My first stop (after flying into Madrid) was Zaragoza, Spain, where I
spent the week. I attended a conference as well as did a little exploring
on food. The weather in mid-March was warm-ish in the days but cool-ish
in the evenings and mornings—call it a low of 10°C/50°F
and a high of 25°C/77°F.
My hotel was near the Plaza España, near the city centre/old town area
which is where the Pillar Bascilica is which is the center of everything.
The Ebro River runs east/west, and our conference was at the University
of Zaragoa's engineering campus which was on the north side of the river,
so I took the tram to get there and back daily.
It was also the week before Easter, and people go a bit Easter crazy.
I don't have photos of that here (yet).
Note (July 21, 2024): Cellphone photos
haven't been incorporated into the collection yet. I figured there's
no reason to delay publishing these.
(Jump right to the pictures
and skip all the blah-blah-blah.)
Photography note:
For some of the panoramic/composite images that I used Photoshop to
"stitch" together, I also used the Photoshop "warp" feature to fix the
distortions caused by me not using (having) a tripod (with the right
mount) when I took the picture. This feature was new to me, but has
probably been in Photoshop for 15-20 years. By unwarping
the image, it looks more like what I saw when I took the picture,
as opposed to just cropping the images, sometimes losing parts of the
picture I wanted. On occasion, I'd leave it as a mosaic of images that
look like some sort of photo ransom note. I try not to do too much
digital manipulation, but I've removed lens spots in blue skies or
grey clouds too in the past.
I also changed up the thumbnail image gallery CGI code to accomodate
all of these "panoramic" shots. The old code put them on their own
line since it was typically a very wide picture. Many of these pictures
are only slightly larger than the normal version, so I changed the code
to scale all thumbnail images to fit in the landscape or portrait
shape depending on whether it's tall or wide.
Also, I took some pictures using a test smartphone. It was lightweight
which was a plus, but a pain in the ass in ever other way. And the images
it produces are highly altered and adjusted that do not really reflect
reality. For simplicity's sake, I decided I'll upload all of my Nikon DSLR
pictures first, and then add the phone ones (when I have time).
¬Frank (April 28, 2024).
My hotel had a balcony and I took a few pictures from there.
The day after I arrived in Zaragoza, I walked into the old town City Centre area, north to the Ebro River, crossed the river, and then walked along the north shore, and eventually came back. It was a pleasant day, though a bit of a gray sky.
I spent most of my time near the old town city centre. Like most
of the older areas I saw in Spain, it has a look that combines older
European cities and what I imagine to be a sort of arabian layout
that I've seen in adventure or thriller movies from the 20th Century.
And by that I mean, all the buildings are of a similar, almost uniiform
height of 4 or 5 stories, narrow streets, and not a single fucking
one of them is straight! Every street is shaped like a J or an S
or possibly some cursive script form that's even more twisty. Sometimes
intersections have 4 streets, sometimes more, sometimes less. The
main point is that there's no view of the horizon, and the only thing
you know is that if you enter a street going in a certain direction,
you won't be going in that direction at the other end of it.
Another thing that I'm guessing is common in Europe is that street
names only apply for a a few blocks. Then the street changes its name.
On the plus side, given just a street address, you could generally get
within +/1 a block of your destination. The downside is that unless
you have a detailed map of the city, odds are that any given street name
is mostly useless because you'll never find it on a map. So a GPS map,
planning ahead, or having a detailed street map is often needed. I
usually used the latter approach because I know I look like a lost
tourist anyway.
I walked around the area around the hotel, which was near the Plaza España.
If I was wandering around the old town area, say, looking for a place to
get dinner, often I'd see a place or two that would be a candidate, and
then when I decided what was the best option, I'd have diffiulty finding
it again unless it was on one of the main streets (which are probably more
modern, have different sized buildings alongside them, and contrary to
what I said above are straight) or I wandered around for 15 minues and
passed it again. If this were an adventure game, I would constantly be
forgetting to save my progress as I went.
And finally, every day for a week, I'd pass by a street a block away
from the hotel and the same question/Simpsons quote
would go through my mind. I knew I had to do my own take on it.
So the last night I was in town, on the way back to the hotel after dinner,
I recorded this. And for the record, it was named after some dude (whose
name means pee-pee...OK, it's spelled with 1 r, but I can't roll r's so
it'd all sound the same coming out of my gringo mouth).