 3 hours here before heading back to Barcelona.

The night plans got screwed up as we had booked our Barcelona hotel and flight through Travelocity who suddenly emailed us canceling our reservation. When we went to rebook the difference was huge...so we had to sit and search around for a last minute deal and finally we got a good deal from Orbitz.

Day 5

Not too much to write here...took a flight to Madrid...our hotel is luckily bang in the city center and the most popular shopping streets in Madrid so my bhabhi went shopping. I went for the 1st half but got dead bored and tired later on so just went back to the hotel and slept. I had heard of Spanish fashion but was initially pretty disappointed in seeing the stuff for sale in Barcelona. However, Madrid isa different story and the stores here are far better and classier. There seems to be no sign of a recession in Spain with no big sales like the USA.

It's past 2:00am now on a Monday here and people are partying out on the streets...of course no comparison to Barcelona's sights and sounds.

We have booked a city tour for tomorrow on one of those open top buses. It's a half-day tour so tomorrow should essentially go in that and tomorrow is the last day of what has been a fantastic trip so far.