cat_cetera: (Don't Panic)
Exceeded Expectations
- the Mezquita. It looks exactly the pictures make it look, but they don't do it justice.

Mezquita - Interior

- the gardens of the Alcazar de los Reyes Cristianos.

Gardens of Spain

Good
- touring through the old Jewish quarter and getting my picture taken with Averroes and Maimonides
- lots of great street views of twisted old pre-automobile-era roads (that cars drive on anyway) with semi-dilapidated buildings, yet way less crowded with tourists than comparable cities in Italy
- people watching on Easter Sunday - everybody out dressed in their Sunday best and strolling around the streets. They put the little tiny kidlets in the parish confraternities at an early age so they might have a chance to carry the floats later in life, but as small children they seem to get drums which their parents let them carry around afterwards. Most of them have pretty good rhythm.
- all of the food places the Three Ravens chose on our own were pretty tasty.

Bad
- most of the first day for the walking tour was rainy :(
- did not get to see the Semana Santa processions

Ugly
- N/A

Interesting
- the reconstructed pillars of a Roman temple stood near our hotel, and, predictably enough there were a bunch of feral cats living in the temple area. This group of cats included five really cute fuzzy little kittens, and we have a cat lover in our group who collected all of our scraps from dinner and took them out to feed the kitties.

Feral Kittens

- the Semana Santa processions (which we did not get to see) feature these immense and elaborate floats that beggar description. Mary is life sized and she weeps tears of jewels. She is covered in silver ornaments and heavily embroidered clothing and surrounded by gigantic candles. The Jesus floats are even more elaborate and feature life sized scenes from the stations of the cross. The ones we saw were displayed in a crowded little area where everyone was jamming in to see them, and somebody's nonna was singing a traditional Andalucian lament. We were told that some people go to see them out of authentic religious feeling, and others just to see the spectacle.

Weeping Mary

- the main agricultural industry in this part of Spain is olives, and the countryside was completely covered with patchwork olive groves from Granada to Cordoba.

- our local tour guide in Cordoba was from Liverpool, which I'm sure will appeal to [livejournal.com profile] philomenaobence

Hipster A&S

Apr. 1st, 2011 08:47 pm
cat_cetera: (SCA!)
On Thursday got asked if I had any pieces of largesse I could take with me to KA&S. I did not, but I did some brainstorming with [livejournal.com profile] falashad about what I could make on short notice. After looking through the stash and my usual selection of references, decided I could probably throw together some coifs.

The women's coifs will be Elizabethan, based on the various extant pieces described in Janet Arnold 4. The men's coifs will be based on two boldly patterned silk taffeta coifs belonging to King Enrique of Castile (c. 1203-17) and his brother Infante Fernando (1189-1211), as described in Dahl, Camilla Luise and Sturtewagen, Isis (2008). "The Cap of St. Birgitta", in Medieval Clothing and Textiles 4: 99-142.

I started from the patterns in The Tudor Tailor and The Medieval Tailor's Assistant (men's) and Janet Arnold 4 (women's) and scaled them up onto my trusty yellow plaid practice fabric.

It's an obscure project; you probably haven't heard of it. )
I liked this project better before it got so mainstream. )

Stone Bugs

Aug. 13th, 2007 09:55 am
cat_cetera: (Default)
On Saturday I was privileged to be able to join one of the hikes put on by the Burgess Shale Foundation up to the Mount Stephen trilobite beds. This important deposit of fossil trilobites is included on the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and is part of the Burgess Shale formation, which is perhaps more famous for the Walcott Quarry creatures, a collection of very strange looking prehistoric organisms on display at about 20 times life size in a memorable exhibit at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta. I got a few good pictures, which you can check out on my Flickr profile here.
cat_cetera: (Default)
I got invited to join the One Object 365 Days Project on flickr. Although it would have been fun to do something like The Conversation, which I have taken frequent pictures of, I realized it would have to be something that I really would see every day, even when I am away from Calgary. For a while I thought of doing "the view from my bedroom window", which could over the course of the year encompass everything from road construction to the East End of Rundle to belltowers and the Arno, but it's not really an object. It could still be a fun project, I suppose. Anyway, I eventually settled on the raven totem my parents brought back with them from their recent trip to Arizona, since he's pretty portable. Then I figured he needed a name, if I was going to be photographing him every day. After some research on Wikipedia, I settled on Muninn, which is the name of one of Odin's two ravens and means "memory", which seemed like a meaning relevant to this project. So far only two pictures are up, one from our favourite cafe in Canmore (Communitea) and one at the Mount Stephen trilobite beds (about which more later), but you can track my progress on the project here.
cat_cetera: (Default)
I have posted several new pictures to Flickr - some from a couple of hikes that I took with my parents, some from San Diego and a few obligatory locks.

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