Sadly, I didn't venture into this museum. Believe me, I wanted to. I think as far as stereotypes go, 'ham obsession' isn't too bad and bizarely enough, its fairly accurate. In the cola-cao cafe today, I saw a poster for a Ham carving sumer course in Leon. Only in Spain.
El MUSAC (museum of Modern Art Leon) has an incredible new exhibition of work by Latin American artists. Room after room was filled with mad and brilliant illustrations and ghostly hanging statues, infact, there was only one pretentious arty video (of a woman packing and unpacking a suitcase no less), so all in all it was rather good.
I like this Mexican Pin-up girl personalised with whirling indigenous style tatuajes. One day, I'd quite like to make a collection of photos of people in art museums. Its always interesting to watch the way people walk around, stand in front of, and generally react to art. In these two pictures, Kae is cute as button, shyly weaving her around the vast, empty museum.
A brief trip to a village on wednesday evening. Small houses (tick), Gossiping old biddies (tick)...everything was picture perfect and glowing in a tinned peach orange light.
We watched some golondrinas duck in out of the rooftops.
Astorga has a beautiful chocolate factory and little else. Ok, so its home to one of the three buildings Gaudi designed outside of Barcelona, but I'm going to be fairly controversial here I say, 'No soy un fan'. Honestly. His Astorgan palace is a messy combination of disney like towers and rip off Islmic tiles and pillars. Just odd. I prefered this block of flats framed by saintly figures. Although its too miniscule to see, in one of the windows there was a Spanish flag. To me, this somehow seemed to have a lot more character than Guadi's souless masterpiece.
Saying farewell to Newton was not easy. He reaped havoc in my room whilst getting ready for my final night out with Ana and Alba and generally tried to distract us from hairstraightening/dress adjusting/tipexing scuffed white stilletos with all his ferrety charm, (which included ankle biting, jumping in the bidet and hiding under cupboards). He is a tio grande and will be missed muchly.
Friday evening and Satur-all-day were unfortunately not photo documented. The eve began with sangria in the field of scorched poppies behind the resi. It moved on to 'La casa de los locos' where we inevitably danced liked 'locos' to Bad Romance (Lady Gaga has been omnipresent through out my time in Leon). Then Alba, Bert and I went for an emotional 'final crepe'.
Home at 5:30 am and out at 9, for an action packed day of gold mine exploring and mountain trecking.
Somehow, I survived, and the day was spent the day in absolute awe of the remains of exploded mountains (left by gold crazed Roman hombres), the Galician countryside (which is as green and beautiful as the South of Ireland, but without the view defying fog), and then later at the ocean of red and yellow flooding the town centre as Mara-Villa y los ninos gave us all another reason to dance in the streets, honk car horns and bravely attempt to sing along to the chorus of Waka Waka.....
'Shamala la la wala wala La- Porque esto es Africa!!'