We flew KLM to Amsterdam and then had a short one hour layover and a final three hour flight to Madrid.  We were worried when the hotel recommended by Vaughan Town didn’t answer my reservation request for three days, so I chose another one near the pick-up point.  It was an AYZ hotel, where everything is done over the phone.  They send you an email which has a button that you press to open the front doors and your room door - but not a second before our check-in time of 3 p.m. unless we paid extra.  We didn’t do that, but we were very jet-lagged.  The room wasn’t made up at all, but I located the only chambermaid.  She was the only human contact we had in the building.  To solve an issue, you use a chat bot.  It was weird and I didn’t like it much.  They put us on the 3rd (which is the 4th) floor and the elevator was broken. I had wrenched my knee getting out of my seat on the plane, and I had a hard time with the stairs, especially with luggage.  But it was a relatively short walk to the Metro station Pinar Del Rey.

We explored Madrid for the next two days.  After going to buy our Spanish SIM cards (cheaper at a supermercado than at the airport), we purchased 24 hour tickets to tour Madrid by bus.  There were two routes, the Old Town and the New Town, with headset audio in multiple languages.  We filled the following day with those tours, and repeated one tour on Friday as a way to escape a hard rain.

We spent the next day in the Royal Botanical Gardens where we saw tulips and a great collection of bonsai trees.  We had lunch at an Argentinian empanada shop and chatted for a long time with a girl from Ceuta, a Spanish province in North Africa.  Then we hunted down all the Goya paintings in the Prado museum.  Walking was a little difficult for me because we were seated in the two middle seats out of four on the KLM flight.  At one point I had to get out of my seat to use the washroom.  It was very awkward extricating myself across the outside seat, and I twisted my already weak knee.  Now, after a short amount of walking, it begins to feel as if the joint is bone on bone.  I have to walk slowly and use my other leg muscles to protect my knee, which is tiring.

On Saturday morning we met the Spaniards and other Anglo volunteers at a collection point for Vaughan Town.  We travelled on a small bus to Barco de Avila, chatting one-on-one all the way for three hours with our Spanish partner. My partner was Lucia.  Each Anglo had to sit with a Spaniard, so their excruciating week of speaking in English had already begun.  For the next six days, they were not allowed to speak Spanish with each other or to us, under threat of being given directions to the bus station in town, and sent home.

Deb and I enjoyed our week at Puerto de Avila Gredos.  I liked the wide passageways and spacious main rooms, and we had a week-long social adventure with all the struggling students.  Some struggled more than others but they were all courageous.  For many, if not all, I understood that it was part of a Masters program.  The views were of open fields and then hills with green spring vegetation, some high enough that they were still snow-capped in April.  On the way there we passed many small towns, most with a church at the centre.  Storks were nesting on every steeple and usually on each of the four corners and other available roof space.  It was amusing to see the stork on the steeple leap into the air when the church bell rang.

We had a mid-day trip into Barco de Avila, which had an old town inside medieval walls, and a castle watching over the area where medieval travelers had had to ford the river (and do their laundry).

The students had many hourly one-on-one conversations with each of the Anglo volunteers through the week, and their fees covered our rooms and meals as well.  It was a bit like being volunteers at a luxury summer camp.  We had interesting conversations and the students had to create presentations and participate in debates.  They were very entertaining.  They felt shy about their language skills, but they were all university graduates and had interesting thoughts and opinions.  They only had to express them in a different language, one they’d all studied in class, but had never had immersion conversation before, for the most part.

As the final day of presentations and farewells approached, the students developed a mood of anticipation of the nostalgia they would be feeling when the week was over, and became even more sentimental than they usually are.

We got a coach back to Madrid, past fields of stones and rounded boulders.  The students quickly organized a trip to the nearest bar to celebrate.  Irene, who began the week with a concerned frown between her eyebrows, had blossomed into a social butterfly who chatted cheerfully and spent the final day collecting contact information to build a Whatsapp group - which has garnered a hundred or more messages in the first day apart.

We had to catch a train to Cuenca, but my Bolt app suddenly insisted on photos of my driver’s licence or passport, even though we’d already used Bolt for one ride, but it wouldn’t accept the photos from my phone - maybe a poor camera, or not bright enough in the bar.  Our student Carlos ordered us an Uber with his phone.  Irene and Susana had already paid for our coffees, and we were on our way.  We rocketed into Cuenca on a train that flew along at 209 kms/hr.  Karen met us at the station, and got us onto the correct bus, which wouldn’t take us all the way to her house way up on the hill because streets were closed for Semana Santa processions, which go on the entire week.  So we hauled our bags through the town and uphill to Karen’s front door.  She  lives in one of the few apartments that don’t have paper-thin walls with their neighbours, which my Vaughan Town students complained about in their apartments in Madrid.

On Saturday we walked around the river in Cuenca, and we had lunch at a nearby club for seniors, where Karen has become a member, for the meals and social activities.  She improves her Spanish by conversing with the friendly elderly club members who come there for lunch.  For $12 CAD we had an amazing lunch with a thick calamari and potato soup, a dish with eggs, ham and tomatoes, a dessert of torrijas (a delicious sort of bread pudding) and bottles of red wine and gassy water.  We had a cafe bombon and a complimentary liqueur.  My sugar level spiked in spite of the medication I had taken before the meal, but it was delicious - especially the soup and the dessert.  I think my sensor is reading high anyway, so I’m not too worried.

Sunday was Resurrection Sunday, “Domingo de Resurrecion”.  We watched the procession - a band led a long line of dozens of banners carried by people in what I called “Catholic gangs”, each of which wore robes of different colours.  There were none of the pointy hats that they’d worn on previous days (I think that the Nazarene gang wears those).  Search Semana Santa on youtube and you’ll see many processions in different cities, including Cuenca.  This was the one we saw; you might see us in the crowd lining the street. Earlier in the week there were processions with different effigies, to illustrate the events of the days leading up to the death and resurrection. In ours, Christ had risen, so wooden Mary met wooden Jesus on their respective platforms carried by the faithful, and Mary shed her black mourning coat before they continued together on up to the cathedral. It's a week long process of various processions - a fantastic annual effort. The pointy hats can startle westerners. Here's an explanation.

We walked to see the Hanging Houses (“Casas Colgadas”). I hiked about five kilometres today with Karen and Deb, leaning forward with vertigo much of the way, which caused back pain because I had to overuse my back muscles to keep myself vertical.  It’s a weird experience.  I’m now calling it the “Steve Stumble”, or the “Steve Shuffle”, which started in Mexico City three winters ago.  I can still run on the tennis courts, but walking more than four kilometres brings it on, and today we walked farther.  Karen is about to walk the Camino Ingles, but I would not be able to do that, I suspect. We’ve had fifteen years of “go-go” years since retirement, and I’m definitely now entering the “slow-go” years.  I hope I can stretch that out and not arrive at the “no-go” years too quickly.

We had a great goat dish for lunch, a Domingo de Resurrecion treat.  I have been under the misapprehension that Buenos Dias means Good Morning and Buenos Tardes means Good Afternoon.  I was wrong.  I have learned that in Spanish you say Good Morning up until lunch, which is at two, rather than noon.  Then you say Buenos tardes, “Good afternoon hours” - it’s not related to 12 o’clock noon, but that’s the only way I can say it in English.  And dinner is at nine or ten; but there’s a post-siesta lighter meal called the merienda around 5 or 6.  With four meals, it seems to me that they eat all day; although the merienda is more for kids when they arrive home from school, rather like “low tea” in Britain.  For me, with my two meals per day and my sixteen hour fast, I enjoy desayuno and almuerzo but don’t participate in merienda or cena, which are the two later meals.  But sometimes I have a cafe cortado just as a  pick me up, especially if I’m still hiking around trying to keep up to Deborah and Karen.

Monday: After a toasted bocadillo (torpedo sandwich) of back bacon and cheese for breakfast, we took the number 2 bus up the hill to Barrillo de Castilla.  The sweeping views of the gorge of the river Huecar and the Casas Colgadas are among the best you’ll get anywhere in the world.  It was a Moorish stronghold before being conquered by a Spanish king in 1177, I believe.  We hiked down to the Catedral that he had built on top of the mosque, and I got a link for an audioguide that includes text and photos in English: https://www.catedralcuenca.es/audioguia/seleccion-idioma

There are thirty-seven sections, and under each a button that says See More to view photos of the topic.

In the afternoon many places closed, because it is Easter Monday. We had a sandwich in a cafe and an unhealthy but delicious frozen yogurt (mango and passion fruit), strolled around downtown and came back home.  

We were going to join a conversation group but it isn’t running this week. 

Tuesday: Karen showed us a good public library and a Museo Cuenca close to her house. The museum was closed but we’ll go there later.

We had breakfast at Confiteria Ruiz and then walked to the mercado, where we ate churros (porras) dipped in a cup of thick hot chocolate.  We cruised the stalls but found nothing that we wanted or needed, but I enjoyed looking at plants and flowers.  I saw one or two that I didn’t recognise.  On the way home we got caught in a hard, cold rain, but after today the temperatures will rise to the low and mid-twenties for the rest of our week here.

For lunch we went to the cafeteria in the music conservatory for a plain but satisfying three course lunch, only 130 metres from Karen’s apartment. 

By serendipity, I found a remedy for my knee and muscle pain.  I had some Celebrex that I rarely use, but if my fingers swell up with arthritis I take one to make it easier to play.  I had a brainwave and took one at breakfast, and my knee pain was reduced to half or even less.  The muscle back pain was also reduced.  I may have discovered that arthritis is responsible for my joint and muscle pain. Celebrex brings down inflammation.

Wednesday: A day in Valencia, while Karen packs for her Camino undisturbed.  We woke up at six, had a piece of toast and took an L1 bus to the train station.  We rocketed toward Valencia at 300 kph.  All the trains we’ve ridden on have been electric bullet trains, and Spain is well-served by trains going in every direction.

Fitzgerald’s Burgers (a more up-scale eatery than it sounds; Karen’s recommendation) was closed until 12:30 and we were hungry so we opted for McDonald’s at the station.  I had a burger - there were no selections containing eggs, no breakfast sandwiches, for example.  It seems that most of Spain doesn’t do “English” or American breakfast, although we’ve had a cute sandwich in two places that has egg on bacon between two pieces of toast with a round hole in the top slice to expose the yellow-orange egg yolk. The tendency is to eat high caloric and sugary food at breakfast, whereas I prefer protein, so a burger was the next best choice to an egg.

My habit in a new city is to ride buses to get the lay of the land inside my head, and the Hop On, Hop Off bus was an option for that.  There’s a red one and a green one.  The tourist info guy at the railway station looked at his computer and pronounced the red one a non-option because the cruise ships were in town.  We bought tickets for the green bus.  Then we hiked, lost but for our somewhat faulty Google maps on our phones.  These buses don’t make the train station one of their stops, which would make a lot more sense. We hiked almost 2 kms to the Plaza de Toros, which was stop ##2 of seventeen.  There was a tourist info office there but no signage for the green bus. The person in the tourist office told us that the green buses were not running, and pointed us to where they usually stop. We saw a red bus come around the corner across the road and realized that it was going in the correct direction.  Deborah marched up to the driver and asked about the green bus, and he confirmed that they weren't running but he accepted our green bus tickets and we went aboard.

We got a spot upstairs in the sunshine. It was a bright and very sunny 26 degrees.  We managed about half of the two hour trip before moving to the back when I spotted a seat under the partial awning.  The bus was parked at a scheduled 15 minute stop when the driver came on the speakers and told us we’d have to transfer to a bus behind him, because his was broken.  Because of where we were sitting, we were last out and therefore last onto the new bus, and we went from the back on top to the back on the bottom, next to a loud, hot diesel motor clacking away so that you could barely hear the audioguide in your earphones, and with small windows to look out at the city.  

We made it to the end of the route alive and dismounted.  We were hungry again and found a tiny hole in the wall called La Tia Juana, decorated in Mexican style with lots of colour, masks, lace flags, toys and a tiny Lucha Libre wrestling ring.  We split a burrito (that’s where we discovered that is is normal to charge $4 Canadian for a small bottle of water in a restaurant) and then headed for the market.  

The market was very large, clean and full of food.  There were very few stalls for dry goods.  Everything made me a little hungry in spite of my half-burrito, which had been excellent.  From the market we went to stop 17 on the tour bus route, hoping to get a better ride. Although you can get on anywhere, many riders simply begin at stop #1.  As the bus approached stop 17 we saw that the two seats at the front left, right at the big bay window, were free, so we beetled up and had a great view for another full round of the route.  On this bus there were better sculpted seats and a hard canopy that stretched  back for about six seats, for shade.  

From those seats we could look up and see the tops of all the buildings.  Going inside architecture is good but our time in Valencia was limited, and the spectacular roof-lines and facades of buildings were a major item to view.  By the second time around we had a pretty good idea of the lay-out of Valencia and we’d enjoyed the second tour.  Some things turned out to be closer than we’d thought they were when we were on the ground.  We dismounted at Pintor de Sorrolla and ducked into Fitzgerald’s, which was now open.  We split a large “Californication” wrap and coffees, and a fig tart.

From there we decided to stroll back toward the train station a bit early in case we got lost on the way.  We got home to Karen’s apartment at three minutes before eleven and fell into bed exhausted, having accumulated over 8,000 steps on our Fit apps, in spite of so much time on the train and buses.  The day before we’d achieved over 11,000.  That’s the day I took the Celebrex, the benefit of which seems to have lasted for two days, at least.

There’s a lot to see and do in Valencia, which is a large and popular city for Spanish and foreign tourists.  We might get a hostal or an airbnb there some day to give us time to visit the Biopark, the Oceanographic centre, the botanical gardens and some musical experiences.  It has a nice beach but we rarely hang out at beaches, and there was no time for that on this trip.  

A tip: hostal with an "a" is not the same as hostel with an "e".  The former may have private rooms available, while the latter has communal sleeping rooms.  I may have cottoned onto this in one previous country, but I’d forgotten.  So, if you want inexpensive couples accommodation, you can look for an airbnb but also consider a hostal.  We’ll stay one night in a hostal when we return to Madrid, a day before our flight home.

Thursday: today we ate breakfast at the music conservatory. I had a nice omelette.  Then we went up to the Catedral at Plaza Mayor where we looked first for the museum of abstract art, which along with a handful of others in that corner of the old city, was free.  But first we entered, by accident, the museum of religious treasures of the catedral, and had to pay - we thought we were getting into the art museum which is in one of the hanging houses at the edge of the gorge.  We saw religious paintings from the fifteenth century, wooden sculpture art that is the same vintage, a treasury of gold and silver sacrament vessels crafted, no doubt, from booty brought back from south and Central America, and enormous Flemish tapestries with religious themes.  Many seemed to be apocryphal, because they were stories I didn’t recall from the Bible.  Some paintings and carvings depicted Alfonso VIII receiving the keys of the city from the Moorish king he had defeated in 1177.

The weather is finally fabulous.  We returned to the conservatory for the traditional mid-afternoon lunch, where they served a slice of Spanish omelette (made traditionally, with potato and egg), a great salad and a paella de mariscos, with fresh strawberries, whipped cream and chocolate for dessert, all for the student-friendly price of ten euros.  Sadly, the paella didn’t hold a candle to the one Deborah makes; it was quite similar to the rather inferior version we had in the hotel at Gredos.  We’ve had our siesta, and we will soon go out for a walk near the Plaza de Constitucion to buy a pre-made tex-mex salad and similar items.  

I’m getting a little better at attacking the stairs and inclines in our walks around town.  In “old town” Cuenca stairs are the preferred method of getting from one level to another; the old town, where Karen lives, is on multiple levels, and was also known as the Eagle’s Nest at one time (or so I’ve read), being nestled between two significant river gorges.  There aren’t many elevators, and the only one I’ve seen, at the conservatory, can only be operated if you have a key.  The old town has many winding pedestrian paths from the days long before cars arrived.  They are wide enough for a human and his or her donkey.  I’m tempted to explore them, but if you walk on them you quickly disappear from view, and you have no idea where you'll end up.  There are numerous small parks with benches so that old people can rest in their climb up the hills.  In Valencia, where it is flatter, electric scooters are very popular, at least for the younger crowd.

Friday: Last night we watched a video about the Reconquista.  That was the process, covering several centuries, by which the Christian kings from the north began to reconquer Spain from the Moors.  It made evident why there are so many distinct provinces in Spain, and seven or eight official variants of Spanish, including Galica, spoken in Galicia, and Valencian, a sub-dialect of Catalan spoken in Valencia.  Words are different in each, including their spellings; in Valencia there were signs everywhere in both “languages”.  I watched a movie called El Olivo about a 2000 year old olive tree and a young girl who tried desperately to recover it from a giant German corporation for the sake of her grandfather, whose heart had been broken by its sale.  The movie was made in Spain but the language that I heard them speaking was not standard Spanish, and the video offered subtitles for Spanish speakers.

Mind you, there are many dialects in latino Spanish as well, but at least you can get along in standard Survival Spanish here and everywhere in latin America.  Locals may speak a lot of dialect and slang, or speak very fast like Chileans, but you can converse with them  if you need to.

I haven’t found any social opportunities here to learn Spanish, perhaps because Cuenca is so small.  There don’t seem to be any “newcomer” groups of the sort you’d find all over Toronto to help people acquire English.  We tried to attend auditions at the music conservatory but there were only lessons going on, and no performances.  There was a lone busker on one street corner with an electric guitar.  There used to be a Jazz Society Cafe, but I think it is permanently closed.  There isn’t a botanical garden, although there a some terrific parks to walk in.

Today we took the bus up the hill to the catedral and walked down to the Science museum, which is very good for such a small city.  It was a Spanish lesson for me, about half the time with English translation. Although many things in Spain seem expensive due to Trump’s effect on our dollar, and maybe some inflation here, a bus ride in Cuenca is only 50 cents CAD.  We ate two meals at the conservatory again, which is partly up the hill toward that museum.  Interesting note: crosswalks here have no yellow warning lights, but every car stops as soon as a pedestrian approaches the crosswalk.  In return, it seems hardly anyone jaywalks.

Saturday: After a breakfast of bacon and cheese bocadillo and coffee, plus a “tosta de frutos secos con miel” (looks like dried fruit in translation, but they are mixed nuts with a few raisins and honey drizzled on top, on toast) we went to the Museo Cuenca where we spent an hour studying their exhibit on the “ausentes” of the Franco regime, circa 1940.  He copied Hitler in his policies, and the language and practices of he and his henchmen were cruel and identical to those that Donald Trump, Sephen Miller and the like have used today.  Words like “vermin”, imprisonment without due process, disappearances and summary executions, attacking the ideologies of people counter to their aims, pitting entire towns against each other, vilifying people of different religions or cultures, changing surnames, and arresting people for having a name of non-Spanish origin. 

One notable photo showed an entire community, with catholic priests in front of the group, laughing hysterically at two blindfolded boys who were forced to fight each other to “kill hunger”.  There was blood on their shirts and their heads were shorn.  Women and girls who resisted the agents of the dictatorship were also abused, had their hair shorn and were often locked up.  

Trump and his cronies are evil, immoral men who have reincarnated ideas from eighty years ago with inhumane relish, and today’s Americans don’t remember those days and news reports, or the reasons that their American grandfathers went to war in Spain, France and Germany.  Like the previous dictators, I believe that they are in a slow moving train wreck that wiil cause a lot of damage to Americans and the world economy, but will ultimately fail.

We spent an hour in the library, reading children’s books.  I discovered that I can comfortably follow a novel written for twelve year olds, so that established my  linguistic level in Spanish; sometimes I can read at a higher level because more sophisticated words are often shared across languages - scientific, political, philosophical, etc.

After a salmon and cream cheese sandwich for lunch we came home for a siesta, and to do research for tomorrow.  We’re also watching history videos about Spain, and some economics and language acquisition videos, on Karen’s smart TV.

Sunday: a significant attraction here that we almost missed is the Museo de Paleaontologia, so that’s our destination for today.  Public transit isn't an ideal way to get anywhere but the only alternative is walking, or taxis.  There are six buses in this part of town, at the foot of the hill up to the cathedral, and they either come only on the half hour or only an hour apart.  We always seemed to arrive at the bus stop just as the last one had pulled up and left.  There’s no Uber or Bolt operating in the city.

The bus took us through the modern section of town.  This is comprised of many five to seven story apartment buildings.  I didn’t see any single family homes.  It may be that land is at a premium in Cuenca and nobody lives anywhere but in multi-family buildings. I would imagine that these buildings have elevators.

The Museum was excellent for a small city.  We spent four hours inside, and that was my Spanish lesson for today. Again, there were English translations for most information placards.  You followed the arrows through ten exhibits from earliest creatures to most recent, many of which were dug up right here in Cuenca.  Southern Spain is a hotbed for fossils.  We were approached by a young museum guard named Maria who wanted to practice her English, and we had a long and pleasant conversation.  She was shooing away visitors who didn’t have a ticket for a special exhibition by an artist of  paleontology, and she called herself a “collie”, i.e. a dog that herds visitors and their kids who climbed on exhibits.  But her job wasn’t terrible.  She got to sit in front of the door and read a Stephen King novel most of the time.

On the way home we stopped for a “donner” (shavings of chicken or veal over french fries with mayo, and they produced a hot sauce for me when they discovered that I like heat on my meat.  We tried to stop at a restaurant called 1946 but for the second time they sent us away even though they had lots of empty tables.  I’ve heard that many Spanish communities are hostile to tourists, but there aren’t many tourists in this town, so I really don’t know why that happened.  Maybe just a general mood of negativity and antipathy toward foreign visitors.  They didn’t really explain themselves, except to say that all the empty tables were reserved.  Passing by later, I saw that they were still empty.  While walking on the sidewalk two days ago someone yelled “Fuck off!” from a passing car, which may not have been aimed at us, but felt like it.  It matched some of the hard stares we’ve received from twenty-somethings in football team uniforms at the same restaurant.

Monday: We had a leisurely bacon and cheese bocadillo and coffee, ate our remaining orange and half a banana for dessert, had a nap, locked up Karen’s apartment and took the bus to the train station. We didn’t get far.  The power had gone out in the apartment about 45 mins before we left, at 12:35.  The breakers seemed fine.  The mailman said it was over the whole barrio.  When we arrived at the train station we saw everyone standing outside and guards at the entrance.  That’s when we learned that power was out all over Spain and Portugal, and no-one knew why.  The trains were electric, so they weren’t running.

We met a Dutch couple with a rental car who wanted to drop off their key, but couldn’t get into the rental office, and even if they had it seemed that no airport buses were running so they wouldn’t be able to get back into town.  They decided to ignore their drop-off instructions and take the car back into town, and they invited us along.  

Deb was determined to exhaust every possibility of getting to our hotel booking in Madrid and then to the airport.  City buses were still running, so we took one to the bus station.  There were buses leaving for Madrid, but if you hadn't booked in advance you were out of luck.  You couldn’t even pay cash to the guy standing at the door of the bus office.  You had to go online to book a ticket, and of course wifi didn't exist because routers are electrically powered. We conferred with a young girl from Boston on a semester exchange at university, and a young Colombian studying business by distance learning.  They both wanted to split a cab into Madrid, a two hour journey for just over $300 CAD.  Deb and I agreed to pay half.

We arrived in a city where cops were all working overtime at every intersection doing traffic duty.  There were no traffic lights,  There was no wifi, no data service, the cabbie’s payment system was offline - literally nothing that required electrical service was working - not even the gas pumps.  Fortunately his cab ran on some sort of propane fuel system.

He dropped the two girls and got cash from them, and then from us when he dropped us at the door of our hotel.  At the reception desk in the dark the staff had lit candles and were busy turning people away who didn’t have previous reservations. A family who’d stayed there for two nights and had run the Madrid marathon earlier in the day were at the desk, desperate.  They were from Brussels.  Their luggage was here and they’d been to the airport but had not been allowed to board their flight.  The mother had managed a seat on the flight but the father was turned away; his daughter and partner were staying in Madrid, but the Metro wasn’t running and getting a cab was therefore nearly impossible - they weren’t even answering their phones.  

We asked the kindly desk staff if they could put an extra bed in our room, and it turned out to be large enough to put two singles in there in addition to our double.  We would be crammed, but it would work.  We went out on a main street and visited grocery stores.  Our Brussels refugees insisted on buying food and making up a meal for us all, which we accomplished by candlelight in a basement lunch room.  Hotel Falfes staff were magnificent for us in the face of this weird emergency.

We all climbed into our beds, Deb wished them Bon Nuit and blew out the cancle.  I slept fitfully, worried about how we’d get to the airport, but slept for eight hours, except for one trip to the bathroom at about four a.m. when I realized with cautious relief that the power had returned. 

Tuesday: I woke up again just before Deb’s alarm went off at six. We pulled on our shoes, grabbed our luggage, hit the washrooms and said goodbye to the morning desk staff.  

Up at the main street my first fear came true: the Metro station was closed; fortunately just at that moment a cab swooped in and rescued us, and got us to the airport for a flat 33 euro fee, which every cabbie in the city charged.  It’s a flat fee, no meter, which made us good business for him.  No meter, no need to make change, and no debate about price.

Our plane left on time.  We landed in Amsterdam and navigated the enormous Schiphol airport, which is woefully short of human tourist information and signage for such things as “Schiphol Plaza” or “trains”.  

We got into town on a train without a view.  We spent too much on two forty-eight hour tourist cards.  One day was helpful because when you make a mistake (which we did - again, because of signage and directions being woefully missing or inadequate) you can get back on another bus or Metro train.   For the second day we only needed to return to the airport, so we could have done without that second pair of 24 euro daily passes, but separate Metro and train charge would be more than half that, so no biggie.  In fact, though, an Uber Share ride door to door would have cost the same and been quicker.

We took the train into Amsterdam Central station and then the Metro plus a short walk took us to the Bunk Hotel. After check-in, we explored our neighbourhood. I tried unsuccessfully to find the public ferry.  Travel from the airport had taken longer than I’d imagined, and directions for ferries seemed non-existent.  We walked across the nearest canal, had a great meal of fish and chips and a plate of sushi at an upscale kiosk - an Amsterdam version of “street food” - and wandered down streets enjoying flowers in small gardens, bicycles everywhere, lots of colour and charm, and tiny cars, including the two seater Canta and a few similar ones.  On my walk I realized that everybody here owns and rides a bike, and they’ll ride those onto the ferry, which saves the long hike Deb and I attempted.  The last time I was here, forty plus years ago, the couple I stayed with got a bike for me and took me cycling all over the city rather than walking.  Oddly, I haven’t seen buses, although there must be a few.  The best strategy, for next time, might be to hang out at the central station and take ferries from there, returning to the same spot to try a different ferry.  There are bike tours of the tulips and other spots, and everyone simply locks up their bikes to go inside buildings like museums.

We’re at the tail end of tulip season, so we opted to wait and look instead at those we have in our own garden at home, and maybe in Ottawa next spring, where there is also a tulip festival.  The gardens here seem to be two weeks ahead of ours.  I wanted to ride the ferries because they are free and there is scenery.  They’re like the poor man’s canal tours.  But it will take longer and more energy than we had, after the flight and the night we’d had before during the power outage.  It took three hours just to get from the airport to our Bunk Hotel, carrying our backpacks and pulling suitcases.  The Bunk is built up inside an old church, with rooms but also with “sleeping pods”.  We opted for a private double bed pod, which only measures six by six with a storage locker beneath. They don’t warn you that it is only four feet high, which is difficult to negotiate when you bend like a seventy-two year old. 

It has private showers in a common area but they are spacious and clean.  It was cheap accommodation and the photos looked interesting, so I chose it for an experience over the Japanese style pods available at the airport, which seemed far from Amsterdam itself.  Next time I would not.  It’s too dystopian and weird, being stacked like shoes in shoe boxes for sleeping, two pods high.  There are dark curtains for privacy, but you can still hear sounds; but I slept soundly with my indispensable ear plugs in. Later Karen posted photos of her evening stops on her Camino, and they had the same kind of shoe box accommodation.

For us, everything in this city seems expensive, including the Bunk restaurant, which is ridiculously high end for the kind of accommodation customers it serves, and ridiculously expensive.  Next time maybe we'll hunt harder for an airbnb; we can afford a more expensive place but always find ourselves asking “why?”  It’s tough being cheap old codgers, but fancy hotels are the same in every city around the world - if you're going to stay in one of those, why leave Toronto? Except that some of those might be closer to our sight-seeing destinations, once we're clear on what those will be.

Wednesday: Travel - always a challenge, and full of constant surprise, good, bad or just plain blah.  We were up early to shower and shave. We returned to the airport, finding coffee and some very tasty bacon and egg sandwiches along the way in the concourse.  The KLM plane seemed ancient, with a very old and buggy inflight entertainment system, which made us wonder whether they were bringing an old plane back into service, and whether it would be a trouble-free flight. We had a late take-off due to a medical emergency about which we learned nothing more, and we landed a half hour late but entering Canada was a serene breeze. On our TTC subway back in Toronto we were stalled underground for another twenty minutes or more for some unexplained "unauthorized" event at Yonge and Bloor, but finally arrived at home. We settled in a bit, inspected the garden, had a nap, and went to play music with our friends for a couple of hours. In the days to come, it will be good to return to normality, having had yet another experience of “how the other half lives”.