Daytripping

After a very brief period of keeping up with this blog, I’ve fallen badly behind again. The main reason is a good one: we’ve been busy. We rented a car last Thursday and have been day-tripping. But before I get into any of that, I have to talk about the first half of the week.

The Monday, March 27, was a do-nothing day. We walked down to the beach in the afternoon and east along it to a patio area with exercise machines and benches, where we sat for an hour reading and puzzling.

There are lots of these outdoor exercise areas in Spain. The machines are built of heavy steel for durability and they’re purely mechanical, with no real ability to adjust them. But they work. And they’re used. I’ve been using them myself. There are four or five machines in the little square across the street from our apartment. There was a bunch along the road behind our casita on Lanzarote. The exercise patio where we stopped on Monday is a deluxe edition – great location overlooking the beach, with more, better and newer machines than most, plus shaded seating and even some landscaping.

It's a good place for people watching. We were amused by the 50-something guy in regular street clothes who spent about 45 minutes, non-stop, on one of the bicycle-like treadmills. He was bent with his head hanging over the handlebars the whole time. I kept thinking, he’s got to finish soon, or fall off, but he kept going. “Why didn’t he just walk the same length of time?” Karen wondered. Good question. There was also a young couple exercising together. We see that quite a bit here, usually couples running together. These two were doing wind-sprints and calisthenics. I can’t remember if it was this time or another time that we saw a trio of young women here doing yoga together. Everything is social in this country, even exercise.

On Tuesday, we went out in the morning to the Bishop’s Palace, a museum in the building that is also the Bishop of Málaga’s official residence. It's right across the square from the cathedral. Some kind of Catholic educational institute is housed in the same complex. We were there for the galleries, but the building itself – what we could see of it – was interesting too.

The museum includes a semi-permanent collection of religious art, featuring mostly painted wooden statues, some by the famous local 17th century carver Pedro de Mena. (His house and workshop now houses the Revello de Toro museum that I wrote about a few weeks ago.) Taken out of context and placed in glass cases with museum lighting, the statues have a different effect than when you see them in a church. They are very beautiful, some of them – even if their bland faces usually fail to convince you of the humanity of the subjects. They’re a little like over-airbrushed photos of models in modern magazines in that respect.

There are also two temporary exhibits on right now. One is an historical exhibit of religious and monetary metalwork from Africa. It was mostly lost on us as there was no English, only lengthy texts in Spanish explaining what the exhbitis were about. They were mostly about hammered metal shapes used in religious or quasi-religious ceremonies in pre-European central Africa, and some coinage. It all just looked like rusty bits of metal to us.

The other temporary exhibit was a strange one for a Catholic facility, I thought: a selection of contemporary paintings, photos and sculptures by Spanish and Portuguese artists. Again, there was no English, so I couldn’t get why this exhibit was here. There was certainly nothing particularly risqué about the art, but equally, there didn’t appear to be any religious themes either. I may have been missing the cues, though. Some of the large-scale photos were interesting, fewer of the paintings. We didn’t linger long.

In the afternoon, I think we shopped at Mercadona. We also went for a walk, because it was on that walk that I spotted the pretty powder-blue building with green shutters on Calle Carretería. (See picture below.) This happens to us frequently – we just happen to be looking up and notice for the first time some particularly handsome structure that we’ve passed many times before. These corner buildings with rounded bow windows or, as in this case, balconies, are characteristic of the architecture in Málaga – built, I think, at the end of the 19th century. When they’re nicely restored and painted, as this one is, they make a pretty picture. It was a little surprising to find it where it is as Carretería is a busy commercial street, with mostly nondescript buildings.

On Wednesday, we went back to the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo (CAC) Málaga for a new temporary exhibit by a Chinese painter whose name I did not know, Jia Aili. The CAC is now officially our favourite gallery in the city. We have seen there this year two of the best exhibits we’ve seen anywhere in a very long time. This one wasn’t quite as spectacular as the Mark Ryden retrospective we saw at the CAC in March, but pretty close.

It’s another huge retrospective of work by an important foreign artist. The CAC appears to be nothing if not ambitious. The other big galleries in town, the Thyssen, the Picasso, the Museo de Málaga are more parochial, concentrating for the most part on local artists. Also interesting that both these exhibits of “contemporary” art were a) by painters, b) of representational work – no conceptual art, no installations, no video. (Quiet cheering.)

Aili is still a young man, born in 1979. The curator aligns his art with European Romanticism of the 19th century, and I can see that. Many are monumental pieces. The largest is bigger than a billboard, probably 20 by 80 feet, with five huge panels. They tend to be dark scenes, with dark subjects – lonliness, alienation, the dying of things, the tyranny of machines, fear of nuclear annihilation. They all include realistic figures and recognizable props, but usually in blasted, abstracted settings. Some seem to be a comment on the militarization of China and the risk it creates of nuclear conflagration, but I could be misreading. (Check out the CAC page on the exhibit.)

Bigger than billboard size, five-panel painting

After the museum, we wandered down the river and took pictures of the street art along its banks. This is part of the "express yourself" SoHo district, an area where the city has sanctioned street artists. The street art scene here is nothing like as vibrant and transgressive as it is in Valencia, but there is some intersting work. It includes some large-scale wall murals, including those shown here, as well as smaller works - and a kind of frieze of taggings and lettering along the river embankment.

We went home and had lunch and then went for a long-ish walk in the afternoon, out to a park across the N340 from the beach in west-end near suburbs. We found quiet benches with sun and shade and sat for over an hour reading, then walked home. God, we’re boring.  

Then on Thursday, we picked up the car. I think I already mentioned that we got a bargain – $78 CDN all-in for 7 days. This was through FlexiCar, a broker. I had ordered the smallest car available, something the size of a Fiat 500. What I got (for the same price) was a very nice Renault Megane, a rather luxurious, brand-new car, at least one class up from the one I ordered. That would pose a problem when it came to parking in the underground parking spot included in our rent.

For our first outing, we weren’t going far, just out to the Botanical Garden. It’s a little too far to walk, and awkward to get to by public transit. It was definitely worth a visit. It’s the former estate of two well-to-do industrial families in Málaga – one sold it to the other in the early 20th century. It’s now operated by the city. I’m assuming they get some funding from the feds as it’s also been declared a site of national importance, or some such. It’s a lovely place, a real respite from the big city.

The highlight was the surprisingly modest 19th century mansion at the centre of the garden, with its fantastic wisteria arbour. The vines look ancient and they’ve grown up into the surrounding trees, as well as over the ribs of the arbour. It looks like the house was once open as a stately home – we could see some furnished rooms through the windows with explanatory labels – but it’s now locked up tight.

The gardens are huge. We spent well over an hour doing a big circuit, ending back near the entrance, but realized we had missed large parts of the historical gardens in the middle. So we had lunch at the little café there, which had been well-reviewed by TripAdvisor. It was good and reasonably priced – we had Moroccan chicken and couscous. Then we went back into the garden to see what we’d missed.

Our second activity of the day, recommended by Bart, our Belgian landlord, was a drive – with possibility of a walk – up the Montañas de Málaga. We went directly there from the Botanical Gardens. We were promised spectacular views over the city. They were okay. We were too tired for a walk. It would have been too much up-hill for wonky knees in any case. (Bart is probably in his late 30s, so maybe has a different perspective on what makes a casual walk in the park.)

Following the GPS directions to get to our apartment was tricky. We made several wrong turns and ended up circling the street for a half hour, with Miss Tom-Tom telling us periodically, “You are 500 meters from your destination.” That's great, but how do we get there? Bart had walked me through using the car elevator – pushing buttons on a key fob – and showed me where to park. It’s a very tight turn from the street to get on to the elevator, with not much wiggle room on the elevator itself. The parking spot, which would have been fine for a Fiat 500-size car was a little tight for a Renault Megane. There was another car parked right beside it, close to the line, and the turn into the spot was awkward and tight. It took half-a-dozen three-point turns to get into the spot. Whew! And people do this every day!

So ended our first day with car. The next day was to be our most ambitious outing – to Antequera and El Torcal. I’ll write about that in the next post.