Alright, already, we went to see some art. Two art things, actually. On Saturday, we went to see the Fundacio Antoni Tapies, which is a large home that Antoni Tapies, a Catalan artist, bought and turned into a museum for his work. The Lonely Planet guide says he is one of the most important Catalan artists, especially among those still working today, but that doesn’t explain why he had to buy himself a museum.

The Lonely Planet used phrases like, “the bulk of the collection comprises,” and “among the remaining works,” and these led us to believe that there would be a lot of art in the place. After all, one would assume that Señor Tapies could put whatever he wanted in there, and why open a museum if you’re just going to keep all of your art at home?

Well, perhaps the purpose of art is to ask unanswerable questions. If so, this museum was worth the €3 (it’s normally €6, but we bought a special ticket), since we’re still wondering where the “bulk” of anything was in the Fundacio Antoni Tapies. Now, let’s be clear: the art was nice. We walked into a beautiful old building that was designed by Lluís Domènech i Montaner, who is often mentioned immediately after Gaudi on the well-known “list of famous Catalan architects.” It was originally a ritzy publishing house and is most notable for the wild rooftop. Atop the building is a rat’s nest of barbed wire that looks like nothing in particular. One of us actually thought the building was under construction. (I won’t say which one, but her name rhymes with…oh, that would be too easy. You’ll just have to guess.) But it’s not. It’s just modern.

So there we are, inside. In the front entryway, which later we would come to call “the museum,” there were some funky painting-ish type things that included clay, rope, and rice, among other media. Smack in the middle, there was a cement desk with a lot of math carved into it. The most “artsy” of the carvings said, simply, “√♥” The square root of love? Are you kidding? Can a real artist really get away with something like that? After examining the piece for a few minutes, we determined that the square root of love equals the opposite of brown eyes (see earlier posting if this confuses you), but we could get no further.

Downstairs, there was a special exhibit: a retrospective of another artist whose name we have forgotten. It was called, “Ida y Vuelta.” This title got us pretty excited, because we knew what it meant – “Coming and Going.” The accompanying flier explained that the curator had a hard time getting the show together, because the artist had said that a retrospective would be pointless. His pieces were only worth seeing in the moment of their creation, apparently. Somehow, he was convinced to put the show – described, like the museum itself, with a touch of hyperbole: “his entire life’s catalog” – together for the Fundacio Tapies. In a nearly empty basement, we found three boxes that resembled drawers from library card catalogs, but much longer. They were suspended from the ceiling by metal cables and they each held roughly 10,000 notecards. One held all black cards. You were allowed to touch them, but since they were all black, flipping them around got dull after a while. Another set was entirely white. The third had words on them, sort of poetic dictionary definitions of various Spanish words. This one was fun, like something one of our Spanish teachers had substituted for the real art to make sure we practiced on the weekend.

Then we went upstairs to the third floor. A striking, colorful painting caught our eye. Much of it was dominated by the very hip lime green color that’s all the rage these days. Oh, that color. It had been haunting us for days. Do you know how sometimes you get a song in your head, and you can’t get it out? It was like that with this shade of green. Sometime in the middle of the week, I had said to Leah, “What was that color we used for some of our thank you notes?”

“Gray?” she said.

“Gray’s not a color,” I said. “It was green something. Not fuschia…that’s pink. What’s that funny name for lime green?”

“The one that sounds like it should be pink?” she said.

“Yes! Yes! What is it?” I said.

“Ambergris?” she said. Leah is reading Ahab’s Wife, and everything makes her think of ambergris these days. If you haven’t read it, you ought to. It’s not so bad, thinking of ambergris.

“No, not ambergris. I’ll know it when I hear it.” But I didn’t hear it. So there it was, staring across the gallery at us. We ran over to it, as if the little cards say things like, “Guernica. Pablo Picasso, 1896-1973. On loan from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. Mostly done in greenish-gray. Maybe olive?” Of course it said the title in Catalan and little else. But it was a fine painting.

That’s one thing about going to museums in another country, though. We don’t know too much about art (except that when we pay €3, we want a lot of it), and so much of “looking” at a painting is actually reading the card and seeing when the thing was painted, what it’s called, and so forth. Someone told me once, actually – Mike Basta, was that you? – that the titles are often dreamed up by gallery owners and museum curators, and they’re often meaningless in terms of the art itself. Even knowing that, words are a lot easier to decipher than a modernist painting, so without them, it was a new sort of museum-going experience.

It was yet another new challenge: to make something of the paintings without the option of being satisfied with their historical information. It was sort of an extension, actually, of something that a lot of the illiterates we know report about Spain: there were no distractions. When you can read without effort, you have to read a lot. There are words everywhere. Ads, bus routes, flyers selling furniture and offering services. We see those things, but without effort, they don’t get into our brains. It’s like walking around in a little bubble. So it was with the painting captions. Since they were sort of meaningless to us, we were able to ignore them much more easily than we would have been able to do if they were in English. Maybe we got some more out of the paintings as a result. Either way, we enjoyed ourselves. It was a worthy museum, and we will take you there if you visit.

And then we congratulated ourselves on have done something more noteworthy than talking to the water company or buying some forks, and went out for coffee. Actually, one of us had coffee, and one had hot chocolate. If you were not planning to go to Spain, and then you heard about how they make hot chocolate, you might change your mind. First they heat up some milk – just like us! Then, they melt candy bars into it. It sort of turns into pudding, which is the best dessert in the whole world. (By the way, if you visit, you can go out for hot chocolate even if you wish to skip the museum.) It was so pudding-y, in fact, that we had to send it back for whipped cream. This annoyed our waiter, but people getting mad at you can easily be turned into just another distraction that you don’t understand. Sometimes living inside the bubble is a chore, but it has its benefits.

And then we went to another museum. This one was free. More on that later.

By the way, the next day, on the Paper Source website, we found the name of that green color. Sitting in the vile internet cafe amidst the teenagers playing video games and the sketchy men surfing porn, we both raised our arms in victory and shouted, “Chartreuse!”