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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.

Somewhere in the morning, my discomfort settles, and I dream of temples. There is an entrance flavored for every belief, but I am stopped by the cool air from an ornate Buddhist arch with a small smiling stone statue in an adjacent nave. The arch multiplies infinitely, each entry stacked slightly behind it’s brother and through the appearance of eternity I see a welcoming space, far down the tunnel. Though I do not feel prevented from entering, it is not time to do this, only to arise and be at peace, tumbling slowly beyond the door and into

wakefullness.

The Rome airport has an idiom of a figure on its knees, for either prayer or blowjobs I imagine. Perhaps both, depending on your degree of faith. The air is cloying, like being pressed against anothers breath, or at least it is inside this train. The woman facing me inhales from a grubby orange packet of cookies, fidgets with a phone trapped in frayed strips of duct tape, the curled flypaper edges capture the few crumbs escaping the surface of her rusping mustachios. Her invariable mole peers, like a bent glaswegian counselor looking to skim the best of the meal for himself. Such moles are invariably male. On the metro a man, sitting just by the door, has somehow managed to will a perfect shining ellipse of baldness just at the crown of his head, like a tonsure. flowing silver hair cascading from the perimeter of this dome give him, when viewed from the rear, the unenviable aspect of a single fried egg.

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.