rainbow day

there was a storm crossing through on Monday here in Lanzarote island. it didn’t get really bad, just lots of rain, some thunder and lightning, and rough waves. the thing about Lanzarote is that it is almost always sunny here, with almost no rain.  that’s also how everything is built: for sun, and wind, not for rain. that’s why rain messes things up here quite a bit. they closed schools on monday, and shut down airports temporarily. here, electricity was gone for a while, and the internet – which wasn’t very good before the storm – now is only almost drowned.

now the sun is returning, but there are still strings of rain clouds passing through. yesterday was rainbow day: a cloud got stuck in the middle of the island, and kept drizzling, while the sun kept shining at the coast – and thus, there was a steady, complete 180° arc of a rainbow, shining for more than an hour. i went for a drive to the light house at the northern tip, and then visited the museum of Cesar Manrique, the artist and activist who engaged himself in the landscape of this island, his work is a bit like Miro, but more connected to the land, with murals and with wind sculptures. He also designed a lava-house, that’s where the museum now is, with the lava structures as key element of the house.

later I went for a beach walk, to find that the storm waves took away a large part of sand, turning a part of the sand beach to stone beach. an ongoing creative process, too:  the elements, water, wind, air.
it’s good to be here, and even the storm was somehow fascinating, with the way it transformed the island for a day.

and so fitting to this all, the book I read these days: “Darwin”, a book that is both travelogue and journey into evolution and biography, written by Jürgen Neffe, a scientist who followed the path of Darwin, and visited the places he went to, on a journey that took more than a year.

(sending this off via blog-per-mail, i hope it comes out all right)