Museum of Contemporary Art

The Barcelona MOCA had the worst collection of art I've ever seen. Seriously. It was housed, however, in one incredible building!

Barcelona

I tried to find a couple moments where the beauty overwhelmed me, and one was the view from the top of La Padrera. I love the apartment buildings and the long view to the mountains.

Barcelona

I spent the last week of my fiftieth year in Barcelona, a city I found to be uninteresting. No matter how far I traveled I was never able to leave the masses of tourists. Where is the actual city? The main highlight was La Sagrada Familia, Gaudi's cathedral. It is like being in a truly alien environment. The interior is simply crazy beautiful.

Tokyo!

The trip to Tokyo was a blast! It was nothing like I expected and always interesting. There was little English spoken there and few signs were Romanized. This led to much confusion on the part of Colleen and Jeff. We typically planned our outing, made some attempt to follow said plan, failed, watched what others did, emulated until successful. The subway was our greatest challenge and I say with great pride that by day 7 we were buying tickets in Japanese and getting to the actual desired destination. The guide books were completely wrong. They were apparently written by people who had only talked to people who had visited Japan. They misled us on every step. The city is gray, the people are quiet and respectful, and it rains a lot in August.

Step step step temple step step temple (repeat)

It seems there are pretty much temples on every block in the city. We traveled to Nekko (outside the city to the south) for a visit to a Unesco World Heritage site. It was situated in a cedar forest and was quite breathtaking. We burned incense, refrained from photographs, took off our shoes, and offended only one person (although the admonishment is somewhat lessened when one doesn't understand the language).

Celebrating the dead

What vacation is complete without a visit to a cemetery? Not much to say but large, old, beautiful.

Art

We explored a bit of Japanese art. We visited the Museum of Modern Art which showcases Japanese art from the 20th century. It was okay, no great moments. The art is heavily influenced by foreigners and one gets the sense of looking at European art (Picasso, Gris, Braque, Monet, Seurat). Much of it was good, but not very original. We then hit the HARA Contemporary Art museum and saw some more cutting edge presentations. There was a wonderful Yasumasa Morimura installation of a man as toilet that I can't find an online image of to share; there was a great installation of Yuken Teruya who cuts tiny delicate designs out of toilet paper rolls, books, and wrote some text from a book on the wall using pine branches; finally there was a nice exhibit by Izuma Kato of paintings and new sculpture (see above). They served wine and it was very lovely. Yay contemporary art!