David Grajal

Today I went to “Museo Reina Sofia” in Madrid to see a temporal exposition about Picasso. It was interesting because the museum bring together lots of paintings normaly located in Paris and we could see a compact exposition with paints and sculptures of all the different stages of Picasso.What I dislike about this exposition is that it only showed paintings but there was no reference about the historical context in which they were painted, something critical in Pablo Picasso. There was nothing, not even a bibliography or historical reference of what “El Guernica” represents.

Nevertheless I learnt several interesting things. For example I always thought that Picasso was a cubism painter since the first moment he start painting but that’s not true. In his first years he painted like in the same way as all the others painters in their period. He suffer a progression and needed several years to invent cubism progressing from realistic forms to geometric forms.

The more interesting paint is without doubt “El Guernica” and the Museum devote lots of space to it. But I also liked two small paints about “The dream and reality of Franco”, one paint similar to “Fusilamientos del 2 de mayo” of Goya but themed in the Korean war and several small draws about explicit sex.

Last saturday I went with some friends to play Paintball in Aldeamayor, Valladolid. The field was really good, in the middle of the castilian pine forest with lots of natural trees, hills and shrubs. The field was large enough to allow changing tactics in the middle of the game and to play like if we were american marines (I love to play in berserk mode) and the guy from the company we hire to organice the paintball was really nice and propose several different games.

I love this game, you can shoot your friends and finish small quarrels or create new ones. Although you need to think and move fast to prevent to be killed at the end is relaxing and a good anti stress. The guy from the company told us that they have special games for businesses and for hen parties (This one with a special rabbit custom for the groom).

I play hard and I had a very good time. Now I need to heal my war injures. The result of the game are lots of scratches in my body and several balls marks in my skin. Plus I didn’t know what happened but I have small pimples all over my body. And pain in some muscles. Clearly I was not made to live in the countryside!

UPDATE: I uploaded an album with all the pictures.

Jaimi is now travelling to Seoul…

Last week I discovered the “Casa de la India” in Valladolid. This house is almost unknown (I didn’t know it existed and I’m sure my friends didn’t know it either) and it was build by the University en cooperation with the Indian embassy to encourage the Spanish people to discover the country, because as they mention in their webpage, India had never have a important presence here or at least as important as in other European countries.

The house is interesting. It has a cool library with hundreds of books (in their official languages, English, some in Hindi, nothing in Tamil) and magazines (in English) and they usually hold different kind of activities as traditional dancings, expositions and seasons of Indian documentaries. It was interesting for me visiting the house, specially after living with south asians in Canada.