Roman Zaragoza

We wanted to go to Merida in Extremadura this week. It's where there are important Roman remains, and the journey is about nine hours by car. We couldn't do it, we had to be in Zaragoza, so we went to see a bit of late-Roman; the crypt of the church of Santa Engracia. It's right in the commercial centre of the city. On the outside it looks like this:

And in the crypt they've got these two fourth century Roman sarcophagi. They are for various martyrs: called innumerable but actually eighteen, I think. The biggest names are Engracia and Lamberto.

Autumn snow

Yesterday we drove home from Zaragoza. The views on the way through the mountain pass of Monrepos were striking; the peaks of the Pyrenees had their first snow. My photos are all speckly because they are taken through a dirty windscreen.

It's amazing how small the mountains look in photos when they seem so enormous from the car!

Clouds

Yesterday afternoon the sky looked spectacular from my house.

Looking south-west

Peg-legged angel

An old photo of my favourite Romanesque capitel, the peg-legged angel. Nobody knows why an angel has an artificial leg. Maybe he's not an angel but a man halfway transformed into an eagle....just an idea-I keep thinking about it!

October

It's mid-October and still quite warm. The leaves are changing colours but we don't have any spectacular views of autumn changes yet. There's a mushroom growing on my front grass; I've no idea if it's edible or not.
I gave up on the poinsettia; I couldn't keep up the discipline of  putting it in the dark and taking it out at the right times.
It's got to rain. There's a drought and the reservoirs are low. They've said for Thursday.
Last week I took a group of Japanese tourists on a little guided tour in Jaca-mostly the cathedral. They were very apreciative, and knew about Romanesque architecture, but there's an interesting cultural gap; although they could do the architectural bit, they (naturally) had little or no knowledge of the Biblical characters and stories which for most westerners form part of their background-at least that was the case in the past.

Project Poinsettia

I'm doing an experiment to see if I can get my last Christmas' poinsettia to turn red for this Christmas. Apparently you have to make sure it's in complete darkness for twelve out of twenty-four hours every day for three months. I've put it in the dark for three or four nights now; strictly 20.30 to 08.30. We'll see what happens.

Where is this?

These surprising images (for those who don't live here) are of the Aljaferia in Zaragoza. It was built more than a thousand years ago as a Moorish palace, and has gone through various transformations and restorations. For example, there is a deep dry moat which was added to the defences in the late 16th century and later filled in, to be restored in the 1980s. As well as a tourist attraction, the Aljafreia contains the  very modern Aragonese parliament.