Daily Archive

I recovered enough to make my way to the Museu Nacional do Azulejo, and I am making  my way around  it very slowly. Joy was right; I wouldn’t want to have missed this.

I like the strabismus-eyed angels:

And these 17th-century trompe-l’oeil diamond patterns. They look like they truly jut out from the wall:

But it is an illusion created by skillful painting:

There’s beautiful contemporary tile art here, also, such as this piece in the entry hall:

I really like the exhibit of combinations of two Portuguese art forms, azulejo and fado, made (with the collaboration of many people) by a French artist named Bastien Tomasini who goes by O Gringo. We just went to a fado performance over dinner last night, so I could hear the songs of longing in my head. This is also perfectly flat, although it looks like the hands have depth.

Now I am back in the museum café, having been delighted to discover that they serve small (20 cl) bottles of Schweppes ginger ale. There is so little ginger in ginger ale that I’m sure its effect as an anti-nausea remedy is 95% placebo, but placebos can be powerful, especially the ones that take you back to your childhood bedroom, sipping from a Dixie cup of ginger ale your mom has given you to soothe your stomach.

It’s our last day in Europe. I was waiting for a bus to take me to the National Tile Museum, when I began to feel increasingly sick to my stomach. I headed back to the apartment and got there just in time.

While my body was hunched miserably, my mind ran the inventory, as they do in this situation: what did I eat this morning? Nothing but oatmeal and mint tea! What could be wrong there? And it came to me: I made the oatmeal with the last of the almond milk. The almond milk that’s been in the half-fridge whose door doesn’t shut properly so that nothing gets very cold. The door that we discovered open a couple of inches when we got home last night, to an apartment that was in the mid 80s at least. Yeah.

I hope it was that, anyway, and not some bug that’s going to be with me for the next 36 hours, because I’m going to spend a lot of those in taxis and planes and I really, really do not want to be traveling while sick.

I’m recuperating and hoping I’ll be able to go to the museum a little later. In the meantime, I’ve sprinkled this post with some of the tiles from the buildings in the neighborhood.