Home again, home again

I didn't post because Indra was running out of uploads for the month. And now that I am home again (sigh) I will sign off on this posting business untill my next travel.

But I should mention our trip to Hampton Court on Sunday. It was way over the other side of London. We set off early in the morning and had trouble finding the entry gates so parked on the green a mile or so away: much too far for Pat and Jo. Our visit was subsequently a bit rushed. Even if you had a full 10am to 7pm you could fill it in enjoying the site. It is a proper palace. Lots of history to learn and since Henry VIII lived there much of the history is sexy. Plus the roses were in full bloom and absolutely sense -ational.

On Monday I joined Indra at her 2 hour line dance class. The last class I went to was in KL with her beginners class about 5 years ago. My feet and my head have forgotten how to talk to each other.

The flight to Singapore was forgetable (just what you want from long distance flights.) The overnight stay in Singapore was not as successful as I had hoped. It took too long to get to the hotel, too long to find somewhere suitable for Jo to eat, too short a time in bed before my brain decided that it was time to get up, in London.

Next time I will come straight home to Puffin who is very pleased to see me and is constantly testing my ability to open the door, close the door, open the door, close the door. . . .

(Thanks to Cherie for looking after her so well and for this photo)

St Pauls

Yesterday was a lovely sunny day (on and off) so the office workers took their lunch to the gardens around St Pauls cathedral and lazed around on the grass.

The entry fee is 14.5 pounds so I declined to see yet another church. The little church behind Stitalfields markets were enough.

Epping forest

The trip across the country by bus from Coventry to Stanstead was much more interesting than yesterday's. The countryside gently rolls and the bus took more secondary roads past farms and villages. Plus the weather was warmer and there was no rain.

Ro picked us up for the half hour drive to Pat and Indra's which was very nice of her. They have all gone off to Tamra's junior school concert. Tamra has a solo to perform. Jo went to bed shortly after we arrived and is still sound asleep. His "cold" seems better but two nights sitting up have exhausted him.

Indra and I went for a short walk in Epping Forest which is looking green but is very dry underfoot. What was mud is now rock hard. Here they have perfected drainage of rainfall and when no rain falls then everything dries out very quickly.

Coventry

I couldn't get a connection last night to blog. Sorry to be late.

Yesterday we went to see Ian Hall's new warehouse after a stroll through the Botanic Gardens and their birds in cages.This heron was a wild one and a bit odd to be standing on a pole out of the pond.

Ian runs the Spar warehouse which supplies all the small Spar grocery stores from the middle of England to the Scottish border plus some army stores in Germany. As you can imagine it is an enormous task. Everything is done by wireless messages to units on the belts of forklift drivers who then deliver the goods to the trucks that set off every morning full and come back empty in the afternoon.

Ian is rightly chuffed about the new facility and how well the changeover went from the old site. (His son was in charge of the IT part of it.) In celebration we went out to Pizza Express, the poshest restaurant in Southport while John was off at his Rotary meeting.
This morning he took off very early for his three day bike ride over the Pennines in the cold, windy rain. It will be pretty miserable out there but they are staying at pubs overnight so they will have an opportunity to warm up. Because it is for charity they won't give up after the first day.

We met the grandkids, Eve and Sam before catching the bus to Coventry at 10am. The countryside is green, hedgy and fairly flat. Not very interesting as we moved from one motorway to the next. But we got here on time and the hotel is a block from the bus which is a block from the cathedral. Jo just managed to stagger around the cathedral before falling into bed to nurse his cold.

Southport

We caught an early plane to Manchester and John picked us up to drive us home to Southport. After a delicious pizza lunch Jo realised that his USB stick was missing. He needs it to give prestentations to the Dept of Health and IMU in Kuala Lumpar. Frantic emails were sent to Denmark and to Australia. But later John had to take his bike to a friend's house because he is going on a charity bike ride on Wednesday. After getting the bike out of his boot he discoverd the USB stick and became the hero of the day.

So Jo is happy and I am happy because there is a resident cat here. He is a one eyed, champagne Burmese called Jasper. Despite all my overtures of friendship, he perfers Jo.

Lazy days in Denmark

We are having a lovely time eating, reading, chatting and strolling through the spring here in Denmark.

The most energetic thing we have done today is to watch some tennis in Lizzi and Erik's tennis club. It doesn't get dark until after 10pm and is light again at 4am and it is still a month until the shortest night. The big black cloud dropped rain and hail but only for 2 minutes.

Yesterday we drove to their son's summer house by the sea (not the one in the photo but nearby.) Behind us came a half hour long line of vintage US cars belching oil into the pristine atmosphere.

Copenhagen

We said goodbye to Madrid this morning and the view from our hotel balconly:

The flight to Copenhagen was uneventful. It was wonderful to be picked up at the airport by Erik and driven across town to their house in beautiful Vaelose. We went for a stroll through the woods nearby to enjoy the beech trees which have at last come into leaf after a long, cold winter.

A drama was played out before our eyes. The local authorities have provided a duck house in the middle of a pond in the forest. But the baby duckling couldn't get back onto the platform. Will it's mother be able to help it up?

Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

Fi and Jim wanted to do something before getting on their plane to Paris this afternoon so we went to this museum not knowing what to expect. It is across the road from the Prado so we had seen the signs for it's Heroine exhibition yesterday.

What a fabulour treat it was! The Heroine exhibition was great. It was spread over two museums so I went to see the rest of the show after we delivered Fi and Jim to the Metro to the airport. I just had to see the Frida Kalho portrait featured on the advertising. It is a great one featuring a very mean looking black cat behind her left shoulder.

The T-B museum has two parts: his and hers. He was a German baron whose grandfather started collecting and he and his father continued obsessively. She was married to a film star who died and later, in the 1980's, married the baron who gave her lots of his art works and infected her with the collection bug. Their collections run parallel but hers, being later consists of peripheral artists whose works fill in the gaps and gives artists who don't have big names a chance to strut their stuff: often just as good as the big name artists' work.

I recommend putting aside a whole day to enjoy it.

Tomorrow we leave Spain to start our visits to friends in Denmark and UK. It has been a great holiday here and in Portugal.

Prado

We had the luxury of being able to spend the whole day in the Prado Museum which was established around 1818, very early for an art museum. The contents came from the royal collection so there are lots of portraits of royalty. What an ugly lot they were too. It is not surprizing that they died out. The inbreeding is visible. But they did like their dogs. I only spotted two paintings of cats in the entire museum although there may have been some in the H. Boschs but there was a crowd in front of all of them.

No photos allowed inside. I longed to take one of a painting by Velasquez in 1657 of women spinning but luckily there was a post card instead. I took one of us in front of the statue of Goya to mark the occasion.

Afterwards we wandered home to our comfortable hotel for a rest before our last dinner together.

to Madrid

No scenic photos today because we were travelling so fast on the bus to Madrid that I couldn't get a good shot. The countryside is looking wonderful. In places there are whole paddocks of red poppies or blue flowers the colour of lobelia. The grass is green and the olive trees in flower. All the farms look freshly whitewashed.

The highways are pretty slick although work seems to have stopped on some of the newer bits. It is interesting to speculate that if the price of petrol takes ownership of cars out of most people's reach, there will be empty superhighways streaking across Europe.

In Aldalusia there were no signs of any financial crisis.

Just one photo of our final hotel check in.

Ronda

We are back in Ronda after 6 or so years. There are more tourists than last time which is a pattern we have noticed all over Spain. Plus some groups are following us around! We recognise a German and a French group.

But the place is as lovely as ever and the bull ring is as beautifully kept. There are bull fights scheduled for this weekend. Thank goodness we will be out of the country by then or Jim would be tempted. We saw some horses being trained in the horse school at the bull ring. And later a horse came to the place we were having a cup of tea. His rider got a beer and he stood still.

The weather was windy but gorgeous. And the gorge is still a real challenge for those of us with fear of heights. My tummy did more mileage today than my feet did today.

Alhambra

It was a perfect day today: not too hot, clear blue sky, the Alhambra to visit. It would have been hard to take a bad photo so I took way too many. I am too tired after all our walking to upload them all so will give a very brief sample before falling into bed.

I was disappointed that the orange trees in Seville had finished blooming. But at the Alhambra today they were in sweet bloom as were the roses which were everywhere and full of blooms and scent. We had lots of time to enjoy the gardens before going into the buildings.

Charles V palace is just as ugly from the outside as ever but the inside is pleasing. They were showing an Escher exhibition with animation and a lot of original lithographs because he was fascinated by the tile patterns here. No photos allowed.

Heaps of photos were being taken in the Nasarid Palaces which are a magnificent as ever although with too many tourists. They do restrict the number of visitors and we were lucky to get a booking for 5:30pm on Sunday afternoon. If you have been thinking of coming to Granada, do it soon before it gets overrun with tourists.

Because the lion pool is being restored I took a photo of a nearby kitten instead.

Shopping

We are saving ourselves for a big day tomorrow at the Alambra. So today we started late and wandered through town from church to church through shopping areas of varying intensity. Saturday seems to be party day here in Granada. As in Portugal, the clothes and shoe shops for children are wonderful. The clothes are so well made, stylish and expensive that it is a good thing that children are in the minority. Otherwise grandmothers and aunts would be impoverished by the time the kids grow up.

Then you have all the adult shops. There are endless shoe shops and shops selling the most extraordinary dresses: some are flamenco dresses with polka dots, others are in the same flamboyant style but in silk, satin and chiffon.


Even the men have lovely clothes to choose from. But we have noticed that there is a severe lack of hairdressers even though everybody is very well coiffed.

In the streets today, were groups of girls obviously enjoying hens partys and groups of boys having bucks parties at the same time. There were also girls in long, white, organdie dresses having first communion parties at our hotel. Boys get to wear sailor suits for the same event. All party, party, party.

After heavy rain in the morning, the sun was glowing in the late afternoon, so everybody else came out to enjoy it.

Moving to Granada

Today was spent travelling by bus to Granada, settling into a new hotel and finding our bearings. The countryside showed signs of recent flooding. The olive trees relentlessly march over hill and dale. It is not surprising that Spain has such a lot of olive oil.

We did visit the cathedral which is grey and overdecorated on the outside.

On the inside it is like being in a gigantic wedding cake. Not much spirituality apparant or any sign of the mosque or temple that must have been previously on the site.

Here is a church that has been obviously converted from a mosque. It is at the foot of the Alhambra hill. See the baroque entry pasted over the moorish keyhole arch.

Medina Azahara

Today we travelled by bus 6k out of Cordoba to visit the place where the caliph built himself a new town in 965-70. He spared no expense but the town didn't last more than 70 years because of disputes about who should be the caliph. It was then knocked down and used as a quarry for building materials for centuries. In the 1930s a major archeological effort was put into restoring the site.

When we visited last (7 or so years ago) we caught a local bus and had the site to ourselves. There was a bit of explantion in the palace but the rest was open to be wandered around. Today we were delivered to a brand new museum (opened by the queen in 2009), shown an animated reconstruction of the way it was back then which looked very like an internet game, allowed to go through the museum and view its storage areas from above then put on a bus to the site. There we didn't see as much as we did before because part if it is being restored.

The museum was good but their labels in English were ocassionally bad. Not as painful as the booklet we were given on the bus but nonetheless, most unprofessional.

We followed the patio walk after our siesta back in Cordoba. It was fun to wander, with a purpose, around areas that we had not yet explored and to be able to poke our noses into real peoples houses at least as far as the central courtyard festooned with potted flowers.

Our favourite thing in Cordoba tonight: tapas.

Especially:

Chick peas and spinach (and a little garlic)

Asparagus (a bit pickled), egg, potatoes and ham

Pisto -- a kind of ratatouille but with less tomato and the veges chopped up small

Fava beans, baby ones any way

Orange and salted cod (soaked) salad with a little chopped onion and olive oil. Sounds suspicious but tastes great.

Cordoba day 2

How lovely it was to revisit the Mesquita. The first time is overwhelming but the second time is a joy. It is impossible to photograph, of course. And there were way too many tourists milling around with their mouths open and their guides squawking. We have seen several groups (predominantly Japanese) who have ear plugs and their guide can talk in a normal tone. Even the German group we saw with earplugs was quiet and well behaved. The vast majority of tourists here are Spanish or French speaking. They are wise enough to get here before the heat and the US tourists.

We visited the Alcazar of the Christian Kings in daylight to see the flowers. The Son and Lumiere that we went to last night was mostly son and waterworks. They have fountains in long pools that play with coloured light to music. It was very lovely. And interesting to see that they only had red, green and blue lightglobes with which to make lots of colours. (The purple wasn't very strong but the rest were lovely.)

We visited the Synagogue . . . the last remaining one in Cordoba. The plasterwork has survived very well and, as you can see the only way you know it is Jewish is the hebrew rather than Arabic inscriptions.