Madrid and Bamberg July 8-15

After the Islamic archaeology conference in Toledo, on the morning of Monday July 8 I traveled with many of the conference participants to Madrid by train. Anja had arranged for us to tour the Valencia de Don Juan collection of Islamic art.

 

One of the galleries of the Valencia de Don Juan collection

 

Three of the group examining an Arabic inscription

 

Our guide (left)

That tour was the end of the scheduled activities of the conference, but I had decided to stay on in Madrid for an additional day before returning to Bamberg. I checked into a hotel and then walked around the center of Madrid.

 

People in Madrid protesting the economic situation

 I went to the Reina Sofia art museum, where the Guernica painting by Picasso is on display. Later I went to the Prado Museum, where there is free admission after 6:00; I was able to make a quick run through the galleries until closing time at 8:00.

The next day Tuesday July 9 I toured the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Museum in the morning and at noon I walked around the Botanical Gardens.

The Botanical Gardens

I then headed to the airport for my flight back to Nürnberg. The flight left Madrid 20 minutes late, which was a problem since that cut a third off of the single hour I had to get to the outlying terminal 2F in De Gaulle airport in Paris for my connecting flight. I made the flight with only moments to spare.

Back in Bamberg after my trip to Spain, I spent my final week winding things up for this current stay. I finished my article about Jerusalem in the Abbasid period.

While back in Bamberg, I decided on short notice to change my travel plans and travel to the USA for my parents’ 65^th wedding anniversary on Sunday July 28. I found out that the cheapest airfares from Europe to Chicago were from Istanbul; they were around 20-30 percent cheaper than anywhere else. That was fine, since months ago, when I bought my round-trip ticket to come to Germany from Amman, I had decided to spend a week in Turkey before returning to Amman at the end of July. So I already had a ticket for travel from Prague to Istanbul and ended up forfeiting only the Istanbul-Amman portion of my ticket.

So on Monday July 15, I moved out of my apartment and took an afternoon train to Nürnberg and then an express bus on to Prague, arriving in the evening at the airport, where I spent the night in a cheap hotel.