Kristian and Frances

Young people generally have too much to say and nothing worthwhile hearing. Which is why I´m up at 12:39am writing this, the young people at this hostel are all up and being loud, obnoxious and generally self-important. There´s few things more difficult to fall asleep to than the sound of a horde of American and Eastern European males trying to impress a few girls, and each other. This hostel makes it worse because it´s one giant echo-chamber with zero sound proofing. So I can heard every door unlocking and creaking open on every level.

But enough about that. Here´s some photos from Granada.

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This is the view Frances and I had from the top of our hostel in Granada. Every night the skies would fill with circling and diving and spiralling flocks of sparrows. or were they swallows. one of the two. On the night this photo was taken I sat up on the rooftop for a few hours listening to musics by myself. Another night Frances and I took up a bottle of wine and ate chocolate and listened to music on our little speakers.

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This is a view of the old town part of Granada, though you can see some of the urban sprawl in the distance. The photo is taken from the top of The Alhambra, which as I mentioned in a previous post, is an ancient Islamic fortress, town and mosque set atop a hill overlooking the city proper. It is indeed very impressive, very beautiful.

The next couple of photos are from the Generalife, which is part of the Alhambra complex, though not within the moated, walled section. It´s a palace and garden of fountains, hedges, ponds and beautiful trees.

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Looking from the Generalife towards the city of Granada below, with part of the Alhambra proper on the left.

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Looking from the Generalife across the lower hedge gardens towards the Alhambra palace (well, one of the palaces).

I am made uneasy by Gaudi and it´s mostly not an aesthetic uneasiness, although the times when I am aesthetically impressed by Gaudi are also kind of few, with the exception of La Sagrada Familia. People always tell me how great Gaudi is, but how great can he be, as an ARCHITECT, if none of his creations (that I have seen) are actually in use, or even POTENTIALLY USEFUL for the people of Barcelona. People seem to like him, and other people seem to think his buildings, although not quite beautiful, are artistic, maybe, or important, perhaps, because part of the modernist movement-style. To me they mostly just seem badly designed and impractical, and why should I care about a guy who made buildings for rich people and organised religion? Park Guell, which we visited today, was okay aesthetically, in a sort of adventure playground kind of way, but Gaudi had designed all of these spectacular pathways that didn´t at all follow people´s desirelines, and hence nobody was actually using AS PATHWAYS. Tourists obviously find a use for Park Guell, but it´s not the kind of park (like the ones all over Paris for instance) that people actually go to sit and be. There are too many tourists to start with, but also it is not located anywhere most people (I would reckon) would want to go, and all the places to potentially sit and be are a good walk from the entrance. e.g. we ate our lunch soon after arriving and had it sitting on v. uncomfortable ¨mosaiced rocks¨. Some picnic. Overall, the place was kitsch.

Which brings me to La Sagrada Familia, which, well beyond kitsch, is like a farcical joke played on Spain by modernism via the old church. It's beautiful in its execution, but the whole concept of building a cathedral of this scale, a physical monument to religious worship, NOW, I find quite repellent. I can go to the Cathedral of Notre Dame and appreciate it physically with an awareness of feudalism and societies that were structured in ways that allowed buildings like these to be created in spite of widespread poverty, possibly over centuries. But then I am supposed to go and see a building being made now, and I am supposed to admire the ambitiousness of the project and its religious symbolism and its inspiration by natural forms, and I can take some nice photos and go away and not think about where it is coming from.

But I want to know, what were his politics, what are the politics? Has Gaudi become a symbol of nationalist pride or just a historical symbol of international art nouveau style? WAS HE SERIOUS? Will La Sagrada Familia ever be used as a cathedral? Should it be? All things the tri lingual museums don´t bother to explain. Art/architecture is never without politics here (if not everywhere) and I feel it should be discussed. In the civil war La Sagrada Familia was vandalised - by who and why?

I may be being unfair, I do recognise Gaudi´s approach to architecture is more artistic, more creative, and less functional than most architects, but I still think even if architecture is beautiful it should also be functional, and by that I do mean as more than just a tourist attraction. And I do think there are other architects, such as Hundertwasser, who achieve this with greater success than Gaudi.

Some pretty photographs, augmented by construction dust, are soon to follow.

Hi All,

We´re in Barcelona now, both of us are a little tired and a little disappointed with this city. So before I whine about that, here´s some photos of places we loved! Oh, none of these photo´s have had the chance to be corrected with respect to colour, lighting etc so they aren´t the best quality.

Click here for Full Size A view of the Cathedral/Mezquita tower from the Jewish Quarter in old town Cordoba.

Click here for Full Size The inside of the Mezquita. What is the Mezquita? Look it up! Basically it´s a temple built in the late 700´s first by Moorish/Islamic peoples and later by Catholics. It retains styles from both religions, though the Islamic aesthetic is far superior to the essentially grotesque and decadant catholic art and architecture. The above photo shows some of the eight hundred or so arches which decorate the main hall of the temple.

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Another internal of the Mezquita. It´s all arches! I really appreciate the Islamic attempts at depicting the divine without using graven images... It´s worth noting here that it was Islamic mathematicians who discovered the secret to infinite geometric patterns, the west didn´t figure it out until the last century. While the West seemed to shy away from The Infinite in mathematics and philosophy for a long time, the Islamic tradition embraced it as the ultimate abstraction of God. Or something like that. Compare with...

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The Catholic influence is clear here, the emphasis is of course on Gold and Wealth as the extension of God. While the workmanship here is in part aesthetically pleasing, it is mostly grotesque. Elsewhere the Catholic art is little short of camp. The idea of a treasury, with enormous gold sculptures is again obviously Catholic in origin. The Mezquita has it a treasury wing, a photo or two of which I might upload sometime later. Uploading is a slow and painful process!

The mascots on the walls of the Alcazar (Islamic/Moorish gardens, the Alcazar is not a singular thing but apparently just the term used for a garden oasis, as other Islamic sites have their own Alcazar)

The following images are from the Alcazar in Cordoba.

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I can´t write much because we have to be back at our hostal in fifteen minutes to get ready to leave Granada and fly to Barcelona. Last time I wrote we were in Cordoba about to go and see the Mezquita which is absolutely mesmerising, the architecture is like living Escher. I have many more things to say about it but I don´t have time. After spending many hours there (and the Alcazaba) we left the next day on a bus for Granada. Granada has been very kind to us, although it´s a much grittier and slightly more epic city than Cordoba, covered in graffiti and very political. We keep hearing claims that there´s only 200,000 people living here, but it has the feel of a million plus city, and in fact I find that very hard to believe. The day after arriving we queued for four hours to get tickets to see the Alhambra. This was mostly a bad thing except that we met a Czech girl named Teresa who was very friendly and excited for us (she started talking to us because K was reading my copy of ¨Bringing Up Girls in Bohemia¨. The funny thing about all this was that after queueing for four hours Mum and I almost didn´t get to see the Nasrid Palaces (the Alhambra´s crowning glory) because you only get a half hour time window to get in, and it was very badly signposted. We originally thought another castle was it and when we finally realised our half hour time period was over. So then we had to feign, well actually not feign at all, the stupid and confused tourist syndrome. It was well worth the adrenalin rush. I will post about 1000 pictures when I get the chance.

The last two days we have been driving around Andalusia in a rented Fiat. The first day we went to cave country north east of Granada, and yesterday we went to Las Alpujarras, all little towns in the skirt of the Sierra Nevada. It has been spectacular, though cold. My favourite thing about Granada is the roof on top of our hostal, from which we can see the swallows circling over the rooftops of Granada with the Sierra Nevada shimmering behind.

Dear Friends,

The moment I got onto the plane from Paris to Madrid, I knew Spain was going to be different. Firstly, the people are all beautiful here. While France has this mythology of being a place of beautiful and sophisticated people, I found it to be untrue. People dressed down and daudy in Paris, except for one or two.

In Spain, so far everyone dresses with style. The young people are confident, attractive and full of energy. The old people all seem quite the opposite! It seems there are no young and uglies here.

My experience of Madrid consisted of a air terminal, a faux up-market hotel and many miles of underground metro. I don´t know if it was just the part we were in or not, but the whole place seemed fresh and clean.

We´re in Cordoba now, after a high speed train ride from Madrid. Cordoba is wonderful, it is swamped with tourists, mainly Spanish, but tourists nonetheless. Despite this it is wonderful. The old town is like nothing I could imagine!

And everything is so cheap, unlike in Paris where we were over budget every day, in Cordoba we´ve balanced the budget in one day. 9 Euros purchased us a veritable feast for dinner, with wine and chocolate and breakfast for the next day.

Umm, have to cut this short!

Bye!