Blue on blue

It was terrifically windy last night and all of today; S went on another walk with the Tortosa group, and I'd planned a bike ride, but I quickly rejected that idea as I saw the wind tossing the palm trees and blowing horizontal clouds of sand everywhere, including all over my clean washing. However, I was able to spend a couple of hours going through my photos from Valencia. I've created two sets:

Las Fallas
La Ciudad de las Artes y Ciencias (this is for you, Arachne and Ceridwen!)

Unfortunately most of my night shots of the Fallas were very noisy -- knowing how crowded it would be, I took the small camera because I can stuff it in my pocket, but it really isn't great above ISO 800. It was awful on "intelligent automatic", and a bit better when I switched to shutter priority so that at least the photos weren't blurred as well as noisy. So I've done my best with the best of the photos -- they still convey a flavour of it. Check out the illuminations -- eat your heart out Regent Street!

In the evening we popped out for a brief drive to watch the sunset from the ziggurat. It wasn't that spectacular, and the wind was cold too, so we didn't stay long, and this boat was one of just a handful of shots I took. Speaking of sunsets, Blip Central are certainly spreading the spotlight love about, because my backblipped sunset from Friday hit the spotlight briefly with less than 100 views and a couple of hearts! Mysterious.

Meanwhile, in depressing news from France, a vague bleu marine is sweeping the country in local elections, with Marine Le Pen's National Front likely to get through to the second round in up to 200 places, including close to us in Béziers and Perpignan.