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Verity
I will pause here briefly for a gratuitous and exceedingly touristy (seriously… this is like THE picture of Tübingen) shot of THE colourful riverside houses (yes mummy there is even a half-timbered house for you there and more to come =).
Gratuitous Tübingen pic
So anyway I arrived at Paul’s place, which had a lovely sign on the door which basically translates as “You can do without some things in life, but not cats and literature”. I couldn’t agree more. In fact Paul’s cat has even been the co-author on some of his papers. He is a very geological cat =). But I have to say that the second thing I noticed about Paul’s apartment was the extremely odd smell which we became very familiar with in the next few weeks (I guess that is what comes from chain-smoking indoors). And then the skulls of course, which I mentioned in a previous post. So as I said before, feeling a bit lonely I sat around writing posts for my blog and eating some of the chocolate I had bought for Jesper in Spain (I know… how terrible am I!... but I bought him lots… and he didn’t mind… and I was sad!).
Here’s a picture of the wonderful boy now.
TÜRD
Some of the other great ones were TÜBA, TÜBB, TÜMM, TÜRF TÜFF (as well as being a cute word for tough this is also a geological term for an ash-deposit… just so you know =) and many others I have forgotten but which made us laugh.
We were slightly terrified by the extremely strange mascot of the Keim backerie (by the way… Tübingen is totally overflowing with bakeries… there has to be at least one for every ten people there. I don’t know how they stay in business). Anyway… the Keim backeries had decided they needed something a bit extra to help them get ahead in the market… so they employed the use of the Keimling. I think the picture will illustrate the freakyness of this enough so I will stop there *shudder*.
And with that chilling picture I think I have talked enough for one post so I will let you go for now. Will be back soon with more Tysk (German in Swedish) adventures. Lots of love and missage!
Finally a nice taken at night photo… hooray for timers.
After paella for dinner (this and Spanish tortillas are the only Spanish food I actually like… everything is so oily), we headed back to watch the total lunar eclipse. I was really excited… I mean it is one of the 101 things to do before you die after all (now I am one step closer to dying… well make that half a step since you need to see a solar eclipse too). And yes, I managed to take some photos using Paul’s tripod.
First I will show you without:
Yeah… not that exciting is it… at least it proves I was there!
But during the time when the eclipse was at it’s fullest (can you even say that?) I took this pic with the tripod (I have also zoomed in as far as I can… hooray for zoomy cameras).
How cool is this?
The next morning we got up super-early to drive to Figueres to catch the train. I didn’t mind getting up before the sun though because the drive was one of those amazingly beautiful moments that you aren’t expecting. The sun was rising over Cadaques as we left, staining all the whitewashed building pink and gold. The moon was huge and golden, still visible on the horizon. It was just so devastatingly beautiful (eek is that a bit of HSC 3 unit English coming back to me… maybe I should have said it was “hauntingly evocative”).
And with that I will leave you once more for a time with a pic of the Alps as I flew over them towards Germany and the next post (yeah I know… I’m lame).
The
Port Ligat
Actually Port Ligat was pretty nice because there wasn’t really anything there except for Casa Dalí, a small hotel and some little fishing cottages. Oh yeah… and some boats. And cats. Lots of cats. Actually I was really happy about the cats because they were very friendly and I was in serious need of some cat-patting.
After a bit of a look around we walked back to Cadaques on a track that gave us the lovely view of Port Ligat that you can see above.
The rest of the day was spent wandering around Cadaques, looking at the church, listening to the sound of the bikes that are ubiquitous in
Whitewashed walls and sun sans Spanish bikes.
Another important part of the say was to find an ugly postcard for Jesper. In case you didn’t know, whenever I go away I send Jesper the most boring, tacky and hideous postcards I can find. This is because I am mean and sadistic. No, not really… I think he likes them. And the one I found him in that day was a real cracker. It was of a flamenco couple looking terribly bored, and they had sewn a piece of material on for the skirt... a piece of fluoro-orange material. Blech!
So… I was talking about Dalí wasn’t
The exterior of Musee Dalí.
I wandered around in a sort of daze discovering all sort of new things about Dalí. Like did you know he had a rock people phase. He has dozens of paintings of people made up entirely of rocks. And a nail phase. There is so much stuff of his that you never see. He really was amazingly talented even if I think some of works are absolutely dreadful. The building was amazing since he designed it, so the architecture was almost as weird as the artworks.
Inside a large atrium in the centre of the museum.
In the middle of the museum was a large atrium and courtyard, with more weird stuff. Like a car that if you put 1 euro in, it starts to rain inside on the statues sitting in it.
In the courtyard.
Actually the better one was when I decided to put a coin into another artwork, one of Jesus hanging on a giant mirrored cross (I am such a sucker for these things… I have to see what it does when you put the money in. I am exactly the type of person they make these things for =(. Immediately the hallelujah chorus blasted out at us and the cross started swaying. A bit hard to hide that you were the one who put the coin in when everyone in the entire museum can hear the religious strains booming out.
See I can be artistic too!
Severely Dalíed out we walked around Figueres for a while, which I have to say was just… well… nasty. It wasn’t a very nice town. Jens got upset because he bought a sandwich which after taken a bite he was certain was garnished with a crispy pig ear =). Ah Spanish food.
I decided to buy a book on Dalí cause I was curious to actually read a bit about his life. And yes… he is really, really weird. When staying in Paul’s apartment in Tuebingen, I found that he had “The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí” a so-called diary (but really I think most of it is made up and apparently so does everyone else). But I had to stop reading it because it was so strange it was giving me nightmares.
And with that I will leave you with a picture of the lovely Mae West apartment Dalí designed. I think I would be a little disturbed to sit on her pouty lips and even more so light a fire in her nostrils, but there you go.
Cap de Creus
But for anyone who is interested to know a little bit about the geological setting of the area (and I guess there aren’t so many of you who are but bear with me =), the Cap de Creus Penninsula is the eastern-most outcrop of the Variscan Axial Zone of the Pyrenees (yes I got that straight from the excursion-book). The cape has undergone a number of periods of deformation leaving it metamorphosed and extremely deformed. The thing is, there is so much happening there that it is sometimes very hard to work out what is actually going on. Also, since the lithology is dominantly turbidites it is almost impossible to follow any of the beds along, so there has not been much done on the lithology.
More Cap de Creus
A nice rocky view of Cap de Creus. Now that I have been looking at more Salvador Dalí artwork I think it is a bit like some of the backgrounds in his paintings (but I will get to Dalí later).
At the end of the first day we went up to the bar that is next to the lighthouse for a beer. Of course it started raining but the view was so amazing that we sat outside anyway. And here it is:
The view from the bar.
Apparently when Paul is running excursions for undergrads he sits up there with a beer and can see what they are doing. Pretty good vantage point.
The second day we went a bit further inland, to Mas Rabbassers de Dalt which is the ruin of an old farmhouse, with some structures nearby that are perfect for kinematic analysis.
Geologists doing what geologists do best.
The ruined farmhouse.
It was at these ruins that we got to experience the start of Tramuntana, an extremely powerful wind that makes you want to go inside and have a beer (unless of course there are amazing structures to view). Fortunately it was not at its worst apparently (I would seriously hate to see it then… I felt like I was going to be blown off the rocks and into the water as it was).
Then we came across absolutely the cutest thing I’ve ever seen (except for Jesper of course ;). A teeny-weeny boudinage. Now any of the geologists out there will know that boudinage is an effect you get in a deformed layer, where it becomes stretched and blobs form with very thin umbilicous joining them. Often these seperate boudins rotate due to deformation and so you can work out the stress field that has affected that area by looking at the way they have rotated, thus determining things about the bigger tectonic picture from just a tiny structure. And how cute are they:
The littlest boudinage (with a coin for scale).
Okay… yes you may think I’m strange but usually you don’t see these so lovely and small and perfect… alright… I guess I’m not digging myself out of the weird rock person hole, so I think I will just dig a bit further (I’m a geologist after all) and show you some almost as cute ptygmatically folded quartz veins.
Ptygmatically folded quartz veins.
At one point that clouds lifted and we got a lovely view of the
The
When the wind finally got too much we headed back to our bungalows. And so another geologically perfect day ended as most do… with a beer.