The Weekly Don Quixote – Performs A Vanishing Act ‘Á La Toledo’

Here he is, our hero, trying to clamber over the wall in an attempt to come to the aid of Sancho Panza, who looks none too happy being bounced around on a table cloth. Just don’t ask me which chapter of the novel corresponds with that scene…!

It’s a tile mural, and the photo is crap 😦  And there is a reason… sigh.

I stumbled across this by chance a few weeks ago, and took a picture, not knowing whether I was ever going to use it for anything. As you can see, the left-hand-side was being hit by the mid-day sun at the time, with the other half in the shade – impossible to fix, unless you have a PhD in Photoshop. And I can barely hit the snap button on my teensy camera while holding the blasted thing steady at the same time.

A couple of days ago, I tried to return to the spot to take another pic in better light conditions, but… it wasn’t there! OK, the mural is still *somewhere* out there – no more than ten minutes’ walk from my house, in fact – but it’s not where I thought it was.

That is what happens all the time in the old town. When I first moved here, a friend (who had also just arrived) and I used to joke about Toledo’s “disappearing shops”, how they were there one morning, and gone the next, when you needed to buy something, because you’d taken the wrong turn. Yet again. My Teutonic punctuality-pathfinder programming is in perpetual melt-down mode.

After a year and a half, I thought I’d finally cracked it… only to get caught out again by bloody Don Quixote. Ahrgh.

Here’s the link to The Weekly Don Quixote series.

Ceramics, and, in particular, tile making, is a traditional Spanish craft. Here are a handful of pictures I took of the stunningly beautiful Museo De Santa Cruz, which is well-stocked with ceramics and whose walls feature many impressive tile murals.