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adventures / photo / Spain / weekend — Comments Off
12
Mar 23

IACS, day two, or the rare weekend post, part one

Happy Sunday. We’re all out of sorts here, with extra posts because of our many adventures. So let’s dive in. Yesterday, Saturday, we spent at the conference, and chatting with friends old and new. It was a fine day with delightful people.

Today, we took in two of Barcelona’s sites.

First was Park Güell, on the northern face of the Collserola mountain range. The design was Antoni Gaudí’s, the architect is the face of local modernism, but more on him in the next post. The park was opened in 1926 and declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1984. More than 12 million tourists visit the park each year, but the initial plan was to build a complex of high-quality houses.

Also, it affords these outstanding views of the city and countryside.

The Calvary — or the hill of the three crosses, or El turó de les Tres Creus in Catalan — is a small manmade mountain. There are three crosses there. It was intended to be a chapel, but Gaudi didn’t finish it. Highest part of the park.

This was to be at the front of the failed housing project, and inspired by the story of Hänsel and Gretel. There are two buildings here, model houses, really. This one was to be an administrative building, but is now a bookstore and gift shop. That cross is not original. It was destroyed in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and rebuilt sometime thereafter.

This is the Escalera Monumental, or dragon staircase. Very popular, and if you’ve ever seen photos from Güell, this is probably what you saw first. The highlights are the mosaics, which you can’t appreciate properly for all of these crowds.

A lot of Gaudi’s work doesn’t appeal to me. The explanations for what he was after often feel like apologia. “It’s an appeal to nature!” If you say so. Modernism has plenty of peculiar strains though, and it isn’t always better. I love the mosaic work, there’s not one in Spain I wouldn’t stop to admire, but I can dismiss much of the rest of Gaudi’s park.

We visited there with some friends from Louisville and Canada — you don’t know them. After, we cooled down with a gelato, took a group photo and said our goodbyes. The conference was ended, and we’re all going to separate places in the hours and days to come.

The first place The Yankee and I were going was to the Sagrada Familia. It was a mile or so away, and we strolled through beautiful high end neighborhoods. Apartment living looks fine, if, I’m sure, you can afford it.

This is Casa de les Punxes, or Casa Terradas. Bartomeu Terradas i Mont, a textile magnate, and his son, Bartomeu Terradas Brutau — a soccer player, a founding member of FC Barcelona and, briefly, the team president — had this house built for the women in their family in 1905. It is actually three buildings, but design and perspective make it all merge fairly seamlessly. (And if I’d been on my toes when we walked by, I’d have a better photo to show that.) The medieval modernism style makes it a signature Barcelona building, and in 1975, it was declared a national historic monument.

Soon after, we arrived at Sagrada Familia, the famous church — and famously unfinished church — designed by Antoni Gaudí.

We’ve seen beautiful churches and cathedrals in London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, across the United States. It’s just a thing we do on trips, now, and they never disappoint. But, as I said above, Gaudí’s quirky style isn’t to my taste. He was killed by a tram in 1926. He was 73 and about a quarter of the project was completed, so he was never going to see this place finished. Here we are, almost 100 years later, work still in progress.

The exterior is adorned with scenes depicting Jesus’ life.

Rich with symbolism, or at least stabs at explanation, it is quite … involved and ornate … in its own mottled sort of way.

I don’t care for the style, is all.

Except for these. While the church work has been underway since late in the 19th century, these doors were installed in 2015. Apparently there were no doors before that.

These are bronze, and that’s symbolic too, since the more it gets touched, the more brilliant and beautiful it becomes like the love between two people. These doors were crafted by a man named Etsuro Sotoo. The “Japanese Gaudí” came to Spain in 1978 and his devoted much of his life’s work to project. I’ve shortchanged his genius by capturing it with two hasty photos.

These doors, the Doors of the Charity, are absolutely stunning.

After Gaudí died, work continued, but then came a two-decade pause from the Spanish Civil War and World War II, and then some time repairing war damage. And the work always continues. A few generations of artisans and laborers since … they’re eyeing a tangible finish line. In the next decade or so, they’re anticipating finally having Sagrada Familia completed.

In the next post you’ll see the interior, and why we will most definitely be back.

adventures / Friday / photo / Spain — Comments Off
10
Mar 23

IACS, day one

That’s the International Association for Communication and Sport to you and me.

We woke up this morning ready for IACS. Still jet-lagged, but sure of where we were, and grateful we made it in time to participate in the conference. Travel issues aside, knowing where you are when you wake up is a good thing. And I’ve become an incredibly poor traveler. It takes me a day or two to get on the right schedule. So far, though, I am impressing myself today. He said, after the rare mid-day nap.

But that’s getting ahead of things.

Our hotel has a fine breakfast. The dining area is just off the check-in lobby, and at the host stand someone is waiting to ask you your room number. They check that number against a list. And, as we ordered breakfast, we’re on the list.

So a guy is standing there waiting to talk to guests.

“Hola. Buenas dias. Número de habitación, por favor.”

504.

And, without a moment’s hesitation, “Oh, Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I am the hotel manager. We are sooooo very sorry about your experience last night.”

So word has gotten around.

Breakfast was fine. We then walked the 400 meters to another hotel where this actual conference was taking place. Here’s The Yankee delivering some of her most recent research to her sports scholar colleagues.

She loves this crowd, and they all love her, too. She said later in the day that this was her favorite conference, but she didn’t need to say that, it was obvious. She was among her people. Similar academic interests and, pleasantly, no big egos.

My lovely bride has been studying the American coverage of the Olympics for almost 20 years now. These are the things we know for certain. Primetime NBC coverage is aimed at a female audience. Fifty-six percent of the audience is female and NBC knows this. So there’s an emphasis on storytelling, and there are no combat sports shared during primetime. Some 60 percent of NBC’s primetime coverage is given over to women’s sports. (Conversely, ESPN famously devotes about six percent of their coverage to women.) All of this, her research says, makes the NBC Olympic coverage the largest media coverage of women’s sports.

And! This year, for the first time ever … women were allowed to be smart.

This might seem like a small thing, but media portrayals matter. Is an athlete athletic or a mom, or tough, or someone’s girlfriend or gritty or whatever. In these last games, commentators tied a woman’s intelligence was to a quality performance.

Now, I guess, the question is whether that will turn into a trend over the course of the next several Olympics.

Speaking of intelligence … The second most interesting thing that happened at the conference today was that the daughter of one of our grad school professors presented some of her original research. She’s a junior in undergrad at Florida, and a thoughtful, talented young woman who brought her junior thesis about collegiate athletes and NIL to all of these noted scholars and … it was really, really good. Really good.

As soon as the panel was over, two professors approached her and started recruiting her for grad school. The Yankee was writing down ideas about how the two of them should work together. Her mother, our former professor, is an incredibly gifted scholar, so none of this is surprising. But it’s no less impressive. Most of us, almost none of us, weren’t doing this kind of work or presentation in undergrad. It was quite exciting.

In the evening, we walked down to the Sagrada Familia, Antoni Gaudí’s famously unfinished church.

We’ll be visiting there on Sunday.

But there’s more conferencing tomorrow!

When we got back to our room this evening there was a fresh fruit plate, a chilled bottle of champagne and a note from the hotel manager, again apologizing for last night.

This is a good hotel, a really fine place, and they’re proving it. Not that we asked, in any way, for this sort of treatment. But we’ve quickly come to appreciate Spanish hospitality.

adventures / photo / Spain / Thursday — Comments Off
9
Mar 23

We made it … somehow … eventually

This is the story of Delta and KLM. Last year we were on American Airlines, who still owe us money, and who will never figure into a story I tell ever again. But between that, and Delta and KLM, we are wondering if we should fly in March ever again.

First, Delta.

When our Delta flight was late departing JFK for Amsterdam, we knew we would be in trouble catching our connection to Barcelona. We were correct. The Yankee spent much of the night talking to Delta on the phone, while we were still in New York, and through their app, while we were in the air.

Delta was happy to send us to Zurich later today, and then to Barcelona late on Friday.

The purpose of our trip to Barcelona was for a conference, and it took place in the City of Counts on Friday and Saturday. Going to Zurich would mean losing the best part of the conference. It’s her favorite conference, so we were getting inventive on ways to get there on time, or close to it. There are four other international airports in Spain. Could we get into one of those? Train over to the city by the sea? Should we rent a car in Amsterdam, after an overnight flight where we had about two hours of sleep, and try driving 14 hours into Spain?

Delta, like arguing with a family member who can’t be proven wrong, couldn’t see the problem of sending us to Zurich. That was just their solution, for some reason. (Delta customer service has taken a hit, it seems.) We went to Zurich last year, thanks, and that’s two countries removed from where we are supposed to be.

Because of this intractability, we were down to figuring this out in Amsterdam, with Delta’s airline partners.

Which brings us to KLM.

After trekking through Amsterdam’s enormous airport, going through the longest, slowest passport control line outside of the United States and being told to go to different wrong places for different wrong desks, you begin to wonder how anyone ever arrives on a plane in the correct place in a timely fashion, let alone how their luggage gets there, too.

At the third desk, we have finally arrived at the right spot, where a laconic KLM agent patiently and emphatically explained that, for us, it was Zurich or bust. Also, we must go to that gate now to make the flight.

Dejected, we headed that way. We were trying to reconcile ourselves to the idea of missing the bulk of the conference when we learned that we missed the flight to Zurich, too.

Back to that last KLM desk. The taciturn woman was helping someone else. Her more bubbly colleague drew the short straw with us. There were no flights, this woman said, into Barcelona through Sunday. There goes the whole conference.

What to do? Go home? Figure out some way to move on to the vacation leg of this trip? It was a mildly grim moment.

Then another KLM agent comes to the desk area. This new man and the bubbly woman chat back and forth in Dutch. And he finds that two people have canceled their trips to Barcelona that evening. While we were just standing there, wondering what to do.

From having absolutely no options to suddenly having seats, we were on our way. Hoof it over to this gate, and we actually have time to do that.

We thank her and her male colleague. To him, it’s just another task, and we’re obviously making him a little uncomfortable. So I turn back to the bubbly one, make the big eye contact and tell her she has been the best part of our day. We left for the gate right then. We’d wait there a few hours, removing all opportunity for stupid errors.

And so we strolled down to gate D85. Which is also, oddly, D55.

At this point we’re 22 hours into our trip, on two hours of sleep, and in a week that hasn’t seen an awful lot of sleep anyway. I sat beneath that monitor, took a photo of that monitor, and studied them both carefully, for a long, long time.

Are we in the right place?

Is this the right time?

Where is the plane?

Or even the gate crew?

Or the other passengers?

Finally, they all showed up. The passengers, the gate agents, the plane. We boarded, not sitting together, but happy to be in two middle seats, and going to the correct country, to say nothing of the correct city. We were finally on a flight to Barcelona.

At the Barcelona airport a guy appointed himself our taxi man. I’d just seen a dog do the squat of shame inside the airport. Then and there I said to myself, we are 27 hours or so into this trip and I will take a cab to anywhere, so long as it meant there was a hotel, and the end of this journey, on the other end.

I’d make Lewis and Clark proud, no doubt.

Or, on the one hand, we traveled a considerable distance, from the middle of the new world to one of the western parts of the old world, in just over a day. On the other hand, it took 27 hours to do so.

The taxi driver, who quickly sussed out that we were American and dutifully turned his radio over to the Barcelona station playing American classics and the hits of mañana, did not have any paper for a receipt in his hand-sized money device. I took a picture of his screen. That’s just going to have to do for reimbursement purposes.

We checked into the hotel at 9:30, dog tired, some eight hours later than scheduled, but ready for a shower, a meal and sleep.

Good news! The hotel restaurant stays open until 10:30. There’s enough time for us to get to our room, freshen up, and get a bite to eat.

The hotel restaurant is good! I had an Iberian pork plate. The Yankee ordered a salad. The salad was fresh. Very fresh. One of the little critters that had made the lettuce it’s home, perhaps as recently as yesterday, was still hanging out there.

Maybe that’s a Spanish thing? Of all the things you look up before traveling abroad, how a nation treats their salads is way down the list. (But it won’t be for the next trip, wherever that is.) The server stopped by to check on us. We show him the critter. He picks up the little saucer and the little critter and speed walked to the kitchen.

We never saw him again.

Another server takes over, apologizing profusely, offering us a dessert on him. We take him up on a scoop of ice cream. He brought us la cuenta, and it’s a blank piece of receipt paper. Flip it over, nothing there either.

Maybe, I said wearily, this is a Spanish thing? The server takes the receipt. Makes a big theatrical gesture of flipping it over and over, holding it to the light.

“Do you see anything on it?” he said, in his quite good English.

No, we did not.

“Then it must be free.”

So they picked up the entire bill. And, because of a translation issue, we’d ordered more than we intended anyway.

This second server said the first guy was so embarrassed he couldn’t bear to come out to face us. So we spent a good amount of time apologizing to one another. Please make sure he understands we aren’t upset, and we know it isn’t his fault. And the second server continually apologizing and humanizing himself and his coworkers. It was charming in a multi-lingual/mostly-English, please-let-me-go-upstairs-and-to-sleep way.

Tomorrow, somehow, we go to the conference that we almost missed.

adventures / movies / photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
8
Mar 23

Should we continue trying to travel in March?

Or traveling at all?

Here is where we are. Spring Break is next week. We’re taking a few extra days for a conference and that meant a trip to the airport and that’s where the fun begins.

We flew, today, from Indianapolis to New York. We did that after giving up on a bike ride, which was the right idea, for a change. That allowed us more time, so we were well ahead of schedule and relaxed going to the very large building with the planes attached at odd angles.

Our flight from Indy to JFK was just fine. Arrived on time. The plane pulled into the same terminal we’d use for our connecting flight, an overnight trip to Spain. Here we are, waiting to board the plane to Barcelona.

We got on the plane, let’s assume it is that one, and everything was just fine.

And then someone kicked out the extension cord that connects the plane to the airport’s power. The plane goes dark! But we’re on the ground, so not a problem. Because there’s ground beneath us. I think about all of that ocean we have to fly over — power and gliders and altitude and ocean — but the crew did not seem concerned. The power is restored, either internally, or via that extension cord. Boarding took forever, and so we pushed back about an hour late.

We got out on the taxiway to learn we had to go back to the terminal for a maintenance issue.

And that ate up the entirety of our second-connection window.

But it allowed me to watch two movies, first, Minari.

Lee Isaac Chung wrote and directed the movie. He was just about to give up on Hollywood, taking a teaching job, when he decided to try one more script. Odd, but lovely, Willa Cather became his inspiration.

She drew upon memories of life in the Great Plains and wrote a series of intensely personal works that are among the most moving novels in American literature. She said, “Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.”

I wondered if the voice was leading me to these words, so that I would begin to trust in my own. As an exercise, I devoted an afternoon to writing my memories of childhood. I remembered our family’s arrival at a single-wide trailer on an Ozark meadow and my mother’s shock at learning that this would be our new home. I recalled the smell of freshly plowed soil and the way the color of it pleased my father. I remembered the creek where I threw rocks at snakes while my grandmother planted a Korean vegetable that grew without effort.

With each memory, I saw my life anew, as though the clouds had shifted over a field I had seen every day. After writing 80 memories, I sketched a narrative arc with themes about family, failure and rebirth. That’s how I got the idea to write “Minari”; it began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.

I also watched Clerks III, which, I assume, Kevin Smith wrote and directed because he wanted to cash in one more time. Truth be told, I knew this was in the works. I was skeptical. I didn’t realize it had already been produced and released. But here it was, on the plane, full of its own brand of contemporary nostalgia.

The first movie was 23 years ago, so there’s nothing contemporary about this nostalgia. But it bristles a bit that we’ve now become a nostalgia generation. But, befitting our role in this timeline, our self reverence is saved for reference to other media. Star Wars is all over the Clerks trilogy, so much so, there are two meta references right there in the trailer.

Give the third movie this: it is better than the second one, and has, perhaps, the best heart of the series.

Tomorrow, the rest of the journey. Or part of it. Or the beginning of a new side-journey.

Anything is possible.

Except for our booking travel in March, ever again, after these last two years.

adventures / cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off
6
Mar 23

That last photo, though!

When I mentioned, last Thursday, that this site recently marked its 5 millionth visitor I coolly said I have no idea why people visit. Only I do know why.

You’re here for the cats.

Phoebe, as ever, is here for the sunshine.

This is my second favorite in-house joke right now. I say to my wife, I say, “On the floor of our house is a medium-grade residential carpet pad. On that carpet pad is stretched a standard 21st century carpet. On that carpet, there is an overstuffed ottoman. On that ottoman, there is a pillow. And that is where your cat is sleeping.”

Perhaps an even better joke is this one. I say to my lovely bride, I say, “On the floor of our house is a medium-grade residential carpet pad. On that carpet pad is stretched a standard 21st century carpet. On that carpet, there is an overstuffed sofa. On that sofa, there is a fuzzy throw blanket. On top of that fuzzy throw blanket, there is another fuzzy throw blanket. On top of that second fuzzy blanket, there is a third fuzzy blanket. And that is where your cat is sleeping.”

Occasionally, Poseidon also looks for the people inside the television.

They’ve gotta be in there somewhere …

This was the Day of Three Presentations. It was a day full of presentations. Many presentations were given, some of them better than others. One was maybe great! That’s the thing about having a lot of things: there will be variance.

I’ll spend all night staring at a wall thinking about every flinch and stumble. Every tone and tenor, time I squinted or had vague eye contact.

But none of that is important. What’s important is what is coming up at the bottom of this post.

Yesterday afternoon’s bike ride featured some dinosaurs. How many giant reptiles do you see in this graphic? I count six.

After that ride, we went outside. This is The Yankee’s first bike ride since her massive crash last September. Look at that smile!

Part of this is physical, sure. The bone is now starting to heal. (Turns out, she busted herself up so badly it has taken this long for the mending to begin.) Part of it is about getting out of your own way. This is perfectly understandable and reasonable. I was in a similar boat in 2012, when it took me five months to even want to ride again.

So we went out for six miles on quiet, empty roads. Whenever a car came along I put myself between the two of them, and we smiled some. It was cheery and emotional. It was a little more normal.