Wednesday, July 3, 2024

Valencia to Zaragoza


Valencia was looking beautiful in the early morning ... I'd saved up going to see the Church of San Nicolás for this morning, with frescoes by Antonio Palomino (designed 1694 and actually painted by his pupil Dionis Vidal in 1704).  They've recently been restored, and are magnificent, and exhausting.




The inquiries room at Valencia Nord train station is rather impressive, too!  Not that I had any inquiries to make, but I went to admire them - like the whole of the station, oranges are everywhere in the decoration, and the landscape was the one that I visited yesterday evening.



Then a five hour train ride, through countryside that was rather like I-40 through parts of California and Arizona and New Mexico, making me wonder, though, why we don't see more olive groves in the southwest.  The conquistadores must have felt very much at home.  And here's the view from my room in Zaragoza - a large, sprawling, apparently business-dominated city; not that many tourists - at least, ones who aren't Spanish - and this is very much a business person's hotel (but cheap, and very well appointed).


Somehow the city is full of strange things - here are some ants crawling up the side of a building;


and yes, those are some legs belonging to a girl doing gymnastics in the long plaza in front of the cathedral.  More of that tomorrow - the light was very much in the wrong place this evening, golden though this looks.  And, I suspect, more baroque.


 

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