Six months from now, we'll be having 17 hours of day.  Now that I've lived through almost an entire cycle of this, I've decided that 17 hours is superfluous to necessity.  Long summer days are pleasant, but it's nice to have night at some point, if only so you don't feel like a five year old going to bed before dark.  And these winter days?  Getting up in the dark is bad enough, but late lunch in the dark is so not cool.

To quote one of my favourite expat-in-Denmark blogs: This country needs to seriously rethink its latitude.

Yep, it's as pretty as they say.  I had vaguely hoped it wouldn't be, so I could be jaded and wordly and all "I mean, it's nice enough, I s'pose...", but it really is kind of awesome.  Spires and bridges and Gothic and Baroque, with big old splashes of Art Nouveau to keep things interesting.

Most surprising: Svičkova(beef and dumplings and gravy and friends) is tasty.

Least surprising: I'm now a huge Mucha fan.

Most obvious: Sightseeing in winter is rather unpleasant.

The last travel post was about Barcelona, where I went back in September.  I'm a little behind.

In the interim, I spent two weeks in Australia, visiting my brilliant nephews.  (Oh, seeing Fee and Nic and my dad and sister and brother-in-law and Most Excellent Mother and step-bro and grandparents.  And the whole rest of the family at my cousin Mike's wedding.  But it's my nephews who were the coolest.)  Observation: Australia is a fucking long way from Europe.

Then I came back to the cold bit, where it was colder and much more orange, and spent a week conferencing.  Then, I popped off the continent again to go visit Ed in Montreal (lovely city) and then down to Orlando (dreadful city) for further conferencing.  Satre was wrong: hell isn't other people, it's a packed Disney World monorail at the end of the day. 

After that, I came back again, where it was even colder and had replaced the orange with grey.

I've only had one weekend away since then, but I'm off to Seattle next week for Christmas/NY.

Barcelona was fun. It was kinda all about the art. Picasso Museum. Gaudi buildings. Dali weirdness.

I have far more of an appreciation for Picasso than ever previously.  I'm unsold on Gaudi.  Charles put it best: "He's a strange one. I don't instantly dislike his stuff, but it doesn't do anything for me on either an emotional or intellectual level. Basically he gives me the 'huhs'."  Gaudi gets props for keeping alive the tradition of taking more than a century to build a cathedral though.  Pillars of the earth, indeed.

On my way out to the Dali Museum, I came across a bunch of Catalans doing what Catalans do - making human castles. There were three groups, the reds and greens seemed to do things the traditional way - adding to the top of their stacks, like Lego (if the pieces were more like Barrel of Monkeys). The purples were a bit fancy - they added to the bottom, not unlike squeezing a very large, colourful, dangerous tube of toothpaste. The kid on the top with the helmet was very cute.

After checking out Dali's bizarre monument to himself (it seems to trite to mention that it was all rather surreal), I encountered the castellers again. It looked like things had taken a bad turn though, as a green and a purple were supervising a shirtless fellow being palpated in the back of an ambulance. Everyone else was continuing building away though, so it was was either not too bad, or pretty common.