El Drac (The Dragon) guards the entrance to Park Güell. While the Sagrada Familia church is considered Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi’s masterwork, I find Park Güell even more impressive. While there are no rides, the place feels like it was designed by Walt Disney on LSD.
While Art Deco was about to percolate in 1900, Gaudi was tasked by Count Güell with creating an exclusive neighborhood and park at the edges of Barcelona on the abandoned Muntanya Pelada (Bare Mountain). With his style influenced by Moorish, Oriental and Gothic, Gaudi designed a fantasyland of shelters, stonework, roads and tiled mosaics that took 14 years to build. But things didnt go as planned: 58 of the 60 exclusive plots were never built on. Count Güell lived in one house and Gaudi barely scraped together enough to buy the other. The family lived here until Gaudi’s death in 1926.
It had been an exhausting 10 days. Chuck and I had visited penpals near Luxembourg, in Bordeaux and Barcelona. They ran us ragged seeing the sites, so we decided we needed a vacation from our vacation.
Driving north from Barcelona in a brand-new, rented, now beat-up Peugot, we cracked the Michelin guide at random to Gavarnie, a tiny town a mile up in the Haute Pyrenees on the border of France and Spain. Driving in at dusk, we could make out a thin white line against the peaks. As the light dimmed, we settled on the idea that it was ice in a crevice and worthy of exploring the next day. It must have been 9:30 when we checked into the hotel and found a outdoor cafe still open and a few guys with climbing ropes nursing bottles of Kronenbourg and sore knees.
The tour boats cruised about 20 miles down the Li River from Guilin. It was winter and inside the unheated vessels, at the center of each table was a coal-fired hot pot. It looked like a mutant bunt pan, upturned and full to the brim with boiling chicken stock. The smoldering coal at the center of the dozen or so hot pots was the only heat on the boat and gave off its painful stench before slowly snaking out the open windows. Because everything in China was heated with small coal devices, every window everywhere was open in winter.
Every year I tell myself that I’ll skip buying a new iPhone if the cameras don’t make a light-year leap. And this year…well…I ordered the iPhone 11 Pro immediately. The leap is that big. As I’m writing the update for The Crap-Free Guide to iPhone Photography I’m running the iPhone 11 Pro cameras through their paces to see how good the improvements are.
Secrets of gesture-based typing in iOS 13 on iPhone. Shhh.
Built-in, gesture-based typing for iPhone is well past due. The good news is that iOS 13 now has the awkwardly named QuickPath keyboard, enabled by default.
So just what is gesture-based typing? Instead of tapping the keys on the onscreen keyboard, you swipe across them with one finger. The keyboard recognizes the pattern as a word. Just lift your finger and type the next word. It’s blindingly fast once you get the hang.
wolfe with an e's blog
