Sant Feliu de Guixols

From Sunday midday until Thursday morning, we were in Sant Feliu de Guixols on the Costa Brava. Despite spending nearly four days there and hearing native speakers say it multiple times, we still don't understand how to pronounce the name of the town. Sam fay-LOU day GWEE-shoals? Sant FAY-lee-you day ghee-SHOALS? Fail-YOU day ghee-SHOAL? Catalan and Spanish are related but independent languages. The Catalan x is pronounced sh after i, but that's about as far as we were able to match phonemes with spelling. Our knowledge of French kept intruding too, in our effort to process that x, so our de kept sounding like deux instead of day, which didn't help.

Sant Feliu de Guixols saw major development post-WWII, when Germans started flocking to the Spanish coast and the Spanish coast responded by building great swaths of hotels and high rises. One hears as much German as English in Sant Feliu (sam fay-LOU day GWEE-shoal?), when one isn't hearing Catalan or Spanish.

Stefan left Elias and me on our own while he attended a European Science Foundation conference. What to do, what to do? Elias was in heaven after all the boring hiking we had done: the hotel had a swimming pool, we could walk to the beach down the hill, and our room had a TV with a channel broadcasting FIFA Women's World Cup games. Because I am about as far from being a "beach person" as is humanly possible, I was grateful that there were two soccer games to watch every afternoon, as they were the only thing that could compel Elias (a beach person if there ever was one) to abandon the sand and pebbles.

On Wednesday, conference participants had the afternoon off, so we drove to Figueres to see the Teatre-Museu Dalí (Dalí Theatre-Museum), the third most visited museum in Spain. Adding to the bizarre art was the industriousness and determination with which most of the huge crowd took photos of the collection. Say "patata," Galatea of the Spheres!