Sunny weekend

I ran Saturday morning (Jan 14) - same route as last time, 4 clicks or so. I’d intended to go further but didn’t have the energy; not enough sleep last night.

We did a mid-size shop at Consum in the late morning. There’s no need to do massive shops when the place is right across the street.

We had planned to go to Bombas Gens, a foundation-run art venue, today, but decided to postpone. This being Saturday, I feared it would be crowded. I think if we wait until Wednesday or Thursday when it’s open again, we’ll pretty much have the place to ourselves, as we have on occasion in years past. Plus, we’ll probably want to go to IVAM tomorrow for the free Sunday entry (being cheap, as we are), and two days in a row of art viewing seems a little much. We’ll probably cycle over to the Turia park instead and sit in the sun somewhere and read.

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Which, in fact, is what we did. Except we left it a little late, and didn’t get down there until after 4. We found a bench in the sun right away, but it was by a dog park and smelled of caca. So we wandered down the park toward the centre, past the Palau de Musica,  and went up the ramp at the pedestrian Pont de Mar bridge. We sat for 20 minutes on one of the stone benches in the middle of the bridge, enjoying the last of the sun before it went behind the buildings. I took a few pictures, then we walked up Calle de Sorni to Calle de Colon. 

Views from Pont de Mar

There are a lot of posh shops along Sorni, including one shoe shop that stocks Camper products. Their post-Christmas sale appears to be better than the Camper store’s, so I’ll have to go back when they’re open. Why were they closed on a Saturday at 5 o’clock anyway!?

We turned up Colon toward home, walking straight into the low afternoon sun. The street was jammed with shoppers, haloed in back light, casting long shadows.

After we got home, I decided I needed a sweet for my evening snack and went back out. My favourite bakery, Le Roi, just down the street, was closed, so I walked back out to the Gran Via to the  Horno De Los Borrachos - the Bakery of the Drunkards - another favourite. I asked the teenaged server if she had “algo con frutas” - something with fruit. “Que?” she said, rudely. (“What?”) I enunciated more clearly. “Ah, no,” she said dismissively. “Chocolate, crema?” “No, gracias.” I walked two doors down to a cafe on the corner, was waited on by a friendly middle-aged Chinese woman, found an apple coffee cake in their display case and bought it. It was cheap, and pretty good too. Enough with drunken bakers!

The setting sun gilding the apartment buildings on my walk home was lovely. It's the magic hour for photography.

View from our front window

View from the back window

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Woke up to this view out my bedroom window. "Red sky in morning," they say, "sailor take warning," but the weather today (Sunday) is supposed to be fine - 19C, sun and cloud.

A little later in the morning, I caught this rather bohemian-looking dude out on his balcony across the street having a smoke.

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We went out a little after 11 to go to IVAM, the modern art museum. The plan was to ride bikes over there and then walk back afterwards through Carmen and the city centre. But when we got outside, Karen decided it was still too cool for cycling. It was cooler than it has been - about 14 or 15C when we went out - and there was a cool breeze blowing.

We walked through City Hall square. Just beyond it, we could see barriers set up to block traffic and police were milling about. Something was happening. Then we could hear what sounded like a marching band. We kept walking in the direction the sound was coming from - towards the cathedral - and came to a place were people were lining the barriers to watch whatever was coming. 

It turned out to be one of those stupid community drum bands banging away and swaying slowly up the street in formation. 

Valencianos, of course, love noise, and crowds. We’ve already heard our first burst of mascletas, the daytime noise fireworks that are a big feature of the end-of-winter Fallas festival in March. We also saw ladies in full Fallas costume on the street in Ruzafa yesterday. So maybe this drum band was something to do with pre-Fallas celebrations. In any case, it’s a sign of how crazy the city is that they would pay for police overtime and block traffic, so a bunch of locals pounding on drums could march through the centre of the city.

We went by the Sunday flea market in front of La Lonja, then into Carmen. We followed a slightly different route than our stroll around the bario the other day, and spotted a couple of new bits of street art. We came out on the ring road about a half a kilometre from the museum and walked around to it, past more street art. It’s a bit of a derelict block, so lots of hoardings and lots of bright paintings. The one with the little cat head among the crude tagging is actually a mosaic, something we’ve never seen before. Hard to imagine it will survive for very long.

Our plan is to knock off one of the current IVAM exhibits each free Sunday visit during our time here. Today, we chose a show by Teresa Lanceta, a Barcelona-based fabric artist. Like the woman whose art we looked at a week ago, Lanceta has been at it for a very long time, since the 1970s, and this is a retrospective. She does traditional tapestry-style weaving, but abstracts. Or she did in years past. Her more recent pieces, which we preferred, are painted-and- stitched fabric hangings in bold colours and patterns. 

These are earlier tapestry weavings

Karen quite liked them - we both did.  I made the point that the “content” of the work was not so different from that of Mark Rothko’s monumental paintings - which I love, but about which she is very scathing. They’re basically about juxtaposing large blocks of colour. Karen wasn’t having any of that. 

These are the later pieces - title: Waiting For The Future

In years past, we’ve seen a few totally underwhelming, not-very-well-presented exhibits at this museum, but we’ve now seen two really first-rate ones in a row. We also noticed there is more and better-translated English, and less art school baffle-gab in the texts. All the interpretive material on the walls was in Spanish, Valenciano and English. I wonder if they’ve hired a new artistic director.

We got bikes right out in front of the museum and rode on the bike path around the ring road to the centre and then up Colon. By the time we got to the bull ring, Karen’s knees were starting to give out, so we got off and walked the rest of the way.

Later in the afternoon, after our late-lunch main meal, we walked over to Central Park and found a bench in the sun. We didn’t last long, though. The sun was in and out behind clouds and the cool breeze was still blowing. Karen was chilled, so we headed home. It’s a really lovely park, and on a sunnier, warmer day it’d be a great place to spend a quiet hour reading.

Zoom catch-up with Ms. Boyes in the early evening. She’s settled in her place in Nimes now. It’s not without problems, but she seems happy enough with it. Sounds like she and Trina had a good, if cool and wet, time in Paris.