Hola,
The bar just an arm’s reach from our finger pier plays the best music, at a really reasonable volume from about 6pm until 9pm. Perfecto!!!!
I went off exploring today. Randal worked on the boat. So what else is new?
Ru
The Picasso Family in A Coruña and Messing Around on Boats….
Living on a boat because you like to travel is like working in a library because you like to read…. Way too much of Randal’s time is spent figuring out how to get us from place to place and then doing boat repairs when we get there. Travel is sandwiched in between those two tasks. When you work in a library, you read book reviews, order books, process books, look up the location of books or other information on the library shelves or computer or microfilm reader and hand them to other people to read. Away from the library is when you actually have time to read. While I was out and about today having a wonderful time exploring A Coruña, Randal spent the day dealing with dirty fuel issues. Yesterday morning we returned to the Pombo shop to collect the exorbitantly expensive fuel filters Randal had ordered and in the afternoon the AIS/GPS repair guy came with one new part and lots of good skill. That also was exorbitantly expensive, but absolutely necessary as it not only fixed our problem but corrected the jerry-rigged set up the original AIS installers had done in Hong Kong that never worked until we got to Singapore years later and those guys and Randal made it work. Now, thanks to the skill of Raul Martinez Lijό Gerente from NAUELEC www.nauelec.com both the AIS and GPS are working correctly! Hurrah!!! The folks at Pombo had suggested Raul and the folks at the marina had called him for us. Pombo had tracked down a supplier for the fuel filters too so everyone here has been really helpful even though the cost of items is double what we’d pay at home.
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Raul and Randal |
Picasso
There are free tours offered through the A Coruña Tourist Office and Randal and I luckily managed to get a spot on the “Picasso’s Town” tour. Our tour leader was half knowledgeable guide, half actor so the 90 minute walking tour was very entertaining. 60 minutes were in Spanish and 30 in English as the Spanish explanations seemed to be twice as long as those in English. Of the 30 participants, only 6 of us were English speakers, all from the United States and the other 4 who were not Randal and I, spoke some Spanish.
When we first met our tour leader…
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Tour Guide: Where are you from? Me: America. Tour Guide: Columbia? Me: North America Tour Guide? Me United States, Virginia…. In Asia if I said United States folks didn’t understand until I said America. But in countries with ties to other North American countries : Central, Latin, or South American, one has to be careful not to claim all of that territory for us. Our guide asked more questions later and Randal fed me all kinds of wrong information making me look really REALLY DUMB. First Randal told me the wrong year the Picasso’s came to A Coruña which I couldn’t remember. Worse, our guide was talking about the Scotsman General Sir John Moore who was sent to help the Spanish against the Emperor Napoleon, and asked us to guess his age. I thought he meant Moore’s age so when Randal told me 47 that’s what I said. Turns out we were supposed to be guessing the age of Eusebio da Guarda, our guide’s persona (or really the guide’s age ) which was 44! Nothing like telling someone they look older than they are. Randal is hysterical for the next 10 minutes or so when the guide is talking but amazingly I’m holding it together really embarrassed that I’d told our guide he looked old! When we started to walk along again I ran up to the guide and told him I thought he’d asked how old Moore was at the time and Randal had made a guess that I’d offered. Duh! Randal did give him a 20 Euro tip at the end for putting up with us. |
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Eusebio da Guarda is the persona of our tour guide. In real life de Guarda was the patron of the School of Fine Arts and the High School were Picasso began to study art at the age of 10. I believe his father also taught there which is why they were in A Coruña among other reasons. It is still in use as a secondary school |
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Picasso House and Museum Most of the artwork is reproductions so it’s really the house that’s of interest. And the tour is just as much the history of A Coruña during the years 1891 to 1895 as it is about Picasso. The Theater where he saw plays and which was the first building to have electricity. The pharmacy owned by the father of his first love, Lola, the subject of the barefoot girl painting. A chocolate shop as A Coruña is famous for chocolate though neither Randal nor I can remember why. |
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Probably not the actual paint brushes and palettes used by Picasso but inspiring anyway. |
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Small dining room |
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Truth or Myth The man in the framed painting is Doctor Pérez Costales physician to and family friend of the Picassos. The photograph is of the richest man in A Coruña at the time. He owned an umbrella store, now a shop not far from the Old Town. The rumor was that the doctor, who was also a politician and big man about town, was the umbrella shop owner’s real father. |
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Authentic sketches: framed and under glass. Boris and Natasha from the Bulwinkle show could be mistaken for a Picasso sketch |
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Picasso with his family |
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http://www.theartwolf.com/articles/picasso-coruna-en.htm “However, there is a stage in the life of Pablo Picasso that remains, at least for the general public, as unknown, a sort of loophole in the popular career of the great genius of the visual arts of the twentieth century: his brief but decisive period in A Coruña, Galicia, Spain (1891-1895), a key time in the artist’s formation” This website seems to match what we heard on the tour and seems to have more info than any other I found that was in English. I don’t know if it was my imagination or wishful thinking but if our guide had been speaking more slowly I might have understood more of what he said in Spanish. But he only had 90 minutes and we had many stops along the way, each with a long story ( Spanish version) and the gist of it version for those of us limited to English. But then I can’t say I’ve ever been on a tour in the US where it was given in any language other than English. Randal and I had walked to Pombo in the morning to pick up the fuel filters that turned out not to be there yet and then walked back to Old Town to have lunch and meet the tour and then walked most of the way back to Pombo to get to the Picasso House so by the end of the tour we were pretty pooped. And we still had to go to the grocery store so the museum shop got short shrift. I did see postcards of the famous Picasso Don Quixote print that everyone had once upon a time and the hand holding flowers. Brought back memories of many many years ago in the 60s! |
