New Year's Day walk (3/3)

 Not all of the walk was about urban monuments or urban art. One of the delights of river walks is the edge between the built landscape and the wild. There were quite a few mallards swimming upstream.

 Between the path and the river, scrubby banks with wildflowers.

 One of my favorite flowers in the area (una malva).

 Parrots are an invasive species here, but the are just as charming as the ones in San Francisco.

 I saw quite a few cormorants--Great Cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo)--flying and swimming. This one dove several times, and always emerged upstream.

Looking back from the Stone Bridge, you can see the kind of vegetation on the banks. 

An encounter that included vigorous sniffing.

New Year's Day walk (2/3)

Nochebuena

Christmas Eve menu in Zaragoza:

• Assorted canapés with spreads like mousse de bacalao, oliva, anchoa, langosta. 
• A very large crab called buey de mar 
• razor clams (navajas) with a green sauce. 
• Largish sea snails called canadillas.

 Not pictured because my camera battery ran out:

•  langostinos, 
• champiñones rellenos,  
• lomo embuchado, 
• ensalada de quinoa,  
• cardo en salsa de nueces, 
• lubina al horno con salsa, 
• macedonia de frutas, 
• turrón, champán.

Zaragoza sunset

Birds roost in some trees behind our building, and their return at sunset is spectacular.  I think they are swallows. Here's a video where you can see how they swirl.

El mundo es un pañuelo

The Ebro river in Zaragoza is flooding, so I googled "crecida del Ebro" and found these fabulous photos by José Antonio Melendo Puértolas. What gorgeous pictures of Zaragoza! And I discover, through his blogroll, that he knows neighbors Marta and Chesus!

Pictures of the Cabalgata de reyes

In looking around for information on the Three Kings parade we saw last night, I stumbled across this marvelous blog, Aragón, where Celedonio García, a teacher, historian, and author of many books about a variety of subjects having to do with the popular traditions of Aragón, has posted his marvelous pictures of the parade. Since I forgot to bring my camera, you can go here to see pictures of the floats, the jugglers, the costumes. Unfortunately, the three kings do not appear, but I'll see if I can dig up some pictures from parades gone past.

"Mapas abiertos"

Today we went to La Lonja (one of my favorite buildings in Zaragoza) to see a photography show called Mapas abiertos. Fotografía latinoamericana 1991-2002. The show opened simultaneously in Madrid and Barcelona, and is on tour throughout Latin America over the next few years. The show is magnificent, as is the book that includes much more material than could be displayed. Some work by Marcelo Brodsky, the creator of Buena memoria, is included in the show. Brodsky became a photographer in Barcelona while in exile from Argentina during the military repression. He sought out the classmates in the picture and interviewed them, photographing those who were willing, and documenting their stories as well as the complex relation to memory and commemoration after the end of the dictatorship. When the show was displayed in Buenos Aires, he also photographed the people who came to see the images, often capturing their reflections in the glass covering the image of the class photo.


Interestingly enough, in Zaragoza when a few viewers made complaints about one of the images, the program organizers did a little preemptive censorship to avoid polemic, although the image had been seen in the show in Barcelona, Madrid and San Sebastian.

In 2005, the Foro Latino organized this conference in Mexico City around the theme of the collection, photography in Latin America in the last decade of the millenium. If you go the conference site and click on the names of the panelists, you can read their conference presentations! Very cool.