Mummified

Monday, 15 January 2024: I ran this morning - the route I think of as the train station tour. I come out the southwest end of our neighbourhood, jog through Parc Central, then down a service road to a pedestrian overpass that crosses the main train lines into the city’s two downtown stations. 

Estació del Nord (in Valenciano - Estación del Norte in Castilian Spanish) was opened in 1917. It’s built in the elegant, and then very au current, Modernista style popularised by the Barcelona architect Antoni Gaudí. When Nord ran out of capacity, the city built a brand-new station on adjacent land a half kilometer away, Valencia Joaquin Sorolla. (It’s named for a Valencia-born painter of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.) The weird thing is, there’s no rail connection between the two, or direct walkway, despite how close they are. If you have to change trains in Valencia, there’s a reasonable chance you’ll have to change stations too. It’s common to see people come out of Joaquin Sorolla and trundle along the city sidewalks, dragging their wheeled luggage behind them, to get over to El Nord.

I come off the overpass and follow little back streets, cross a major artery, cut through a parking lot and come out into the forecourt of Joaquin Sorolla station. I follow those same sidewalks over to Nord, run past it to the breezeway beside the bull ring and through to the Gran Via. And so home. I was pleased because it didn’t seem as tiring as earlier runs, which I thought might be a sign I was getting in better shape. Then I measured the distance on a map and realised it was only a little over 4K. “You’ll have to up your game,” Karen said when I told her of this. She was meaning to be ironic. But I will.

Later the same day: Karen and I went out for a wander after lunch-dinner. No real agenda, other than to stop at one of the Chinese everything shops and buy a knife sharpener. Which we did. The knives in this flat are generally better - and sharper - than in any place we’ve rented before, but they’re not quite as sharp this year as they were last. So. 

We continued on, weaving back and forth, and ended up over in the neighbourhood between Av. del Regne de València and Gran Via del Marqués del Túria, Eixample. (I never knew how you pronounced the word, so I just asked the oracle. It’s apparently a Catalan place name, and in Catalan, which is very similar to Valenciano, it’s pronounced, Eye-SHAHM-pluh. Whether that’s the way the locals say it, I don’t really know.) It’s a place where rich people live.

We were checking out restaurants for our first lunch out, coming up on Wednesday or Thursday. There’s a Japanese place that we liked last year, which we found again today. Along with lots of others. Which we’ve already forgotten now. And probably couldn’t find again if we did remember.

Eixample streetscape

Bas-relief over door of posh apartment block

At one point, we passed the chi-chi studio-gallery of a local abstract artist called Lu Gorrizt. His stuff looks kind of interesting, but I couldn’t find much about him online. His own website is undergoing renovations and points to a catalogue on WhatsApp, which I don’t use. His Facebook page says he works at a TV channel called Arte TV, which bills itself as the ‘European cultural TV channel.’ If he works in TV, does that mean he’s just a Sunday painter? And if so, how does he afford a posh-looking studio and gallery just off one of the city’s prime rich-people streets? Probably because he sells his large canvases to the neighbourhood moneybags for outrageous sums.

Tuesday, 16 January 2024: A full day - for me anyway. 

I did a fast walk in the morning around a truncated train-station-tour route. We’re in the middle of a January warmth wave. It’s been over 20C all week - though mostly cloudy. So I wore shorts for the first time. When I got back, I suggested we do our planned trip to Caixa Forum to see the Egyptian Mummies exhibit before rather than after lunch-dinner. We set out at about 11:30 and rode bikes down Peris i Valero.

    I had not registered when I saw the advertising for this exhibit that it also features artefacts from the British Museum. The one we saw last year, which was excellent, was from the BM as well. It was mostly statuary. This one displays eight mummies from the museum’s collection with accompanying videos of  CRT scans that reveal what’s under the wrappings. Here's a video that explains the process using as an illustration one of the mummies that was included in this travelling exhibit.

    The videos are layer-by-layer time lapses, showing first the mummified body, then the skeleton underneath. The scans produce such sharp and detailed images, archaeologists are able to identify the metal and ceramic amulets stuffed under the wrappings, meant to magically protect the deceased in the afterworld.  And they can detect remnants of viscera left in the body cavities. There are also, of course,  grisly descriptions of the mummification process - including drawing the brain, which was discarded as useless in the after life, through the nostrils using a hooked instrument. Yuck! The heart, which was removed and mummified separately, was considered the seat of emotion and intellect. (The pictures below are of a mummy and funeral masks from the Greco-Roman period.)

    As last year, the detailed explanatory texts are in Spanish and Valenciano only. So we used Google Translate. It allows you to take a photograph of the text, which it then automatically translates. By the time we got our devices set up to do this, a couple of school tour groups had come in behind us. We had to loiter near the beginning and wait for them to wash over us and clear out. We ended up spending almost two hours in the four or five rooms. A lot of the many small accompanying artefacts we just didn’t have time to translate and read.

That left us not much time to look at the second exhibit our tickets got us into - the Colours of the World, a show of photos from National Geographic, grouped by dominant colour. It included over a hundred pictures, each one displayed on a dedicated high-resolution flat-screen monitor. The capital cost of the exhibit must have been huge. Like the Egyptian Mummies, it’s a travelling show. We didn’t linger long. It’s not the kind of photography I really enjoy, especially when displayed this way  - too bright, over-saturated colours, no subtlety.

Building that houses Caixa Forum

Linea 10: Oceanografic stop

    To save further wear and tear on Karen’s knees, we had decided to take the Metro home. When we first started coming here, there was no Metro line out to the City of Arts & Sciences. Four years ago, we noticed a new tube stop at the edge of Ruzafa on Av. de Regne de Valencia. We don’t use the subway that often so didn’t bother to explore it. Turns out the stop is on an all-new line, Linea 10, that goes from the city centre all the way out to Natzaret, the previously isolated seaside community established to house dock workers, seamen and fishers. It also goes right past the CAS. 

    We walked a quarter of a kilometer or so to the stop in front of the Oceanografic aquarium - the line is above ground at this point - and caught a train that took us back to Ruzafa. So Valencia built a new subway line in a matter of five years or so - tops - and we didn’t see any sign of it. No major roads dug up for months or years. While Toronto can’t get its new line built for love or money. And the project turns the whole city upside down.

In the late afternoon, I decided to go over to Carmen, my favourite photo hunting grounds. Karen was done for the day, she stayed behind. It was a frustrating outing. First of all, I couldn’t get a cellular signal in the neighbourhood - which I need to borrow a bike. I walked out to a major intersection. Cops were there directing traffic on the Gran Via because the lights were out - and there was no power to the Valenbisi station either. So I walked on another few blocks to the bull ring where I was finally able to get a bike. By this time, almost six, the light was fading fast. Luckily, the superb technology in my camera allows me to take pretty decent pictures in just about any light - even of dimly-lit museum displays.

The evening continued frustrating, though. I said earlier that about the only bad things that could happen in Carmen are going in circles in the rabbit warren of narrow streets or finding yourself on crowded streets lined with tourist junk. Well, that was my whole evening. I finally gave up and went home.

Carmen: bookshop window

Valencia cathedral