destino Figueres

I´m writing from Andorra, the tiny nation in the Pyrenees Alps wedged between Spain and France. There´s not a lot to do in Andorra if you´re not into shopping or walking around in ski-gear looking rich... so I´m killing the few hours between what I consider dinnertime and what the Spanish consider dinnertime (restaurants don´t even open until after 8pm). Yeah, officially Andorra is an independent principality but it feels like another Catalonian city - albeit in a vastly different setting. Yesterday I finally made it to Figueres and the marvelous Dalí Theatre-Museum. Basically, in the early ´70s Dalí converted the town´s old theatre into one immersive surrealist artwork in homage to himself and to the artists that he admired (but mostly to himself). Signs point the way from the train station, but it´s hard to miss the enormous peach-coloured building crowned with eggs and decorated all over with loaves of bread. Inside, some of his most recognisable paintings are hung in small rooms amongst installation works (eg, a gold-painted chimp skeleton with a woman´s face in its belly, a nude bust dotted with ants and a limp baguette draped over its head, and an entire room is dedicated to a spatial reproduction of the Mae West painting). Some of it seemed a bit outdated, particularly his later experiments with optical illusions and computer imaging (such as it was in the ´70s), but it was such an exciting place... There were two other Dalí museums that I had planned to see, but they would have been separate bus trips to his house at Portlligat and to his castle at Pubol... Too much Dalí would be a bad thing and I didn´t feel like playing too much into the personality cult anyway. This morning in Girona I got up early, caught the train back to Barcelona, and then had a 3-hour bus ride up into the mountains. Eventually out of Spain and into Andorra. The town is warm and sunny but surrounded by snow-capped mountains. It´s got a lethargic pace, not as busy as I´d expected given that we should be in the middle of the skiing season. The waiter at the cafe I was in this afternoon had nothing better to do than to lazily, repeatedly, chase the ducks away from the empty seating area. Andorra is not an easy place to get in or out of. There´s two mini-buses daily that head to France, and I had to choose the earlier option of 5.30am for tomorrow morning. It´s 3 hours to Toulouse, and from there I´ll be heading west to Bordeaux for a few days. I think. Adios.