A great way to get around downtown St. Pete… all for free!

… once you get out of the rooms with all his incredible creations…

I am not into art. I am not into fine art! I am not into anything “fine” in life.

But she dragged me (almost literally) to the Dali museum.

While I did not come out any wiser for the wear, I did learn some crazy facts…

1. Dali Salvatore was a rebel (well, at least now we are talking)

2. He split his time between America and Spain (this I had no idea about)

On that last point, I had no idea about the Abraham Lincoln painting he did. My picture does not do any justice. In reality, if you stand in front of the huge painting, the whole thing is a blur… you will only see the surrealist painter’s painting of the nude woman from the back surrounded by random colored blocks. One of those blocks has, what appears like, a pixellated picture of Abraham Lincoln.

And here is the crazy thing… if you see the picture from a distance… it suggests twenty meters on the writeup … or you can simply try to look at the picture from your iPhone camera… all those individual blocks meld together to produce a smooth picture of Lincoln … and the nude woman is just not visible… The telescopic effect is unbelievable.

I know I do not get art… but I do get visual effects. That was too cool !! To do that without computer effects… totally unreal….

And there was I… quietly taking in the beauty of the water… appreciating the rocks in the water when Her Highness rudely interrupted my peace …

“Did you see these?”

“The rocks?” I asked

“These are not rocks. These are manatees!”

And that is how I came up close and personal with rocks that apparently move… and are called manatees!!

Jokes apart, there were three of them. We had no food to give them. But they hung round and were sweet.

One unfortunate part of those creatures in their natural habitats co-existing with us human beings… you can see the propellor marks o one of them… somehow it got too close to a motor of a boat.

Reminder to all boat riders… be on the lookout… especially in shallow waters… keep as close to idling as you can before you are in deeper waters.

Buggy cart in the pier…

What I really want to do is to see if I can get a boat and get a closer view of the small airplanes landing there..

For the frequent fliers… this is SPG … not PIE.

… as my Bengali friends would no doubt say… “বিনয়ের অবতার”