Advertisement
Photography lesson one
Is there anything in the photo that shouldn't be there? Hi there...
OK, so the whole point of this blog was to chart our travels through Southern Africa and beyond, but the thing is we haven't
quite left London yet.
So we'll just use our last couple of short breaks in Europe to practice using the site and to re-establish mailing lists etc...Recently we've both been a little bit complacent about the whole communication thing I am afraid. I'd like to blame it on our self-absorbing London lives, but there is no real excuse.
These first couple of entries will also give Katherine plenty of incentive to get to grips with her whopper digital SLR camera she's just bought because she now knows her pics will be on display for the world to see! It's a beast I tell you, with more functions than a Swiss army knife. The great thing is that her new camera means that I get to play with our old one. Although sadly I am told that a close eye will be kept on my efforts and that I am not allowed to fill our entries with silly photos (or be silly in Katherine's photos). So wrong to deny the use of a
god-given gift I say - the lawyer in me also notes that adding one or three of my selected shots to each entry would hardly be
filling them.
Barcelona
Anyway, travel blog Andrew so talk about travel. We've just come back from a great long weekend in Barcelona. Spain was one of the countries in Europe that we both enjoyed the most, so it was great to get the opportunity to have a final fling here before we leave on our travels proper.
We stayed in a budget place just east of the Placa de Catalunya. The room was tiny with ceilings about twice as high as it was wide, so it was bit like living in a milk carton, but it was a good base to head out from and do all the touristy kind of things.
We wandered up and down Las Ramblas. We checked out the Museu National d'Art de Catalunya which has a
fantastic collection of Romanesque church frescoes. I don't think collection is the right word - basically they have somehow taken the frescoes off their original walls and moved them into all these little replica churches. Seen a lot of galleries
and art in our culture-crawls around Europe but this was something special. We also wandered around the parks of Mont Juic and took the funicular, which is an intimidatingly high cable car made out scraps from old Batman movie sets, to the seaside area of Barceloneta.
We spent most of Sunday doing the obligatory Gaudi crawl, the highlight of which had to be the Sagrada Familia - the massive still under construction Gaudi designed cathedral (its been under construction for over a 120 years - I think it is fantastic that some people still think of projects beyond their own life-times). Apparently a lot of Gaudi’s inspiration came from trees, plants and seashells and the cathedral really does have a subtle organic feeling to it. Also liked how it was kind of a ruin in reverse - a big stone structure slowly being filled up with details over time rather than stripped of them. Award for most surreal moment of the trip was appropriately at the top of one of the bauble-encrusted towers when a large inflatable black horse floated past - a real head scratcher that one.
Other than that, we filled the evenings soaking up muchos
bebidas y comidas tipicas in various tapas bars and restaurants - being honest now this was the main event for us in coming back to Spain one last time! Viva las pimientos padrones! Gotta love sitting at a bar with good beer/red wine in hand and eating through an endless supply of tasty little things.
Off to Venice next - last stop before Africa. Ohhh, but may first have to add something about our 4x4 driving course and trip up to Wales.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.362s; Tpl: 0.019s; cc: 18; qc: 69; dbt: 0.1381s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Caroline
non-member comment
That photo caption
OK Andrew, we took a straw poll about what was not meant to be in that photo. Rachel thought it was that the 2 of you were in it and therefore someone else was taking the photo Keith thought it was the rubbish I thought it was the phallic object between the two of you Ben thought you were screwing with our minds Which is it?