Marlene’s son Ezra had rented a car to drive us through the mountains to the absolutely beautiful southern coastal resort of Nerja. Ezra is a good driver, but the very curvy mountain roads provided me with an experience I haven’t had since Cape Town, where I needed enough gravol that the trip consisted of a series of snapshots taken between naps.
Wind Turbines
One of our stops took place at a set of giant wind turbines placed on the edge of a mountain. We were able to get out of the car and walk right out underneath the blades. From a distance, they look leisurely, even elegant. Standing underneath them, on the other hand, you expect to hear the voice of Blofeld saying: “And so, Mr. Bond, we meet at last.”
Tiny Lizards
They live on the cliff face and go like the dickens, especially when you are terrorizing the poor things by trying to capture them on video. Each one is a little brown/green jewel, about the length of your finger.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Granada
A flight of just over an hour will get you from Barcelona in the north to Granada in the south, and you have really flown to a different world. This is the Spain I had been expecting to see, with a strong Moorish influence in the architecture and a more powerful Catholic presence in the streets.
A Pearl Set in Emeralds
That’s a phrase Wikipedia mentions in describing the Alhambra, originally a 14th-century Moorish fortress and now a UNESCO world heritage site. Certainly there are some gorgeous buildings and some lovely gardens in this massive complex, which was sufficiently abandoned by the 19th century that Washington Irving could squat there with some gypsies. In fact, the modern curators have used him as the fictional tour guide in the little wii remotes you can rent to explain the place. Unfortunately, he doesn’t come with a reverence filter, with the result that you get to hear more poetry than facts. Luckily, you aren’t required to listen, so you can set it aside or take it in small doses. An amazing feature of the place is the intricate carving on the walls, ceilings, doorways and windows. As Irving puts it: "everywhere the same and yet each piece different." There are also silent pools for reflecting the architecture, and noisy fountains for cheering you up, all of them with goldfish swimming in their depths. One of my favourite uses of water is in the stone balustrades to one of the staircases, which have channels cut into their surfaces so that the water runs down under your hands.
Serrano Ham
Legend has it that the ubiquitous, deliciously cured Serrano ham was originally a test devised by Catholics to make sure they weren’t inadvertently feasting with people from religions where pork is forbidden. If it is true, from these ignominious beginnings has arisen the tradition of having plates of cured shaved ham available for every meal. Tostado with jambon for breakast, a plate of jambon for second breakfast, jambon on the tapas for both first and second lunch—it is hard to avoid it in Spain. I can’t, of course, speak from first-hand knowledge of its presence at dinner.
A Pearl Set in Emeralds
That’s a phrase Wikipedia mentions in describing the Alhambra, originally a 14th-century Moorish fortress and now a UNESCO world heritage site. Certainly there are some gorgeous buildings and some lovely gardens in this massive complex, which was sufficiently abandoned by the 19th century that Washington Irving could squat there with some gypsies. In fact, the modern curators have used him as the fictional tour guide in the little wii remotes you can rent to explain the place. Unfortunately, he doesn’t come with a reverence filter, with the result that you get to hear more poetry than facts. Luckily, you aren’t required to listen, so you can set it aside or take it in small doses. An amazing feature of the place is the intricate carving on the walls, ceilings, doorways and windows. As Irving puts it: "everywhere the same and yet each piece different." There are also silent pools for reflecting the architecture, and noisy fountains for cheering you up, all of them with goldfish swimming in their depths. One of my favourite uses of water is in the stone balustrades to one of the staircases, which have channels cut into their surfaces so that the water runs down under your hands.
Serrano Ham
Legend has it that the ubiquitous, deliciously cured Serrano ham was originally a test devised by Catholics to make sure they weren’t inadvertently feasting with people from religions where pork is forbidden. If it is true, from these ignominious beginnings has arisen the tradition of having plates of cured shaved ham available for every meal. Tostado with jambon for breakast, a plate of jambon for second breakfast, jambon on the tapas for both first and second lunch—it is hard to avoid it in Spain. I can’t, of course, speak from first-hand knowledge of its presence at dinner.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Barcelona
The three-hour train trip from Valencia to Barcelona passed without incident through some rather stunning landscapes. One thing that caught my attention is that the Spanish trains have a security checkpoint that scans your luggage. They don’t do anything else, like looking at your passport or metal-detecting your body, or even talking to you, really. There is just a guy watching a screen beside a luggage scanner and you put your bag down on one side and pick it up on the other. I don’t recall having experienced that before.
A Place Without Street Corners
A unique architectural trope in Barcelona consists of the absence of corners where streets meet. Instead, nearly all the buildings have faces on the diagonal, so that there aren’t two walls forming a corner, but rather an additional short wall. This has several desirable effects, such as making more room for pedestrians and improving the lines of sight for drivers, which is good because the drivers here have a bad habit of treating a red light as a stock car starting line. In fact, the motorcycles will routinely creep up between the cars, so that just before the light changes, there is a burst of a couple of dozen motorcycles leaping forward, and heaven help the hindmost pedestrian.
City of Nudes
One of the striking features of some areas of Barcelona is that they are chock-a-block with marble statues of ladies who forgot to wear their clothes. They are kneeling in the park, sitting beside fountains, wearing wings but no heads, and in at least one case getting up to no good with a bull. One of my favourites is an odalisque lying on a pedestal in the median of a major street, eating an ice cream cone.
Gaudi
You can’t spend any time in Barcelona without becoming aware that the architect Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926) lived here, and created some iconic buildings such as his 6-storey apartments, an extensive park, and a cathedral, for which he was apparently still trying to raise funds at age 74 by going door-to-door, when he was hit and killed by a tram. This is not the land of Don Quixote for nothing. The buildings are variously called art nouveau or modernism, but to my way of thinking they are not so easy to classify except to say they have a lot of at least potentially disturbing influence of the organic. Take for instance the glass case in the top floor of the apartment block, where there is the skeleton of a snake as a reference for the way the internal brick arches have been built. As Teresa said, “I’m not sure I want to think of myself as walking around in the belly of a snake.” You can always exit the snake, however, and go up on the roof, to be greeted by rows of penises with faces.
San Jordi
Just as Valencia celebrates St. Joseph by blowing shit up, the Barcelonians celebrate the attributes of their patron saint by giving symbolic gifts. San Jordi, or in English St. George, is not only known for slaying dragons, but is also associated with books and roses. Accordingly, on April 24 the city is filled with temporary stalls that sell these items so that people can exchange them, as the tour guide phrased it, as tokens of love.
Stacks of Fashion Models
I first noted a peculiar behaviour at the 1992 Olympic park, where we’d gone to see the absolutely fabulous futuristic telecom tower by Santiago Calatrava. As we exited the grounds, there was a pile of people sleeping in the sunny corner of the wall. I thought to myself: “That’s quite a few more derelicts than I’m used to seeing together,” but as we got closer, it became clear that they were in fact lovely young women, very fashionably dressed, just taking a little communal nap. At first I assumed this was some anomalous event, like perhaps the break between photos at a fashion shoot. But then I saw a couple of other similar stacks in a completely different part of the city, in fact down on the pier.
Ironic Spanish Guitarists
One rainy night, we went to the little brick chapel off to one side of a cathedral to see a couple of Spanish guitarists named Ksenia Axelroud and Joan Benejam. They played up a storm, including a lot of what I have now begun to think of as the characteristic irony of Spain. For instance, in the signature section of the concert, they played four movements of Bizet’s Carmen, reverse-engineered from the symphony score to Spanish guitar, which Bizet had claimed as his inspiration. The second encore was what they introduced as “a little musical joke.” It was a version of Mozart’s Turkish March with one performer standing behind the seated other so that they could play at the same time on the same guitar.
He Never Got a Dinner
This was a comic line from the celebrity roasts that were fashionable in the 1980s. The comedian would list famous historical figures, which in contrast to the current roast victim had some genuinely remarkable achievements, but had never been honored with a public dinner. I’ve been having a somewhat similar experience throughout Spain, where they eat five meals a day: two breakfasts, a 2:00 lunch, tapas at 7:00, and dinner at midnight. Despite my inability to survive a day long enough to actually get to dinner, I couldn’t be happier with Spain in this respect, since it often happens, even in relatively cosmopolitan world centres, that there is nowhere to eat by 10:00 in the evening. In Spain, they aren’t even getting started eating by 10:00 in the evening.
Sing Coo Coo
Spain is, apparently, the land of green parakeets. We had the chance to sit under a palm tree and watch a pair of them making a nest. They would fly in with a beakful of string, then chatter away while they wove it into a bundle they had set into the crease of a palm leaf.
A Place Without Street Corners
A unique architectural trope in Barcelona consists of the absence of corners where streets meet. Instead, nearly all the buildings have faces on the diagonal, so that there aren’t two walls forming a corner, but rather an additional short wall. This has several desirable effects, such as making more room for pedestrians and improving the lines of sight for drivers, which is good because the drivers here have a bad habit of treating a red light as a stock car starting line. In fact, the motorcycles will routinely creep up between the cars, so that just before the light changes, there is a burst of a couple of dozen motorcycles leaping forward, and heaven help the hindmost pedestrian.
City of Nudes
One of the striking features of some areas of Barcelona is that they are chock-a-block with marble statues of ladies who forgot to wear their clothes. They are kneeling in the park, sitting beside fountains, wearing wings but no heads, and in at least one case getting up to no good with a bull. One of my favourites is an odalisque lying on a pedestal in the median of a major street, eating an ice cream cone.
Gaudi
You can’t spend any time in Barcelona without becoming aware that the architect Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926) lived here, and created some iconic buildings such as his 6-storey apartments, an extensive park, and a cathedral, for which he was apparently still trying to raise funds at age 74 by going door-to-door, when he was hit and killed by a tram. This is not the land of Don Quixote for nothing. The buildings are variously called art nouveau or modernism, but to my way of thinking they are not so easy to classify except to say they have a lot of at least potentially disturbing influence of the organic. Take for instance the glass case in the top floor of the apartment block, where there is the skeleton of a snake as a reference for the way the internal brick arches have been built. As Teresa said, “I’m not sure I want to think of myself as walking around in the belly of a snake.” You can always exit the snake, however, and go up on the roof, to be greeted by rows of penises with faces.
San Jordi
Just as Valencia celebrates St. Joseph by blowing shit up, the Barcelonians celebrate the attributes of their patron saint by giving symbolic gifts. San Jordi, or in English St. George, is not only known for slaying dragons, but is also associated with books and roses. Accordingly, on April 24 the city is filled with temporary stalls that sell these items so that people can exchange them, as the tour guide phrased it, as tokens of love.
Stacks of Fashion Models
I first noted a peculiar behaviour at the 1992 Olympic park, where we’d gone to see the absolutely fabulous futuristic telecom tower by Santiago Calatrava. As we exited the grounds, there was a pile of people sleeping in the sunny corner of the wall. I thought to myself: “That’s quite a few more derelicts than I’m used to seeing together,” but as we got closer, it became clear that they were in fact lovely young women, very fashionably dressed, just taking a little communal nap. At first I assumed this was some anomalous event, like perhaps the break between photos at a fashion shoot. But then I saw a couple of other similar stacks in a completely different part of the city, in fact down on the pier.
Ironic Spanish Guitarists
One rainy night, we went to the little brick chapel off to one side of a cathedral to see a couple of Spanish guitarists named Ksenia Axelroud and Joan Benejam. They played up a storm, including a lot of what I have now begun to think of as the characteristic irony of Spain. For instance, in the signature section of the concert, they played four movements of Bizet’s Carmen, reverse-engineered from the symphony score to Spanish guitar, which Bizet had claimed as his inspiration. The second encore was what they introduced as “a little musical joke.” It was a version of Mozart’s Turkish March with one performer standing behind the seated other so that they could play at the same time on the same guitar.
He Never Got a Dinner
This was a comic line from the celebrity roasts that were fashionable in the 1980s. The comedian would list famous historical figures, which in contrast to the current roast victim had some genuinely remarkable achievements, but had never been honored with a public dinner. I’ve been having a somewhat similar experience throughout Spain, where they eat five meals a day: two breakfasts, a 2:00 lunch, tapas at 7:00, and dinner at midnight. Despite my inability to survive a day long enough to actually get to dinner, I couldn’t be happier with Spain in this respect, since it often happens, even in relatively cosmopolitan world centres, that there is nowhere to eat by 10:00 in the evening. In Spain, they aren’t even getting started eating by 10:00 in the evening.
Sing Coo Coo
Spain is, apparently, the land of green parakeets. We had the chance to sit under a palm tree and watch a pair of them making a nest. They would fly in with a beakful of string, then chatter away while they wove it into a bundle they had set into the crease of a palm leaf.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Valencia
I stepped through the looking glass into this unbelievable Spanish port city with two colleagues, after 19 hours in the air. We descended through some of the blackest clouds I have ever seen—as-black-as-the-keys-on-my-laptop black—and I began to wonder if I would be able to breathe after we landed. On the contrary, the air seems fresh and beautiful down here, perhaps because it is being cleansed by the breeze off the ocean. It wasn’t long, however, before I began to develop theories about where the smoke might be coming from.
The Nineteen Days of Burning
The patron saint of Valencia is St. Joseph the carpenter. You see statues of him in the cathedrals and churches, which are easy to identify because he is carrying a two-by-four. From the connection to carpentry comes a local tradition, dating to the middle ages, that prior to the feast of St. Joseph on March 19, you should burn any scraps of wood you happen to have around the house. The next phase involved the logical step of saying why stop with scraps of wood, when you could equally well take the opportunity to burn any old furniture you had kicking around. I’m not sure what the other steps might have been, but in its present incarnation, the Fallas in Valencia consists of thousands of people building hundreds of giant wooden sculptures, “dolls” people said “as large as buildings” then setting fire to them all on the same night—March 19. The designs are too large to move, and have to be shipped in pieces to the places in the city where they will eventually be assembled, displayed, judged, and burned. I have heard estimates ranging from 400 to 1000 of these objects will appear all over the city beginning March 15, at a total annual cost of something like 300,000 euros.
Mascleta—“a symphony in gunpowder”
Prior to March 19, there are 19 days of explosions. Everyone gathers in a particular square at 2 pm. We went on the Sunday, and the crowd of tens of thousands of people of all ages was so thick that I had something happen to me that has never happened before. I was following a string of people moving through a heavy crowd on both sides. Suddenly the line stopped moving, and I realized that as far as I could see ahead, for blocks in fact, no one was walking anymore. So I looked back, and no one was walking there either. I was immobile in the middle of a packed crowd. What we were all waiting for was a series of about 5 minutes of continuous explosions, like a fireworks display, except it is only sound. The windows rattle in the buildings nearby. You can feel it vibrating in your body. There is a steady orchestration of small explosions, punctuated by larger ones, until the climax which is almost unbearably powerful but consists of just an overwhelming number of small explosions. The air fills with the gunpowder smoke. It is like nothing I have ever experienced.
Firecrackers
A city that spends 19 days exploding things in preparation for setting fire to a thousand public sculptures is a city that appreciates loud and unexpected noises, and the kids seem to enthusiastically embrace this ethos. Boys and girls of all ages carry boxes of firecrackers, usually 100 to a box, and can be seen in all the parks and streets, with either lighters or matches or else borrowing their parents’ burning cigarettes to light them. And these aren’t the mild little snappy firecrackers that I remember from my youth. These ones pack a punch. I’m not sure if my nerves will ever recover.
Churros
Nearly as ubiquitous as firecrackers are doughnuts. Made fresh on the not-infrequent stands that sell them, they are available in a traditional doughnut shape, but more common are these long stringy loops, textured with straight ridges that run the entire length, delicious and sprinkled with sugar.
The Palace of the Arts and Sciences
One of the words that appears occasionally in the city collateral is “irony,” and I think the writers might be on to something. As an example, take the postmodern architecture of Santiago Calatrava at the Palace of the Arts and Sciences, where you have a conquistador’s helmet, a giant eyeball, somebody’s spine, and a harp. They respectively house concerts, an iMax theatre, a science museum, and I’m not sure what. On the far end there is also an aquarium. The path leading to the complex is lined with giant photos enriched with pop quotations from song lyrics and the Dalai Lama and so on. The path leading from the complex has cheerful, colourful cubist sculptures by Juan Ripollés of people with giant heads, wearing suns, clocks, and their hearts on their sleeves. As Teresa pointed out, everyone walking along the lane of sculptures was smiling and laughing.
A River Used to Run Through It
Until the 1950s, when they experienced a series of devastating floods, there was a river running through the middle of Valencia. Then they moved it outside the city, and converted the entire course of the old river into a long, serpentine green space, with parks and playing fields and ornamental orange groves bearing the sourest oranges imaginable. All the bridges are also still in place, making it simple and easy to cross from one side of the park to the other. The bridge outside our hotel is loaded on both side with flowers, and there are palm trees that grow from the river bed up through the surface of the bridge to provide shade.
Children in Disguise
As if the firecrackers weren’t evidence enough that the Valencians love their children, there is the further observation that the children are often seen running around in costume. I first noticed it on the plane, when a five year old in a wizard’s hat as big as he was exited just ahead of me. I thought it might be exceptional until I spotted two or three other costumes in the crowd. What finally cinched it was the Sunday morning sight of two formally dressed parents being accompanied into the cathedral by a two-and-a-half-foot tall version of Zorro, the desert fox.
The Nineteen Days of Burning
The patron saint of Valencia is St. Joseph the carpenter. You see statues of him in the cathedrals and churches, which are easy to identify because he is carrying a two-by-four. From the connection to carpentry comes a local tradition, dating to the middle ages, that prior to the feast of St. Joseph on March 19, you should burn any scraps of wood you happen to have around the house. The next phase involved the logical step of saying why stop with scraps of wood, when you could equally well take the opportunity to burn any old furniture you had kicking around. I’m not sure what the other steps might have been, but in its present incarnation, the Fallas in Valencia consists of thousands of people building hundreds of giant wooden sculptures, “dolls” people said “as large as buildings” then setting fire to them all on the same night—March 19. The designs are too large to move, and have to be shipped in pieces to the places in the city where they will eventually be assembled, displayed, judged, and burned. I have heard estimates ranging from 400 to 1000 of these objects will appear all over the city beginning March 15, at a total annual cost of something like 300,000 euros.
Mascleta—“a symphony in gunpowder”
Prior to March 19, there are 19 days of explosions. Everyone gathers in a particular square at 2 pm. We went on the Sunday, and the crowd of tens of thousands of people of all ages was so thick that I had something happen to me that has never happened before. I was following a string of people moving through a heavy crowd on both sides. Suddenly the line stopped moving, and I realized that as far as I could see ahead, for blocks in fact, no one was walking anymore. So I looked back, and no one was walking there either. I was immobile in the middle of a packed crowd. What we were all waiting for was a series of about 5 minutes of continuous explosions, like a fireworks display, except it is only sound. The windows rattle in the buildings nearby. You can feel it vibrating in your body. There is a steady orchestration of small explosions, punctuated by larger ones, until the climax which is almost unbearably powerful but consists of just an overwhelming number of small explosions. The air fills with the gunpowder smoke. It is like nothing I have ever experienced.
Firecrackers
A city that spends 19 days exploding things in preparation for setting fire to a thousand public sculptures is a city that appreciates loud and unexpected noises, and the kids seem to enthusiastically embrace this ethos. Boys and girls of all ages carry boxes of firecrackers, usually 100 to a box, and can be seen in all the parks and streets, with either lighters or matches or else borrowing their parents’ burning cigarettes to light them. And these aren’t the mild little snappy firecrackers that I remember from my youth. These ones pack a punch. I’m not sure if my nerves will ever recover.
Churros
Nearly as ubiquitous as firecrackers are doughnuts. Made fresh on the not-infrequent stands that sell them, they are available in a traditional doughnut shape, but more common are these long stringy loops, textured with straight ridges that run the entire length, delicious and sprinkled with sugar.
The Palace of the Arts and Sciences
One of the words that appears occasionally in the city collateral is “irony,” and I think the writers might be on to something. As an example, take the postmodern architecture of Santiago Calatrava at the Palace of the Arts and Sciences, where you have a conquistador’s helmet, a giant eyeball, somebody’s spine, and a harp. They respectively house concerts, an iMax theatre, a science museum, and I’m not sure what. On the far end there is also an aquarium. The path leading to the complex is lined with giant photos enriched with pop quotations from song lyrics and the Dalai Lama and so on. The path leading from the complex has cheerful, colourful cubist sculptures by Juan Ripollés of people with giant heads, wearing suns, clocks, and their hearts on their sleeves. As Teresa pointed out, everyone walking along the lane of sculptures was smiling and laughing.
A River Used to Run Through It
Until the 1950s, when they experienced a series of devastating floods, there was a river running through the middle of Valencia. Then they moved it outside the city, and converted the entire course of the old river into a long, serpentine green space, with parks and playing fields and ornamental orange groves bearing the sourest oranges imaginable. All the bridges are also still in place, making it simple and easy to cross from one side of the park to the other. The bridge outside our hotel is loaded on both side with flowers, and there are palm trees that grow from the river bed up through the surface of the bridge to provide shade.
Children in Disguise
As if the firecrackers weren’t evidence enough that the Valencians love their children, there is the further observation that the children are often seen running around in costume. I first noticed it on the plane, when a five year old in a wizard’s hat as big as he was exited just ahead of me. I thought it might be exceptional until I spotted two or three other costumes in the crowd. What finally cinched it was the Sunday morning sight of two formally dressed parents being accompanied into the cathedral by a two-and-a-half-foot tall version of Zorro, the desert fox.
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