Saturday, May 22, 2010

¡hasta luego Barcelona, ola Madrid

Day 8 -- Weds. April 21

We hit a couple more sights in Barcelona before we took off for Madrid. First, we stopped at the Statue of Columbus (Monument a Colom). Apparently, this is where Columbus first set foot on the ground again after seeing America. His big bronze head is covered with birdshit. But it's still pretty cool. Then we headed on a tour of the Gothic quarter of Madrid (which is where a lot of the Shadow of the Wind is set). We considered seeing the Picasso museum, but saw Dali instead. It didn't disappoint. If you know, Dali, you can imagine the kind of wild stuff we saw there... It was full of stuff he did throughout his life plus lots of photographs of him. He was a weird sonuvagun. I like him.

I'm not doing a very good imitation of Chris... and I'm not sure why he's pointing anyway...


Salvadore was an unusual individual.


He did illustrations for a fancy edition of Cervantes' Don Quixote.

The train ride to Madrid in the afternoon went smoothly, literally speaking -- the train, even at 180 mph, rides silky smooth. Amazing.

Here's the high speed Barcelona-Madrid train. Fancy.

Upon arrival in Madrid, Anita's friend Adam met us at the station and we went back to their place where we stayed a couple of nights with he and his gf, Maria. It was nice to have somewhere to stay and Adam and Maria were very generous with food, etc. Their place was quite tight with four of us there! Madrid stories in the next entry...


2 comments:

Janie said...

Cool Cervantes illustration by Dali.
I like the train. It looks much more modern than the boxy versions we see in the US.
Nice engineering feat to make it so smooth at high speeds.

Juegos de Ben 10 said...

Cool Cervantes illustration