Iter Facere

Saturday, July 7 - Zaragoza - The Search for the Internet

The goal for the day is the Aljaferia, the Moorish/Christian fortress. And find a Internet connection. Our hotel doesn’t have Wi-Fi yet. We walked toward the Aljaferia with my computer, hoping to find a hip coffee shop with WiFi. Wrong part of town for hip. This was a little more gritty than hip. Oh well. The Aljaferia is pretty neat.Its been heavily restored since it was a pile of rubble in the 1930’s. It’s also the Cortes for the region of Aragon, so it was closed yesterday because the legislature was in session. The outside is massive castle, inside is a mix of Moorish and Mudehar. I really liked it. After Ferdinand and Isabella tossed out the Moors they rebuilt a number of rooms. Their motto seems to have been Tanta Monta which we think means tantamount. Back to Plaza de Pilar. We walked through the Mercado Central which is quite a market, meat, fish, produce, people. Then we rode the ascensor to the top of one of the towers in the Basilica. Great view. A bit of vertigo for Sean and me. We had stopped at an place that offered internet connections, but only on their computers. The woman told us about a hot spot in the Plaza. I had assumed that many of the bars would have hot spots. I was wrong. We found the hot spot on the Plaza de Pilar, but I couldn’t connect anywhere. It turns out it only allows you to connect to sites for the local government. The kind folks at the Turismo (they recognized us) told us about a mall (!?) that has free WiFi, so off we went, back to the Paseo de Independencia. We found a coffee shop and I found a connection but couldn’t get it to work. Ack!. Finally we gave up and left. As we stood outside the entrance we saw a little tiny sign that gave the name of the network to use and the password. Success. We got a couple of emails from Jenny, so we finally found out how her trip was going. She sounds like she is having a great time. We are reconnected to the electronic world.
Its brutally hot. One unfortunate aspect of our visit is that four of the museums we want to visit are closed, I imagine to prepare for the Zaragoza 2008 Expo. Note for future trips. Do not visit a city preparing for a giant event one year before the event. Everything will be under construction or closed in preparation. So back to the hotel for a brief siesta while we wait for everything to re-open at 5:00.
After siesta we walked back to the hot spot to post to the blog, re-read Jenny’s trip info and other electronic chores. We sat there for two hours, the bliss of the European cafe, and then set out hunting for our dinner. I saw another Plaza on the map, San Felipe which looked promising. It is west of Calle Alfonso I, which I think must be a dividing line between the gritty and not so gritty sections of Zaragoza. Suddenly there was an abandoned lot, lots of disturbing ‘art’ on the walls and slightly more dirt around.
Nonetheless we found dinner in the Plaza de Santa Cruz, a nice plaza we had seen several times before. There always seemed to be a bunch of children bounding around while their parents sat at tables watching them. Casa Portoles was terrific. They were doing some interesting things with traditional style Spanish food. Kathy and I had goat chops, Sean had veal with foie gras (he didn’t care for the foie gras) and we had a nice bottle of wine from Somontano, Senorio de Lazan. Again, the orujo was pale yellow. Why does orujo come in different shades?

posted by Jim @ 4:34 PM