Buen Retiro Park - Madrid, Spain

In June I visited Madrid just for a few days as part of a work trip, unfortunately I didn't get a lot of time to see the sights.  So the one evening I had free I checked TripAdvisor (as I usually do when I only have a few hours for tourism) and settled on Retiro Park.

Sadly I only had my phone for pictures....sorry guys.

This place is breathtaking, its super energetic even approaching dusk, there is tonnes to do and see and it stretches 1.4 square kilometers.  Though the park had existed for some time already in 1561 it was redesigned to have its distinctive avenues of trees and given a more structured layout.

Beautiful gardens and ponds are basically just scattered all over the place.

The above was some type of public forum type space, this lady was performing something for a crowd that came and went as they felt like it.

I should have actually gotten a closer photo of this small lake, it was SO beautiful.

Random museums and things just scattered around the park of course, as they should be.

Oh my god The Crystal Palace, this is one of the weirdest things I have come across.
Built in 1887 by Ricardo Velázquez Bosco, it was originally designed to house a collection of plants from the Philippines as part of the General Exposition of the Philippine Islands held that year.

Now it is primarily used for various exhibitions... so imagine this if you can a wide eyed tourist Abigail wandering around a park, sees a sign for a crystal palace... and finds this weird looking building.

With ducks... And then decides to take a closer look because she can't really decide what this thing is for.

By random chance, an exhibition is currently happening so she goes inside.... what is the exhibition?
Its just a bunch of chairs.... and books.....
Congratulations you have just entered the Splendide Hotel exhibition, which is taken from a Rimbaud poem "And the Splendide Hotel was built in the chaos of ice and night of the Pole"

So what does it do? (from the pamphlet which I HAD to take just to decipher this mystery)

"several rocking chairs surrounded by books, inviting visitors to sit down and transport themselves to the worlds hidden inside the literary selection that the French artist has made for this occasion.  Authors like the Philippine Jose Rizal, Dostoyevsky, Ruben Dario, H.G Wells and Vila-Matas become companions on the voyage in time that Gonzales-Foerster encourages us to share"

It was very artistic I am sure, but also quite unnerving.

Cute pathways randomly appear throughout the park leading to yet more secret treasures, it really felt like everywhere I went was a complete theme change or another amazing curiosity.

Even the trees don't care what is expected of them.

I know this blog entry is not much, but I am actually heading back to Madrid next month so I will try to get some better pictures and maybe some more locations since I will likely be there for a week or so.

I will also post my Kyoto entry during this week I think....

Much love! Abigail

Further reading:
Retiro Park
Crystal Palace


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Château de Versailles, France

The Palace of Versailles is located around 20 kilometres away from Paris to the south-west, and is easily reachable by train from Paris.  Upon arriving at the train station you will immediately be accosted by various ticket sellers and tour guides offering "hassle free" ticketing for the Palace.

Honestly, I am not so sure it really requires that... we simply walked to the Palace and purchased tickets ourselves, there was no huge wait, and the process was quite painless.  

Keep in mind there are actually several different ticket options to choose from.

Trianon Palaces and Marie-Antoinette Estate: €10

Grand Trianon and gardens of the Grand Trianon, Petit Trianon, Queen's hamlet, French and Anglo-Chinese gardens, French pavilion, temple of Love...

The Palace: €15

The Palace's most famous places: the Hall of Mirrors, Grand Apartments of the King and of the Queen, King's Bedchamber...Exhibitions are included in the price of the ticket.

You also receive an audio tour guide which is available in multiple languages.

The Passport: €18

To discover the Versailles Estate in all its glory, the Passport gives you admission to all the Palace tours : grounds, Trianon palaces and Marie-Antoinette's Estate.  Exhibitions are included in the price of the ticket.
+ Musical Fountain Show, Musical Gardens (from April to October) €25.

Hidden Versailles: €16

Guided by a lecturer, you will discover the private apartments of Louis XV and Louis XVI, the Royal Opera or the Royal Chapel. These places are open only to accompanied groups.

Almost everything about Versailles screamed at me justification for the French Revolution, in my travels around Europe I have seen all manner of excess and gaudy gold encrusted fences.  But everything about this palace just screams obnoxiousness.  I honestly don't know how they ever lived with themselves.

Look at that thing.... seriously guys... its a gate!  Anyway, enough of my revulsion and on with the history lesson...
Originally Louis XIII had built a hunting lodge on the site in 1624 after being introduced to the area by its owner Albert de Gondi, in 1632 he purchased the land outright from the Gondi family and began expanding the lodge into a complete château.  This would later form the basis of the palace as it stands today.
When his son Louis XIV became king he set about transforming and expanding on the original château making it one of the biggest palaces in the world.
And in 1682 he moved the French court to the palace establishing it as the center of leadership.

 ‘A Toutes Les Gloires de la France’ – ‘To all the glories of France’
This was inscribed on the buildings during Louis XIV's reign between the years 1682 and 1715, and the palace really was testament to the French empire at that time.

Many years, and many wars, and many kings of France went on... the palace continued to be developed all the way through to 1788 and King Louis XVI... and this is where things started to get really interesting.
From 1776 Louis XVI had been supporting the American efforts to achieve their independence from Great Britain, this of course had come at quite a heavy cost, mostly to the citizenry.  This during a time period where the famous "Encyclopédie" had been released only a few years earlier promoting the idea of Enlightenment which caused enormous upset among the French nobility.

"If exclusive privileges were not granted, and if the financial system would not tend to concentrate wealth, there would be few great fortunes and no quick wealth. When the means of growing rich is divided between a greater number of citizens, wealth will also be more evenly distributed; extreme poverty and extreme wealth would be also rare." (Wealth, Diderot) - An excerpt from Encyclopédie which neatly summarized the situation in France at the time.

The people were paying excessive taxes to help save the country from the enormous debts it had incurred during the Seven Year War and the American Revolutionary War while the aristocracy paying significantly less tax were painting their ceilings gold.

So as we walked through the palace and looked at the numerous statues of French nobility taking on such mythic poses as above... I was really quite angry.  I had never really given much thought to the French Revolution, I never studied it in school and it was just a passing note in history to me.

But suddenly it all made sense... and I had to fight the urge to throw a few flaming torches onto the ridiculous furnishings myself.

Even their table lamps had to be chandeliers... these people were asking for it.

The Hall of Mirrors... quite possibly the most obnoxious room in the entire palace....the principal feature of the hall are the seventeen mirror-clad arches that reflect the seventeen arcaded windows that overlook the gardens. Each arch contains twenty-one mirrors with a total complement of 357 used in the decoration of the Hall of Mirrors.

This travel blog seems to have taken a very negative turn for the worst... and I really am trying to write something nice, to encourage you to visit this place.  But every time I think back on it I just want to slap a rich French person.

Look how smug she is right now... she won't be smirking like that when she is chased off by an angry mob.

The Queen's bedchamber, another fine example of excessive extravagance. There is a barely discernible 'hidden door' in the corner near the jewel cabinet through which Marie Antoinette escaped the night of 5/6 October 1789 when the Paris mob stormed Versailles.

Oh such bravery and valor depicted on the walls... here young master Napoleon Bonaparte fought somewhere around 15,000 Ottomans at Abu Qir, Egypt.  Though the painting makes it look like he managed this alone I think he may have had a few friends help out.
However he certainly makes a mockery of Louis XVI, who couldn't even manage 7,000 angry French women who arrived in Versailles with various canons and assorted weapons.

This is my friend Chrissy being a photographer... look how dashing she is! Like a secret agent!

Sadly when we visited the gardens were closed... so we really missed out on rather a lot of the grounds which would have been more interesting to me.  I shall go back sometime to visit them and post an update.

Who knows... by then I may stop hating everything this place represents.

NEXT UP! PRAGUE!

References:
Palace of Versailles - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_Versailles
Louis XVI - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_XVI
Marie Antoinette - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie-Antoinette
Age of Englightenment - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment
Encyclopédie - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedie
The French Revolution - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution


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Espace Dali, Paris, France

Part Three of the Paris Blog!

Espace Dali Montmartre
Address: 11 rue Poulbot, 75018, Paris
Nearest Metro: Anvers
Opening Daily: 10.00–18.00
Cost: Adults 11 euro, Children 6 euro, or free with the ParisPass card

After our visit to the Sacre Coueur we then took a very brief walk around the hill to Espace Dali, which is a fantastic collection of sculptures and paintings by master surrealist Salvador Dali.

So for a little history, in case you have been unfortunate enough to have never heard of Salvador Dali...
Born in the Catalonia region of Spain as Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marqués de Dalí de Pubol, on the 11th of May 1904.  And known simply as Salvador Dali, this man was a visionary within the art community.  He was a painter, photographer, film maker, sculptor and all-round eccentric hero.
(NOTE: I have used the excellent description texts below from the Dali Sculpture Exhibition website, these descriptions are placed in quotes for clarity, a link to the full site is available in the reference links)

In 1931 he painted probably his most famous painting "The Persistence of Memory" (there is a link to this in the reference section) which featured the melting clocks for the first time, here is a sculpture called "The Nobility of Time" featuring the clock in a slightly different way.

"The terminology, "the crown of a watch" is assumed to mean a mechanical device that allows us to set the hands and wind the timepiece. Time, however, according to a Dalinian watch, has no internal power or motion. Given this watch's lack of movement, the crown is interpreted as a royal crown adorning the watch, clearly identifying time's mastery over human beings, rather than being an object of utility."

This sculpture is based on "Alice in Wonderland", Dali also created a series of paintings based on this famous book, as seen in the background.

"Alice's hands and hair have blossomed into roses, and her jump rope has become a twisted cord. She encounters the confusion of the surreal looking-glass world with the naiveté and unanswerable logic of the eternal child, finally emerging into reality unharmed, and also unchanged."

This sculpture is called "Homage to Newton", Dali admired Newton so much for his discoveries that "when the King of Spain dedicated a large plaza in Madrid to him in May of 1986, Dali created a large monument of Newton for the plaza."

"The human head (and an analytical and emotional mind) is the principle part of the body that differentiates humans from other animals. In the creation of "Birdman", Dali has removed this 'advantage', and replaced it with a brain both incapable of higher thinking and learning, as well as being unable to create art or appreciate art in any form."

Okay it seems I cannot find the official name for this sculpture, but it was near the Don Quixote painting series, so we will assume that it was something along those lines.

"This woman, almost entirely composed of flames, combines two of Dali's favourite obsessions: fire, and a female figure interspersed with drawers. Dali found flames fascinating because they seem to have a life of their own, exerting an almost hypnotic influence on the observer. The flames also represent the erotic impulses of the female figure. Dali once explained this figure as a Freudian outgrowth of the natural curiosity of children to investigate enclosed spaces, both in order to satisfy the desire to know what these spaces contain, and to exorcise the fear that what is unknown may be harmful. Freud explained that drawers are a representation of the concealed sexuality of women. Dali portrays many of the drawers to be slightly ajar, indicating that their secrets are known and no longer to be feared. Two crutches rise from the figure, symbolising a blend of authority, stability and sexual power." this statue is "Woman Aflame"

 'Galutska en ultra-surréalisme corpusculaire (Ultra-Surrealistic Corpuscular Galutska), series Mémoires de surréalisme (Memories of Surrealism)

'Cirouette culinaire (Culinary Weather Vane), from the series 'Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel', (Pantagruel's Comical Dreams)

One of the pages created for Dali's 'Roméo et Juliette'

From the series 'Tarot', this tarot card is the "Knight of Swords"

"Biblia Sacra 6- Mulier e latere viri"

In 1963 Dali was commissioned by his friend and patron Guiseppe Albaretto to create illustrations for a bible to be printed as a means to guide Dali back to God and the Church. , this took six years to complete, he also used a technique of his own devising called "bulletism" where he fired an arquebus (an old flintlock style rifle) which he loaded with ink capsules and fired at sheets of paper. Whatever random pattern appeared would then be incorporated into the drawing.

And here as a bonus image....Salvador Dali walking his pet anteater... don't ask questions you just saw some examples of how his mind worked.

Next! Just to catch my breath, I have decided the I will do a type of extreme tourism post which covers the cemetery stuff and a few other bits which don't quite need a full entry each

References:

Salvador Dali - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Dali
The Persistence of Memory - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Persistence_of_Memory
Descriptions of the Sculptures - http://www.dalisculptureeditions.com/Index.asp?Sez=Sculpture
Espace Dalí (official site) - http://www.daliparis.com/

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