Art in the sand

What better to do on a day on the beach than play in the sand?

Perhaps turning playing in the sand into art?

Here are some of my photographic memories of an annual Sand Sculpture Festival held on Mustang Island, off Corpus Christi, TX.

The festival lasts three days. the artists start on Friday, with their beach place, barrels of wet beach sand and a few tools. Bu Sunday noon all sculptures have to be finished, because then they are judged.

The pictures are from all three days of the 2005 festival and the top pictures are of the sculpture that won firt price that year .
Hope you'll enjoy this little trip to the beach art gallery. :-)

Guava pastries

Here I am enjoying my coffee and my guava puff pastry at a reposteria.

It is Sunday afternoon and I am tempted to have something sweet with my coffee. I had brunch around 10:30 and now it seems like a long time ago... but dinner will be served no sooner than in 4 hours.
I open the fridge, look around.... and see two big, round cans of guava paste I brought for my daughter.

She is the one, who discovered a neighborhood reposteria with great Guava pastries when she visited me in PR in November.... and initially it was just her who ate the pastries while I was trying to be close to 100% on living food diet. But once I tried them, boy.... anytime she drove by that reposteria after that my percentage points of living food went definitively down! But every now and then those pastries are worth going off your diet for a brief moment :-)

Daughter is braving the weather right now, playing a tennis match, and will arrive hungry in about half an hour, so I decide to bake those guava pastries for her...and for myself, too, ;-) OK, OK, I'll use the light variety of the paste, if you insist.

I quickly check the freezer: hurrah, there is frozen puff pastry in here.

Thus in less than an hour we shall be enjoying our gourmet Puertorican coffee with freshly baked Puertorican guava pastries.

Please, drop in, join us :-) . You are very welcome!

Arte y Pico Award

Ewa has done it again! This time I have not been tagged, but I have been awarded the "lots of fun" Arte y Pico award.

Thanks heavens I am not a high strung and treating herself waaaay too seriously teenager any longer!

As a teen I happened to have been showered with far too many - both deserved and undeserved - awards far too quickly .... and the first one too many was for me a first prize in a poetry competition awarded for my very first poem.... which resulted in my not being able to show another one to anybody afraid that it might be worse than the first one, that in that first one my "arte" was already in "pico" !

Then followed a prize for a cabaret, I wrote, inspired by the King Ubu (never again), directed (never again), designed and made all scene decorations (...yeah, you guessed it, never again) and ... like all narcissistic people - played a main role! (uh, huh, here I broke the never again rule time and time again, lol)

In that fashion any possibilities for an artistic "career" for me - either in visual or performing arts - became exhausted before I turned eighteen. So what was a self critical (? or just "chicken"? or perhaps much to vain???) girl to do?

I went to study international relations and international law (both at a doctoral level) and then topped it with international business management. A logical choice, don't you think?;-)

But now, in my early retirement I have become mature enough ( or so I hope) to accept this Arte y Pico award graciously. After all, if my "art" were not to "pique" now, then when?

Thanks Ewa ... and please don't take my ramblings the wrong way... I always try to make fun of myself when I feel both delighted and embarrassed. :-)

The rules of the award dictate that:

1. I have to pick 5 blogs that I consider deserve this award through creativity, design, interesting material, and also contribute to the blogger community, no matter of language.

2. Each award should have the name of the author with a link to their blog.

3. Award winners have to post the award with the name and link to the blog of the person who gave them the award.

4. I have to include a link to the “Arte Y Pico” blog so that everyone will know where the award came from.

5. And, finally, I have to show these rules.

Here are my pics:

1. Randi from Scania (Southern Sweden) for her undeniable, breathtaking artiscic talent and skill and for the visual orgy her blog is!

2. Nicole, a self described Caribbean island girl, working in international development and blogging beautifully about her travel, art, Caribbean gardens, cooking etc.

3. Heather, a Brit living, painting, blogging and food gardening in Grenada. I love her paintings and her blog posts. And I thank her (blame her?) for encouraging me to blog myself.

4. Jeff and Katrina, an American couple who about a year ago decided to move to Puerto Rico, bought a house and are busy diving, renovating their house, gardening and taking care of an avalanche of formerly stray animals, feeding them, curing them from whatever ailed them and...giving them imaginative names, like "Chicken Little" for a cat. From their blog I learned that Katrina is an artist, but, regretfully, she has not yet (?) shown any of her art in her blog ... or I just have missed it.

5. Finally, last and foremost, my newest virtual friend, Jose R. Bourget Tactuk, a Dominican Republic both native and inhabitant, multiblogger (so please check all the links to his multiple blogs) and a true renessaince man: a skilled educator, passionate activist (for Las Terrenas, social justice, environment etc.) and no less passionate poet.

Please, all of you, accept the award graciously without stopping what you are doing ;-) .

There can - and should be - many "picks " of many kinds of "art" to climb.:-)

Alhambra

Alhambra, the complex of mostly Moorish palaces, gardens of Generalife and a fort of Alcazaba (from which most of my pictures of Granada were taken) is absolutely breathtaking.
Look at the visual "lightness" of the construction of the palaces,

the amazing detail,

the tranquility

the elegance,

the openess,

the pompousness of official parts of the construction,

the generous use of water in design,
and Generalife's fabulous gardens.

Alhambra invites you to stroll for hours (especially if you - like I - visit in the cooler weather seasons of fall, winter and spring - in summer the heat is brutal) admiring all this beauty and greatness,
resting a while in one of its many courtyards, or at the court of the lions, studying the ingenous house cooling system from the XII -XIII centuries,
hide a spell in the aromatic shade of an old orange tree studying excavations of the new archeological discoveries,

or pose for a photo under the myrtle wall :-)

Granada

Since we are on Granada's coast, let's make a short excursion up the mountains to Granada. Here are a few pictures of Granada from above.

I have to admit that the clean, color unified (predominantly white walls, red roofs) Granada - and other Spanish towns and villages - appeal to me a LOT more than the assault of exaggerated forms and colors of Puerto Rico.

(Of course it is likely due to my European cultural conditioning, but I can't help it. I DO try to enjoy visual cacophony to be more open minded... and I got this far that I intellectually understand it...but am still unable to emotionally appreciate it. )

Spanish towns and villages appear elegant, Puerto Rican appear visually cacophonic.
So let's enjoy the views of Granada, when we can.

Tomorrow we shall go visit Alhambra.