Ahhh! This is a beautiful city. It once rivalled Madrid as the dominant centre of Spain, but a French invasion a few hundred years ago destroyed much of the infrastructure, including severely damaging its massive cathedral.
Our takeaways from Valladolid are: its huge and numerous large open space plazas, all with NO cars, incredibly neat and tidy everywhere, impeccable new transit vehicles, very cool Sunday evening plaza concerts with hundreds of city-provided chairs, everyone eating ice cream cones at 6 pm, (before dinner), grandparents with grandkids everywhere, just a great feeling everywhere we strolled.
We stopped at about 8pm for dinner, which was eggs and pulpos (octopus) for John, and four different tapas for Patti.
Then – an ICE CREAM for John. So good. The concert in the Plaza Mayor featured a pipe and drum band with costumed dancers. Beautiful. The snare drummer at the centre of the band was probably about eight years old, and he was right on the money. The traditional dancers were lovely to watch. A bit later, the concert became more of a EuroVision scene. Hmmmm. Not our bread basket, but the very young dancers on stage were having a good time. These were shows for the citizens of Vallodolid, they weren’t shows for tourists. The city has many plazas for socializing, many parks, many art galleries and public sculptures.
We’re seeing octopus in the menu more frequently. I – Patti – am excited about that!
Here’s a video of our stroll though downtown Valladolid on Sunday night, followed by a couple of clips leaving Valladolid in the morning and a small town along our way. Tonight we’re in Toro, Spain, a location of one of the largest bullfight rings in Castillo-Leon. Ummmm – we’ll pass.
The final photo is from our hotel room last night, right across the street from the cathedral. Nice, corporate hotel with a typically disappointing, ridiculously expensive, corporate breakfast. If you’re travelling in Spain, those small, privately owned hotels are the way to go. The food is spectacular. dinners AND breakfasts.
Also: We may or may not have been partaking of some of the wines on the map to follow.
Mmmm … PULPO! I love octopus. I ate lot of it in Galicia. I don’t eat it much any more as Susan has adopted the octopus as one of her favourite animals. I appreciate how interested they are —changing colour and having brains in their tentacles and all that — but they are also really tasty.
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We had a huge plate of pulpo today for lunch. YUMMMM! We’re in Zapados, last night in Spain. Tomorrow Portugal. Zapados is a beautiful town on the Castille-Leon path of the Camino. A few pilgrims around, but not as many as we saw on the French path. And – BTW – I think octopus and squid are fantastic food sources for us humans. A very efficient and greenhouse-gas friendly alternative. Sorry, Susan. I’m a meanie! So insensitive.
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