At Home, part 2

Everett Rice’s Spanish art history class continued to be one of the highlights of each week for me. By the beginning of November we’d completed the study of Roman art and architecture in Spain, and there had been plenty to view. So when I started to plan a trip for the kids’ first long weekend break from school, I decided we should go see some of it.

When there was a holiday in Spain on, say, a Thursday, many people would make a puente—a bridge—and take off Friday, too. That’s the kind of weekend we were planning. And once in a while you had a week where there was a holiday on Tuesday, and another on Thursday, and many people would take off both Wednesday and Friday so they could have some real fun. That was called an acueducto—a humorous reference to a really long bridge.

The place to go for lots of Roman ruins in one geographical area, I knew from Everett, was Extremadura. This western section of Spain was known for its harsh living conditions and for the bold souls who had left the region to seek their fortunes in the New World—that is, most of the famed Spanish explorers.

Using guidance from Everett and Fodor’s, I planned a four-day driving trip that took us first to Trujillo, about 200 miles west of Madrid. This had been a small, poor town, but when Pizarro and other local conquistadors returned from Latin America laden with gold, it became an enclave of heavily ornamented palaces. Julie loved the equestrian statue of Pizarro in the Plaza Mayor, and we all enjoyed climbing around the ruins of the town’s castle.

We went from there to the undistinguished town of Badajoz, where our hotel was. I knew of an English-speaking travel agent in Madrid, Gregorio, who was going to make my hotel reservations for me, but Amy Levine told me about a bargain plan she’d gotten from her neighborhood travel agency. With the Bancotel plan you purchased coupons for 6,500 pesetas each (about $50). Each coupon was good for a night in a room at a member hotel. These were mostly business-type hotels, not especially elegant but of good quality, and the price was a real bargain.

The hotel in Badajoz was typical—not a five-star place, but clean and comfortable. In fact, it was nice enough to have been booked for three noisy weddings while we were there—which made sleeping extremely difficult.

Badajoz was interesting from a food perspective. It was getting late when we checked in on Thursday night, so we asked the desk clerk for a nearby restaurant, and he directed us to one. We walked over and sat down, and the waiter promptly brought over a small dish of pre-appetizers—a treat you got in most restaurants, always something different. I was really hungry, so I reached over and forked something out of the brown-gravied clump.

“I wouldn’t do that so fast if I were you,” Mike said, looking at the plate dubiously.

“Oh, it’ll be fine,” I said, putting the stuff in my mouth—and panicking as my teeth made contact with the unpleasant texture of cartilage. I spit it out into my napkin.

Mike waved the waiter over. “Qué es eso?” he asked—“What is that?”

“Oreja de cerdo,” the waiter replied amiably—pig’s ear.

I blanched. Mike translated for the kids. “Mom, you had a pig’s ear in your mouth!” Lisa laughed.

“Pig’s ear! Pig’s ear!” Julie chanted. They wouldn’t let me forget it.

Another food worthy of note in Badajoz was the tostada. This is probably the simplest kind of breakfast a person could eat—buttered grilled bread. We found it at a little fast-food restaurant near the hotel on Friday morning. They had a breakfast special, for just a few pesetas, of tostada, orange juice and coffee, which we ordered. And those tostadas were the perfect breakfast food—hot and buttery and satisfying.

The third food story of interest in Badajoz was our discovery of where all the Tab went. There had been many years in my youth when Tab was the diet cola of choice, and I suppose I had been sorry to see it replaced by Diet Coke. But in Badajoz, if you wanted a diet cola, the only one they had was Tab. I hadn’t seen that familiar pink can in years, but there it was, at every restaurant in the town.

Badajoz was just a couple of kilometers from the Portuguese border, so we had planned to cross into Portugal for a day and see what we could see without driving too far. We had an ulterior motive—I wanted to get the kids’ and my passports stamped.

We were living in Spain under not-quite-legal conditions. Because of his work, Mike had been assisted in applying for a residencia, a residence permit. This entailed a huge amount of red tape and the presentation of such items as a report from the Stamford Police Department saying that they were not aware of Mike’s having committed any crimes. He carried with him a document that proved he had applied for the residencia, but he had no idea if or when one would be issued to him.

Meanwhile, the kids and I were there on tourist visas, which theoretically lasted for four months. Christine Lotto had told me that it would be a good idea to leave the country and come back every four months in order to get a new tourist visa stamped into your passport, so that was one thing we hoped to accomplish in our border crossing.

We went to two little walled towns that we found in our Campsa maps, Elvas and Estremoz. Both had fortresses—fun for climbing—and they looked different from walled Spanish towns because all the buildings were whitewashed. I threaded the Mercedes through the narrow streets till at one trying point I gave up, got out of the car, and made Mike take over the driving, because I couldn’t see how we could negotiate the tiny alleyway.

We had lunch at an upstairs restaurant, a place with no ambience but pretty good food. Our cartilage-free pre-appetizer was a plateful of tiny tins of various patés that one could spread on bread. This, it turned out, was a regular thing in Portugal, but we’d never seen such an item in Spain. Julie and Lisa ordered soup—“the best ever,” they said—and Lisa managed to leave her jacket behind when we left, which we didn’t realize till hours later.

As we approached the border to re-enter Spain I pulled out the passports. Mike lined the car up for the one of the booths we could see ahead. But as we rolled into the booth, we saw it was empty.

We scanned the other booths, saw they were all empty, too, and exchanged a look of alarm.

“Well, I guess this isn’t going to work,” Mike said. We’d have to find some other way to look legal.

Much later we learned that member countries of the European Union really didn’t maintain guarded borders, so there were no barriers to travel between Spain and Portugal.