Celia puts a brave face on it

Today we managed two trips out, in spite of Celia’s sore foot. She bravely walked along at a snail’s pace, and eventually we got to where we were going.
First trip was to the covered Market, [see photo] which is reputed to the be the largest covered market in Europe. It may be, but it wasn’t somehow as pleasant as the market in Barcelona, which was only a couple of blocks away from our place of residence. The Valencia market is very spacious, and things are divided up more clearly, so that the fish market is isolated from the rest. Yet it didn’t have the friendly feel of the Barcelona one, nor the exuberance of the Melbourne one we saw three years ago. Never mind, we bought plenty of food there, enough to keep us going until we go home. It’s the first time we’ve actually had food on hand to any extent. We had a cup of coffee each in the café across the road - a real blue collar café - and the coffee was very black.
On the way back I found that there was an art exhibition in the building next door. I think the place is called Obras Sociales - or it could be Caja Mediterráneo. Both names appear on the two catalogues they gave me for free. Entry was free as well.
There were two exhibitions, one related to mental health in the community (related very loosely, but that’s by the by), and the other by Marlén Ramos, about whom I know nothing really since the text is all in Spanish. Both were good exhibitions: the first had paintings collected together from a variety of 20th century artists, many of whom are now dead. Ramos’ work came under the cover of ‘Patchwork Paintings’ and were carefully crafted abstract pieces. Both the catalogues have reproductions of all the paintings in their respective exhibitions. That was a bonus.
Our second trip out was to the Aquarium. We got the 95 bus as far as we thought it went and then found that it went all the way. Unfortunately this meant Celia had to walk some distance, from in front of the Science Museum, past the next building and the covered garden and right down and around the corner to the Aquarium entrance. In due course we got there!
Pluses. The walruses were a delight, swimming on their backs right under where we were watching from, and huffing and puffing and grunting and making rude noises in their usual fashion. The something-or-other whale (I’ll really have to take a notebook with me) was equally enthusiastic about swimming past us, as was a single penguin in a large area that had lots of other penguins preening themselves. The first area we went into had fish from coral reef areas; two huge tanks with hundreds of fish of all sorts swimming around. There were seats between the two tanks so you could just sit and relax. (After our walk it was essential.) The hypnotic tank of jellyfish, and of course, the seahorses and seadragons were a delight.
Minuses. In spite of this being touted as the biggest aquarium in the world, it isn’t the most exciting. It’s spread out over a large area, but includes three restaurants in that area. The walruses and that whale are in tanks that really aren’t big enough for them long-term, and having an aviary in an aquarium seems a bit odd. The flamingoes and pelicans have a lot of room, but there are only ducks in another pond (!) and what are they all doing in an aquarium? The tropical fish aren’t particularly colourful - in fact, there were far more colourful fish in the shop we went to in Norfolk (for free) than there were here.
I think the aquarium in Melbourne, though not so large in terms of space, is actually better value for money. Presumably the Valencia one has plenty of room to expand!
Worst Minus: the terrible music that accompanies you wherever you go in this place. It's monotonous and trivial.
And so back onto the 95 bus, which we thought would take us in a loop back around to the Towers of Serranos, which are at the top of our street. When we got to the bridge across the riverbed that leads onto the towers, Celia said she didn’t feel like walking across, so we stayed on the bus assuming that in ten minutes or so it would come back closer to home. Half an hour later we finally got there, having gone into the depths of suburban Valencia, and sat for five or ten minutes while the driver had a break. In the meantime it had got dark, which made seeing the Towers more difficult. And we were very hungry.

Travelling to Rome

17 October 2007
Travelling to Rome, after a quick detour to Pisa, to see the famous leaning thingee. We had to get a bus to it, and it does lean fairly dramatically (the thingee, not the bus - though that was pretty rough as well). I wouldn’t trust getting on it, though people were climbing to the top quite happily. The cathedral it’s alongside is also leaning a bit, I think, though Celia wasn’t convinced.
Pisa was very hot, and it’s got hotter since. We’re travelling down the coast some of the time, though at present we’ve lost sight of it. It’s nice to be near some sea again.
My post about yesterday’s sightseeing was a bit short, and during the early hours I was thinking what else I should say, but, as though things do, they’ve now dissipated. I meant to explain what a double recorder was: seemingly it’s something you can blow two notes on at once, as it not only has two mouthpieces (very close together) but also the note holes are separated into two halves. Be interesting to have a go on. There were richly endowed early keyboards, one with some thousand jewels embedded into its surface. The serpent I spoke of yesterday is a serpent-shaped horn, seldom used in orchestras or bands these days, but reasonably popular in its brief heyday. There were some other pseudo-serpents: instruments that looked playable but were probably just for use in a theatre performance. One violin had an absolute encrustation of carving on its underside; would have been quite uncomfortable to hold, I think. It was sitting alongside a Stradivarius, that doyen of violins. There was an upright piano - literally. The keyboard was still in the same position as usual, but the strings were vertical, as they are in modern uprights. However, the difference was that these strings were arranged in the way a grand’s strings are.
The Palazzo Vecchio, apart from what I said about it yesterday, has room after room upstairs with decorated ceilings. I don’t mean a pattern painted on, but umpteen paintings, some mythic, some religious. The artists must have worked years on the place. It also has many wonderful craft works on display: items that are for practical use but have been adorned by men (perhaps women) with an artistic nature, and the results are just wonderful. Superbly fine carving in bone with details so minute you wonder how they managed to avoid damaging the work. It was the same with Michaelangelo’s David: one misstep in the making, and this enormous work would have had to have been abandoned. The actual statue is twice human size, I’d gauge, and it stands on a plinth that’s about human size again. So it towers above you. You can’t see some of the detail, but we were looking at a book after we’d viewed the statue, and the eyes are done in such a way that they appear to be looking at something. They’re not just blank, in other words. The strap of his sling is pitted, as though it was some material. The details of the limbs are extraordinary (though of course Michaelangelo wasn’t the only master of such details); but there is a sense of human flesh under the skin, and there are even veins showing in places.
We also saw statues by Benvenuto Cellini yesterday - he was virtually Michaelangelo’s equal in his ability to work with stone, and various other wonderful artists whose names didn’t mean so much to me.

In the country

Just been for a walk round a little of the village we‘re staying in. We‘re on the outer perimeter, I think, so that the line of houses on one side is contrasted with wide open fields on the other. Everywhere we’ve been lately the farmers have been cutting the wheat and then gathering the hay into large round bales. The dusty smell lingers in the air.
At the end of our Close is another of the innumerable old churches that dot the Norfolk/Suffolk countryside. This one has a square tower which makes it Norman, if I remember rightly. Inside it’s quite cramped compared to many of the old churches, and seems to have little to differentiate it from dozens of others. There is a turnstile at the gate, however.
Outside the grass is growing up amongst the older graves, some of which are on a lean, and will soon fall to the ground. Most gravestones only seem to go back to the late 18th century; perhaps the earth has swallowed up earlier ones, as it seems to be threatening to do to later ones, or perhaps gravestones weren’t large in the earlier days and the graves of the old saints are well and truly hidden from sight.

St Nicholas

After we’d been to Ickworth yesterday, we took a bit of time wending along the back roads near where we’re staying. Came to Little Saxham and the church of St Nicholas, which has a round tower – a crenulated round tower in fact, for those who want to know such details. This means that it’s not just round, but has various indents and ‘windows’ in it.
It’s also been described as the most spectacular Norman round tower in Suffolk, by somebody called Pevsner. A man who ought to know, by the sound of it.
It’s a lovely little church, set amongst the quiet and peace of a graveyard (nothing like being reminded of where you’re heading when you go to church), and it’s in good condition, considering its age. It dates from the 12th century, though of course, as with all these buildings, there were various modifications over the centuries.
Inside, within the tower, is a small stained-glass window, made all the more effective by being set in walls that are a couple of feet thick, so that it shines out into the gloom.
The place was empty when we went inside, and we had to ourselves for the whole of our visit. I took a number of photos, though whether they’ll come out well is debatable; the flash wanted to keep flashing and made everything brighter than was helpful for detail. What I most wanted to try and photograph wasn’t the tower, which we couldn’t see well anyway (though I’ve included a photo from the Net here) but the wonderful carved animals on the ends of the pews. They were at both ends of each pew, and also at the place where you lean your arm, if you’re lucky enough to be sitting on the end of the row. Each one was different.
Unfortunately, a number of them have been worn away with time, and with children digging at them and various other mishaps, but the best remain. There are dogs, and lions, and sheep and various fierce exotic animals, all in height about the size of the full open stretch of a hand. They bring a delightful homeliness to the atmosphere of the place – even the exotic animals – rather like the pictures in a children’s book rounded out and made ‘real.’The Norman tower may be the architectural feature of the place, but I think we’re more likely to remember the animals a lot longer.