Just a quick note, since the spacebar on this keyboard is about as responsive as a tapas bartender when you want your bill. We’ve wandered through the 3rd grandest palace in Europe, and our summary is that the royals had absolutely no ability to put color schemes together. Bright yellow and red curtains, paired with mauve painted ceilings, over marble brown, beige and maroon flooring. Throw in a few ornate pieces of furniture and clocks that don’t match, and you get the thought “Wow! Were the royals color blind, or too inbred to retain any aesthetics?!” The palace was grand in a huge architectural sense, the Middle East peace treaty from 1991 and the joining of the EU in the 1980’s was signed here, and they did have very expensive historical pieces of furniture, table settings and musical instruments… but, somehow it was a relief to get back outside and away from the rocco-maniac clashing interiors. Yeech.
Today we hit the Museum of Americas and saw an odd layout of Mayan and Inca artifacts. The museum was newly redesigned and for some weird reason they believed organizing the pieces due to religion, culture, marriage and some other abstract nonsense was a good idea. This means we just viewed in the most confusing manner possible a mix of pieces from Venezuela, Columbia, Peru, Costa Rica, Pacific Northwest, Arizona and Mexico under each of the pretold headings throughly mixed across mish-mash of centuries. It sort of was like a pop quiz when you walked up to a display: 1) Can you identify the culture? 2) Is it an AD or BC piece? 3) Why do you think it belongs in the ‘muerto’ case, since there is no placard explaining such?
The temperature is a toasty 98 degrees today, so we headed over to a second museum, an Academy of Art to hang out in the air conditioning. They had a number of paintings and statues that were fascinating. I particularly liked a painting of lemons in the 16th century that looked like a photograph when you stood 10 feet back from it. Just think… to make a study of lemons for the length of time that it must have taken to paint that picture. That guy must have been a world class meditation expert, and a had a fine appreciation of fruit. I was very impressed. Now, Goya on the otherhand, also had a number of paintings in the museum. His claim to fame is being a court hired portrait artist. His other claim is that he was able to portray the patriarchy in quite an unflattering way and still get commissions from the court. They would fit well in the palace we saw yesterday, though.
Derrell managed to get too much smoke from too many Spaniards during the late cafe hours and turned it into a cold. He has a nice long rant about too much smoking in Spain. It includes handing out free packs of cigarettes at the bars by the equivalent of the Budweiser girls. And a nice rant including the habit of lighting up while waiting for your food, including the finale of cigarettes at the end of your meal.. all expressly exhaled in his direction. It isn’t good to have smoke allergies in Spain.
All is good otherwise, we landed a good room at the Hotel Regente. The food is taking some effort to avoid the tourist traps. Although a highlight (which also made us swear off meat for a bit) was a tapas bar called the Museum of Jamon, sausages abound here.. and the chorizo grilled sandwich is fantasitic and way too rich… good, but one bite over the sausage line. It’s back to some low fat vegetarian fare for a few days.
