You don’t have to wander too far into Granada’s tangled web of crumbling streets to realize that it’s a city of graffiti. And one artist is largely responsible: the legendary El Niño de las Pinturas. His work can be found all over the web, whether it’s being analyzed in various articles (if you can speak Spanish) or Flickr pages in his honor.
But obviously it’s only on the streets of Granada, that you get to come face to face with the real thing. From tattoo parlors on Calle Molinos…
…you can hardly move without bumping into one his curious (haunting, even) works. Hunting for his handywork down dark alleyways, on the sides of abandoned houses or in the deserted plazas of the Realejo, both makes for a great way to explore the city, and another fantastic free thing to do in Granada in and of itself.
As to why Granada should have such a lot of really good, creative street art…? Well, it’s a beautiful, mystical sort of a place with a faintly mournful feel to it. And that’s always attracted a crowd of alternative types, hippies, artists, soul-searchers and assorted would-be bohemians stretching all the way back to Washington Irving.
Who, after all, wouldn’t be inspired by the spectacle of this Moorish gateway on Calle Elvira?
During a checkered traveling past, HostelBloggers have slept in some fairly unusual places: there have been castle hostels, treehouse hostels and even a couple of haunted hostels. When luck and planning have been against us, we’ve had to make do with a park bench on a few occasions…
Beaches have also, naturally, featured quite highly. But never, in all our days, have we slept in a giant sand castle.
And a giant sand castle is exactly what the ’sand hotel’ that’s been built on Weymouth Beach (in Dorset, England) is. It took four eager sculptors (and a JCB) over a week to build, and is made up of over 1,000 tonnes of sand. As for the price? A very reasonable £10 a night. But then, of course, it doesn’t have a roof!
For more details, check out the full story from the BBC here.
Veering wildly from the ridiculous to the sublime, we spent the morning clambering up two of Edinburgh’s hills: Calton Hill and Arthur’s Seat. Jumping on the opportunity to get some Edinburgh video footage, we got the cameras out and did a couple of sweeping pans of the glorious panoramas laid out at our feet.
Rising up just a little to the east of the New Town, Calton Hill is crowned by a curious landmark (visible on the footage at 0:16): the unfinished National Monument. There’s something about its utterly out of place Grecian grandeur that’s actually really rather endearing…
There’s a shot of the spectacular Arthur’s Seat, too, (of which more below) at 0:50 on the video.
But, its folly aside, Calton Hill is dwarved in every way by the magnificent Arthur’s Seat. Its appeal lies in the genuinely wild slice of the Highlands it brings to the heart of Edinburgh. As you climb up through the stunning Holyrood Park, you can check out Salisbury Crags, the evocative ruins of Holyrood Abbey, and ponder the unlikely possibility of the Arthurian myth that hangs over it.
The footage draws to a dramatic close with a gradual zoom back down onto Calton Hill. And so, rather neatly, does this post.
Backpackers in London keen to be part of a public art exposition should get along to Trafalgar Square in the coming months.
Over the course of a period of 100 days, members of the public will be given the opportunity to stand on a plinth – day and night – for an hour.
The artist, Antony Gormley, is quoted as saying: “Through elevation on to the plinth and removal from common ground, the body becomes a metaphor, a symbol and allows us to reflect on the diversity, vulnerability and particularity of the individual in contemporary society.”
Whether or not that’s any consolation for standing on a plinth, in the rain, at four in the morning, remains to be seen.
From the merely curious (the woman swinging a child around) to the totally bizarre (like the upside down statue of Charles La Trobe in Melbourne) Oddee’s roundup of the world’s most bizarre statues throws up a couple of real crackers.
Standing outside the Ernst & Young building on 725 South Figueroa in Los Angeles, the above statue is presumably a caustic attack on faceless global capitalism. Or it might just be a man with his head stuck in a brick wall…
In any case, full marks to the surprisingly witty caption entries on accountingweb.co.uk (and I promise this is the last time you’ll ever see them mentioned on HostelBloggers!!!):
