Three hours later, we stopped in Perpignan to have lunch with Averil's former French professor, Ghislaine Sagot:
After lunch, it was a mere 45 minutes until we crossed the border into . . . . Espana!
Our first stop was a town called Figueres. We had tapas that night in a place that happened to be broadcasting the Barcelona-Madrid soccer match (which Averil had been dying to see). Here are the tapas:
Averil says this is the most intense soccer match she has seen in a long time. Forget Galaxy vs. Sounders, and look for a showing of this match. The Real Madrid (Cristiano Ronaldo)/ Barca (Messi) rivalry is renowned. We won't spoil it for you by saying who won, but do tune in for second half.
Figueres is where Salvador Dali was born, and there is a big museum there. He designed it and made sure his pictures, drawings, sculptures, and jewelry were displayed there, along with copious pictures of him and his flamboyant mustache. Also, he is buried there in the middle of the museum not too far from an old Cadillac with creepy plastic people and artificial plants and baby dolls inside. The whole museum was, like, totally surreal. Here are some photos:
Outside Museum -- Dali was Big on Eggs and Loaves of Bread, which are the dots covering the museum
Flamboyant Mustache!
Is This a Man with a Bushy Mustache . . . or A Woman Standing Near a Curtain?
After the Dali Museum, we drove to the town of Cadaques which is on the coast. From a distance it's a nice looking town. Up close, we opine that Cadaques is nothing to write home about . . . but it's very near the place where Dali and his muse had their house. And now his house is a museum and you can go inside and see how he liked to decorate it all strange-like. Better make a reservation though. (They only let people in at appointed times, and we made our reservation a month ago).
Here are some pictures of Dali's house:
Exterior of House
Backyard (query: how long before Ford is as tall as Averil?)
Dali's Bedroom
Room Where He Painted His Pictures
Entry Way (Ivy, I thought we told you to stay in the hotel?!)
Dali loved Gala, his lady muse. When she died, he quit their house in Cadaques never to return. On his death, he left it to Spain.
Matters of great importance have occurred in recent days.
Ford made a lemon tart.
We brought the lemon tart to the house of our friends, Anne and Laurent. Did you know that French people eat all of their desserts (cakes, pies, tarts, it doesn't matter) with a spoon instead of a fork? It's true. It's an inferior method to be sure . . . . you want to be able to stab your dessert at times, not balance it on a spoon. Seems pretty obvious to us . . . . but when in France . . . .
After we ate the tart we went to the movie theater to see Marsupialami. This is a French movie. The theater was packed full to bursting. It was a pretty bizzare movie about a journalist who travels to South America and ends up searching for a strange monkey-like creature with the help of an animal doctor who also runs an orphanage. Along the way, a professor finds a kind of flower that helps him stay young all the time so he takes over the local military from the general and then the general has to take it back over by doing a Celine Dion impersonation that hypnotizes all of the soldiers. Everyone in the theater laughed when the journalist and the animal doctor got captured by the natives and buried with only their heads above ground and then a little dog came and tried to mate with the animal doctor's ear. The guy next to me was laughing like there was no tomorrow, and he had halitosis.
Here, Averil and Asha and Ford walk home from the show past some wisteria in full bloom:
We got a traffic ticket in the mail. A camera caught Ed going 6 km (4 miles/hr) over the speed limit. In this photo, Le General is trying to figure out if there's a way out of paying the ticket. There wasn't.
"Thinking Like a Lawyer"
Here, Asha is helping to clean the house:
Here is Asha at a field trip to the college (high school) to see a musical performance:
Her teacher reports that her results are always very good and she is a very serious elf who tries hard.
Ford's teachers remarked on his evaluation that his work and results are often excellent. The rest we couldn't understand and have to get out the dictionary.
This is the 92-year old neighbor from across the street, Robert:
He still rides a bike. And he plays chess and "boules" and walks to and from town regularly and works in his garden.
We saw a snake in the vineyard. We think it might have been a Montpelier snake. It was about two feet long and looked something like this:
Well, that's all for now. Saturday we head to Spain for three weeks. We'll check in from there!
