This is the first guest post on b!c! and is written by my mother who accompanied mi mujer and I on our holiday in Spain. She wrote it for her own column but I’m appropriating it here as it perfectly captures a first time experience in Spain as well as a significant portion of our trip. No mention is made yet of some events and places like Toledo which she says will wait for her second column. I’ll probably appropriate that as well.

I learned a lot about Spain on my first day in country March 16th except how to kiss socially. I should have read this morning’s Wall Street Journal (”Americans Learn the Art of the Social Kiss,” 3/27) before leaving. I’d known from our daughter-in-law Cristina when Dale and I first met her parents in London last May that it’s two kisses in Spain. And I’m pretty sure the sequence is left/right although the Journal reports otherwise.

But I was also pretty sure a kiss is just a kiss before I realized to my chagrin, more formally and on first meeting, it isn’t. Rather it’s a cheek touch, sometimes accompanied by light smacking sounds. Uh oh!

Yet, “no importa.” The Spanish are sociable and forgiving. And they’re probably used to stumbling Americans: some immediately extend a hand to shake.

Their country is beautiful, bien bonito. The people are relaxed. It’s early spring, and the Semana Santa (Holy Week) holiday is commencing. On Palm Sunday we are heading for the Church of St. Francis the Great. Needing to find a place to park, Cristina’s Dad, Rafael, drops us off at one of Madrid’s innumerable plazas. The air is filled with the beautiful and very loud sound of sacred music. I can’t see the speakers from whence it comes. Crowds of people are following a group we can identify only by the tall palm fronds that sway over their heads. Many of those who follow carry olive branches, and these are being sold along the way: “Gypsies,” Cristina says of the sales force: “They probably took them from somebody’s property.”

The Church of St. Francis the Great is an ordinary church in the sense that is has a parish and hosts regular services, Cristina’s Mom, Pilar, tells me, but my jaw drops as we enter. This is a city where extraordinary is the norm. The walls rise several stories above us to an inner dome, beautifully painted, and I think immediately that the window at its top must be the funnel to Heaven. Below, around the rotunda, are 9-foot high statues of the twelve apostles, carved from white marble. Paintings throughout the basilica and the seven lavish chapels that surround it are magnificent.

In fact, everything in the church is magnificent except the pews, which are wooden and bereft of softening cushions. They are only half filled as we enter. Later more worshippers come, and others stand in the back to observe the service. Most are middle aged and older. There are a few children, but as Cristina points out, no 15 year olds.

Semana Santa is deeply interwoven into the tapestry that is Spain. For some the celebration is deeply religious, but for all it’s a part of the national culture. Each city and town has celebrations and even the smaller ones publish a guide to each day’s events. These are mainly the processions of the faithful and penitent that wind through narrow street and broad avenue each night. In between life goes on with a holiday spirit.

Leaving the church, we walk to the center of old Madrid, the Plaza Mayor, that’s walled on four sides by buildings. We’ve walked through a typical Sunday’s street market, mobbed solidly for blocks with people. Cristina stops to buy waffles from a street vendor. They’re actually very light waffle rolls, some dipped in chocolate.

We’re on our way to eat at Las Cuevas De Luis Candelas, a restaurant whose name commemorates the resident of an earlier inn on the site and whose handsome waiters dress traditionally. Candelas himself was in 1836, the menu informs, arrested for some of many robberies and thus described: “28 years of age, married, native of Madrid residing at Cuchilleros 1, thief by trade, ordinary height, black hair, large mouth and prominent chin, well formed and robust.” Sadly, his fate was not good, but his last words are famously etched in Spanish character: “Be happy homeland of mine.”

And who wouldn’t be happy eating at this restaurant. Rafael has ordered ahead a roast suckling pig for the five of us to share. It’s skin is crisp (and edible); it’s meat moist. But this, of course, has followed the shared entrees: Shrimps 1800 style with garlic, black pudding from Burgos, Spanish “jamon” ham (cured, not cooked), roasted peppers (none hot) and of course olives. Accompanied by a fine red wine and followed by caramel custard and strong coffee, the meal has convinced me I need never eat again. (Unfortunately this is a conviction I foreswear at 10 when dinner is served, which act of perfidy accounts for my being seven pounds heavier today.)

Rafael forswears a siesta after our lunch for a drive to the former royal summer palace that lies about 30 miles outside the city at Aranjuez (which name Cristina spends five ineffective minutes coaching me to pronounce correctly). It’s an easy drive though. Spanish roads are excellent. Pilar points out the absence of trees along the way. There’s an old Spanish saying, she says, that a squirrel used to be able to travel from Granada to Madrid without ever touching ground…but that was before Queen Isabella (the female half of Isabella and Ferdinand who drove the Moors and Jews from Spain) had them cut down to eliminate her enemies’ hiding places.

(As a footnote, though, on the flight back from Madrid, I watch the movie “Elizabeth the Great.” It offers another explanation for the missing trees: Philip II cuts them down to build ships for the feckless Armada Spain launches against England in 1588.)

The summer palace itself is large and impressive, and it’s set next to a tree-lined waterway with grounds people congregate in and enjoy. Inside, our favorite room is completely tiled, floor to ceiling, in bright Moorish style. It was reserved for smoking. There’s no smoking in the palace today, but there’s much smoking in Spain. In one small restaurant in the mountains above Salobreña where we will go later, at Las Alpujarras, the proprietor waves away the “Prohibido fumar” signage and points to ashtrays on the tables.

We go to Salobreña on Tuesday—about a 4 ½ hour drive. Here Cristina’s parents have a condo a literal stone’s throw from the pristine Mediterranean beach and a house surrounded by 600 fruit trees in the steep hills above to which they will retire someday. On another high hill of the town is an old Moorish castle that’s lit spectacularly at night. It’s a steep drive with still some steep climbing to reach it and worth it for the view of town and sea and coastline and for the more leisurely walk down through narrow cobbled streets and occasional rest stops at bars and cervecerias.

Bars in Spain serve everything from orange juice and coffee to beer and wine and whiskey, and at our stop in Salobreña, I kick myself for not ordering, as Cristina does, an Irish coffee to warm the cool late afternoon.

Spanish wines are very good, but there is only one good beer, and it’s hard to find, and we find it here: Alhambra 1925. But ordering the typical Mahou lager is still worth the tariff because orders of beer and wine nearly always are accompanied by a free snack. Many of these are quite good. In a small ordinary town on the drive back from Madrid, the service is potatoes in garlic sauce, excellent. In Motril before the Thursday night procession, a crowded working class bar offers a skewer of barbecued chicken and peppers (and wonderful bar food: barbequed pulpo or octopus, calamari, shrimp, black sausage). Can you understand why I am seven pounds heavier today? Everywhere the bread and cheese are to live for only…if it were not for the olives, fruits, and jamon. I contemplate writing a travel book on seeing Spain without ever spending dinero to eat.

It may seem odd to head from bar to religious procession, but this is Spain, not Los Estados Unidos. Life is of a piece, not compartmentalized. The square before the church’s door from which this procession, Christ of the Good Death, will begin is crowded. We have already had a sneak peak inside the church thanks to a friend of Rafael and met the leader of the cofradia or brotherhood that puts on the event each year. Their “float” or paso dates from the 18th century. It will be carried by “costaleros” who shoulder the weight. They must dip to exit even the church’s tall, ancient wooden doors. Oddly, after they do so and before the silent procession leaves the plaza, taps is played.

All the processions in Spain, and they are innumerable (three in the small port city of Motril this evening), are organized by brotherhoods or hermandades de hombres (men) or particularly those honoring the Virgin Mother, de mujeres (women). Members are signed up as children or at birth, and this procession includes many young boys in the traditional garb (nazareno) of the penitent, some topped with the coned hat and facial mask. The preceding evening, as a procession for the Blessed Virgin stopped before me with no inches to spare between the walls of buildings lining an old street, spectators, and participants, I looked down into the calm, beautiful eyes of a young girl, no older than four at best, who held onto a corner of the float. Perhaps it was her mother who walked behind.

This night, the procession of the Good Death begins at midnight and ends about five hours later. We leave it a little before 2 a.m. and head for the car, stopping at an outdoor bar along the way. There are huge gas heaters to warm the air, and I can take off my top layer of clothing. We sip drinks and watch the passing procession of celebrants. Some parents push baby carriages. Some older children dance along the way. A few groups of teenagers pass by laughing among themselves, and several clowns and a dancing octopus on stilts come by to invite us to a new disco. This bar will probably stay open until 4, Cristina tells me, discos probably until 6 a.m. The city’s streets are safe. There is little violent crime in Spain except domestic violence, Cristina says.

But we don’t last at the bar until 4. The older contingent, at least, is tired. We retrieve Rafael’s car from the underground parking that was crowded and required the skill of an automobile rodeo artist to fit into earlier, but is now almost empty. Driving in Spain requires great skill. It’s like the social kiss…close brushes but no real contact hoped for.

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