Week 12 – Arles and Barcelona

 Arles:

·         Aumar, someone we met on the bus from UK to Brussels, had suggested we visit Arles in our travels, so we did.  He grew up in Garda, Algeria and has lived in Arles for 5 years.  We hadn’t heard of Arles before.  He’s recently retired as a hotel clerk and was visiting his daughter in London.

·         We had thought we would meet Francoise, Martin, and Colleen in La Rochelle area on the west coast but the timing didn’t work out, although it’s still on our list for someday.

·         This was a Roman settlement during Julius Caesar’s time.  There is still an Amphitheater that went into disrepair for centuries and had 200 homes in it once upon a time, until a local pushed for restoring it.  Really cool spot.

·         Van Gogh spent about a year there and created 200 paintings, many of them in town.  This is where he cut his ear, then a local petition went around demanding him to leave town.  A tortured genius.  When he went back to Holland he gave a painting of a doctor to him.  The doctor didn’t care much for the painting and used it to keep his bard cage sheltered.  It sold recently for $50 million.

·         They have an archeology museum, including a barge dug up nearby from the River Rhone in 2010 after sinking with a load of stone around 60 AD.  They had a film explaining the restoration, which took painstaking to a new level.  Great history on Roman times.

·         A new draw in town is a funky building designed by Frank Gehry that is now mostly an art museum and made of 11,000 stainless steel panels.  The highlight was talking with Jean-Baptiste, a security guard on the observation level in his 20’s and glad to share his knowledge of the city on a slow, rainy day.

·         Aumar met us at the train station, walked us around, then met us the next day and visited the archeology museum with us and shared a drink (coffee for him, tea for KK, wine for me.)  He lived in Phoenix for a year, with his brother, who now lives in Tampa.  We said maybe we’ll visit Garda someday.  Just a very warm guy and I think we’ll keep in touch.

Barcelona:

·         Another city I had figured I would avoid because of stereotype of a tourist mecca.  Glad we avoided peak travel time but also glad Bobbie convinced us to stop there.

·         Miguel gave us a tour of the Gothic district, which included coverage of the Jewish quarter and some history.  To make up for making the Jews choose between converting, emigrating, or dying during the Inquisition, if you can prove you are descended from one of the victims, you can get Spanish citizenship.  By my math that would be about 20 generations back.  It was good to get a 5-star guide after a couple of 4-star ones (Aumar doesn’t count.)

·         Lisa gave us a tour of some of Gaudi’s homes.  She was enthusiastic and knowledgeable and gave us an appreciation for a genius with a difficult streak.  One of my favorite anecdotes was the wife of a client kept stressing to him to make sure the daughter’s grand piano could fit in a room.  When the day came, the piano didn’t fit and Gaudi’s response was, “Buy her a violin.”  His swan song was a cathedral, where work on it continues today, after 100 years (not a typo) and might finish in 2028.

·         We walked the beach one day.  There were about 10 swimmers and 20 surfers and it was easy to picture it packed on a summer day.

·         We rode the subway, then the funicular, then a cable car to the top of Mont Judic and wandered around, checking out the view of the city, including a working harbor that looked huge to me.

·         The fast train to Madrid felt more like a flight – checking tickets and scanning luggage to enter the terminal, then queuing again for another ticket check to walk onto the platform.  The train topped out around 265 kmph / 160 mph and was really smooth with seats approaching US business class in comfort.  But the tickets were more than 10 times as expensive per mile as the Balkans travel.

·         There is a public transportation mask mandate in Spain.  My guess is the compliance rate is around 20% on subway and train.  Minutes after I typed that, a conductor with a food cart just asked a bunch of us very politely to put our masks on.  The average is now above 20%.

·         The food was nothing special, except for an awesome 100% gluten-free bakery across the street.

Misc:

·         Karen and I have continued playing Wordle almost every day, at times trying to find a starting word that is decent and related to our travel.

I started down a rabbit hole on calendars – Julian vs. Gregorian vs. Napoleon.  Fascinating stuff but complicated:  Julian calendar set the 12 months and leap years but were adding an extra day every 128 years so that by 15^th century the solstice was almost 2 weeks early.  Gregorian calendar tweaked that (off by a day every 3,000 years) and for decades many documents listed dates in both formats (think standard and metric.)  Somewhere along the line they stopped denoting years by the emperors’ reigns.  Napoleon tried to erase all church influence and said to reset Year 1 to coincide soon after the French Revolution.  He made progress with metric, at least:  There are 3 countries left to get on board: Myanmar, Liberia, and the US.  Made me wonder about it from my work standpoint, thinking about “user adoption” (if we introduce a new version of software, how do we convince customers to switch, how long do we support the old one, etc.), only a slightly larger scale.