I go on a long bike ride

Wednesday, 17 January 2024: The weather continues unseasonably mild: 23C with sun and cloud. Our big activity today was going for our first restaurant meal in Valencia. 

    We go at Spanish lunch time - two or later - which corresponds pretty much to the time we have our main meal of the day at home. We decided to stick to the neighbourhood this time. There are lots of restaurants within a few blocks of us. But fewer and fewer, we’ve noticed, offer the fixed price, multi-course menus that were a great low-cost Spanish tradition for lunch. We wandered for 45 minutes or so and ended up going back to a place we knew and liked from last year - La Tasqueta del Mercat (Market Stall), just across from the Ruzafa market. 

Their prices, inevitably, have gone up, but they still have a €14.90 fixed price option that gives you a starter, main, dessert and one drink. Karen had a chicken salad with curry dressing to start and roast chicken with scalloped potatoes and peppers for her main. For starters, I had patatas bravas, Spain’s national snack dish (fried potatoes in a spicy tomato sauce, served with garlic mayo for dipping), and a hamburger with more bravas and an unidentified vegetable mash on the burger bun. 

We both had two glasses of wine and, for dessert, the restaurant’s excellent brownie with caramel sauce and candied walnuts, which we remembered from last year. It was all good: high quality ingredients, well prepared and nicely presented. Our young waiter spoke excellent English to boot. Total bill: €37 (about CDN$55). Think what you’d pay for a three-course meal with two drinks in Canada! Now add a tip.

I went out again later in the afternoon and rode over to the old city. I had a good wander, but with little success on the photographic front. One thing is clear: the golden age of Valencian street art is sadly over. The best wall murals - at least in the historic centre - are ones that have been there for years. One giant mural, of a horse being lassoed by snail cowboys, I remember photographing the first year we came here in 2011. The newer stuff is smaller - or it’s just gaudy tagging, graffiti really.

Carmen shop front

Carmen grot - note the old bathroom tiles exposed by demolition

    The prettily lit main squares are always worth a shot, though.

Plaça de la Verge (Square of the Virgin) - Basilica and Neptune fountain

Thursday, 18 January 2024: Today was our first planned beach day. We left about noon and rode bikes down. It’s about a 40-minute ride, with a change along the way. (You can keep the bikes for as long as you like, but after the first 30 minutes, you start paying by the hour. You can turn the bike in at a station along the way, though - there are stations everywhere - and take it right back out again. Then you can go another 30 minutes for free.) 

The day ended up being a bit of a fiasco, mainly, sad to say, because of the bikes.

The high was supposed to hit 22C, with sun and cloud. But the weather reports also warned of a “possible disruption due to coastal event.” It’s supposedly a warning about high winds and high waves along a seacoast. When we got to the beach, it was a bit breezy but the water looked fairly calm. Our usual thing is to walk up and down the promenade, then find a seat, preferably in the sun, and sit and read for a while. It wasn’t going to be that kind of beach day. For one thing, the sky was pretty solidly overcast. Worse, for the first time ever, we ran into a problem with the bike share system.

After we’d settled on a bench, I pulled out my phone and it opened at the Valenbisi app - showing that I supposedly still had a ‘journey’ underway. I didn’t. When I’d turned the bike in, I’d waited for the double beep that tells you it’s properly locked, and the app showed the journey ending when it did. So what was going on? 

I sent off a panicky email to the Valenbisi customer service desk. Last year, we had occasion to call on them a couple of times and were able to get through by phone without any problem - and always get an English-speaking agent. This year, they’ve switched to a 900 number, which is free if you’re on a Spanish phone, but which my UK cellular provider’s local partner would not put through because the call would have been charged at a ridiculous €2.75 a minute. Disappointing.

I had an initial somewhat reassuring, if noncommittal, response to my email within 15 minutes or so. But the minutes kept ticking off on the bogus journey. We decided to head home to try and deal with the problem there. We walked to the tram stop and trammed to the nearest tube station. I emailed twice more from home over the rest of the afternoon and evening, but never got another response. The last time I looked at the app, the journey was still ticking away, and was then up to more than 500 minutes.

Friday, 19 January 2024: First thing this morning, I checked the Valenbisi app. My bogus journey had ended, at about 10:30 the night before. According to the details, the bike had been taken from station 165, position 2 - and returned several hours later to exactly the same station and the same locking bay. Which would have been a huge coincidence - if true. The charge against my account was €17. I fired off another email. They eventually responded, saying they were sending the case to their technical staff and would respond after an investigation.

In the meantime, it was cleaning day. Our hosts provide a cleaning service every 15 days. This was the first of them - even though we haven’t been here quite 15 days yet. It meant we needed to clear out to let the cleaner, Adriana, work. But it also turned out to be a day of extreme weather change. Temperatures were dropping during the day to about 12C, and rain was expected on and off, sometimes heavy. A bit of a shock after the dry, unseasonably warm weather we’d been having. 

So not a day for just wandering around the city, but we had a plan. Last year, we discovered a lovely public library, housed in a beautifully repurposed Renaissance-era hospital. It’s one of the city’s hidden gems. And it’s right beside one of the big public (and free entry) galleries, MUVIM - the Museum of Illustration and Modernity. So our plan was to go to MUVIM and see what was on show, then scoot over to the library and sit and read out of the rain for a while. 

There was only one show on at MUVIM - the other exhibition spaces in the museum were in the process of being changed, we were told. The one still on didn’t sound all that promising, but it turned out to be a lot of fun.

The artist is a guy named Antonio Perez (1934 - ). He’s from Cuenca, a very cool, arty hill town halfway between here and Madrid, where he has an art ‘foundation’. He’s as much a collector and writer as an artist apparently. The pieces on show at MUVIM are so-called ready-mades - bits of stuff found and repurposed, or arranged, to make ‘art’. The Dadaists in the early 20th century invented the idea of ready-mades. Some of theirs are kind of lame (IMHO). But a lot of Perez’s pieces I thought were quite witty. He calls most of them ‘homages’ - to the various modern artists he admires - or ‘winks’ to those artists. Here are a few of my favourites.

Carefully crumpled magazine pages in a Plexiglas cube - not sure who it's an homage to

Crumpled oil drum - meant to represent...a fish?

Not sure what these are, some kind of industrial waste he's hammered at to make them look like faces

Homage to Las Meninas - crushed bases and filaments of light bulbs, mounted on banana clips from which the arms have been removed

The exhibit killed 45 minutes or so. Then we went to the library, which was as welcoming a place as we remembered - almost. We sat in exactly the same chairs we did last year on another rainy cleaning day. Next to them was a rack of books, as there was last year, labelled ‘Books To Look At’. There were a few coffee-table photography books in the selection, including one by a French artist I’d never heard of, Pierre Gonnord. The picture on the cover was an arresting portrait of a young girl with curly red hair. It looked like an old master painting.

I ended up reading the book from cover to cover - well, there wasn’t much to read - and looking at every single photo. They are all fabulous. Gonnord travels around, often in Spain but further afield as well, and takes pictures of people in marginalised cultural or ethnic groups - Romas, the homeless, the blind. They’re large-scale images and always very carefully lit. The subjects most often look directly at the camera. There’s an unsettling intimacy about them. The book beautifully reproduces the portraits. I might have to own it. Here’s a selection of my favourites that I found reproduced on the web.

While I was looking at it, I got an email from Valenbisi, saying they had resolved my issue - at no cost to me. When I checked my account in the app, the bogus journey and its charges had been removed. Good result.

I did a tour around the library and at one point took this picture looking down from the first - we would call it the second - floor to where Karen was sitting below. A security guard hustled over and told me I couldn’t take pictures in the library without prior permission. A library tech passing by tried to translate for me, but her English wasn’t up to much. It didn’t matter, I’d understood, and said as much. Last year, they had no problem with me taking pictures. Oh, well.

Karen is sitting in front of the pillar to the left of the round table

Not much later, we headed home. Adriana was just leaving as we arrived.

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

Have Bikes, Will Travel

Saturday, 13 January 2024: We’ve run into a spot of bother with the elevator in our building. It was out most of the day Friday, came back in the early evening - and now it’s out again today. 

I went out for my walk this morning - we take the stairs down when going out - and came back to discover the elevator was dead. I had to hike up five flights, again. I have a sneaking suspicion someone, possibly workmen renovating a flat a couple of floors down, is turning it off - putting it ‘on service’ as we say in our building at home when someone is moving in or out and needs exclusive access to one of the two elevators. Trouble is, we have only one lift here. If the workmen are putting it ‘on service,’ who gave them permission to do that? 

It’s not such a big deal for me, but Karen is coming off a period when her arthritic knees have been bothering her. She doesn’t want to take the chance of going out and coming back to a five-flight stair climb - at least until her knees are feeling better. So she refused to go out for a walk yesterday afternoon. I couldn’t blame her.

I did go out. I grabbed a bike around the corner and rode to the central market. Then I wandered aimlessly in the rabbit warren of streets in the ciutat vella (‘old city’ in the local dialect), the parts that were laid out in the middle ages. Here’s a map that gives some sense of what it’s like.

    It’s one of my favourite activities here. As you can see, the streets are in nothing like a grid pattern; they go every which way. Most are too narrow for more than one vehicle. They’re lined with two- and three-storey apartment buildings. Some are pedestrian only. Some are more alleyways than streets. Many have hoardings up around vacant lots where old buildings have been torn down and new ones not built to replace them yet. Despite the grottiness of much of this district, I never feel unsafe here, even after dark. The worst things that can happen are that I end up inadvertently going in a circle and seeing the same things more than once. Or I accidentally veer into one of the areas with tacky tourist shops.

I always have my camera. I’m looking for anything that catches my eye: mainly interesting streetscapes and wall art - there are always new murals every year, plus lots of old favourites - and interesting store fronts. My haul on this outing wasn't up to much, but it’s the process I enjoy.

Later the same day (Saturday): The elevator came back at some point in the early afternoon. Karen and I went out about 3:30 and picked up bikes over at Av. de Peris i Valero (named for Jose Peris y Valero, a 19th century Spanish journalist and progressive politician). This was Karen’s first ride of the year in Valencia. She’d gotten used to her pedal-assist motor at home, so wasn’t sure how her knee would hold up without it. This would be a proof of concept. We went slowly, and she was fine.

We rode down Peris i Valero to the river, crossed it and rode along the other side to the City of Arts & Sciences (CAS), where we ditched the bikes and walked. I never get tired of this place. The architecture is just so outlandish - and so begs to be photographed. There were lots of people about, it being Saturday. By the time we got there, though, the sun that we’d enjoyed on our balcony earlier in the day had disappeared and the threatened cloud cover had materialised. It was about 15C. 

We wandered over to the Caixa Forum, the relatively new exhibition space sponsored by one of the big Spanish banks. They have another exhibit of Egyptian artefacts, this one concentrating on mummies. We saw an excellent one last year with stuff from the British Museum, so we have a taste for it now. We’re going to have to go this week, though, as it’s over 21 January. We were pleased to see the price hadn’t gone up, still €6 (about CDN$9) - pretty reasonable.

We walked up and sat along the Umbracle walkway for a short while, but it was a bit chilly without the sun. So we picked up bikes at the next corner and rode home by a route similar to the one I took running the other day - the high-rise ghetto route, I think of it. But, hey, people gotta live somewhere. And prices in the much more attractive Ruzafa have skyrocketed in recent years, putting it out of reach, I’m guessing, for most Valencians.

Sunday, 14 January 2024: One thing that has changed about travel in the digital era is that you’re never completely away from home anymore. This is to state the fairly obvious, I know. 

We’re in constant touch with people back home, and in England, by email and Facebook Messenger - and this blog, I suppose. We even have a free voice-over-Internet phone service from Fongo that allows us to make calls from here to numbers in London, Ontario as if we were there - and receive calls if necessary too. Not that anybody calls us. 

We can read all the same news that we do at home too. It occurred to me this morning that we have access to an awful lot of quality reading - far more than we ever did in the print era. When we first started coming to Europe, all the news we had from ‘home’ came from the International New York Times

We’ve subscribed for years to the PressReader service ($40 a month). It gives us access to digital facsimile editions of the London Free Press, Globe & Mail and Toronto Star, which one or both of us read every day on our tablets. The Guardian, the UK daily, is there when we want it. (I get The Guardian’s free newsletter of daily headlines by email as well.) PressReader gives us access to hundreds - thousands, actually - of newspapers from all over the world, including right here in Spain. Even English-language Spanish papers aimed at the expat community. 

And it gives us a bunch of magazines too, including weekly Guardian and Observer magazines that I look at regularly. There are hundreds more that we dip into less frequently - including, I discovered recently, Atlantic, one of my old favourites. 

PressReader isn’t  our only source of periodicals either. The London Public Library offers digital facsimiles of a bunch of magazines through its Libby app, including Harpers and New Yorker, which I look at occasionally - and Wired, which I just ‘subscribed’ to this morning (for free). 

I hadn’t looked at Wired closely for a number of years, not since I worked as a tech journalist. Then, it was a pretty nerdy publication with lacklustre writing, very American-centric. Now, judging by the current issue, it’s a much broader-based magazine, with way better writing and a more international flavour. (There is also, I noticed, a UK edition of Wired.)

This morning, I read an excellent article about how ground-penetrating radar - the technology used to locate graves of indigenous children at Canada’s residential schools and find the remains of Richard III in England - is changing how archaeology is done. Some multi-disciplinary teams have ambitious plans to scan vast swaths of land to reveal unsuspected layers of our past. Ground-penetrating radar isn’t exactly up-to-the-minute technology, but this article, written by an award-winning New York Times journalist and book author, is first rate.

Another article was an interview with an American Nobel-prize-winning geneticist, the inventor of the AI-assisted  gene-editing tool called Crispr. She is heading projects that hope to use the technology to ‘edit’ individual genes in particular bacteria in the gut biome to tackle diseases like asthma, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. And finally, I read a short piece about a Nairobi-based African-American entrepreneur using satellite technology to generate data to help small-holder African farmers farm their land more efficiently.

Oh, and of course we get all our books from the London Public Library and read them on our e-book readers. 

On tap today: take in one or more of the exhibits at IVAM, the Valencia Modern Art museum, which we’ll probably get to by bike - it’a about a 20-minute ride from here.

Later the same day: I started feeling a bit cabin feverish late in the morning so went out for a walk around the neighbourhood. Karen was about to start lunch-dinner prep so she didn’t want to come. 

Lots of people about. At home on a Sunday, downtowns are generally dead. Ruzafa isn’t downtown in the sense of being the city centre. But it’s a uniquely European mingling of high-density residential, retail and commercial that feels very urban. And even though most shops are closed on Sunday,  the neighbourhood is quite lively. It’s the day people get out and socialise. Spaniards are as apt to do their socialising in the streets and in cafes and restaurants as at home, so eating and drinking places were starting to fill by noon - even though lunch typically isn’t until later. A big Sunday lunch with family is traditional here. 

It’s cloudy today but a mild 17C and going higher, so the outdoor tables are in high demand. People were mostly noshing on tapas and breakfast-y things when I went by. I saw more than one singleton with a small plate of something, a glass of beer or wine and a book open on the table in front of them. Lots of people are just strolling arm-in-arm or hand-in-hand too. I noticed more than a few middle-aged folks out walking elderly relatives - another Sunday tradition here. It’s a scene. It’s one of the things we love about Spain. 

Coming home along Regne de Valencia, I was struck by this group of small ‘bills’ pasted on the wall of a technical school. They’re protesting the devastation of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. The pictures are digitally altered photos, most taken by a Palestinian photojournalist named Belal Khaled. They come from a website/twitter feed called Unmute Gaza. The middle bill with pictures of bombed out buildings in Gaza reads: “Israel murders the Palestinian people. Free Palestine boycott Israel.”

    Valencia has traditionally been a politically progressive place. It was one of the last hold-outs of the democratic Republic before Franco’s dictatorial regime took over in 1936. So it’s not surprising to see public expressions of support for Palestine, a popular stance among European progressives. And the Spanish often use blank walls and hoardings to express their views, about anything.

A little further on as I walked back into the neighbourhood, I noticed - for the first time - a small very ancient-looking convent near the Ruzafa market. I don’t really know if it’s still a convent, but it appears to have some religious function. I was intrigued by this ceramic plaque on the wall. I was pretty sure I knew what it was talking about, but wanted Google Translate to confirm. 

In plain English, it says, ‘This is the place where the surrender of Valencia by King Zayyan was signed on September 28, 1238. King James I [of Spain] entered the city in triumph on October 9, the feast day of Saint Donis.’ It’s referring to the Reconquista, the reconquest of the Iberian peninsula by Europeans and the end of 500 years of Muslim rule by North African and Arab people. This ancient history - the history of conflict between Christians and Muslims - is still very present in Spanish culture today.

The plaque was mounted in October 1985. I wondered, why at that particular moment in history? Turns out that in April of that year, Spain was struck by one of the first of a long series of terrorist attacks by Muslim jihadists. A suspected Al-Qaeda operative bombed a Madrid restaurant, killing 18 and injuring 82 others. Was this Catholic Spain thumbing its nose at the Muslim world? We beat you once, and we will again.

Later still: Karen and I set out a little after 4 for IVAM (Institut Valencià d'Art Modern). We picked up bikes around the corner and rode to the museum. Most of the route was on the inner ring road: Xativa St., then Guillem de Castro St. It was all on bike lanes separated from vehicle traffic, but not without hazards. Lots of heedless tourists and suburbanites enjoying Sunday in the big city. At one point, two women, one looking down at her phone, the other not looking at all - and leading a toddler by the hand -  walked out into the bike lane against the light right in front of Karen. She had to jam on her brakes and came within inches of hitting them. She swore - in English - but they didn’t even acknowledge that anything had happened.

IVAM is a great museum, but the two exhibits we looked at today - there are typically four or five on at any one time - left us…cool. The big one, spread over several rooms, was entitled popular and attempted to illustrate and explain a concept of the popular that Karen and I had great difficulty getting our heads around - even after reading reams of explanatory text in pretty decent English translation. 

This is from the introduction: “Popular is not fame or celebrity. Popular is not the products of mass culture. Popular is not pop. Popular is not the art of the people, nor the identity of the country, nor the symbols of the nation. The popular is not the product of the proletariat or the craftsmanship of the working classes. The popular is not folklore. The popular is not clichés or tourist souvenirs. The popular is not visual candy, one-euro merchandise, advertising royalties.” 

Okay, I was asking myself at this point, so what the fuck is it? I never did get an understandable answer

Whatever “popular” is in the mind of the curator, the exhibit did include some interesting stuff to illustrate it. Some, not a lot. For example, it included colourful posters like this one for Valencia’s Fallas festival, and a set of raunchy prints on the subject of prostitution by George Grosz, an early 20th century German expressionist artist. I also spotted a series of photo images by Cindy Sherman, the famous American artist who specialises in elaborately staged self-portraits in which she dresses up as different characters from pop culture or stereotypes.

George Grosz print

Wall of George Grosz prints about prostitution

    We bailed before the last rooms. We might go back to it later, but probably not. The good thing is, we didn’t pay to get in. IVAM is free on Sundays. Being cheap, that’s when we always go. 

The other show we looked in on was a kind of retrospective reconsideration of the second-rank Spanish artist Ignacio Pinazo. I’d never heard of him. He was working at the same time as the Impressionists (late 19th, early 20th century). According to the explanatory text, his work didn’t go over well with “the elitist art market.” We could see why. (Not that we’re elitist or anything.) Where the Impressionists applied paint loosely, Pinazo was loose to the point of near abstraction. And where the Impressionists were all about colour and light, most of Pinazo’s paintings are dark. To make it worse, it seemed he couldn’t afford supplies and almost all the examples shown in the exhibit were miniatures. Miniature landscapes don’t very often work well - in my humble opinion. 

Ignacio Pinazo, Firecrackers (the little puffs of smoke maybe?)

By the time we came out, it was dusk. We’d spent longer than I thought. We walked back through the funky Carmen neighbourhood, with me snapping pics along the way. 

Not sure what the spire is...Karen walking on right

    The guys in this one were giving me a cheerful finger as they walked by, and called out an ironic ‘Thank you’ in English as they went. 

It was slow-going. Karen’s knee was just about done in from two hours of standing around on top of the bike ride to the museum. She had to stop and sit down by the central market. It was almost 7 by the time we got home, and pitch dark. 

15th century silk exchange lit up on left