Tiia-Triin came home from Barcelona with a memory card full of photos that look like they're from upscale architecture magazines -- half as many photos as taken in the entire six months in the States. I'll (as the current family historian) be posting them at our photosite the Refuge in the coming days. "Gingerbread house" gets bandied about when talking about our own Old Town, for lack of a better term for the ornate medieval architecture, but some of the fanciful modern buildings in Barcelona are closer to the sagging graham-cracker wall and melted icing look of the houses we used to make in elementary school.
The slightly staggered layout of this post is not intentional and nothing to do with surrealism. I just don't fully understand how photo alignment behaves in blogspot. It would be nice if they made it either completely codable or completely what-you-see-is-what-you-get.
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Tiia-Triin also brought me a cookbook of 1000 Catalonian recipes (in Catalan) and was sweet enough to translate some of the headings. I couldn't help thinking last night that reading Catalan is a little like reading Spanish after getting hit hard over the head. The French element is just perceptible. Hence llet is milk -- clearly more like lait than leche. But it's pronounced "yet". And there are also instructions such as treure-les, which also sounds French. And separeu-ho, w.hich sounds...enthusiastic, like something a knight might say to a horse or a sidekick.
WIthout resorting to Google, the recipes are like those football score puzzles where you have some of the outcomes and you try to solve for the rest of the matches. For example, "arengades". Sounds delicious. But what are they? Well, you can eat them cold (arengades fregides), you can slice them in half by the espina (a spine or stem?). They can be grosses and grasses (big and fat or big and greasy?). You can serve them with a half kilo of raim. What is raim? Well, another recipe calls for white raim which comes in grans. All, which is garlic, also has grans, so it must be something like cloves of garlic.
So for now I'm no wiser as to what can be but is not always white, has cloves and is used by the pound. :)
4 comments:
Code the pics with img src tags, with align=left and right, and make sure to leave line breaks between images that you do not want side by side. One img per paragraph == the stagger effect you're looking for.
I think it might mean head rather than clove, in which case it might be half a kilo of white cheese?
Are you saying discard the lines of HTML that the blogpot interface's script generates, and use a simple img src tag linked to the same uploaded photo?
Right now looking at the page in Safari, the top right photo is positioned one row higher than the left one. I don't see any explanation, and I'd actually like them to be flush, not staggered.
I'll try cheese and let you know how it turns out. I could look it up but that spoils the fun.
I feel obliged to assist you, Kristopher. I do not know what periodical you are discussing yet I possess doubts in terms of it being the "cook book" you insist it to be.
"Arengades" is a slang for something the size of a herring that rough Catalan men put in and take out during times of unlegal activities. This is origination of the saying of "no caguis arengades" which means "do not shit herrings". A rebel division of the Catalan Motorcycle Boys Club for Men has named the rebel division as The Arengades Boys.
Raim stands for "Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring" which are named for Australian spies in Barcelona who monitor the Arengades Boys very closely. The Arengades Boys have secret rule which by every member must rename hisself to "Bruce" which the late Australian First Minister John Howard reinterpreted as a mockery of Australian "mateship" and so he gave Australian intelligence to monitor the rebel division.
I hope this helps you!
It seems Thomas Pynchon is living in Barcelona? And has developed a real fixation with homoerotic themes... I had my suspicions all along...
On a serious note, someone should really set a shaggy-dog story/postmodernist novel in 1937 Barcelona -- kind of like the Summer of Love set in the middle of a battlefield.
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