Day 5 of 8: Wednesday 29th June 2011

We both slept well after yesterday's trip, waking just before 8. I killed a mosquito in the bathroom in revenge for the bites that had been taken out of my ankle and calf over the past couple of days. A shower and a light breakfast, and then off to the newspaper booth to buy Tuesday's edition of the European Guardian. The main story was about a Tory dying in a portaloo toilet at Glastonbury festival following a leak (political), which was very odd.

A visit to a pharmacia on Via XX Settembre to buy some "after sun" lotion for my back involved showing off a bit of my sunburn and the shop assistant dashing off to get a tube of aloe vera gel. From there we crossed the road to the Coral Museum to buy our Gaudi exhibition tickets. A €5 ticket for the exhibition got us into all the other museums in town that were taking part.

From the Coral Museum we followed the route round the cormer to Torre di Sulis where we could get onto the roof for views over the town.



As it was noon, we stopped off in a cafe for a light lunch and water before heading back to the hotel for a siesta. I slept well from 1300 to about 1600 after Sonia had rubbed some of the aloe vera onto my back. She repeated the treatment at 1600 before she went to the cloisters to read while I dozed and read the paper for an hour before I joined her. By 1800 we were ready to continue on the Gaudi trail.



I was amazed to find that Gaudi used a lot of hyperbolic paraboloids in his structures, and was even more amazed to realise that I knew what this meant, thanks to a presentation I had to prepare during my degree back in 1984. It's surprising what lodges in the memory!

Having finished the Gaudi trail and been fascinated by the organic influences of his structures, as well as personally recognising the elegance of the structural solutions he created, we went down to the promenade. Here we found many stalls at Ferra San Giovanni - a local saint's fair. We didn't go on the fairground rides set up on the harbourside but did try some of the food samples such as the olives in extremely hot chillies. It was an odd mix of stalls - food, hardware, sweets, "hippy" clothes, Sky TV, the Coastguard...

We stopped off for crepes and gelato at a cafe overlooking the harbour. Sonia's nutella and banana beat her, it was TOO sweet, although my ice cream crepe was fine. Here's the view from out table...



Suitably refreshed we wandered off into the shopping streets of the "new" town to find the Fair Trade shop on Via XX Settembre where Sonia bought a beautiful green handbag. A stroll down the road took us back to the Orange Bar for alcoholic mojitos as a night cap before heading back to the hotel. When we asked to buy a couple of bottles of water from the fridge in the hotel reception, the doorman got me a 1l bottle and refused payment, which was very generous of him.

We settled down in the room while the mojitos did their thing, discussing our plans for the next few days. We thought that we might go on the open top bus trip and do some shopping on Friday but I was down to €25 so needed to visit an ATM which would be interesting so I scoured the phrasebook for Italian banking phrases, just in case.