On The Road: La Bisbal d’Empordà

What better way to spend Divendres Sant (Good Friday) than at a ceramics and crafts fair?  La Bisbal d’Empordà is a small town about 40 minutes away.  It is the capital of Catalan ceramics and today was the first of its annual two-day ceramics fair. 

Ceramics has been the primary economic activity in La Bisbal since the 18^th century.  Production is diversified and includes home furnishings such as sinks, building materials, housewares, and decorative items.  There isn’t a single producer; the area is full of workshops of all sizes and artisans who work in a wide variety of styles.  “Ceramica de La Bisbal” is an EU protected designation and is licensed only to those manufacturers and artisans who work in and around La Bisbal and who maintain the required standard of quality.  When I had my artisan shop in Tarragona, I carried ceramics from three of its workshops.

The ride there was pretty, the town is attractive, and the fair was enjoyable.  It has indeed been a good Friday.

 

 

No Fear

There’s a difference between overcoming fear and not having it in the first place.  I’m working on getting past mine so I can explore and enjoy the things available to me in the area where I live.  Driving was second nature to me until I came to Spain where I find the roads dangerously chaotic.  But taking the train isn’t always convenient, and the train doesn’t go to all the places I want to see.  What was I afraid of?

Besides being killed on the road by some speeding nincompoop, there was the more mundane problem of being able to read the road signs.  True, I managed to obtain a Spanish driver’s license.  But somehow, the signs as you enter the toll stations on the motorways are still a mystery to me.  What do you do if you’re first up in a lane where you must have a season pass?  Or if you have cash but there is no cash machine?  There used to be lanes manned by real people, but they seem to have disappeared. 

I finally decided to resolve this problem by finding an explanation of the signs (in English!) on the internet and using the lanes that accept credit cards, as most of them do.  In my research I discovered that the symbols for the season pass and the multiple-option lanes are identical except that one is enclosed in a circle and the other in a square.  No wonder I was confused.

This week, credit card in hand on a glorious spring day, I headed off for Collioure for their weekly market.  Market days in France are simply more aesthecially pleasing than the ones in Spain, even though the market is Collioure is small.  Nevertheless, you can find some yummy small goat cheese rounds, or unpasteurized camembert, or macarons, or an enticing array of breads, or soft nougat, or scented soaps.  And even paella.  And anyway, the grass is greener on the other side.

 

 

Threatened by Peaceful Demonstrations

At last year's Human Chain for the Right to Vote, held on 11 September 2013, 1.6 million people stood side by side, holding hands.  The chain ran 400 kilometers (250 miles), and covered the length of Catalunya from the French to the Valencian border.

The organizing of this event that included so many participants and so much territory was an amazing feat and much of it wasn't obvious.  Participants were asked to arrive early and wear yellow shirts or the yellow t-shirts designed especially for the occasion.  The official time of the Chain was 17:14, which corresponds to an important year in the history of Catalunya -- the year when it lost its independence!  A little before 17:14 everyone joined hands and we stayed joined for a while.  During that time, helicopters flew overhead to film us, and photographers on the ground moved down the line to photograph us.

Participants wore yellow or draped themselves
in Catalan and Indpendence flags

Eight hundred photographers along the 400 kilometers took more than 107,000 photos.  Now, after more than six months of work, all those thousands of photos have been combined into the Gigafoto.  You can scroll through it and see each of the 1.6 million people who covered over 400 kilometers.  In fact, you can find someone familiar in the section below.

The Assemblea Nacional Catalana (ANC) the grassroots organization that organized this event, has recently been accused by a far-right group of being terrorists.  This far-right group, that calls itself Manos Limpios (Clean Hands) has brought a complaint with the accusation to a Spanish court which is now investigating.  You can look at the Gigafoto for yourself and see if you think the demonstration looks in any way violent.  In fact, both this demonstration and the one organized the previoius year by the same ANC, when 1.5 million people gathered in Barcelona, had, in spite of the huge number of people who gathered, the peaceful spirit of celebration.

Here's a link to the Gigafoto.  If you have lots of time, you can scroll through the whole thing.  If you want to find me, click on Gigafoto, scroll down to the dropdown menu box and select section 674 (Figueres).  Scroll towards the left.  I'm near the Beep.

Gigafoto

On The Road with Friends: Besalú

Gracia and Miquel are Catalans but I met them in California before I moved here.  We’ve remained friends for the last 13 years since I’ve come to live in Catalunya and they continue to live in the Bay Area.  Although a relatively new friend, Gracia has been very supportive of my move to Catalunya and whatever project I've taken on.  When her mom was still alive, she would come to Catalunya often and we usually had the opportunity to meet up.  But it had been a while since our last visit, so it was with great pleasure that I went to pick up Gracia and Miquel at the AVE train station the other day and whisked them off for a visit to Besalú.

Besalú is a charming village that still retains much of its medieval architecture.  The most impressive of these buildings is the bridge that spans the Fluvià river, yet the feeling of stepping back in time embraces you everywhere.  But that is not to say that nothing modern has invaded.  American-style muffins – that is, very large muffins of various flavors – have become popular and Besalú has one bakery almost exclusively devoted to this delight.

Muffinville

But muffins aside, it’s the beautiful medieval bridge that keeps me coming back to visit.

See that white umbrella? That's where we had lunch.

Changes

Sometimes change is for the best.  Sometimes it isn’t.  And yet it is inevitable and is happening constantly, whether we like it or not.  Here are two examples where I like it.

First, my living room that I recently had painted.  Here you can see the old color and the new.  Going from wishy-washy to strong, I would say that the new is an improvement.  Well, of course I would. 

 

 

The second example concerns the cats more than it does me.  This change was not in their control.  Their old scratching post was great when I bought it, but after almost two years of scratching, the two cats had pretty much destroyed all four of the sisal-covered posts.  Not only had it provided many months of scratching joy, it also provided a nice perch to take in the view of the neighborhood, such as it is.   Both cats scratched their hearts out, but it was mainly Minnie who perched.

 

 

As successful as it was, it didn’t occur to me that I would have trouble replacing it.  But as it turned out, the manufacturer was no longer manufacturing it.  They had opted for other less effective and more expensive models.  In fact, everything in the shops I visited and the catalogues I looked at (here shopping is done mostly with catalogues), had either single posts (that tend to move or fall over when scratched with gusto), and perches that wouldn’t fit a standard grown cat.  Who designs these things?  I couldn’t find anything as good for any price.

So I resorted to Amazon UK and voila, found one a little different, but just about as good.  I’m happy that the living room now looks much better without the old eyesore.  Both cats started in scratching right away, but Felix won’t have anything to do with the perch which, in this configuration, is a hammock.  However, after a little coaxing, Minnie has taken to it heart and soul and will hardly sleep anywhere else.  Sometimes change is good, even if wasn't you who decided it.

 

 

Eternal Life in Girona

I recently saw a multiple-part BBC documentary on the art of ancient Egypt so with that fresh in my mind, I was interested to see the exhibit of ancient Egyptian funerary art, "The Secret of Eternal Life" currently on at the Caixa Forum in Girona.  Any excuse works since Girona is lovely and only a short train ride away, and a lovely train ride it is too.

The exhibit, from the Rijksmuseum Van Oudheden of Leiden, was good.  Not as grand as the King Tut exhibit of the 80s, of course, but I have my memories of that and, it is always interesting to see works of art in person.  And there’s something special about them when works are either (1) very famous and you’ve seen reproductions of them all your life or (2) the pieces are very very old.  The unfortunate thing is that all my photos of the exhibit were lousy, with some being only less blurry than others.   The good thing is that the ones I took from a moving train turned out decent.  Now I just have to figure how why that is. 

 

 

The Caixa Forum is owned by a
savings bank and run as a cultural
service to the public, free of charge