Monthly Archives: December 2012

Too Full Of Noise? Perhaps Not!

This photo of the day will not be sent to my stock agencies for one big reason — noise artifacts in spite of using noise removal in my Lightroom 4 software. But at a smaller resolution, it still packs a punch of funny energy! It was taken in quite low light and actually looked almost black before I worked on it. But bringing up the image also meant bringing out the grain and the surface noise. Ah well — at least I can share it with you.

We were in a very dark cafe in the Barri Gotic district of Barcelona a few weeks ago and this man was sleeping soundly in spite of the dishes clattering and the people coming and going through that door right next to him. His wife sat there reading her Spanish daily newspaper — and he slept and slept and slept for the 20 minutes that we were in there having a cup of tea.

Enjoy!

Napping man with black beret in a cafe in Barcelona, Spain.

Permis De Conduire? (Driving License) French Bureaucracy Stuck in 19th Century!

It’s all so straightforward, everyone assured me. You simply take your old driving license into the Prefecture in Foix before the expiration date and turn it in and they’ll replace it with a French one. Right???

No — not in a million years is it straightforward! Perhaps if you are one of the million-plus Brits living here, but if you are Australian? Then it is not so easy, reliable, and speedy.

We took a day off in November to go to Foix, a lovely day out in a beautiful and historic town with the bonus of a delicious lunch. The man at the driving license desk was charming and he handled all of my paperwork pleasantly and told me that I would be receiving my new French license in the post very shortly. Days went by — then weeks. I was checking our mailbox daily and at this point my Australian license was about to expire.

But today — only today — did some bureaucratic twit woman in Foix write to me AFTER I sent a polite request for information about why the license had not arrived yet. And what she told me simply sent me over the edge into white-hot rage.

Nothing in France is digital — nothing. They are still firmly entrenched in a 19th Century brain-set about how to operate in a 21st Century world, so things never go quite right. Everything is awash in paperwork and every single government office requires photocopy after photocopy of your documents. They must have to build vast warehouses just to store all of the damned paperwork!!!

When you need to renew your license in Australia, it’s a 21st Century DIGITAL world. You walk into the VicRoads office, have them take a new digital photo right there on the spot, (no — they don’t make you bring in a 4 photos the way they do here!) hand over your payment, and out you walk with a new laminated license — period. They DO NOT ISSUE a file full of paperwork each time showing when your original license was and so forth. But apparently they do here in France — and PAPERWORK is what they want before they will issue my new license.

They could have told me that in November and it would have been here by now. Now I have to fill out online forms from VicRoads, have them signed and witnessed, and send them BACK to Australia so they can send the completed dossier BACK to France. Then and only then will the uppity woman in Foix decide that I am ‘worthy’ of a f**king French driving license.

My love affair with France is, quite justifiably, wearing off. The shopkeepers are charming, the French people are invariably polite, the everyday man and woman we deal with are very straightforward. But the nightmarish and antiquated government systems here are doing my head in and I am the one who has to deal with this over and over and over just to be able to live here. Every single month there is some sort of paperwork dragon to fight and I shouldn’t have to be doing this at my age. That’s why after 10 months of fighting with another bureaucratic office and submitting the same paperwork again and again, we still do not have a Carte Vitale for each of us (national health card) because you never talk to the same person twice.

As of now, I am unable to get a French driving license before my old one expires because bureaucrats who are paid to do a very simple job simply occupy a desk, get paid their comfortable little guaranteed government salary, don’t care one bit about the people they are supposed to be helping, don’t tell the poor suckers at the counter any information in a timely manner, and then they collect a comfortable pension at the end of their working life.

Are you thinking of moving to France? A piece of advice — unless you have some personal body slave who can go and run errands for you and do all of your paperwork for you and you never have to buy a car, drive a car, earn a living, or negotiate through the health care system — just DON’T DO IT!

It will save you a lot of gray hair and stomach aches. The way the French bureaucrats treat the foreign residents who pay their taxes and prop up this crumbling country is simply appalling.

Inside the Salvadore Dali Museum in Figueres, Spain

You’ve seen my previous articles and photo essays — the goddess atop the Cadillac — followed by the eggs adorning the exterior facade. So now it’s time to have a wee peek inside the museum.

As I mentioned before, the Salvadore Dali Museum in Figueres, Spain is spread out over 6 levels accessed by stairs, stairs, stairs. So do be prepared for that!

Many of the items on display are either framed and behind glass, surrounded by reflective surfaces, encased within glass boxes, or were completely obstructed by other people in the way. All of those factors limited the amount of photos that I could take which would have even been worth trying to post online. But I think that this sprinkling of images will give you a small bit of insight into a very complicated mind. Whether it was drawing, painting, sculpture, film, or jewels — Dali seems to have been inspired to work in a variety of artistic mediums.

The final photograph was taken in a room full of jewelery and small carved objects — and I found it rather poignant that he chose to be there at the end, surrounded by the work that he created with love.

Take your time when you go to this museum — there is quite a lot to see and absorb.

Nose of the black Cadillac within the central courtyard

Goddess riding atop the Cadillac in Dali’s courtyard

Another view of the always busy courtyard

Sculpture niches in the courtyard of the Dali Museum in Figueres, Spain

Dali’s humour on display in this vast ‘Sistine Chapel’ ceiling

The chairs which appear to be so small beneath the painting actually reveal the massive scale of this work of art by Salvadore Dali.

A very large and very lovely painting of women comprised of rock shapes

Dali’s “Soft Self Portrait’

Dali’s tomb within a wall of his museum in Figueres, Spain

Come back soon for more articles and photos of Barcelona and Figueres.

Damaged Drives and A Wintery Pause

It’s been an odd week — I can’t say otherwise. I had a catastrophic hard drive failure on one of my MacBook Pro computers, so I spent an entire week getting things sorted out.

We have no authorized Apple stores anywhere near where we live in rural France and I didn’t fancy trying to ship off a computer when it was 3 weeks until Christmas. As it was, I was rather staggered when I spoke to one authorised Apple repair place outside of Paris and they quoted €99 for the diagnosis, over €500 for the new hard drive installation, and up to €1,000 to recover the information on the hard drive. I had called them on Skype and Mark heard the entire conversation. After I hung up, I turned to him saying, “If I have to spend that much money, I might as well wait until the after-Christmas sales and buy a new one!”

Through sheer stubbornness and bizarre optimism, I managed to clone the hard drive on the working computer, wipe and reformat the damaged hard drive on the dead one, load the cloned information over onto the wiped drive, and get the damaged one up and running again. I have no idea how long that drive will last, but trust me, it will get backed up every single day if new information goes onto it!

My really, REALLY amazing bit of handiwork though was recovering all of Mark’s ‘lost’ photos from Barcelona. I kept downloading test versions of expensive software programs that claimed to be able to ‘find’ images on digital camera drives even if they had been deleted. Day after day I tried program after program with no success until finally, amazingly, one of them showed me ALL of the photos on the SD cards. I was stunned since the computer said that they were empty, yet the software was clearly showing me the photos. And yes — I now have all 761 of Mark’s Barcelona images on both computers and on a back-up drive as well. Whew! It was an exhausting week of highs and lows that ended splendidly.

The rest of my photo essays from Salvadore Dali’s Museum in Figueres, Spain will be up soon. But this past weekend was spent doing things with the darling Mark since it was his birthday.

Gifts were presented on Sunday morning and then after a nice lunch in a nearby cafe, we took a drive in the countryside up into the Midi-Pyrenees mountains where Mark is currently working on a large barn-conversion-into-residence project. I knew that there was snow and ice up there since he had already gotten stuck in a ditch once this past week, had a ride inside the cab of the snowplow, and then he and the snowplow driver pulled him out of the ditch. But little did I know that he had a bit of an ‘adventure’ in mind for me.

Mark at barn-conversion-into-residence job site in the Midi-Pyrenees of France

We drove through Massat and then Mark turned onto a one lane road that had multiple hairpin turns and which wound higher and higher up that mountain range. I was getting white-knuckled by this time since there were no guard rails along the road, no place to pull off if there was any kind of difficulty, and it was a huge plunge if you went off the side of the road anywhere!

Snow covered mountains of the Midi-Pyrenees in December 2012

Up and up we went and then the worst-case-scenario arrived in the form of an old blue van which was going down the one lane road as we were trying to go up. We each backed up a bit to see if there was any room to pass one another, and just as the blue van got stuck in the ice at the edge of the road, Mark continued to back up DOWN that road and he began to move toward one of those sharp curves. It wasn’t my finest hour — I admit that freely — but I suddenly shouted, “Stop! I am getting out!” I was shaking all over from fright and the mental image of us plunging off the side of the road at that curve.

Mark walked up the road, helped the people in the van get out of the ice and back on their way down the one lane road, and somehow without shearing off our side mirror and with the woman driving whilst the two men shoved at the side and back to keep the van on the road and not plunging off the right side, they managed to pass with a whisker’s distance between the two vehicles.

Back in our own vehicle and with a bit of ice and mud being flung into the air, we spun our way out of the very narrow ditch we were parked in. I was close to tears and Mark realised that, given the road conditions, perhaps it hadn’t been such a good idea after all. But I was calm again by the time that we got to the top — another 5 minutes of white-knuckle driving time — and the photos above show the view from the top. This is where Mark has been working every day for the last several months and I had to admit that it was quite a special place to go to work each day.

You may or may not be able to see the small black shapes in the deep shadows. Apparently a small herd of Pyrenees horses arrived this past week and they are being wintered in that paddock next to the construction site.

I’ll be returning to more posts from Barcelona and Figueres in the coming days — so come back soon!

Eggs, Anyone? Dali Can Help!

Walking up the streets of Figueres, Spain on a clear and sunny winter’s day, we came around a corner and were only half way down the block when I saw huge eggs atop a the upper edges of a pinkish-orange building. I laughed and said to Mark, “That has to be the Dali Museum!”

The photos below show the striking and crayon-strong colours of the building and sky on that day. This is the side of the museum where you enter the Dali Jewels Museum.

Huge decorative egg shapes alternate with golden statues on pedestals atop the Salvador Dali Museum in Figueres, Spain.

Closer view of the huge decorative egg shapes & golden statues on pedestals atop the Salvador Dali Museum in Figueres, Spain.

Huge decorative egg shapes atop the round tower of the Salvador Dali Museum in Figueres, Spain.

I couldn’t stop smiling the entire time I was taking these photos. The whole building just gives off an energy of amusement! And how wonderfully flamboyant are those Academy Award style statues which alternate with the eggs? Genius!

Eggs are a favourite repeating motif of Salvadore Dali. “The egg is another common Dalíesque image. He connects the egg to the prenatal and intrauterine, thus using it to symbolize hope and love.”

The courtyard side below is the main entry into the 6 level (yes, you read that correctly) Dali Theatre Museum. And isn’t the soft colour palette of this more classical facade an interesting contrast to the other side of the building.

Inside the museum there are stairs, some quite steep and circular, and no elevators. So this is definitely not a place for anyone with mobility issues. It was a fascinating place to visit, but after hours and hours of trekking up and down flights of stairs, I have to admit that I was quite exhausted.

Front entry of the Salvadore Dali Museum in Figueres, Spain.

This church tower is directly opposite the Dali Museum entry that you see above. It was the Dali family’s church, Salvadore Dali was baptised here, and it has been reconstructed following severe damage during the Spanish Civil War.

St. Pere Church (10th-14th Century) tower directly across from the Salvadore Dali Museum entrance in Figueres, Spain. This was Dali’s family church and he was baptised here.

My next post will show you some of the glorious things inside the museum — so come back soon.

A Wanderful Life

The Neverending Journey