Life: Idiotropic

What to do when you've had your cake and still have an hour+ to "kill" before picking up the girls from school and having more cake before going to guitar?  (My secret to happiness = cake and good coffee)

Talk a walk.  (Which is why I won't wear all that cake and good coffee.)

Where?  Eh.  It doesn't matter.  We're in Spain where in every village, even the boring ones, you can find something just a bit strange.  And that strange is what's interesting and kind of fun.

So, we picked the village nearby with the funny name that is hard to pronounce without instruction.  Albuixech.  (Al-Buey-Shek)  Emphasis on the "xech."

It's small and relatively unexciting as Spanish villages go.  Running along the train tracks to Valencia, it's a cluster of buildings surrounded by fields filled mostly with artichokes and partially with tiger nuts and other random things.  But it's a sunny day and we're stuffed from tapas at El Pito, so a walk is the aleviator of guilt, the hail Mary to my culinary trespasses of which, with company in town for 10 days, there are far to many to count.  Better walk farther.

I took oh, 50ish photos which isn't many.  But it was still cool.  This little chapel has a Biblical scene painted onto tile under each cross that lines the courtyard wall.  It was closed, but the yard was open to see.   It was actually sort of false advertising because this first thing was saw in the village was by far the prettiest.  Figures.

Next is the typical farming village view:  Old man in horse drawn cart.  I'm a bit disappointed though.  Just yesterday I saw an old man sitting tall in a white plastic lawn chair in his cart, but was driving and couldn't take the picture.  He was far funnier.  This guy was just cute in that old man cute kind of way.

Next we found the Casa de Cultura found in nearly every village where children and adults can learn music and art.  This one had a large dome on top that looked like some sort of astronomical thing - an observatory or something.  The building had a nice garden with this date palm heavy with immature dates.  The white triangular house is a barraca, a traditional farm house in these areas that would have been thatched originally.  And, finally, a new use for old CDs - to scare away birds.


The most fun I had on this walk was at the end.  I've decided that you can't properly do the "stretch-out-your-arm-and-click" style self portraits with a large bulky camera, and since I'm a bit of a control freak with my camera anyway, the chances of actually having photos of myself when I'm quite a bit older and wrinkled to look back upon wistfully are pretty slim. 

Thus, my new plan for self-portraits - the shadow portrait!  It works well in Spain where there's quite a bit of sun and there's no need for air brushing if I'm having a bad skin tone day!   :)