Museo de Prado Part 1
Ready to take on our first adventure in Madrid, I fired up Uber and expected to see a horde of cabs around the hotel, waiting to be summoned by my spell of UberX.
Well, what I saw was this:
Notice the car looked like a bat. And yes, it was the day of Halloween, thank you Uber for reminding me that. Just when I thought I could sleep well with a spook-free Halloween by flying all the way across the Atlantic to Spain!
Upon arriving at the front entrance of Museo de Prado, we saw this sculpture of a man as short as shrank Ant-man, his name is Goya.
I was utterly confused for a moment. Isn't Goya the brandname of a famous canned bean?
Afraid that I might be more terrible in names than what I already pessimistically assumed, I resort to google. And here is what came out from ancestry.com regarding to the name "Goya":
Japanese: found mostly in the Ryukyu Islands, this name is usually written with characters meaning 'barbarian room' or 'give room'.
Source: Dictionary of American Family Names ©2013, Oxford University Press
nameberry.com had the following:
Well, what I saw was this:
Notice the car looked like a bat. And yes, it was the day of Halloween, thank you Uber for reminding me that. Just when I thought I could sleep well with a spook-free Halloween by flying all the way across the Atlantic to Spain!
Upon arriving at the front entrance of Museo de Prado, we saw this sculpture of a man as short as shrank Ant-man, his name is Goya.
I was utterly confused for a moment. Isn't Goya the brandname of a famous canned bean?
Afraid that I might be more terrible in names than what I already pessimistically assumed, I resort to google. And here is what came out from ancestry.com regarding to the name "Goya":
Japanese: found mostly in the Ryukyu Islands, this name is usually written with characters meaning 'barbarian room' or 'give room'.
Source: Dictionary of American Family Names ©2013, Oxford University Press
nameberry.com had the following:
The name Goya is a girl's name ...
From the experts:
Passion for the Spanish painter Goya may transcend the difficulty of this name -- just don't say it in a Jewish community.
More confused, but definitely intrigued by the part "just don't say it in a Jewish community", I quickly googled "what does Goya mean in Hebrew", and Wikipedia, always being the smartest guy on the internet, told me this:
In modern Hebrew and Yiddish the word goy is the standard term for a gentile. In English, the use of the word goy can be controversial. It is sometimes used pejoratively to refer to a non-Jew, but it is inherently no more insulting than the term gentile.
Although I'm still confused, here is the gist of it:
1. Japanese, among other things, have a different opinion on what Goya means.
2. The name has a artistic genesis tracing back to the Spanish painter, so this museum might turn out great.
3. I'm a Goy, or gentile according to what I read previously in the Bible. I'm not so sure if I should show off by saying "we are all goys" in the next Sunday school, which I was too busy to attend for ages.
So here I am, a Goy, entering the national art Museum of Prado...

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