I've just come back from a few days up in the Alpujarras (see previous posts for photos of where I was) where the weather was summer, fall, winter and I was with my sister & we took some walks & found walnuts, almonds, inedible figs cuz they were on the ground & the same for the apples & pomegranates though they were all half eaten by birds & other animals, but the sky was wide & endless & amazing and we saw zillions of stars & drank coffee on a terrace across from an entire mountain range that appeared so close that you could've touched any of the weeds or bushes or patches of dirt and we had the sounds of a full loud stream right below our terrace.
But the week before that, I flew to Barcelona to meet my sister who flew in from NY and we spent nearly a week in Tapies/Gaudi heaven (at long last!),
me thoroughly overwhelmed by the combination of wanting to see so many places -- the Fundacion Tapies, Gaudi houses & parks & foundations and his broken tile & ceramic work, squiggliesh towers and seats and fountains -- and Barcelona, which compared to Granada, is a Big city, not hard to navigate once you get the hang of it, but Judi and I started our week there
first trying to find the place that I'd rented over the internet &
then waiting for the woman to come & give us the keys & show it to us -- it was supposed to be a "loft" apt. located "next to" Parc Guell ...
that turned out to be a sort of midlevel basement room, pipes running along the ceiling, walls & ceiling painted white and dark bubble gum pink, Ikea everything fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle -- I'm not sure I've ever seen such a tiny place with so much furniture, above Parc Guell, which meant about 30 minutes from the city center & Very Smelly, damp, humid & kind of toxic although we had the humidifier going 24 hours a day & upon entering the place we opened the front & back doors & kept them open.
Our "terrace" ... well, that's another story, but yeah, we were so far above Barcelona that we had an amazing view that cut between houses all the way down.
The good part was that the shower had endless hot water & came out strong & serious.
Our digs gradually became less important after days 1 & 2 when we spent Hours sort of crisscrossing the city in search of various neighborhoods or Gaudi works and actually felt relieved to get all the way the hell back up there to our tiny smelly apartment & rest our feet & legs.
We started the entire visit right by going to the Tapies Foundation -- a place I'd dreamed of visiting for years.
And now, in NO particular order I'm posting some of the more than 320 photos that I took while in Barcelona. Most of them, for the moment, are smashed tile & plate works:
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