Roaming Tales

Barcelona, Spain; October 2008

We spent five days in Barcelona, staying in an apartment about two blocks from La Sagrada Familia (The Sacred Family), the famous cathedral designed by Antoni Gaudi. It’s worth seeing for two reasons. Firstly, the architecture is startlingly original - it really is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The building reminded me of a giant wax sculpture - all melted curves and tapering spires. The classic religious imagery such as the Passion of the Christ and the Nativity is represented but there are also unexpected touches, such as colourful piles of fruit on the tops of columns.

Secondly, the cathedral is not yet finished. At the height of the vogue for cathedral construction - in the Middle Ages and Renaissance era - it took hundreds of years to build a cathedral. Now we can whack up a skyscraper in a matter of months. But it seems cathedrals, especially cathedrals with this level of architectural detail, still take some time. Construction started in 1882 and the roof only went on recently. Things are speeding up now though and the current timetable estimates completion by 2026. Like my friend Jess, I’m definitely keen to go back and check it out!

It’s not often you get to see a cathedral under construction and I found it really interesting to go in the lift to the roof and look down upon all the cranes, and then descend via a stone spiral staircase.. The whole interior is still a workspace as well, with just a walkway for tourists around the edges. Underneath the building is a museum with drawings and plans and plaster work models of various parts of the cathedral - these days, this kind of work is usually done on computer using 3D printing technology, but they are still using the traditional methods.

The cathedral opens at 9am and if you can get there at opening time, you’ll be pleased you did. Most tourists are not that organised so it’s still relatively quiet at that hour but an hour or two later the entry queue is around the block and there’s another long line inside for the lift to the roof.

This post is part of Photo Friday, a weekly blogging event hosted by Debbie at travel blog DeliciousBaby. Check out the other submissions this week and also my photo post on chocolate bull fighting at my food blog The Gooseberry Fool.

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• * If you ever travel with children, be prepared for a few embarrassing moments dealing with the culture clash. Kayt at Travel Savvy Mom shares her own hilarious, cringe-making moments.

• * Autumn is here and in rural England, the apple harvest is underway. Anthony from the Smith Travel Blog helped make cider in Herefordshire.

• * Enjoy these stunning pics of iconic American landscapes from Kim Wildman at Wild About Travel + Writing who took a trip to Monument Valley on the Utah/Arizona border.

• * In nearby Nevada, Liz at Perceptive Travel is living it up in Vegas.

• * Myamii from For the Love of Food shares what she learnt on her trip to Ireland.

• * Intelligent Travel has a new home, more fully integrated into the National Geographic site. The blog also brings us news of an art exchange between Atlanta’s High Museum of Art and the Louvre.

• * Lara at Cool Travel Guide recommends Art House, a boutique hotel in Damascus - unusually it’s located outside the Old City but, as Lara explains, this has some advantages.

• * Darren at Travel Rants on the rise of virtual travel, with virtual malls and the whole Secon Life phenonmenon. Personally, I don’t see this replacing real travel but I have been known to check out destinations pre- and post-trip on Google Earth.

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Madrid, Spain; October 2008

This, my friends, is a 17th century painting by Alonso Cano of Saint Bernard receiving the milk of the Virgin Mary. It’s on display at the Prado Museum in Madrid.

When people talk about being “catholic in their tastes”, somehow I don’t think this is quite what they have in mind.*

This post is part of Debbie at DeliciousBaby’s Photo Friday feature - please visit her site to check out all the other contributions. If you enjoyed this post, you might also like my quirky Jesus post from earlier in the week.

* Of course, “catholic” in that phrase refers to the other meaning of “catholic” and not Roman Catholicism.

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Spain is packed with religious artworks - some of them more quirky than others, such as these Jesus statues from Barcelona and Sevilla.

Spain is an intensely Catholic country and has been ever since the Moors were expelled in the Middle Ages and the fearsome Spanish Inquisition in the centuries that followed. So it’s not surprising that the country is brimming with beautiful cathedrals and religious paintings and statues from the medieval and Renaissance periods. Sometimes the endless paintings and statues of Madonna and child can seem a bit repetitive so I like to look for the ones that are a little different.

For example, it’s not too often you see statues of the Virgin Mary breast feeding the baby Jesus, such as this Medieval sculpture from the Frederic Mares Museum in Barcelona.

Those Medieval sculptors also liked to imagine Jesus as a playful child. From the same museum, here are examples of Jesus playing with his mother, and another of Jesus riding on the shoulders of Saint Christopher.

And at Sevilla Cathedral, we see Jesus with his stepfather Joseph and Jesus as a young boy. Not quite unorthodox but certainly less common themes than Mary and the infant and Jesus on the Cross.

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Hola! I’ve just got back from a two-week holiday in Spain. I fully intended to post from the road but there was too much to do and see and I spent any down time keeping my travel journal. When I did have net access, I usually needed to organise the next leg of the trip.

It was my first time in Spain and we managed to see quite a bit of it. We had five days in Barcelona to start with and then hopped across to Andalucia for a driving holiday through Sevilla, Jerez, the White Towns of Arcos de la Frontera, Zahara and Ronda, Granada, Cordoba, then Toledo and Madrid.

I saw lots of Spanish art and architecture, both Moorish and Christian, ate plenty of great food, and caught a bit of sun. Lovely!

There will be a Spanish theme to my posts for the next week or so.

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Kew, London; May 2008

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve wedged the heel of my high heels in between cobble stones or in a grate. Of course, the only time I’ve ever seen a warning sign was in Kew Gardens in London when I was perfectly sensibly dressed in jeans and trainers.

This post is part of Debbie at DeliciousBaby’s excellent Photo Friday feature.

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The November issue of Australian Women’s Health is out, with my article on kayaking in the Arctic in the travel section.

The idea was to write a blog-style piece with plenty of humour focusing on the wildlife. The photographs (with the exception of the one that I’m in) are mine as well.

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Cotswolds, England; May 2007

I grew up in Australia but had always had a sense of the English countryside from children’s books such as The Wind in the Willows. I was amazed when I went to the Cotswolds just how familiar everything was, from the quaint villages tucked amid gently rolling hills to the countryside with its black-faced sheep and bluebell woods. It really does look like you’ve always imagined it would.

But there were also a few unexpected pleasures… such as this cheeky gargoyle setting a bad example for children everywhere… and this Buddha in the Batsford Aboretum, the garden of a stately home connected with the infamous Mitford family. The statue was imported from Japan by Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford at the turn of the twentieth century.

This post is part of Photo Friday, hosted by Debbie at DeliciousBaby.

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