Second Day in Venice

A couple of images of Venice's self-explanatory beauty.



A is rowed across the Grand Canal for the finals of The Bachelor: Rome.


The big market. We bought bananas for a fiber blast.

At the Rialto bridge A is saying, "Yeah, baby, let's go shopping! And then let's go get some gelato! Yeah, yeah, yeah!"


These boots are too blue.


One of the best salads amagomundi has ever eaten too quickly. Those are little shrimp under the smoked salmon. And yes, that is rucola. Also known in the UK as "rocket."


As promised, another fine Italian fish display. This salmon is just taking it easy, being cool. Hmm. We just got a good idea for a poster for a classroom!


Coconut gelato on the left. Hazelnut gelato on the right. The photographer is enjoying his day out with his girlfriends. Finish up! Let's go look at some more boots, ladies!


Our landmark campo--the street to our apartment runs up frame left.


Professor Guglielmo's Venice office.


The salami was literally five feet long, and yielded forth its savory sandwich meat with the alacrity we associate only with the tenderest Braunschweiger. These little sandwiches will rock your world. They sure rocked ours.


Fine Italian white wine with La Doge.

Lele on the right. We have mixed feelings about him right now. Check back in a few weeks.

First Day in Venice

Our view from the apartment near Ca D'Oro.

The view looking up the other end of the street. If you concentrate you can just smell the pastries from the shop downstairs.

The pharmacy where we awaited our friend La Doge. The pharmacists are talking about pastries and debating the finer points of milk foam.

A waits for our friend La Doge and contemplates the trash can that will soon be full of garbage.


Our first panini in Venice. Oh baby. One had vegetables and the other was a caprese.

S with La Doge in an unnamed campo. We walked through so many campi that their names are swimming through our heads in a confused cloud.


La Doge is taking a picture of one of the amagomundi photographers. He is uncomfortable when this happens. But he let it happen just this one time.

Fish display! Our faithful readers know just how much we love a nice fish display. Tomorrow we will upload another! Oh, the fish whimsy!

La Doge took us to the big art opening at the Peggy Guggenheim museum. We drank prosecco and wolfed down handfulls of fried sage leaves. If you come to our house next year for a visit, we just may try to make fried sage leaves for you because we have decided that we really love them. A lot. There were also some little sandwiches there, but we pretty much ignored them. Damn, those sage leaves were good.


We also have a well documented fondness for statuary here at amagomundi.


These are the fine pizzas we ate for dinner on that first fine day in Venice. In the immediate foreground, we have gorgonzola, tomatoes and rucola. To the left, basil and tomatoes. And in the background we have a shining example of how good tuna can be when it is taken out of its natural habitat (the can) and paired with capers and olives. We suggest having a cold beer with your pizza. But wine is also nice.


So, on the first day we caught up with La Doge, who we haven't seen for 20 years. We then headed back to bed. But first we took our acid control tablets and drank plenty of water. This is our room, which we rented from a friendly pair of opera singers.

Seriously.

La Doge Vita

Um kai. We took 400 photos in Venice and we know that our faithful readers are dying to see them. But it's going to take time, faithful readers. Until then, this is an electronic shout out to La Doge who we know is reading right now. And to all the rest of you faithful readers, why won't you leave comments? Come on. Do it. You know you want to.

In the meantime, please enjoy a photo of amagomundi on the vaporetto out of Venice.

And enjoy another photo, this time of authentic European budget air travel in action. My Air apparently holds significant parts of their planes together with duct tape. It is perhaps no wonder, given the duct tape that keeps important parts of the cabin together, that the entire flying public applauded when we landed in Madrid.

A and La Doge on the Grand Canal. Let us assure you that a good time was had by all.

Stay the Course, Madrid Style

“My guess is that you might find that in no case will you find a specific date” for assuming a particular task, he said. But, he added, “You might find a month, or you might find a spread of two or three months, a period where they think they might be able to do it.”

Amagomundi, in discussing at a news conference on Oct. 11 the meaning of the phrase “stay the course,” refused to be pinned down.

“Stay the course means keep doing what you’re doing,” said Amagomundi. “Our attitude is, don’t do what you’re doing if it’s not working; change.”

Amagomundi added: “Stay the course also means don’t leave before the job is done. And that’s — we’re going to get the job done in Madrid. And it’s important that we do get the job done in Madrid.”

One Week Anniversary

Today we are celebrating the one week anniversary of last Monday, when we went to the Círculo de Bellas Artes to see famous Spanish author Juan José Millás present his latest novel, Laura y Julio. The presentation was presided over by the author, a professor of Spanish literature named José-Carlos Mainer, and the Argentine-Spanish supermodel Martina Klein. No wonder there were so many photographers there. And we were thinking that in Spain novelists are treated like rock stars. We had to go home and type "Martina Klein" into the old google search engine to figure out that she was a supermodel. But that still doesn't answer why she was there. To be honest, she really didn't add much to the conversation. But Millás seemed to listen to her very attentively, while Mainer was, well, the odd man out.

The really interesting part of the evening happened about ten minutes into the presentation. A hush spread across the room, and everyone started to titter as the one and only Pedro Almodóvar sneaked in and found a chair in the fifth row, guided by his personal assistant. Then he sneaked out about fifteen minutes before the end of the presentation. He was too far away for the amagomundi photographers to get a shot at him, but it was a cool moment. Later, while we were having a beer and some ham, we saw famous Spanish historian Julian Casanova, author of La iglesia de Franco, walk by. Madrid can sometimes feel like a small town.

So, anyway, S is still reading his copy of Laura y Julio by famous Spanish author Juan José Millás and wondering whether or not he should be marking up the pages since the book now has the author's autograph. But then he thinks that it probably doesn't matter since he won't be selling the novel on ebay or anything. It's not like it's worth more than the 17.50 euros that he paid for it at the Casa del Libro. We guess that the signature just adds sentimental value.


One view of Gran Vía from the fourth floor of the Círculo de Bellas Artes.

And another view from the same floor, with advertisement for palindromic Spanish dancer Sara Baras.

For those intrepid readers who have made it all the way down to this portion of our fine blog entry, we thought that you might like to know about another book that came out last week. If you like the fiction of famous Spanish author Juan José Millás, you might be interested in pre-ordering a copy of True Lies, by famous Spanish literary critic Samuel Amago. He has a really great chapter on Juan José Millás. You can order True Lies on amazon.com: Boom. We have it from a pretty good source that you will probably qualify for free shipping.

Or better yet, you can contact Bucknell University Press directly and order a copy from them: Boo-ya. The book is so new that it hasn't actually appeared on their website yet, but we are certain that you can order your copies without any problem. Indeed, you can be the first on your block to add this handsome edition to your library.

And in anticipation of the inevitable question: No. True Lies makes no mention of the eponymous 1994 film starring Arnold Strong. But you can really help the author out by buying a copy. Or maybe you'd like to buy two? That way you can keep one copy at work and another at home so that the kids on the bus won't make fun of you for reading literary criticism.