Saturday, May 27, 2006

Nos embarrechemos

Or something. Whetever the Spanish is for "we are drunk".

Hello from hot, sweaty Malaga bus station. We have just missed a bus to Granada, and so here I am killing the time before the next one.

Had a nice time yesterday, starting off at the Picasso Museum. Having established in one room that Picasso was bored with just drawing stuff well before he was out of his teens, we followed his bosom fixation through various stylistic developments. His experiment with form seems to have been so you could look front-on at a naked lady, and still see all of her bum.

The Dr was especially taken with the classically influenced stuff. There was some splendid hasty sketches of satyrs and fauns larking about, all with delightfully smiley faces. We bought a poster.

Also liked the more realistic one of the Minotaur hunched over some bird. Looked like an Eddie Campbell drawing, I thought.

Then we went to the Moorish castle on the hill, which the Dr explored valiantly, even with her crutch. It´s a beautiful place, all done in shallow red bricks and using any bits of antiquity they had to hand. So orphaned Roman columns support the arches, stuff like that.

It´s so beautiful, with small courtyards and spaces running into each other, and water babling peacably throughout, that you could almost miss the carefully constructed defensive purpose. Every turn of the entrance is well covered, with handy hidey holes and nooks for soldiers to squeeze into.

The views are also spectacular, and would have been even better in the days before the high-rise blocks and cement factory on the water´s edge.

I´d be quite happy being on guard duty in a place like that.

After some very nice paella and a kip, we headed to a fantastically high-Catholic church for the wedding, admiring the Madame Tussauds-like dioramas of various nuns and saints. I´d never seen a donkey done quite so majestically.

Wedding went on into the very wee hours, and I got the cerveza all to myself. Left about 3 as the dancing got going, and had about four hours sleep before we got turfed from our very plush hotel. Now got four hours on a bus. Bah.

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