Bi-Weekly Photo: Madrid at Christmas

I'm back home for the holidays, visiting my family and friends. The latter is not always easy, since my family lives in Segovia and most of my friends in Madrid, 100km away. I took the bus to Madrid last Thursday afternoon hoping to meet a friend, but when I arrived I couldn't get in touch with her, so I took the chance to walk around Madrid and get some practice with the 50mm prime lens I got for christmas. I had never used a prime lens before, and I thought it would be harder to get what you want on the picture without a zoom, but i got used to it pretty fast. I guess that the fact that a 50mm gets more or less what you can see with your eyes in the picture helped a lot. That does not mean that the quality of my photos has gotten better, it just means that they contain exactly what I wanted to capture.

 

I spottet this protest against the plunge of Bankia's shares in Alcala at the center of Madrid. It's one of the few signs that make you notice that something's wrong in Spain. Which is something I really like about Spain: even though the situation is somewhat tough right now, the general feeling you get in the streets is that of a lively crowd.

Another thing I noticed is that the christmas decorations were simpler and there were fewer than in the past few years.

This, in my opinion, is a good thing. A few years back they started putting up lots of colors and weird "artsy" forms which didn't really have much to do with christmas decoration... Imagine the picture below, but with lots of different colors:

 

Bi-Weekly Photo: Somewhere in Castilla la Mancha

This was one of the many moments I regretted not having a GPS tracker for my camera. I took this picture from the car when my brother and I were travelling from Madrid to Alicante, on the eastern coast of Spain. If I remember it correcly, and by the looks of the landscape, the photo was taken somewhere in Castilla la Mancha:

I know the post is titled Bi-Weekly Photo, not photos, but i'll make an exception. Here's something you will almost certainly encounter as you drive through Spain's roads:

These bulls were originally put up during a marketing campaing by a company named Osborne, and have since become an unofficial symbol of Spain.

Christmas in Germany - Feuerzangenbowle

It's that time of the year again, when magic and freezing temperatures turn the reaction to cheap warm wine from "eeewww!" into "mmmmhh... Can I have some more?". Once again, Munich is filled with christmas markets with all sorts of beautiful [and slightly overpriced] ornaments, delicious foods and of course, hot beverages, mostly alcoholic, to keep us warm. Here's a picture of an ornament shop at the christmas market in the "Marienplatz", with the town hall in the background:

Ever since I saw the movie by the same name I've wanted to try a "Feuerzangenbowle", a traditional christmas beverage made of hot wine with cinnamon and other spices, which is then sweetened by a block of sugar soaked with rum and melted by lighting it on fire. It was quite interesting to hold the cup and watch the sugar burn, slowly melting into it.
I burned my tonge attempting to drink it shortly after the flame went out, but once it cooled down a bit, it was really a treat! This is what it looked like half way through the "melting process":

Bi-Weekly Photo: Alcazar de Segovia

This is a picture of my hometown's old castle, the Alcazar de Segovia in Spain. Since I don't really know much about its history, and copying what another website says is kind of pointless, here's a link to Wikipedia.

Here's something interesting though: Take a look at the DVD cover of "The 10th Kingdom" and see if it looks familiar. Yep, they took the Alcazar and several church towers from across Segovia (including the cathedral, of which I will probably post another photo sometime) and pasted them all together. I think the Alcazar was also used as an inspiration on several other movies, but I don't remember any specific one right now.