On Saturday afternoon, we took a stroll around the center of Burgos and visited the Burgos Cathedral. To get there, we had to walk a little along the Arlanzón River that runs through the center of Burgos. It was a beautiful day and a wonderful walk. I now invite you to walk along with us with this slightly picture-heavy post.
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On Saturday, we drove two hours to the city of Burgos to meet Nora’s youngest cousin, Rodrigo, for his two week birthday and baptism. Rodrigo is related to Nora because – concentrate here! – he is Nora’s mother’s father’s sister’s daughter’s son. His grandmother and Nora’s grandfather are siblings. I had never been to Burgos, and I was interested in seeing its famous cathedral. With two cars and two conflicting GPS guides, we somehow managed to park near Rodrigo’s neighborhood.
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The video they can’t stop showing on the Spanish news cycle today, besides the one where Obama thanks a member of the Spanish royal family for being in attendance when she was not (what’s Spanish for faux pas?), is of a restaurant in Jávea, Alicante, where a tornado came by and took the roof off while customers were eating inside. Clearly Spain doesn’t have the kind of tornadoes that the US does, because no one was sucked out and thrown miles away, but it’s pretty darn scary enough as it is.
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During our evening walks in the Extremadura summer heat, I enjoyed taking my camera along and capturing the beauty of the sunsets across the huge horizon-to-horizon sky. Here are a few pictures that didn’t make the cut for my previous HDR post.
One of the cool thing about taking an entire fortnight of vacation and spending much of it outside in the evenings for an astronomy enthusiast is that you get to see one complete half of the moon cycle, from new moon to full moon.
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The point of high dynamic range (HDR) imaging is to, via post-processing, more accurately capture the wide range of colors and tones that the human eye sees as it saccades around the scene. Current camera photon sensing technology is just not as good as the human eye at capturing a wide range of light levels. The typical procedure involves taking three or more photographs of the same subject, with minimal camera movement, at various exposure levels, e.g. one where the shadows are underexposed, one where the highlights are overexposed, and another middle range. Then, using a computer program, the images are aligned and the detail from the shadows in one exposure is combined with the details of the highlights of another exposure, thus giving you detail across a wide range of light levels.
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Recently someone told us of an outside-the-box way of preparing a Spanish tortilla de patatas. Rather than cutting up peppers and cooking them inside the tortilla, what if you put the tortilla inside the peppers? An inverted Spanish tortilla!
When a friend of ours who has a little vegetable farm gave us a bag of enormous gorgeous green peppers, we knew we had to try this recipe.
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Every year in the harbor of Colindres, they hold a Carrera de Artefactos Navegables, which translates to “Sailable Artifacts Race”. Basically they race handmade contraptions that float, very often involving plastic barrels normally used in the salting process of the town’s anchovy industry. Rowing is a big sport in northern Spain, dating back hundreds of years when fishermen rowed out to see to hunt whales. This race puts sort of a comical twist on the sport.
We saw the event the first year that we lived here, missed two years, and then went again this year. I’m always blown away by the creativity and detail of the designs, which are only meant to float and impress for about an hour. Prizes are awarded for creativity and originality as well as speed around the course, with various different categories, depending on the number of occupants the craft can hold. Below are some photos I took of the participants in 2009, and a high definition video that should give you an idea of the fun of watching the event.
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One difference between the US and Spain – and the rest of Europe, I think – is the practice of tipping in restaurants and bars. In the US, tipping is such a common custom that the waiters’ salaries are reduced, sometimes below minimum wage, under the assumption that the tips that they make will put them back over the minimum wage. In Spain, waiters are paid at least minimum wage, and there is no tipping whatsoever. None. If the check comes and it says 4.80€, you put down a 5€ bill and you wait for the change to come back. That’s the norm. I submit to you that the European system of non-tipping is inherently superior to the American system of tipping.
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Every year, on the last Friday of August, the nearby beach town of Laredo holds the Batalla de Flores (Flower Battle), which consists of parade floats decorated with flowers and young girls. It’s always a very beautiful event. This year the weather was terrible, i.e. raining and cold. The Batalla, however, is not really an event that can be postponed, since each float is decorated with 100% real flowers, all specially harvested and attached to the floats for that one specific date. So they had the Batalla anyway. We chose not to go, because the event is only barely worth the impossible effort to park and the crowds, so in the rain, forget about it! Luckily for my blog readers, however, we went the day after to examine the exhibition of floats.
The creativity and quality of the designs were absolutely staggering. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that these are 100% real flower petals!!! In the 2D photos, it’s sometimes hard to appreciate the shapes amongst all the bright colors. It’s a contest, and every year there’s a winner, but the winner seemed completely arbitrary since the quality of each float was so outstanding. I can’t even begin to imagine how much work goes into these things every year.
Enjoy…
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On the penultimate night of our summer vacation in Extremadura, we went, at my insistence, to a local restaraunt that we call El Cruce because it’s at a crossroads, but that is really called Hotel Trajano. The food was excellent, as always, but so was the company. My camera got passed around the table, and my sister-in-law, Belén, took several portraits of the attendees. She’s a good portrait photographer.
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