Day: April 7, 2012

Parade Rerouted

Post by Charlie: On Good Friday there was a parade at 7:30pm and a procession at 10pm. We missed the later one but we went to the parade. We had a map of the route from the tourist office. We got there a few minutes late and it seemed they were going the wrong direction. Then they looped around and we thought they would just reverse the route but then they switched again and they stopped for 10 minutes and there was a lot of back and forth conversing. We suspect that they messed up the route and were not sure how to correct it. It is hard to turn a long parade. There were barricades and people along the other route where they should have been. Finally they just decided to go with the mistake.

First came the romans on horses, note that the cafe patrons had a great view.

Then the drummers and pipers, then the Roman soldiers:

Then the people in pointed hats and robes

Sagrada Familia

Berniece was saying that when she saw SF it had no roof. I was the same. When Logan and I went to Barcelona about 10 years ago the place was just a shell, no roof at all. The floor was dirt and had cement mixers and things in it. I guess after 10 years you get things done, if you have the money, because now it is a regular cathedral. Only about 10-20% of the stained glass is in but lots of progress.

When I saw it I thought it was a shame that it hadn’t been completed because it is a good example of a classical design done in a modern way.

People in Spain

We like to take pictures of the people we encounter. People love it when you ask to take their picture. Here is Hannah from our hotel in Toledo. She cleaned the rooms, made breakfast and checked us out when we left, she does it all.

Here is the woman running a coffee bar in the Madrid train station:

Here are the two chefs at the place in the Barcelona market where we ate twice because it was so good:

And our hard-working waitress, from the back unfortunately, she never stopped moving long enough so that we could ask her to pose for a picture:

 

Foreign Languages

Wynette and I are in a foreign country, and I don’t mean Spain. It is hard to understand the signs. The menus are especially hard since they seem to have a language of their own. You see a different national flag.

I am speaking, of course, of Catalonia and Catalan. Many signs are only in Catalan, which seems to be a mixture of Spanish, French, and Italian, and maybe some Basque, who knows. The words have lots of Xx and double Ls. Often there are cognates with Spanish but they seem to be far enough off to be hard to get. We learned the Spanish menu words but they are useless for Catalan and often the dishes are something like partridge Catalan anyway which doesn’t give you much information.

The desk clerk at the hotel in Barcelona said that the schools teach only in Catalan. English and Spanish are taught as foreign languages. She wants her son to be a native Spanish speaker so he can easily live anywhere in Spain, so she has to work extra with him in Spanish.

I still have some high-school French so sometimes I am better at guessing the words than Wynette with her Spanish.