Please tell me that this is not the new England shirt. I adore the sight of Paul Sackey scoring tries, but I’m not sure that I adore that shirt. Please tell me that it’s just a change strip because the Pacific Islanders were in white. Please. It looks like an Arsenal shirt. Ugh.
In other news, Spain is lots of nice things. Among other stuff, the hot chocolate is amazing, clearly, and the food is all kinds of good things. I have been taking lots’n'lots of pictures, as ever, but I forgot my camera cable, and so ye cannae see any of them till I get home on Wednesday. Or as my father said, “So the world can expect a deluge of Madrid photos then, can it?” Well, just my world. I very much doubt refugees in the DRC will be paying attention.
I have been to Toledo, and Segovia, where I managed not to hug the aqueduct, and to Salamanca, where I found the frog on the carved front of the university and therefore will clearly be getting married in the next 12 months, as that’s apparently what I get for finding the frog. Whoopeeeee. I have also played in the three main art galleries, and discovered that I am ok with modern art up until about the middle of the twentieth century, and then I start going, ‘ugh’ or ‘hmm, I do doodle like that in Friday seminars.’ Early Miro, good. Late Miro, well, I don’t dislike it, but I don’ understand how it qualifies as art. And some of the other stuff in the Reina Sofia.
Just ugh. But the second floor stuff, the early twentieth century, I liked that. And Guernica is most impressive, and looks quite different when you actually see it full-on in HUGE size, rather than in poster-size on your roommate’s half of the wall. I liked the Thyssen-Bornemisza best though – despite being completely unable to pronounce it. Lots of lovely things, including Kandinsky, and a very very lovely Pissarro, which is a sibling of the Pissaro I adored in the RA’s ‘From Russia’ exhibit, and which I cannot even find a postcard of anywhere. It is Rue Saint-Honore: Rain Effect, on the right. I love love love it. (The other is Avenue de l’Opera: Snow Effect, apparently it lives in St Petersburg most of the time.) Apart from the contents – which did also include a fab exhibition called 1914! The Great War and the Avant-Gard – the museum itself is just so pretty. Yay for pretty museum architecture.
Finally, of course, I did follow the US election, completely failing to sleep properly, because I am that kind of person (the kind of person who stays in the same location watching a sporting event if the supported entity is doing well, because clearly it brings luck), and ended up checking the web at 5.30 am in time to catch McCain’s concession speech. Big yays from me for Obama winning, clearly. And now I’m following the transition a bit, and being very amused that after the Obama-being-like-Santos-who-was-based-on-Obama West Wing tale, Rahm Emanuel, who was apparently an inspiration for Josh Lyman in the West Wing, has been appointed Chief of Staff, which is the job Josh ended up with in the Santos administration. I am focusing on this amusment in an attempt to remain in denial about the fact that I find Emanuel oddly attractive…
