Saturday 30 August 2014

Holiday Ramblings II: "Trains, Dives and Chicken Baguettes" (Day 2)

More holiday extracts; There were eight days in total!

When last I wrote the two-decker TGV was heading ever closer to the phantom like first timecheck that was Avignon, but that phantasmic city was still far further away than I thought. Now a day later the destination of the latest and last train is Barcelona, the first proper venue for this holiday. There are only four more hours to go! Marseille will be returned to in a few days, as will a disappointing hotel, and will be left for discourse until then.

The TGV was nice, but this AVE train from Marseille to Barcelona is far far more luxurious and less antiseptic. In a callback to my earliest plane trips they even handed out free earbuds so you could listen to the in-train movie. Yes, there was an in-train movie! It was in French though, and looked terrible. Who needs a movie when the scenery is gorgeous, anyway? While leaving Aix-en-Provence just a few moments ago, there was a marvelous aqueduct (or possibly viaduct), and the rest of the countryside is wonderfully bucolic and verdant. That's the south of France in a nutshell: Extremely pretty. It's also wildly impractical but that's another story for another writer.

Predictably the only thing not going well so far is food, the perennial bugbear of the traveller. My diet has been almost exclusively chicken baguettes and bottled water for a day and a half now and at some point the tolerance for those items will snap, especially here in France where they put mayonnaise and salad cream on seemingly everything. You're ruining food, people, ruining it! Umm, perhaps that was an extreme reaction on my part, brought on by mayonnaise fatigue. There is still one baguette waiting to be eaten, sneering in my bag, but hot food awaits in Spain when there will be no pressure on catching trains or coaches or worries about the Tube or Metro. Happy days will come again! I care about food a lot, which is why the seeming impossibility of ruining a chicken baguette is so vexing. It vexes me. The other problem with travelling is sleep, but that has always been impossible on holidays, and so is barely worth mentioning. I'll sleep at home when it's all over, probably for a week!

Part of my time travelling so far has been spent thinking about the long-term frictions between the French and English, and the best conclusion I could reach was that the two sets of body languages must be built on antagonistic foundations, and that the perceived arrogances on both sides are from some deep and mutual difference in the very way we've developed as cultures, as well as the deep history between these two countries. It's not all just 'frog legs' and clichés by the truck load surely? I say this while firmly enjoying some of those clichés, to be fair and honest. Is it possible there is a total dichotomy in how we move and react? Is this all some symptom of the sleep deficiency? Does that explain the dancing sheep in the aisle? Oh, blast you, French cinema!

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Much later, it is dusk, and I sit at the foot of the steps to the Museum of Art, at the edge of the magic fountain and waiting. The performance will start in three quarters of an hour or so. Looking back it was a good day, although I'm just a bit disappointed with the accommodation again, having landed in another supposedly dubious area, although I never have gone anywhere and not been warned about pickpockets. It happens relentlessly every time I go to a city anywhere, so perhaps it's not so bad an area after all? In any case, putting that aside, there is no window so it is certainly not a great room, only a hatchway into a chimney like square in the middle of the block. You can see light if you lean out, but you also get all the noise from adjacent rooms, floors, and building. It's weird, and the hatchway doesn't lock.

My primary reason for returning to Barcelona is about to be fulfilled: The Font Magica. It's a highly complicated set of dozens of moveable water jets and lights, that are controlled and orchestrated to go to music usually, which I'll explain tomorrow. There are far more people here this time than last, again illustrating the difference that visiting in high season can make, clouding the enjoyment more than a little. The black market re-sellers of beer and water are circling and people are gathering in masses all the way up the steps to the museum itself, and down the avenue known as The Cascades. It's rather overwhelming. Thankfully the walk around Montjuic and the quest for food was relaxing beforehand, and now it's time to relax and see what happens.

O.

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