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Extremely Normal Necks and Faces

Hibernian Bimbo Hoki Poki

B R

B R

— 3 min read

The day before we left Barcelona some world events utterly overwhelmed anything I might have thought to say about the remainder of the trip.1 That said, there are odds and ends that readers might find interesting I wanted to drop in here.

The two big things we saw towards the end were the Sagrada Familia and the Picasso Museum.

Under construction in fits and starts for the last 140 years, the Sagrada Familia is the last and greatest of the works by Gaudí (previously). You book very far in advance for a tour of the interior, or you show up very early on Sunday and suffer through a full Catholic Mass. We did neither.

The Picasso Museum was a bunch of arguably lesser works by the famous Barcelona-born artist, but was interesting nonetheless:

Early example of Picasso producing figures with Extremely Normal Necks.
“Oi mister! You me dad?“ Look at this lil goblin. I adore her. I assume she is someone who happened to piss off the artist somehow in a chance encounter.
There are those that argue the animation of the early Simpsons was a result of a haphazard shift between studios but I choose to believe they were inspired by Picasso.

Something I didn’t mention was my brief visit to the El Born area. It’s mostly another touristy place adjacent to the Gótic, but it did have a cultural center which was focused on the dual tragedies of (1) the crushing of Catalan independence mentioned previously and (2) parts of the international AIDS quilt.

Now a rapid fire of the silliest or weirdest things I saw:

I am Cannabis.
But enough about my weekend.
“Ben you usually scope out the bars or queer scene what happened in Barecelona?” The only well rated cocktail bar in the city had this Bitcoin themed beverage which turned me off to the whole notion. Also: the jet lag was murderous.
Get out of the most touristed regions and you start to see increasingly better street art.
Download our random bag of debris app for special deals and exclusive news-you-can-use about garbage.
England did such a hard completist run of colonizing Ireland that you see this kind of thing as normal (Hibernia is the classic Latin name for Ireland)
Sure. Fine.
A very old board game in the staged children’s room in Casa Milà that appears to involve clowns torturing pigs. The game in the background with two soccer/futbol players running cheek-to-cheek is more appealing.

  1. I only really have one thing to say related to recent events - a cease fire followed by a just and equitable peace has always been the only way for either Israelis or Palestinians to have the security both desire. The last twenty or so years of walls, domes, and occasional air attacks as a strategy for one-sided security was both monstrous and has unequivocally failed. ↩

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