lisbon- uncropped.

in order to get these out quickly i'm letting go of the urge to crop, adjust levels and color, resize. the uneven images are making me itch. but, here you go. lisboa!

i just spent a great few days wandering the streets of lisbon with good friends amber and dan, here from MN. since they are both great sketchers and had just attended the Urban Sketchers annual symposium before i arrived, we spent our days meandering, eating and sketching. 

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after recently coming from rome, it was very refreshing to be in a bright, vibrant city with [seemingly] few tourists. prices were great- especially on food- and it makes it a little hard to go back to the land of CHFs. oh well. i think howie will be jealous when he hears about all the seafood we ate and how delicious it was. i'm drooling a little now just thinking about it! 

Jeronimos Monastery, Belem

we squeezed in a visit to the azulejos museum and it was too bad we didn't have more time there. besides the fantastic tiles filling my love for geometric patterns, color and ceramics all in one, the monastery that houses the collection is a beautiful space where one could spend some time. 

azulejos beauties

another highlight was sketching around belem at the tower, monument to the discoveries and the monastery ***, which was literally sandwiched in the day by two visits to the pasteis de belem shop for coffee and the most magnificent egg tarts. 

to die for!  (for shelley)

i'll be dreaming tonight of armillary spheres and azulejos…

sketching in Romainmotier.

so it sounds a little sketchy, but i found some swiss sketchers on the internet and met up with them last weekend. i saw that they were heading to a town very close to lausanne to participate in the 31st worldwide sketchcrawl found through the urban sketchers website.

i hopped a local train from lausanne station and within 30 minutes was in the middle of farm fields and tiny towns. luckily nora came along for a few hours so i wasn't completely on my own. we walked 2km or so to the town of Romainmotier. a very tiny old town with a very beautiful abbey church. the main church that exists today was built in the 10th &11th centuries, and this nice plan diagram found here shows how the church developed from much earlier.

the church also had a traditional cloister which was removed during a period of religious reform. remnants of the old cloister still linger on the exterior walls and stones were laid to represent the original plan.

one of the most beautiful aspects of this church is the sandstone on the exterior- the color and aging of the stone is amazing. also, of course i love the way that there's still a taste of what used to be- ribs still sprouting from the exterior facade gives an idea of what used to be.

it was nice to escape into the countryside and listen to the music of cowbells for a few hours. it was also great to meet some lovely swiss sketchers who turned out to be just the kind of people i'd imagined.

Update: the sketchcrawl results from our group can be seen here!