March 2010

Spent the afternoon roaming around a small museum within the British library, containing among other things, the original magna carta.  It is emboldening to see a handwritten poem by Sylvia Plath and others, literary immortals that in fact, crossed out whole lines of their poems, adding and eradicating words throughout.  We were all once only human, deified by the printing press and, ultimately, the spell check.

cake for breakfast, rose at the crack of 1pm, and little to do before the bus to lubeck.  I think of this trip as a very successful tourist experience, but for the replacement of monuments with naked, willing nymphs.  Explore the people not the places… Wish they also came with a guided audio tour.
I feel a sense of complete and boundless peace suffuse me as I step into Victoria station and hear the train announcements in a language that isn’t German.  Jostle me with your shoulders and vocal cords, oh hurrying speakers of my mother tongue!

we do our best to find portobello rd by first arriving at notting hill, but inexpertly wind away from our destination, ending up at Kensington park.  Flocks of unhinged many specied birds gather to molest the unwary bread wielder, and then, in the center of the rather spacious common, it suddenly turns torrential.  We are soaked by the time we make it back to the street, just in time for the downpour to inexplicably cease.  The taunts of the geese weigh heavily on me, and I decide there must be a shoot of christiane chasing them with a rather large butterfly net.

we wake at a balmy 4:30am in order to make our flight to Barcelona only to find the train cancelled when we reach the station.  Luckily, we easily pick out a few more victims and share a taxi over, together with a garrelous last minute additive to our entourage; a drunken young man paying a surprise visit to his brother, at 8am…fingers crossed.  Arriving in Barcelona without further issue we manage the route to the decidedly lovely apartment of christianes friend bibian, ogle her vast army of collectibles, and, valuables stowed in our most unreachable areas, stomp off to explore.  The parque guiell is only 15 minutes walk, and I feel a sensation akin to first seeing the eifell tower as we reach the summit of a side street and turn into the vista of gaudis dripping, undulating and impossible architecture.

I return to the apartment at 3, for Ismas gothic paella, a seafood and rice dish the color of newly packaged formula one tires, as the ink of the squid is actually used to saute the dish.  Our flight is late and we miss the last tube home, but the view of oxford circus’s christmas lights from the top of the nightbus makes it all worthwhile.

we are walking up, up into a labyrinth-like park, each terrace more commanding than the next, each vista more sweeping.  I am awed by the tension between the sagrada familias undulating, towering lineless bulk, and the gherkins muscularly ellipsoid proboscis. 

I realize as the 4 pound camera leans off my left shoulder, slowly bending my spine, that I have not been able to put it away, that Barcelona has the most beautiful light that encourages me to inanely frame bits of trash, a freeway overpass, even pigeons for gods sake…I feel like that little girl in petticoats I once was before deciding to be a super serious photographer man.  A feeling worth remembering.

another sampling of the all round best coffied city I’ve visited, and I am rocket fuelled and ready for colored rain on windowpane gaudi, beginning with his apartment building, and ending in a reinvented Spanish village made just for the olympics and me.  Some dubious sandwich for lunch in the scattered sun, made vastly more interesting by a troupe of squabbling, 5 year olds, who could not manage 2 minutes without assaulting one another.  The village offered a multitude of organic arts and crafts, cunningly disguised as tourist tat… Or maybe a bunch of tat shops that upped their game a skoshe.

las ramblas, watch yo shit!  For here we are in pickpocket central, and we survive and pursue an armorer who I’ve been pestering for some time, Manuel albarran.  We pass bibis store to marvel at a giant poster of christiane.