Monday, March 31, 2008
Monday, March 24, 2008
Carousing Constantinople
After having a Turkish coffee outside of Sophia to absorb what we'd just seen, we headed off to the Grand Bazaar. Market, jewelry, bags, haggling....and over four square kilometres of it? I was in heaven. We stopped in the middle of the afternoon to fortify ourselves with some kebaps and then continued shopping. (And went back the next day as well.) Best line shouted at us from a stall: "Hey, Spice Girls! I have carpet for your dowry right here!"
Our last day in Istanbul, we walked through the Spice Bazaar (henna!), buying some nuts and tea along the way, before having lunch on the Galata Bridge linking the continents of Europe and Asia. Below is a photograph of Golden Horn, taken from the bridge.
Last highlight: an early evening in a traditional Hamam. Think being naked and sweating it out on a large marble slab plus a very large and naked Turkish woman with a loofah mitt and bucket of water. Yowza!
Sunday, March 16, 2008
First Look at Istanbul
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Teatre-Museu Dalí
The museum is in Dali's hometown and is constructed around the theatre that he attended as a child, which is also the same building he held his very first exhibition in. It was largely destroyed during the Spanish Civil War, but in 1960, Dali and the mayor of Figueres got together and decided to make it a museum in dedication to the town's most famous son. It's typical egocentric Dali, I suppose, but standing there in this gorgeous building, it was obvious that so much thought went into how Dali wanted the theatre to be transformed and his work to be viewed. When you set aside the commercialism of Dali's work, I think that he's actually a difficult artist to fully appreciate. The photograph below is of the central room of the building, where the stage was in the original theatre. Consider the detail about it as dictated by the book about Teatre-Museu Dalí:
"Overlooking the stage, the massive backdrop produced in oil that Dali designed for the ballet Labyrinth, based on the myth of Theseus and Ariadne, which premiered in the Metropolitan Opera House in New York on the 8th of October 1941. This space reveals the most scenographic aspect of Dali: with the enormous composition, where a bust appears with an opening in the breast, from behind which emerges a phantasmagoric landscape with Böcklinian cypress trees from The Isle of the Dead. The rocks, sinking into the sea, are a reference to the scenery of Cap de Creus, which the artist repeatedly turned to in his work. In front, on the stage itself, is an extremely discretely placed tombstone, reminding us that this is where the artist is buried, in the radial centre of his own Theatre-Museum." There are a couple of other photographs of the museum in my Barcelona Flickr set.
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Gaudied Out in Barcelona
I was remarking to a friend who asked after my trip that, like Paris, it seems that Barcelona is the kind of city you have to visit a half dozen times to really experience the true feel of it. And I was slitghly surprised that it didn't seem quite as Spanish to me as did Bilbao or Madrid. Thus, I'm already looking forward to my next visit back: photographs here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)