Brought the sun and the flowers

The weather was perfect today (lately the weather here is usually perfect, but it did rain for one and a half days straight earlier this week -- the horror) so I thought I would go for a long walk by the beach. But then I decided that what I really felt like doing was looking at weird modern art. So that's what I did. Some aspects of un/der employment rock. I'm not really sure why I felt like seeing weird modern art -- the super modern two-piles-of-dirt-type stuff usually sort of irritates me and I remember not loving Barcelona's contemporary art museum the last time I was there. Maybe I've gotten more weird, or the museum has gotten less weird, but this time it was perfect. They had a big exhibition of old Barcelona photographs -- boxers and brothels and street scenes and drag queens -- and some video stuff that I genuinely liked, including some stuff by Aleksandr Sokurov, the guy who did Russian Ark. Seriously, old gritty underbelly photos and dark artsy Russian film with readable Spanish subtitles is about the best a contemporary art museum could possibly do for me. I should probably never go to another one again.

Anyway, they kicked me out of the museum (it was closing) at exactly that point of the evening where, if it's been a clear day, the sky starts to glow bright blue. I got myself a little lost -- I don't stay lost for long, but I kind of like that I can still sometimes get lost here -- and as I wandered through the palm trees and soccer balls and hash, being here felt like travel. Travel in the good exhilirating everything-is-an-exciting-adventure way, not the I-am-so-clearly-a- tourist-please-no-one-rob-me way. It's amazing what a difference not having a painful job (or the flu) makes.