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.