Fourth Week
All healthy and ready to go! We were fairly back on track with activities. We extended our anniversary celebration to a rooftop aperitif hour on Monday evening. Tuesday we went on a day-long group tour to Montserrat followed by a winery tour and tasting with lunch. We’d been to Montserrat once, when we hiked from the bottom and arrived to a rainstorm. We didn’t go into the basilica, so this time we wanted a different experience.
We went on another outing to Terrassa, a town about an hour by train from Barcelona. Our destination was a textile museum. Textile production had been a very big industry in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
That evening we had Robert and Nina over to the apartment for drinks, snacks and lively conversation on our terrace. The weather cooperated wonderfully!
During the days of this week, we carried on usual daily activities. Bob went to the studio some mornings, and had some Spanish lessons on some afternoons. I worked on stitching experiments while watching lessons of an online course called “Fragmentation and Repair.” Working on expanding my toolbox for creating mixed media work with soft and hard materials.
Other happenings this week included lots of walking, a visit to an art gallery, then a trip by a teleferic and aerial cable car up to the Montjuic Castle. The ride offers great views of Barcelona, the Old Port and the Mediterranean. The castle itself is now a military museum, as this place was a fortified castle first built in 1640. It saw battles for hundreds of years, and according to Wikipedia, “The castle is infamous in Catalan history books because of its role in the civil war from 1936 to 1939. Lluís Companys, who was the president of the Generalitat of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, was executed upon orders from the Spanish State at Montjuïc Castle in 1940.” We just walked around the grounds; didn’t feel like spending money to see centuries of weapons of war and torture.
That evening we met friends from the U.S. for dinner. My mosaic artist friend Bonnie Fitzgerald and her husband Ken are in town to lead a tour group. Many in the group are also doing a mosaic workshop for 5 mornings, in the studio of a Barcelona mosaic artist. I’m going to stop by one morning to say hello. We had a lovely time eating and visiting, and the weather remained lovely into the evening.
After the great weather on Saturday, we didn’t expect that on Sunday we’d be stuck inside for most of the day because of thunder and lightning storms with torrential downpours! We did get out around 5pm for a nice walk and a gelato. Then the storms started again to last most of the evening. The storms cleared out the muggy air, and Monday morning dawned clear and fresh. Fall is in the air!
