5 September 26
The Mary Thing: A Teeny-Weeny Somewhat Sheepish Memoir
I just submitted a comic to an anthology in which we were encouraged to imagine a new saint. Our Lady of the Take-Off is mine.
4 September 26
Skirting The Pamirs
We are continuing to follow on YouTube the Catalan adventurer Enric Luzán as he walks around the world, having started at the Plaça de Catalunya in Barcelona at the beginning of last November. Right now he is trekking through Tajikistan and is following the Pamir Highway. A portion of his walk has been along the Panj River that marks a border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan; he was walking entirely on the Tajikistan side and looking with great curiosity across the river at Afghanistan.
The Pamirs as a place name makes me think of the well-regarded historical board game Pax Pamir, designed by Cole Wehrle. This game is about the competition between Afghan leaders in the 19th century as they vie for autonomous control of the region amidst the “Great Game” being carried out between Great Britain and Russia over Central Asia. Wehrle’s design notes for the game give a number of book recommendations, the first of which is Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-1842, by the Scottish historian William Dalrymple and published in 2013.
I quickly went to the library to fetch and read this book, which is an account of the First Anglo-Afghan War which was waged from 1839-1842. It is an excellent work of history, both in terms of its narrative style and the fact that Dalrymple was able to uncover some interesting archival material about the war such as 19th century epic poetry about the war that had not been previously translated into English. To do his research Dalrymple traipsed through Afghanistan and Pakistan during the 21st century war there.
At the end of his book Dalrymple comments on the parallels between the 21st century war and the First Anglo-Afghan War. The First Anglo-Afghan War ended disastrously for the British. Their objective was to install a pliant monarch in the region as a geopolitical counterbalance to Russian moves in the region. This Durrani monarch named Shah Shuja had been deposed several decades previously, the British returning him to power in 1839. A couple years later there was a general uprising resulting in the British and East India Company forces being driven from the region and Shah Shuja being killed.
The painting above is entitled Remnants of an Army by Elizabeth Thompson from 1879. It shows Dr. William Brydon approaching the fort at Jalalabad following the retreat from Kabul in 1842. He was supposedly the only survivor of the retreat, though there were actually other stragglers.
3 September 26
Catalunya in German
We took the month off in our German class (this is a weekly Zoom meeting through International House which I’ve been running since our teacher Paul died a couple of years ago). I was asked to make a presentation on our Catalunya trip (this isn’t unusual; folks often share their photos from trips). I hurried to put one together.
I often tell people I don’t take photos on vacation, I sketch. But this is patently false, since I managed to find a whole load of pictures I took with my phone (sometimes to provide color reference for sketches I’ve made in ink but not yet painted in watercolor). It was fun to combine photos with sketches. The kids in this photo were football pals who had made 20 litres of lemonade (well, Ruth did) and crepes, which they sold for one Euro each in the plaza outside the village church and made a killing.
The difficulty comes in switching registers from Catalan to German. (I’ve made at least one German error in the caption to this photo: according to the acronym TEKAMOLO (temporal/causal/modal/local) which is used to remind students how to order German syntax, the “bei der Kirche” should come after “wärend der Eklipse.”) It was even harder on the day of the eclipse, when I was out and about sketching, running into a young French artist who had made it to Tivissa by train and hitchhiking. My French is, or was, good, but I found myself inserting Catalan words liberally into my French sentences…
2 September 26
Sometimes A Trap
My sketch for today is of one of our cat carriers. Our cat Winston had his annual checkup and vaccinations today, which mean schlepping him six blocks to our vet. It was no challenge getting him in the cat carrier. Quite the opposite. He hopped into it to check it out about 25 minutes before departure time, and promptly started dozing. Alas for him, the time came to leave, the top got zipped up, and he was no longer free. But he had a brief and good appointment, and we quickly got him back home.
1 September 26
Drama in the Persimmon Tree
The cats often alert us to interesting, but silent, things going on in the garden. In this case, Esme was fixated on an immature Cooper’s hawk perched in the persimmon tree outside. There is a family of California scrub-jays that our neighbor feeds with peanuts daily; I’m sure this was what the young raptor was looking for. (Silence from the hedge in which the jays had their nest earlier in the year.)
Because the bird perched for a good long while, I was able to make the initial drawing (which I painted) and then made several other quick sketches, including this hummingbird that fearlessly harassed the hawk. (Because hummingbirds, alone of all birds, can fly backwards, this is less risky than it sounds.)
31 August 26
The Era of DIY Sewing Kits
It’s been a long while since I’ve traveled so I was scrambling when packing for our Catalunya trip and didn’t know what to put my clothes in. I was looking for a dark blue bag I thought I had, but didn’t find it, but eventually unearthed the bag shown at left. It is a little small, but we were traveling to a very warm place during summer and wouldn’t need heavy clothes, so the bag would work.
This bag was sewn by my mother around 1980 or thereabouts from a kit made by Altra Sewing Kits. The 1970s through the early 1980s were an era when several companies in the United States such as Altra and Frostline were manufacturing kits for DIYers to sew their own outdoors gear, enclosing the needed precut pieces of fabric, zippers, straps, and so on. My mother liked to sew from these kits and she made a number of pieces of gear for me included several jackets (one made with down), this piece of soft luggage, a rain poncho, and bike panniers.
Towards the end of the 1980s the economics turned against the market for these sorts of kits and these companies went out of business. I do not know of any equivalent kits being made for outdoors gear today. Here is a retrospective about Altra Sewing Kits compiled by somebody who studies the cultural resonances of Boulder, Colorado, where Altra and Frostline were based.
30 August 26
A Crisis With the Kit
One of the hardest things about packing for a trip is to determine how little you can get away with in the article of art supplies. Both Numenius and I like to sketch in place, with the occasional drawing done after the fact from a photo. This means being nimble — your sketching stuff should be easy to pack and retrieve, light, and as comprehensive as possible.
Although fountain pens in planes can sometimes be disastrous, I’ve found the TWSBI brand loaded with DeAtramentis Document Ink to be very reliable. I like this ink because it’s waterproof: you can sketch in ink then lay in a watercolor wash over the drawing without having it run. The TWSBI Eco has a very large reservoir for ink which lasts a long time.
Unfortunately the TWSBI Diamond isn’t as large and though the nib is delicious on the paper I chose for this trip — Stillman and Birn Zeta — I managed to run out of ink in Tarragona before the trip was over. I’d been using a brown-black (“Sepia”) ink which is new to me from DeAtramentis. I still had a TWSBI Eco loaded with what I thought was Urban Gray, but which turned out to be black, which suddenly felt very harsh. (Stressing out about this kind of thing definitely falls under the category of First World Problems, of interest to maybe three people, but still.)
My attempt to remedy my predicament had us visit “the largest stationery store in Europe,” Raima, in Barcelona. I didn’t find ink there but I picked up a permanent brown marker. This turned out to be too light. We did find a nearby pen store that stocked ink (Platinum, also permanent for fountain pens), but there wasn’t the right brown, and did I really want to buy a whole bottle of ink before I got on a plane? I decided against it. Numenius lent me a Uniball Signo brown-black pen for the rest of the trip which was definitely close in color to what I wanted but I really do prefer to sketch in fountain pen… When we got home I gave my pens a new supply of ink.
You always learn something for the next trip. My favorite place to buy stationery supplies, on this continent, is JetPens, at least where fountain pens and inks are concerned. ETA: forgot to add a link to Art Toolkit which is a fantastic source for pocket-sized travel palettes. I also forgot to add the two waterbrushes I travel with (Pentel Aquash) and a mechanical pencil, which I almost never use.
29 August 26
Two Barcelona Favorites
I found Barcelona overwhelming, which is probably related to the fact I haven’t lived in a place with more than 190,000 people for over 36 years, but we did visit some interesting spots. My two favorites were the Catalan bookstore and the orxateria.
We went to Ona Llibres the evening of Friday August 14th. This is probably the largest Catalan-only bookstore extant. Pica fearlessly conversed with the shopkeeper in the Catalan that she’s picked up and we came away with four publications shown at left from the store: a novel by Barcelona author Montserrat Roig, a Catalan textbook, a translation of Terry Pratchett’s Equal Rites into Catalan (there have been about a half-dozen Pratchett books translated into Catalan), and a 1:300,000 scale map of Catalunya.
The second place was the orxateria. An orxata is a sweet chilled beverage from Valencia and Catalunya that is etymologically related to the horchata from Mexico, but they are made from different bases. The latter is made from rice, cinnamon, and sugar, but the former is made from ground tiger nuts. Bottled orxatas are widely available across Catalunya but I wanted to try an orxata that was made from scratch. Prior to our trip, I had watched a video on the YouTube channel betevé that was entitled Orxateria Verdú, el secret de l’orxata artesana a Barcelona so I tracked the place down. The drink was well worth savoring..
28 August 26
Tarragona
We took the crowded regional train from Hospitalet l’Infant to Tarragona, the capital of Roman Spain. It was hot when we arrived in this beautiful city on the cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean. By luck, we hit the fiesta del Sant Magí, one of the martyrs killed in the Roman amphitheater we visited in the heat of the afternoon. We saw sardanas, the circular Catalan dances, being performed in the main square, and castells — human pyramids — precariously erecting themselves in front of one of the churches. And we took ourselves to the Cathedral for some more cloister sketching. (We encountered two separate couples getting their wedding photographs taken at the Cathedral, which was entertaining for us if not them.) The cathedral was built on the site of the Augustan temple of Tarraco and is dedicated to Santa Tecla (also martyred, though not in Tarragona). The word “tecla” in Spanish means key, as in keys on a keyboard. I’ve yet to discover whether there is any connection between them…
27 August 26
An Interlude On Public Transport
Apart from the excursion up to Vall de Boí via rental car, basically all of travels throughout Catalunya were via public transport. How did this go?
The train (Renfe). Train service in Spain in general and Catalunya specifically can be divided into high-speed rail (the AVE) and regional rail lines. Spain has invested a lot into building out the AVE — Spain has more mileage of high-speed rail lines than any other country besides China — but this has been at the cost of lack of investment in the regional rail network. We rode the AVE twice, once to go from Barcelona to Girona, and the other time to go from Girona to Lleida. These trips were fast as advertised but navigating the stations, particularly Barcelona-Sants, was tricky. We rode the regional rail three times: first to get from Barcelona airport to downtown, then to go from L’Hospitalet d’Infant to Tarragona, and then from Tarragona to Barcelona. The latter two trips were miserably overcrowded and I had to stand all the way both legs. The trains however were on time. There was an episode of Easy Catalan a year ago where the hosts interviewed people on the street in Vilafranca del Penedès on whether they took the train anywhere. The answer was almost without exception no, the trains in Catalunya were just too slow and unreliable.
The metro in Barcelona. We rode it extensively the last three days of our trip. It is a large system and we found that changing between lines took a lot of effort in going up and down to the different underground levels via escalator or elevator. Our base for our stay in Barcelona was a hotel on the metro line running directly to the airport so we had to do a lot of line changing. We also learned that summertime is when they do maintenance on the system; specifically on our first trip from the hotel to downtown we discovered that the L1 line which had the easiest interconnection to downtown was closed for five stations, replaced by a special bus. We then had to route around this discontinuity in the metro lines the rest of our stay. One thing that made our travels easier in Barcelona was buying a three-day Hola Barcelona pass, unlimited travel for that time period on the city buses and the metro. Another fun diversion was taking the funicular up Montjuïc that is directly connected to the metro system.
Buses. They are harder to research than trains or the metro but the buses can be quite enjoyable. Returning to our hotel in Barcelona the last day we found a bus that ran from Paral·lel straight to our hotel — it was much more efficient than the metro plus it skirted the lower slopes of Montjuïc, passing by some magnificent architecture on the way. And my favorite transit experience the entire stay in Catalunya was taking the bus from Lleida south to Mora d’Ebre. There are only two buses a day on that route but the trip passed through some really interesting countryside. Also the bus station in Lleida is right next to the train station which is quite convenient.
Taxis. We used these fairly often for short legs. In general taxis are easily found but we had a stressful twenty minutes waiting for a summoned taxi to take us from our hotel in Girona to the train station to catch the AVE.
All of which has taught me to pay more attention to bus transport while traveling. A good guide for researching buses worldwide is busmaps.com. As an example, this shows all the agencies running buses through Lleida.