Museums

My vision is to be able to tell you of all the marvellous places I am finding and re-finding, and give their longitude and latitude,  to upload pictures with real space/time coordinates (within 26 feet or so), and finally, to include the direction you should face!  Perhaps utopic, though i am just a common dreamer.

Madrid is still the encantador.  Between the de novo ambience of Cafe La Palma and the constipated woopie-cusion seats you can try shoes on from in the Camper outlet store, I am continuously amazed.

I also discovered a trick I would like to share with any of you not so hot on classical art (perhaps a ‘dirty trick’ for those of you who are) yet nonetheless fancy peeking at what all the hype is about. 

Short for time, Amanda and I swung by the Museo del Prado just to get a postcard (and as a second hint for abridged tourism: the gift shop is often a good place to start if you are unsure you want to purchase a ticket to enter a museum or not).  We learned, to my poor recollection, that the gift shop is in the center of the musem and they will let you in for 20 minutes, without a ticket, to tend to any shopping impulses on premise.

Noticing their fault in not recognizing our intentions to speed through the museum at some uncanny pace, we entered the gift shop and precariously bought the first thing that looked like it might satisfy my intended goal.  Maintaining regular breathing techniques, we purchased the postcard an quickly, not haphazardly, began our 17 minute ‘free’ tour of the museum!

In this 17 minutes, albeit a tad rushed, we enjoyed works by Goya, Velazquez and even my favorite work in the musem, The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch.

Also, all of our museum viewing has lead me to a philisophical question—or maybe just a curator-istic one:  How do they choose what color to paint the museum walls?  Any insights into this mystery would be greatly appreciated.

Madrid

Despite a bagel-fire and a surreptitious and aggressive sprinkler system, I am still welcome here in Madrid and feeling quite nostalgic.

Isabel (my flatmate while in Madrid) is putting Amanda and I up in her very fashionable flat (I hope to provide an unsatisfying visual soon, though, in the meantime, a quick spin through the nearest IKEA (pronounced ‘ee-kay-uh’) peppered with stippled paraphernalia from a Lichtenstein exhibit should suffice).  The flat is downtown in the Alonzo Martinez area, which provides us good company with her and Bruno, and easy access to most all we could wish to visit.

As we walked around Madrid these past two days, the memories came rushing back to me—the drums in the park; the long, slow, chat-full walks; the cars parked in the middle of one way street with no driver inside and a chorus of horns shortly behind; the near-mulleted hipsters; and our server picking his nose as we awaited our order.

Even though Isabel cooked a spectacular Spanish dish of seaweed and carrots our first night here, such strange foods to my Bay Arean palate like tortilla patata (Spanish omelet), morcilla (blood sausage), tapas, cafe cubanos and mojitos are filling my days.  I notice myself trying to get tired of each of them so when I return I will not have unachievable longings.  Yet I have had no success thus far.

And we continue.  Off to see Lichtenstein or whoever replaced him.  And maybe some chocolate and churros, or two.

Pixels and Peaks

Within the next 4 months, I hope for everyone’s benefit, I will try to learn to talk in pixels (or at least learn to hear in pixels).  Until then, I hope the scattered-quality photos in the photo albums section will do.

My fascination with Fall continues.  Fall and iron-bar-laden hiking trails.  These Eastern trees are merely teasing us at the moment.  Perhaps they are more concerned with dodging hurricanes, though under such stressful conditions, my scientific urges lead me to believe their leaves would be changing in droves—the equivalent of blushing or turning white in fear.

Amanda and I just finished up a short jaunt through Acadia National Park in Maine.  Despite the parks peculiar shape (a conjunction of privately donated lands), there were plenty of spectacular trail-like continuums to enjoy.  We found a couple non-technical climbing trails to be the best of them.  These were essentially teetering trails up modest granite cliffs and ledges.  The trails were strung together with iron handrails and ladders where gravity would naturally get the best of the not-really-rock-climber tourists like myself.

A new toy, or should I speculatively say, life-saving piece of technology which accompanied our ascent was a handheld GPS (global positioning system).  This machine, at a casual speed, tells you your current longitude and latitude amongst other neat, if not essentially unessential information.  Amanda humored my intrigue with grace, yet I must boast that, on more than one occasion after a hike, the GPS helped us find our way back to the trailhead parking lot.

More humbly, I will also admit that there were numerous occasions where, while globally disoriented and locally perplexed, Amanda found the way to where we needed to go before that darn GPS even finished turning on.

Next, my sights are set on places where we will more likely get lost for more than a few minutes, where foreign language will confuse and misdirect us, where directions may come in awkward finger-point fashion: Southern Europe.  I will continue to bear the GPS (maybe sometimes turning it on a little ahead of time), and amongst friends and foreign lands, I will report back on my success.