Everywhere you look in Barcelona there is a piece of public art – either ancient or modern. Here are just a few examples.
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Barcelona’s Park Güell
Gaudí’s creations for Park Güell are one of the icons of Barcelona (his Sagrada Família being another). The park was originally intended as a residential garden city in the English style, but only one showhouse was ever built, and the venture failed.
Although you can walk to the park from the Lesseps Metro station (and it’s well signposted), the walk is pretty boring, along busy city streets and then slogging uphill through a side street. A better way (in my opinion) is to go to the Vallarca Metro station. After a short walk along a street, you turn into a pedestrian street that climbs steeply up towards the upper reaches of the Park. Thankfully, the municipality has thought to put in escalators to take the effort out of walking uphill. The other advantage of this route is that you don’t have to fight your way into the Park through the crowds that throng the main entrance.
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Barcelona’s Architecture – The School
This school building on the Via Laietana in Barcelona has the most hideously sentimental decoration seen outside of a chocolate box or stomach-churning oil paintings of wide-eyed waifs. It’s so bad, I couldn’t resist taking photos.
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Restaurant Can Fabes
When I retired from Shell, my colleagues presented me with the cost of a meal at our (Martin and I) favourite restaurant: Can Fabes.
It’s been almost a year, but last week we finally returned to this three Michelin star restaurant in Sant Celoni (a small town about 50 minutes by train out of Barcelona).
Well, folks, I have to tell you that your gift was thoroughly appreciated by us. We took the Menu Primavera – a 10 course (I think, but I lost count!) meal that started with “aromatic eggs” and ended with coffee and petit fours. The aromatic eggs were sublime – a hen’s egg filled with an egg foam flavoured with rosemary, and a quail’s egg filled with a egg foam flavoured with ginger. The quail’s egg in particular made me think I’d died and gone to Heaven. Along the way we had mackerel, a bouillabaisse flavoured with saffron, baby octopus with macaroni, sweetbreads, sorbet (pear, strawberry and mandarin), and peanut icecream with a caramel tart. To accompany this magisterial meal we had a bottle of Cuvée Santamaria Finca Montagut, a bottle of Alíon 2000 and a glass of Moscatel Soleado Colosia with dessert.
Thank you. We really appreciated it.
One response to “Restaurant Can Fabes”
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[…] RIP, Santi Santamaria Posted on April 11, 2011 by Geoff Coupe Damn, I see that the chef, Santi Santamaria has died of a heart attack – he was only 53. We have made three visits to his three-Michelin-star restaurant El Racó de Can Fabes in the sleepy town of San Celoni near Barcelona, and each time we really enjoyed it. […]
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Gaudi’s Casa Batlló
Gaudi’s Casa Batlló house in Barcelona is a magnificent machine for living in. The amalgam between organic design and technology is perfect. Since we were last there in 2003, the attic space has been opened to the public. The whole house is well worth a visit. Pure genius.
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La Boqueria
The La Boqueria market in Barcelona (on the Ramblas) is well worth a visit. Here are a few photos taken last week. The range of foods available is vast. From eggs, nuts, fish, mushrooms, meat through to such interesting delicacies as rabbit tongue, maggots and scorpions covered in chocolate. I have to say that I passed on the last three.
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Twenty Questions
20Q.net is an experiment in artificial intelligence. It’s an eerie take on the old game of Twenty Questions, where you think of something, and the object of the questioner (in this case the neural net program) is to discover what you are thinking in 20 questions or less.
Try it. The more people that play, the better it gets.
There’s now even a portable version of the game, which contains a chip holding 250,000 synaptic connections to the most popular 2,000 objects that people challenge the game with.
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We’ve Been Here Before
Intolerance is on the rise again in The Netherlands. This incident is not the first, and I’m sure won’t be the last. The commentary on it by Bruce Bawer, reproduced by Andrew Sullivan in his blog, makes disturbing reading. That, coupled with the fact that I’ve just finished reading The End of Faith, by Sam Harris, has not put me in a sunny and relaxed mood.
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Cheating on the Brain
Carl Zimmer over on the Loom blog has a nice entry that covers a fascinating aspect of evolutionary psychology: Cheating on the Brain.
This whole field of evolutionary psychology is a fascinating one. One of the books I took to Barcelona was V.S. Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain – an absolutely riveting book about the workings of the brain. Professor Ramachandran has a wicked sense of humour – but also manages to convey the sense of wonder about the workings of the human mind, and how they are tied back to the mechanisms in the brain. Brilliant book – read it and open your mind.
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Normal Service Has Been Resumed
To quote Sam Gamgee: "Well, I’m back"…
Martin and I went to Barcelona for a week. We just love that city. I’ll try and post some impressions from the week once I’ve had a chance to absorb what else has been going on in the world, and had a chance to sort out the hudreds of photos that we took.
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Microsoft Turnabout
One bit of good news is that Microsoft has reversed its decision to take a neutral stand on the anti-discrimination bill that failed by just one vote in Washington state and will now actively support it again. Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer explained:
After looking at the question from all sides, I’ve concluded that diversity in the workplace is such an important issue for our business that it should be included in our legislative agenda. Since our beginning nearly 30 years ago, Microsoft has had a strong business interest in recruiting and retaining the best and brightest and most diverse workforce possible. I’m proud of Microsoft’s commitment to non-discrimination in our internal policies and benefits, but our policies can’t cover the range of housing, education, financial and similar services that our people and their partners and families need. Therefore, it’s appropriate for the company to support legislation that will promote and protect diversity in the workplace.
Accordingly, Microsoft will continue to join other leading companies in supporting federal legislation that would prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation — adding sexual orientation to the existing law that already covers race, sex, national origin, religion, age and disability. Given the importance of diversity to our business, it is appropriate for the company to endorse legislation that prohibits employment discrimination on all of these grounds. Obviously, the Washington State legislative session has concluded for this year, but if legislation similar to HB 1515 is introduced in future sessions, we will support it.
Glad to see that Microsoft has done the right thing.
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If You Could Teach The World Just One Thing About Science…
…What would it be? To mark the fact that 2005 has been designated Einstein Year, Sandy Starr at spiked and science communicator Alom Shaha have conducted a survey of over 250 renowned scientists, science communicators, and educators – including 11 Nobel laureates – asking what they would teach the world about science and why, if they could pick just one thing.
Professor Gerardus ‘t Hooft’s response is typically Dutch…
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Women and HIV
Stephen Lewis, UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, delivered a speech at the University of Pennsylvania’s Summit on Global Issues in Women’s Health on April 26, 2005. He took as his theme Women and HIV. His speech is well worth reading, because it conveys some of the seriousness of the issue, together with his anger and despair at the inability of the world to grapple with it. A short extract:
Just a few weeks ago, I was in Zambia, visiting a district well outside of Lusaka. We were taken to a rural village to see an "income generating project" run by a group of Women Living With AIDS. They were gathered under a large banner proclaiming their identity, some fifteen or twenty women, all living with the virus, all looking after orphans. They were standing proudly beside the income generating project … a bountiful cabbage patch. After they had spoken volubly and eloquently about their needs and the needs of their children (as always, hunger led the litany), I asked about the cabbages. I assumed it supplemented their diet? Yes, they chorused. And you sell the surplus at market? An energetic nodding of heads. And I take it you make a profit? Yes again. What do you do with the profit? And this time there was an almost quizzical response as if to say what kind of ridiculous question is that … surely you knew the answer before you asked: "We buy coffins of course; we never have enough coffins".
It’s at moments like that when I feel the world has gone mad. That’s no existential spasm on my part. I simply don’t know how otherwise to characterize what we’re doing to half of humankind.
Do yourself a favour. Read the speech and think about what you can do to help make a difference. Then do it.
One response to “Women and HIV”
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I read the speech and I think everybody can do something against it. With a little bit help from friends….for humanity!
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Normal Service will be resumed…
…as soon as possible. I’m going to be travelling for a few days, and I doubt that I’ll have time to dive into Internet cafes to keep up the stream of consciousness here. So you’ll just have to bide your time… Tot ziens.
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The WEEE Man
The WEEE Man is made from the amount of waste electrical and electronic products that an average UK citizen will throw away in a lifetime, if he or she carries on disposing of products at the current rate.
At the risk of being flippant, the multiplication factor for Americans is probably 2.65.
2 responses to “The WEEE Man”
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I really liked your blog.
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Why, thank you!
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60 Years Ago On This Day…
…the concentration camp at Dachau was liberated by US troops. This post from Orac should be read, lest we forget.
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Multi-Player Games
I feel such a ham trying to complete games such as NeverWinter Nights in single-player mode, that I’ve never dared venture out into the multi-player version.
Perhaps what I need to do is ease myself into it gradually. For example, shuffling fridge magnets in a group – like this.
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The Falkirk Wheel
In the last entry (on the Animarus Rhinoceros Transport) I spoke of the marriage between Art and Engineering. That put me in mind of this amazing boat lift, which I suppose is more a marriage between Engineering and Art.
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Animarus Rhinoceros Transport
I love the marriage of art and engineering – particularly when it results in the feeling that you’ve landed in some strange universe… Check out the video, and then follow the link to the main page to find out more about Theo Jansen and his beasts.
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