Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Hmmm, it occurred to me that I have not blogged in a while and as I am having a lazy day today I thought it might be a good chance to rectify the situation. I am in Barcelona, where they have the two most awesome cathedrals ever! One (picutred) is the Sagrada Familia which is a crazy building with impossibly tall spires and all the stones look like they are melting off it and the rest of the building kind of sprawls and melts like a gingerbread castle. The other cathedral has a pond for geese right in the centre.
They used to have two rivers in Barcelona, I can´t remember their names but they translate literally as the ´s*** stream´and the ´turd bearer´. Basically because people used to throw their s*** in them, hooray for sewage. There is no sewage here now though, hooray for no sewage!
Where else have I been? Canterbury in England, where they have all these castle and church ruins that you can just walk into for free. Inside one of the castle ruins I found a gathering of disreputable youths.
Lille, in France, where we found a park containing a kid´s fun park, a zoo and a military base. In the zoo when they didn´t have the animals they wanted in the enclosure they just put cardboard cut outs in, including cardboard cut outs of a polar bear and two whales... in the woods!
Paris, which has a law against building skyscrapers in the city so every building is really nice and old and cool. And also it is true that French drivers won´t let you cross the road. I saw an old man with a stick moving so slowly because he was old across the road and thought ´they´ll leave him be, surely´and then a couple of minutes later I heard this crazed shouting and it was the man still trying to cross the road and all the cars were trying to nudge past him and he was waving his stick at them in fury.
Mont St Michel, which is a walled city on a rock which becomes an island at high tide!
Toulouse, which was a completely random decision as I could not find any accomodation anywhere else in France but turned out to be quite good. At the canal in Toulouse they have statues of people which are made out of dead leaves and in the half light when I arrived you don´t really notice them at first and then you do and some of them have disturbing postures like this one that is clinging to the rails like he is going to jump in and it is actually quite spooky.
Carcassone, another walled medieval city with a castle fortress which was kick arse. Here I went to the museum of torture and learnt about all the creative ways the Catholic church thought of to interrogate, punish, kill and just generally induldge their insane passion for violence. I will give you just one snippet, which I actually learnt about later in Barcelona. They used to cut open the feet of Jews they wanted to force to convert to Christianity, insert an ice cube, sew it back up and then heat the foot so the water inside boiled. Lovely.
I have pictures of all this (except the feet thing) which I will upload at an unspecified point in the fututre...
- comments
Trish All the cathedrals and castles sound awesome - I'm just picturing Lord of the Rings! Haha! Whales in the woods! But of course ... Hmm, that's horrible about the Catholic Church. If they were converting Jews to Christianity (though probably it was Catholicism) that just flies in the face of what Christianity stands for "love your neighbour" and indeed, even your "enemies". That's just horrible that torture You sound like you're seeing so many amazing things! That is SO COOL! Wow, you're gonna be so well cultured and travelled! Little bit jealous over here :D