Creativity and unbridled imagination
Ok so I'm back. It's been two days so I now feel good enough about posting my incomparable enthusiasm for Barca and my sorrow over Diana Wynne Jones's death. Here goes:
Diana Wynne Jones was the smartest fiction writer I've ever read. I feel lost knowing she's not out there conjuring up fantasies and new ways to delight me and the world and my future children. Her work makes me happy.
I wonder if she'd ever been to Barcelona. I think she'd have liked the modernismo architecture and how it's kind of magical and insane and outrageous. It's what's struck me the most. There is a roof that is shaped like a dragon's back. With scales. Cylindrical solariums like out-of-place towers attached on buildings decorated with intricate metalwork and stained glass. On the Passeig de Gracia the street benches of white mosaic stand at the foot of lamp posts the like I've never seen before nor imagined. The indescribable Sagrada Familia which I'd always compared to a sand castle that was made as if by dripping sand mud, looks like it was carved with a scalpel out of a rock because only nature would dare make so haphazard looking pillars or chthonic divinity. Occasionally. When it doesn't look like a gothic monstrosity. While it's actually build of stone-dressed concrete. And still being built. The faery-tale-land of Parc Guell with the colourific dragon and the terrace and the gallerias... okay basically, Antoni Gaudi is a god to me. A god.
Sadly no photos yet because I took pictures with a borrowed camera but soon! Soon!
I visited the Picasso Museum--I think I've almost grasped cubism--and the Catalonian Museum of Art which is a fucking palace (I know I've never been to the Louvre Museum but daaaaamn). Food was great while we kept away from the touristy stuff. Was particularly fond of a vegetarian cuisine restaurant around the corner from the flat we rented with the sweetest most helpful hipster host ever who explained the menu to us and suggested stuff and it was all so yumm. And the delicatessens. I like cured meat sausages. A lot. And stinky cheese. Also, I bought like a hundred lapel pins and buttons (ok ten) especially since at first I couldn't find any and then on Sunday we toured the placas looking for street markets and found vendors with old worthless stuff that were oh so awesome and I still regret not buying that old broken pocket watch. Or that bayonet. Errrr. And the last day we went to the zoo (tapirs! a caiman that looks like it came straight out of How to train your dragon! and a cheetah looking rather intently at little children!*) and to Hard Rock Cafe. What?
*I don't really approve of zoos so I'm always guilty at how excited I get. Espesh when I discover OMG THE CHEETAH TOTALLY THINKS THAT KID IS PREY HOW COOL IS THAT. And then I feel worse.
Diana Wynne Jones was the smartest fiction writer I've ever read. I feel lost knowing she's not out there conjuring up fantasies and new ways to delight me and the world and my future children. Her work makes me happy.
I wonder if she'd ever been to Barcelona. I think she'd have liked the modernismo architecture and how it's kind of magical and insane and outrageous. It's what's struck me the most. There is a roof that is shaped like a dragon's back. With scales. Cylindrical solariums like out-of-place towers attached on buildings decorated with intricate metalwork and stained glass. On the Passeig de Gracia the street benches of white mosaic stand at the foot of lamp posts the like I've never seen before nor imagined. The indescribable Sagrada Familia which I'd always compared to a sand castle that was made as if by dripping sand mud, looks like it was carved with a scalpel out of a rock because only nature would dare make so haphazard looking pillars or chthonic divinity. Occasionally. When it doesn't look like a gothic monstrosity. While it's actually build of stone-dressed concrete. And still being built. The faery-tale-land of Parc Guell with the colourific dragon and the terrace and the gallerias... okay basically, Antoni Gaudi is a god to me. A god.
Sadly no photos yet because I took pictures with a borrowed camera but soon! Soon!
I visited the Picasso Museum--I think I've almost grasped cubism--and the Catalonian Museum of Art which is a fucking palace (I know I've never been to the Louvre Museum but daaaaamn). Food was great while we kept away from the touristy stuff. Was particularly fond of a vegetarian cuisine restaurant around the corner from the flat we rented with the sweetest most helpful hipster host ever who explained the menu to us and suggested stuff and it was all so yumm. And the delicatessens. I like cured meat sausages. A lot. And stinky cheese. Also, I bought like a hundred lapel pins and buttons (ok ten) especially since at first I couldn't find any and then on Sunday we toured the placas looking for street markets and found vendors with old worthless stuff that were oh so awesome and I still regret not buying that old broken pocket watch. Or that bayonet. Errrr. And the last day we went to the zoo (tapirs! a caiman that looks like it came straight out of How to train your dragon! and a cheetah looking rather intently at little children!*) and to Hard Rock Cafe. What?
*I don't really approve of zoos so I'm always guilty at how excited I get. Espesh when I discover OMG THE CHEETAH TOTALLY THINKS THAT KID IS PREY HOW COOL IS THAT. And then I feel worse.