Another day, another Dalí

OH. MY. GOD. Wowowowowow. I haven´t been to that many places, but Cadaques may be the most beautiful place I´ve ever seen. I´ve been walking around grinning like an idiot. I want to call everyone I know and tell them to come here. The town surrounds a little bay and the sun sparkles on the water and the white houses fold into the mountains... nothing I write is gonna do this place justice. It´s just fabulous.

Getting here yesterday was kind of a mess. I was stuck in Figueres longer than I wanted to be because the buses don´t run very often. When I finally got here the sun set before I was able to find my hotel, so I wandered around in the dark fearing for my life for a while. They really don´t do street signs here, and a lot of the streets are no more than narrow paths, sometimes involving stairs. Finally I broke down and asked for directions and this nice woman walked me most of the way to the hotel and made me feel good about humanity. It´s no surprise that the hotel is full of Dalí prints, but it is noteworthy that my favorite of his paintings (Christ of St. John of the Cross) is hanging in my room. Which also has a view of the sea. Did I mention that I love it here?

Port Lligat is a short (or long, if you get lost like I did) walk from Cadaques and is where Dalí lived for forty years or so. I read somewhere that he got the Spanish government to declare the whole town (it´s tiny) a national monument so that no one else could build there, then he bought all three other houses in the town (told you it´s tiny) so no one else would live there. The house where he lived apparently started out as several fishing huts and over the course of years he bought and connected them. The house has been a museum since 1997. The first thing you see when you walk in is a giant grizzly bear with stuffed snales and a rifle hanging from its neck; that kind of sums up what the place is like. One room had a giant birdcage in front of a window overlooking the water (at least the caged canary had a nice view) as well as a tiny cage on the wall where he kept a cricket. He liked to hear cricket chirping. Poor cricket. Of course there were eggs everywhere; there were also some statues of the Michelin man outside in the garden.

There´s not much surrounding Cadaques and Port Lligat; walking along the roads that wind through the hills, you feel very small and away from everything. It´s dry here, and there are cacti and desert-looking flowers. And there are all these isolated rocky beaches that you can hike down to, and the water is all different shades of blue and green. I think I´m in love. I´ll post pictures once I get a new camera cable (I´m working on it).

I feel a little silly calling anything here surreal (get it?) but the town church really was. When I walked in it was empty (except for the organ player, I guess, but I couldn´t see the organ player) with organ music so loud I wondered if they were trying to get me to leave. And instead of the typical church art, they had arty art, even some weird stuff. I was half waiting for objects to start flying around.