soaking up the sun

I've just arrived home from the library, a little after midnight, walking back in shorts, tea-shirt and flip-flops, feeling wonderfully comfortable. We've been having a fantastic few days of weather here, occasionally tipping the scales a little over 30 degree.

This weekend was the first (almost entirely) non work weekend in quite a while, as an old friend came to visit. Having not seen each other for several years there was plenty of catching up to do over some excellent Galician food and a few local brews.

Saturday we attempted to go to the beach in A Coruna, just fifty minutes by train north of here, but the final couple of kilometers saw us drawn into the sea fog and the temperature dropped by 15 degrees, leaving us shivering in the rather strange twilight zone. With no beach to be seen we found our way to a Japanese restaurant and indulged for lunch, before going to the Museo de Bellas Artes, housing a fine collection of Spanish paintings chronicalling some of the best work of the last 500 years. A nice, well set-out museum and definitely worth checking out if you're in the area.

After a typical Spanish night (something that I can rarely manage), terminating as the sun rose on Sunday morning with venus glinting in the dark blue sky, Sunday was spent lazing around in a park, attempting to defrost after the previous days meteorological surprise. I managed a little reading of the papers I'm currently trying to read through but it was slow and ultimately rather unproductive.

I have around 1000 pages of papers left on my desk at home, of the 3000 or so I had a few months ago. The routine of going to the library at night seems to be working nicely and the simple act of getting away from the computer makes a big difference to my non-programming productiveness. The students in the library on the other hand seem to have different ideas and those sitting around me with laptops are constantly plugged into facebook, their attention spans limited to around 2 minutes before another input of stimuli are needed to get the neurons going again.

Anyway, travel adventures are on hold for now as my passport is in England, awaiting the Chinese visa I'll need to go and see the eclipse in July. For the mean time life revolves around Santiago and while the sunshine lasts, I'm happy to continue this way for a few more weeks.

Weekend ramblings

We're back to a completely full schedule again with the first English corner since I arrived back from Japan. Work is still a little crazy with too many projects on the boil but I did get a chance to escape from the office for a bit this weekend.

It's a pleasure when the rather anonymous words on the screen turn into a real person and I finally met up with Kevin of Weifang Radish fame and his wife Jinjin of Weifang Radish fame, by proxy. A very enjoyable evening chatting with someone who has spent a good length of time in various parts of China and who's blog continues to be an interesting read. Lots of hints for places to try and visit in my remaining time here, too, though I fear spare time may not be in great supply.

There's been talk in the local papers of the rather infamous Sensations art show coming to Beijing's Capital Art Museum. Unfortunately, having read the papers I completely forgot which gallery it was to be shown at and ended up at a rather insipid exhibition at Beijing's World Art Museum of photographs of 'new Beijing' which was very uninspiring. They're currently also showing a display of Egyptian artwork with some fine sculpture but anyone who has been to the British Museum or the like is probably going to be rather unimpressed. In the basement is a carved mural of Chinese history which is worth a peak and the central golden columns are wonderfully gaudy, if nothing else.

On the way to the train station I passed a young girl sitting idly in a chair overlooking the remains of the flats which had once sat where she now was. I found it rather more moving than any of the art on display at the museum.