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Barcelona And Antoni Gaudi
“Who knows where the road may lead us, only a fool would say Who knows if we’ll meet along the way Follow the brightest star as far as the brave may dare What will we find when we get there” Lyrics from “La Sagrada Familia” by the Alan Parsons Project To visit Barcelona is to enter the world of Antoni Gaudi. What was he? Genius or nut job? Inspired or crazy? And what was his work? Flamboyantly brilliant or belligerently ostentatious? The bravest of designs or art for art’s sake? Inspired architecture or the world’s first Disneyland? Whatever your take on it, he still has everyone talking almost a century…
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Barcelona Revisited
Would it be appropriate to call it culture shock, leaving behind the vineyards, villages and mountains and being transported in a comparative instant to the international tourist maelstrom which is Barcelona’s La Rambla? Well it’s certainly a significant change of scene. The place is absolutely alive with people and activity in exactly the way we remember it, and Barcelona feels as joyous and energetic as ever. It’s a fairly long time now since either of us have been to Barcelona, and we haven’t previously been here together, so this is a reacquaintance with different memories for each of us. Some things have changed down La Rambla since our last visits:…
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On To Saigon Or Whatever It’s Called
Day 35 of this trip and we cop out for the first time. Up until tonight it’s been local food all the way….Indian, Nepalese and Vietnamese dishes, local specialities, street food, even a frog on a stick for God’s sake. But Can Tho is different: the restaurants aren’t quite as inviting, the atmosphere is less accessible, and the street food we’ve tried is unpopular with locals and close to inedible. So we cop out and find an “ordinary” restaurant, The Lighthouse, which, perish the thought, does steaks and stuff. For the first time since we entered the country, we eat some non-Vietnamese food: Michaela’s is a French dish, mine Belgian.…
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Empty Roads, Desert Rain & Mirages: Matmata-Douz-Tozeur
It’s fair to say that the journey from Matmata to Douz isn’t the most challenging foreign drive we’ve ever undertaken, with long stretches of empty road cutting a perfect straight line through the desert. In terms of civilisation, there is nothing: a good hour of roadway passing not a single building, let alone anything as grand as a village. In fact the greatest – maybe the only – challenge is the patches where the sand has covered the road, the tarmac has all but disappeared and the grip of our tyres is about as good as a stiletto on a polished floor. At last we reach signs of life as…
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Photographic Memories #5
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With no current prospect of travel even domestically let alone worldwide, we will have no new adventures to blog, but we do have many such memories….. Photo #5: Mother Russia What makes this photograph special to us is how it captures the very essence of the way we had pictured Russia probably since childhood: a frozen river, austere architecture, smoke billowing into the morning air from the tall chimneys of factory buildings, it is the Russia of our mind’s eye. This was sunrise in St Petersburg, captured as we made our way…
