Barcelona/Cordoba: Crazy-Ass Architecture and Other Adventures

24-25 November 2011

On our second day in Barcelona, we went into the Frederic Mares museum.  Mares was a rich dude with a penchant for collecting not one of anything, but everything of anything.  The ground floor of the building he lived in is room after room of early Christian statuary.  A row of nearly identical Mary-and-child statues.  Walls full of crucified Jesuses that still have him looking Middle-Eastern.  No Aryan Jesus-and-Marys up in this joint. I'd just about had enough, being a devout atheist, when we headed upstairs.  There was even more of this stuff on the next floor.  But the top two levels were something else.  I forgot all about the Jesus overload.  We entered rooms full of bell jars encasing bouquets of flowers made entirely of shells.  Framed arrangements of cigar wrappers.  Pipes with creepy heads on them.  Walking sticks with creepy heads on them. Eyeglass cases.  What-the-hell-are-these-things.  Raffle tickets.  A machine that prints raffle tickets.  Very, very old bicycles (last night I dreamed Ross Hart lent me one of these to ride, which I did for a while, but I gave it back because nobody'd be able to help me if I had a breakdown).

Jack and I left the place shaking our heads.  Crazy-ass.

The next day we went to visit some architecture.  I could spend a few paragraphs explaining Antonio Gaudi's Sagrada Familia cathedral, but Wikipedia has already done the job.

This is one crazy-ass church.

We only walked around the outside; lines were long to get in and we'd been advised by John and Rosa that the wait wouldn't be worth it.

Speaking of John and Rosa, who we went out to dinner with on our last night in Barcelona, Rosa has the coolest job of anyone either Jack or I know:  she's translating the first season of Scooby-Doo into Catalan.

Jack wanted to know what she's doing about "Zoinks!"  Rosa said that they'd settled on "Iay!"  As in "Eeeeee-eye!"

"What about 'ruh-roh'," Jack asked.

"We're leaving that to the actor."

Anyway, Gaudi:

The words are "sanctus" over and over again:

Um, bowl of fruit?

In the subway station, there's a vending machine for cell phone apparatus:

More Barcelona street scenes:

Wherever there's shopping, there are these wire patterns spanning the street.  Usually it's car-free too.

Another shot of the round whatever that I took the day before, this time at night.

Quirky graffiti:

When shops close for the day, they pull down metal grates.  Many of them are decorated.  Kevin, maybe you'll need a special category for these.

If you look closely at the top third of this picture, you'll see what every group-riding cyclist sees:

We took the train from Barcelona to Cordoba.  The speed was posted constantly on a screen on the inside of the car.  We got up to about 175 mph.  Taking good pictures out the window was pretty much out of the question.  Most of the landscape looks like the desert southwest in the US.   As we approached Cordoba things greened up a little.

Once again we wound up in a deeply-discounted hotel.  For 80 euro, we got a 390 euro room.

The unfortunately-named Conquistador Hotel was across from what we came to see:  La Mezquita mosque/cathedral.  Here's Wikipedia's description.  It's a mosque with a cathedral plunked into the middle.

As water passes up this fountain, it spins the wheel.  Twice per revolution the little bell goes, "tink."  It's very peaceful.

Paintings of Jesus and saints and things hang next to Moorish architecture.

The ceiling:

The view from the bathroom, of all places:

In the cathedral, someone was tuning the pipe organ.  It sounded less like an organ than a sick moose or an MRI about to get going.  By the time I remembered that I could use my phone to record this "blaaaaaaaaat," the tuning stopped.  Oh well.

I tried, and tried, and tried, to hold my hands still enough to get a close-up of the mouths that were the pipe openings, high above my head.  I hate my camera.

Outside, in the courtyard, and throughout the Medieval section of the city, stones are laid, often sideways, in patterns.

Oop!  One more door for you, Kevin, at the mosque/cathedral entrance.  Here, Muslim and Christian designs meet:

This is the view of the mosque from the outside of our hotel:

And down the street:

Clay bulls for sale:

A crack in a wall.  Did I mention that I hate my camera?

We walked over the bridge that crosses the Guadalquivir river.  It looks tidal, but when we searched the web trying to find out, we had no luck.  Cordoba is pretty far from the coast.  But there was a clear tide line, there were egrets, and there was an obviously wet shirt just above the water line on a bridge support far below us.  I don't have a picture because I would have had to shoot into the sun, and the camera that I hate just sucks at shooting into the sun.

Looking from the bridge back into the Medieval part of town:

If this camera could zoom without being a fuzzy blur, you'd see egrets at the water's edge.

Oh, wait.  I did zoom.  See those white blobs on the shore?  Egrets.

Here's the hotel's second floor landing.

And the stairwell:

A view from the lobby into the courtyard:

I know, I know, pictures of a hotel? Really?  Yeah, because we never stay in places like this because we can't afford it.  And if you think this is posh, wait until you see the pictures of the place we're in now, in Madrid, at some minuscule percentage of what the place usually charges.  I'm trying to find out who the architect is.  I have my suspicions.  But you'll have to wait for that.  It's almost 1 a.m. here and if I don't get in bed before Jack starts snoring, I'll never get to sleep.