Bike woes

I ran Sunday morning (January 22), my now usual route down to Turia park and back. It was cool again, about 11C, but sunny and still. Karen worked on her art on and off through the morning, and we had our usual mid-afternoon main meal.

Later in the afternoon, we had intended to go to IVAM, the modern art museum. We have three Sundays (the day when entry at IVAM is free) before we leave and there are still three (or four?) exhibits we haven’t seen yet. My plan had been to do one exhibit per Sunday throughout our stay here.

The museum is a 20-minutes-or-so bike ride away. But we had Valenbisi woes again. First of all, there weren’t many bikes in the neighbourhood. The nearest stations were reporting one or none. We had to walk over to a station on Calle de Peris y Valero, five or six blocks away. Karen tried to log in with her card, but was told her account was blocked because there had been too many failed attempts to log in. She insists she only flubbed entering the PIN once, but it wouldn’t let her in. On the off-chance it was a malfunction at that station we walked to the next nearest and tried there: same message. We would have to reset her PIN by logging into her account in a web browser.

I doubted Karen was up for the 40-minute walk to IVAM (and 40 minutes back) - and I wasn’t really up for it myself - so suggested we change our plan and go to MuVIM instead. It's much nearer, just on the edge of the historic city centre - and also free on Sunday. So that’s what we did.

MuVIM is an interesting, probably unique, institution. The acronym stands for (when translated to English) the Valencian Museum of the Enlightenment and Modernity. But in Spanish, it’s called El Museo Valenciano de la Ilustración y de la Modernidad. “Ilustración” means both illustration and enlightenment in Spanish. I’m still not clear on the etymological connection between those two concepts, but the museum definitely has as part of its brief exploring illustration and design as art. The exhibits we saw there yesterday were example. 

But at the same time, the entire third level of the museum is given over to an elaborate multi-room permanent exhibition about the history of…the Age of Enlightenment. It features artefacts, reproductions, animatronic tableaus and sometimes live costumed actors. You walk through and listen to pre-recorded commentary that automatically plays from loudspeakers when you enter a room. It’s quite wild. Sort of a Disneyland attraction for history nerds. We did it the first year we stayed in Valencia.

Yesterday, we looked at four exhibits. The big one, the one they’re promoting most, is called Design + Health. The curatorial notes, which were not available in English and which I was only able to translate after we got home, begin, “Design by itself can't cure anything, but neither can a vaccine if we don't have a syringe to inject it with. Designing it is part of the solution, it is not an added value, it is essential in the development of any innovation, for the social good.” 

The displays, in separate little pods devoted to different areas of healthcare, include design drawings, prototypes and products. Without English labelling, they didn’t mean a lot to us. And we lacked the energy or, to be honest, the motivation to puzzle out the Spanish. Some looked mildly interesting, others not so much.

The exhibit also included these two walls of small posters. The one, logically enough, is about Covid. I don’t understand how the other, seemingly posters protesting the Russian invasion of Ukraine, fit with the theme. But never mind. And I’m not sure if the posters were created especially for this exhibit by one person or were produced independently. They all appear to be in a similar style and format. Oddly, many, or most, are in English.

Another exhibit, one of the permanent displays, is about an 18th century priest who became obsessed with mapping Valencia. It includes reproductions of his and other early maps, and a large scale model of the city based on his map. The commentary, thankfully, was in English as well as the usual Valenciano and Spanish. The model includes what the commentary claims is every building pictured in the original map, hand carved by accredited miniaturists. (How do you get that kind of accreditation, I wonder?)

Another small exhibit, not even mentioned at the museum’s website for some reason,  is about the local sculptor Joan Martí who was responsible for the four “guardians,” the four crouching winged statues - part-human, part-bird, part-wildcat - that stand at each end of the Bridge of the Realm near the City of Arts and Sciences. I’ve always loved those statues, which are often referred to as gargoyles but are meant to be forbidding only to enemies of the realm. I’ve often photographed them (and can’t promise I won’t again). This exhibit was about Martí’s creative process and included design drawings and models, many related to the guardians statues, but other work as well. 

Interestingly, I later read a 2014 article in El Mundo, interviewing the bridge’s architect, Salvador Monleón. He claims the guardians, in concept at least, were part of his original design for the bridge. Martí won a competition to execute that design. There is a whiff in this article of professional noses being out of joint. Martí, who died in 2004, seems to have gotten all the credit for creating these beloved statues, and Monleón seems to be trying to retake some of it. Or maybe I’m misunderstanding.

Architect's drawings for Pont de Regne, showing guardians

The final exhibit on the day’s agenda was another small one in an annex outside the main building. It featured work by Cuqui Guillén, a Valencian artist who figured prominently in something called “neokitsch” or “Valencian Pop,” an art movement of the 1990s. The works on show are mostly large oil paintings in a…well, a kind of kitschy style, but oddly interesting. The exhibit is titled A Subversive Temptation. The curator argues that although the paintings are of stereotyped, seemingly exploitive images of women, the way they’re done subverts this and they actually carry a strong feminist message. I could sort of see what she meant. 

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On Monday, I did a fast walk in the morning - the usual route through Central Park, over the pedestrian rail overpass, up to Bailen Metro stop and through the tunnel back to Ruzafa. Most of the rest of the day was given over to reading, puzzling, blogging, painting (Karen). 

Karen was intrigued by my idea of viewing the lights in the city so we held off going out until almost six. We wandered through the centre and over into the old city. We didn’t hit on any really interesting streets, though, and didn’t get as far as Carmen, where things are a little more lively and interesting. We came back by the cathedral and city hall, where there were lots of lights. I don’t think Karen was impressed with my route. 

Plaza de Rodrigo Botet

But I still managed to get a couple of shots I like. It’s astonishing what modern digital SLRs can do in low light. The anti-shake, or image stabilization technology allows me to shoot handheld at very slow shutter speeds - as slow as an eighth of a second (yes, that’s slow) - and still get acceptably sharp images. The rule of thumb in pre-digital days was that you couldn’t shoot handheld at shutter speeds slower than a 60th of a second.

And shooting at ISO 800 - which is about twice as high a light sensitivity as ASA400 film - gives me images that are a little bit grainy/noisy, but I can mitigate that with a Photoshop plugin I have. Shooting on ASA400 film produced much grainier images, and there was nothing much you could do to make them appear less grainy.

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This morning (Tuesday), I ran. I tried a new route, similar to one I walked last week. I must have taken a wrong turn at some point - or didn’t turn when I should have - and ended up at the Turia, but quite a bit further from home, further south, than I’d intended. I thought, that’s fine, I’ll ride back. But when I got to the first Valenbisi station and tried to borrow a bike, the app told me I didn’t have any Internet connectivity. 

This is the third time this has happened now. Three UK partners with Movistar in Spain, which is a big multinational provider. I thought European mobile services were super reliable, but apparently not. The upshot was, I had to walk back. Even walking fast, I was cold. It was mostly in the shade and I was quite sweaty from the run. Lesson learned. I’ll get my Metro card set up to use with Valenbisi as a backup.

That's all for now. Time to make dinner...