Welcome to Merryville

Everywhere I go I look for love. Not the love a any person, but the sort that you can breathe in certain places once you understand them. It is in the air, in the scent of the vegetation and on the walls of buildings.
I was never a lover of beauty, and the fabled prettyness od Europe, always redolent of Royal or Papal hypocresy, and of the lame timidity of the burgoisy, bores me.
One day I will return to the Historic emptyness of woods and lakes.
In the meanwhile, to divert my mind from iits terrible isolation and its constant longing for who the fuck knows what, I like walking through some strange places.
Mainly in the countries of Southwest Europe , Spain France, Portugal, etc , you can feel, if you are observant, the proximity of the beautiful and dreadful East. As you go South, the Gothic structures of the sober North begin to metamorphosiae into wild architectural wonders where here and there appear the haunting mathematical and musical motifs of the Middle East, lean towers that seem made of crystals, with impossibly turqoise, blue and red mosaics. The magic of Arabia, Morocco,and so forth...
This mixture pervades the human phisionomy as well. The North of Spain is teeming with tough red headed women pushing their baby carriages along, with a fierce look which is seldom found in the more sophisticated North American women of the same origins, Celtic, Germanic, or whatever, and as you go South you meet a kind of perplexing beauty, dusky skinned people with steely blue eyes, the jet black hair and delicate features of the ancient Roman the Hebrew and the Arab.
The land is almost always hilly or downright mountainous, and cities still stand all over the place which were built hanging precariously on the edges of abysses.
Industralization has turned a lot of this cities bizarre worlds whre the concrete blocks built by totalitarian regimes for their factory workers maim the natural beauty of the landscape irreparably. But in all that ungliness there are plenty of spots remaining from a rural past: strange patches of greenery where old people still grow their vegetables, houses of fantastical design built with the fortunes and whim of migrants returning from North and South america,
forsaken palaces with broken window panes, surrounded by fields overgrown with weeds, against a background of tall smoke spewing factory chimneys. Even on very sunny days, whgich are nost unusual here in the North, the air carries the scent of the Atlantic and the soft scent of Eucalyptus.
Ant this mixture of industry and agriculture remind one of the Far East. China is not as far as you think.
The city in the photos is called Villalegre, or Merryville. Surely the names of its streets where named by the old regime to distract people from the then dreadful reality of day to day poverty and toil. There are names like The Neigbourhood of Light, Serenity Walk, Square of Smiles.
Normally it is a dark place. I walked through it on a beautiful sunny day.