Sunday 15 April 2007

Adventures with Dennis

I´m really getting into my afternoon excursions with Professor and poet Dennis. I´ve since learnt that a professor is actually a teacher so from here on in he´ll just be know as Dennis.

After Monday´s tour of the old city the following day we went to the art gallery. Dennis, who has quite a short attention span - or perhaps he´s done these tours 100´s of times - wasn´t too interested by the painting´s composition, more about the artist´s origin. Italian, Mexican and Nicaraguan artists got huge thumbs up. He would point to the origin and then usher me to the next one before my eye´s had even reached the canvas.

The gallery actually has a very good collection, there´s lots of religious works from Europe but also some good recent Central American pieces and also a Picasso and lots Rembrandt sketches.

Incidentally, Dennis doesn´t like abstract art (arte abstracto) he shakes his head, sighs and generally doesn´t give it the time of day.

Thursday took us to the Mueso Entomologico that is a one roomed museum full of preserved butterflies and cockroaches, not very interesting in itself but the dedicated owner gave a really interesting talk - in Spanish and then in English when Dennis wasn´t in earshot - about how he goes about getting all the creatures (he goes out into the field catches them and trades them with a network of people around the world).

And finally to Subtivia, Leon´s indigenous district. From what I could gather it is autonomous from the government. It also has the country´s oldest, and dilapidated, Cathedral (circa 1620 I think).

We went in and an excitable Dennis would tug at the fixtures and fittings and say ´muy muy antigua´(very very old) as a piece of altar almost crumbled away in his hand.

In the midst of this daily excitement, if we ever run out of things to say (or I want a break from cathedrals and butterflies) we move onto Dennis´favourite subject, English war-time history.

These are a few of his favourite things:

Bomberderos Lancaster - Lancaster bombers
Colonel Montgomery
The Halifax bombers (wasn´t aware of this one)
Spitfires
Winston Churchill
oh, and aside from the war, the Beatles

Looking forward to next week.

2 comments:

Steve Jackson said...

Just a quick hello from a blogger who has set himself a similar target to learn Spanish.

I'm a Brit just arrived from a two and a half year spell in Vietnam where I volunteered for a street kid project.

I'm just settling into Granada.

Good luck

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