Finally got around to writting something. Its fitting that my first post should be a link to the website that previously lived here in this domain. Infact it still does. It is funny the way websites acumulate layers and layers of matter. Web Mulch.

Its funny how you never have the time to clear it all out years of work tangle and mingle until you can’t change it because it’ll all fall apart. Not very professional but who has time for that after you get home from work?

Full circle. Flipflops.org was put together as a diary of some travels and then hacked around and shuffled and chopped as needed for various job getting portfolio purposes. Gainfully employed right now I can use it for something else.

Still I shouldn’t be working, I should be making art.

I am writting this from memory (no notes) a month after it happened but it needs to be recounted. We were travelling by train from Almeria to Granada to Aljeciras. Between Granada and Aljeciras the train hit a truck which had broken down on a level crossing. The train was derailed and unfortunately the truck driver was killed, luckily nobody else was hurt.

As a result of this all the passengers were transfered to busses. On a bus we met some Kiwis called Jan and Josetta who in a twist of irony have spent the past year living at Highbury Corner just down the road from us. We all stayed in a tiny hotel by the port and had a laugh.

Shame we’ll never see them again – we got the first ferry to Morocco before they got up.

Whizzed to the Sierra Nevada and discovered a hostel down a dirt track perched high on the cliffs ouside the tiny village of Pitres. Run by an old (70ish)german lady named Barbara.

We introduced her to her first internet experience after she persuaded us that we needed to drive her to an internet cafe along the mountain range and help her book a plane ticket to Shannon.

Multilingual conversations in halting Spanish, German and French. Phew.

We visited the great Moorish and Renaisence palace and fortress on the hill overlooking Granada. Stark Cubistic Islamic military architecture in the Alhambra fortress. Perfect for B&W architectural photography.

The buildings known as the Nazrin palaces we the homes of the Sultans and are absolutely extrordinary, apparently they are the best surviving examples of this type of architecture and decoration anywhere in the world. Because representative architecture was proscribed by religion instead artists were forced to investigate abstraction – every surface covered with organic and geometric carvings in the stucco plaster. Light, darkness, water and air all connecting in interlocking patterns burried among which is an Islamic script which says (I believe – I can’t read ancient arabic well) ‘God is the only conqueror’. To be honest it is too much to appreciate.

In the evening we went for food and then to ‘Hannigansd Irish Bar’ a detail perfect mimesis of an Irish pub in London. It was like stepping into one of those funny Umberto Eco essays about the fluidity of reality. The Guiness was very good. It was the odd little details that gave it away – the tables were too clean.