Sunday 24th May 2010

Today we visited the Centro Leon. It's a private museum, and the mixture of birds in the wire enclosed aviary was quite remarkable. I'm told the aviary used to be a japanese garden, which explains the bridge. The wire hatching was too close to fit the camera through, by the way, so the clarity of every bird but one is due to the fact that you can't focus on the near and the far at the same time. The camera, it seems, focuses so exclusively that the fence becomes a smeared gray which in the right light, disappears completely. Another part of the museum held art of various kinds. I wish I could explain more about it, but while thoughts were provoked, they were quickly replaced by the thoughts provoked by the next work, and so the effect was rather muted. The museum also contained a lovely gift shop (of course) and an exposition on the history of a local entrepeneur whose name completely escapes me. Catherin and I went to Mao, her hometown, and met quite a few of her relatives. As my Dominican Spanish is barely functional, I had some trouble understanding what was going on. There is a tendency to drop or swallow certain consonants. It's relatively accepted in the wider spanish speaker world for instance, that some speakers pronounce past participles without the "d", so ado and ido become ao and io. However, the dropping of an "s" is something I'm not altogether used to, and in some cases, renders a perfectly innocent sentence into something rather curious (rather like that joke about the mispronunciation of quiche) . The talk of the family was her uncle's skill and ability with sinning. It was all they could talking about; how he'd been sinning for so long, how he'd been doing it right down by the river over there, and how he caught one that was this big- you guessed it, they meant fishing. Pescar is to fish. Pescando is fishing. Pecar is to sin. Pecando is sinning. In any case, I tried to avoid interaction with Catherin's family, so that she could catch up with them (not an easy task, the status of guest confers all kinds of attention) and took photos of the gardens, tried to fruit from the local trees, and in general enjoyed myself until it was time to go home and fall into bed waiting for the next day.