Fishy Bites the Dust

Before bed the other night, Alec discovered Fishy floating belly up in the fish tank.  He hadn’t been looking so good—he’d gotten sort of bloated around the middle.  Truth be told, the tank hasn’t been looking so good either.  So I feel kind of guilty—we might have unwittingly pushed him over the edge.  Alec told Milo yesterday morning, and he took it pretty hard.   Fishy was his fish, and he’s been here since the beginning.  Last night before bed we gathered around the fish tank, inhabited now only by Carolina and the Zipper, and held a little memorial service.  We all said a few things we remembered about Fishy, and that was that.

Zadie slept like a champ again, and is happy as a clam here with her extended tribe.

I spoke with my colleague Amalia this morning, who spent all day yesterday in Plaza Catalunya.  She was horrified by what she saw—the destruction, the beatings.  The press seems to speaking pretty much with one voice.  Videos posted on the New York Times website are unbelievable.  Amalia told me the police went first for the communications group in the plaza, destroying computers.  She saw a woman bringing water back into the plaza who was chased and beaten by police.  The local papers today describe police incompetence—apparently, they came in with garbage trucks, loaded them up, and had no exit route. They panicked, and violence ensued.

Meanwhile, the enormous screens that were to have been set up for a public viewing of the Champions League Final—Barca vs. Manchester United—were set up at the Arc de Triomphe instead.  But Plaza Catalunya is the traditional place of celebration, so no one knows what will happen if (or, more accurately, when) Barca wins tonight.  We will watch at home—Milo is dressed in his human highlighter suit, and Zadie is wearing her new Barca bib.

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And Baby Makes Five

It’s funny how so much comes back to you, years after having your own babies.  Soon after my niece, Zadie, entered the world, and when Jody and Matt began to plan their trip to visit us in Barcelona, I offered to take the baby for a couple of days so they could get away.  They took me up on it immediately, which bodes well for them as parents who will remember to take time for themselves.  They left yesterday morning for Paris.  Jody shed a few tears, but Zadie has made the transition quite nicely.  Apparently babies don’t experience much separation anxiety until they are about 9 months old, and she’s a couple months shy of that.

I felt nervous going into our baby stint—it’s one thing to screw up your own kids, but you really don’t want to mess with someone else’s, even if they are family.  And I had already bitten her.  One day on our road trip she slipped one of her slender little fingers into my mouth as I was holding her and talking.  I didn’t realize it was there until I chomped down on it, causing her to wail.  Not an auspicious start. 

But somehow all of the instincts come back.  You remember how to shush and rock, the funny faces you made with your own babies, the feeling of unparalleled accomplishment that comes from making her laugh.  It doesn’t hurt that this baby is happy, charming, and knows how to sleep. When she cries, it is truly because she needs something.  You figure it out, and she stops.  Not so with my babies, especially C.C., who reacted badly when I consumed any dairy product during the nursing months, and who had colic. 

We took C.C. to Italy when she was about Zadie’s age, colic and all.  (Looking back, I think we must have been crazy).  Our friend Jerry was celebrating his 50^th birthday there, and he and Rhonda had invited us and one other family—who also had a 6-month old—to join them at a villa in Tuscany.  Jerry and Rhonda’s kids were 10 and 8 at the time, so perhaps they were the crazy ones, for inviting two babies along. As it was our first baby, and we had not spent much time with other babies, we thought our baby was normal, and that all that crying and screaming was what people meant when they said having a baby was tough.  When we met our friends’ baby, who sat placidly in his little seat for hours, we thought perhaps something was wrong with him, and asked our friend Rhonda if there was any cause for concern.  “No, Lisa,” she said gently, “it´s your baby who is not quite normal.”

Alec and I were out at a late dinner on Wednesday night, so we were tired when we began our first day of baby duty yesterday.  But all went well.  Alec took the first shift while I dropped the kids at school and went to physical therapy.  When I took over, Alec accompanied us on our way downtown—he split off to go to his office while I met my collaborator, Sarah for lunch.  We wondered whether folks thought she was our granddaughter, or if they just assumed we are very old and tired parents.  After lunch, I put her in the car and we went to pick up the kids from school—three car seats, lots of buckling and unbuckling, stroller, Bjorn, diaper bag…  I don’t miss the schlepping, I can tell you that much.  And then we went to Gracia to pick up Milo’s scooter at Bateau Lune on the Plaza de la Virreina. 

You may have heard that there have been big demonstrations in Spain for the past two weeks.  In Barcelona, the big one is in Plaza  Catalunya, but as the movement has grown, other neighborhoods have created their own sites of protest.  In Gracia the site is the Plaza de la Virreina.  We heard it before we saw it—a brass band playing When the Saints Come Marching In.  As we got closer, we saw a small crowd—mostly families with children—grouped in front of the band.  Young girls, about 8 or 10 years old, played the brass instruments while a few adults played the drums and bass.  We joined the peaceful group, eating our ice cream cones and listening to the music.  It was incredibly sweet, not at all threatening.  No matter what you read in the news, this is a peaceful group.  A makeshift clothesline held notices and flyers, attached with clothes pins.  And by the time we left the shop, the crows had tripled.  Someone brought large rolls of butcher paper for the kids to draw on.  The music continued.

By the time we got home, Zadie seemed tired.  We gave her a bottle and she slept for an hour while the rest of us ate dinner.  She woke up and Alec fed her while helping C.C. with her homework.  And then she wanted to sleep again.  So, although I should not admit this when I know her parents will be reading it, we rocked her to sleep, without a bath, without putting on her PJs.  She cranked about an hour later, drank some milk, and went back to sleep.  We hurried to bed—an act of self-preservation, convinced as we were that she would be up in the night.   However, although Alec and I kept waking up to check on the baby, she slept like an angel until 6:15, which must be some kind of record.

As I write this, Plaza Catalunya is a mess.  Police showed up in full riot gear this morning to force the protesters out.  Apparently, the city used the excuse of needing to clean the plaza to use forceful tactics, destroying the infrastructure that had been set up there, as well as the personal property of those who have camped there. My colleagues Joana and Amalia have been there all day, while those of us in the office track the goings-on on our computer (it’s no place for a baby).  The images are sad but familiar—tense police dressed in black, young people—frustrated with a crisis that has led to 40% unemployment among their age group—on their knees, refusing to meet violence with violence.

And all the while, Zadie sleeps in her car seat, at my feet.

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The Beverly Hillbillies Go to the Spa

As it turns out, Arnedillo is home to an attraction that we did not know about before we left Barcelona.  Or, to be more precise, none of us knew about it except Alec.  Alec had found the hotel, rented the car, and basically planned the entire trip.  He did a fabulous job.  But he failed to tell any of us that Arnedillo has thermal baths.  I love baths, especially when they are out in nature.  But because we had all had to pack so light to fit our stuff into HVJrII, no one had packed a bathing suit.  No one, that is, except Alec.

But the women in my family are not famous for their modesty.  Or at least we won’t let a small thing like the lack of a bathing suit come between us and some thermal baths.  So we improvised—the kids would wear their short pajama bottoms, I had a black bra and underwear that matched okay, and Jody had black underwear and a camisole.  Matt opted out.  Alec, of course, had his bathing suit.  The Beverly Hillbillies go to the spa.

We walked along the river, past the beautiful gardens organized into neat squares, the squares divided into rows of onions, lettuce, artichokes.  Many small towns in Spain have these gardens just outside the town.  The towns are so dense that there is no room for a garden next to or behind one’s house.  The garden plots are large—large enough for a household to grow most of it’s own produce.  And the gardens—called huertas here—sit next to a river, if there is one, and the town itself.

We walked for about 15 minutes, past a part of the river where the locals were bathing.  An older man sat on a rock and changed under a huge bedsheet type article with a hole cut out and elastic’d for his head.  We asked him and his wife how to get where we were going—they bathed right there, they said, because it’s free.  But we had no towels, and had not brought portable changing rooms with us.  So they directed us up the hill to a hotel, where we bought tickets for the pool and rented big, white terry robes that doubled as towels.

The kids were ecstatic just to be in the water, which was warm and salty.  And the setting could not have been more spectacular, set in a valley with the mountains all around.  And the pool itself was a trip—it contained a tiled spiral and had a current that pulled you into and through the spiral.  It felt great and I just started laughing and whooping as the water pulled me along.  Zadie and Matt watched from the sidelines, and we made her laugh by jumping and splashing.

We got some lunch and then hit the road for the long trip back to Barcelona. It always takes longer than you think, even though the baby was tremendous, again, and there were no threats of puking until we were within spitting distance of the city.  We got home around 10, unwound, and got ready to start another week.

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Pamplona, No Bulls

On Saturday we decided to go to Pamplona, a little more than an hour’s drive away.  We had a slow morning but wanted to get there before the car rental place closed at 1.  Alec had not liked the way the transmission handled on Hooky Van Jr. from the get go, especially driving in reverse up that steep hill the first night—the inside still smelled like something nasty had been burned inside of it.  So we thought it best to exchange it for Hooky Van Junior II. 

By the time we got to the center of town, it was time for lunch, of course.  We had pintxos (what tapas are called in this part of Spain) for lunch—red peppers with shavings of Idiazabal cheese, spinach crepes in mushroom sauce, rounds of toast topped with jamon, cheese and eggplant.  We walked through the old city and across the main square where the local protests are taking place.  The gazebo in the center of the square was covered in signs decrying government corruption.  My favorite:  “No hay pan para tanto chorizo.”  This translates roughly to “there isn’t enough bread for all of that sausage.”  “Chorizo” in this context could come from the gypsy word “choro” which means thief.   Or it could be a reference to what we call pork barrel politics in the US.  Another translation—there’s not enough bread for all of these sausages to fit in the sandwiches, as chorizo is typically eaten with bread.  

After lunch, the square was empty save for the protesters, and we walked around the streets of the old city, which were virtually deserted.  We found a green hill in the shade where we could rest a bit while Jody fed Zadie and someone changed her diaper.  Then we circled back to the center.  By this time, the city had begun to transform from a sleepy Saturday afternoon to a dynamic Saturday evening.  The shops had opened back up and it seemed as though everyone had come out onto the streets.  We headed back to the main square.  Alec and C.C. went looking for a new knight for her castle, Milo read The Shape of Me and Other Stuff to Zadie as she lay on a blanket on the grass, and Jody and I got ice cream cones, which we ate on a bench while we watched the square fill up—young anarchists, old people out for their daily stroll, girls in puffy white first communion dresses, and drunk football fans wearing Viking hats and waiting for the Osasuna game to begin. 

Eventually, we made our way back to the car and piled into HVJrII for the ride back.  It was after nine when we pulled into Arnedillo.  Our innkeeper had recommended Casa Cañas for dinner, so we went, and sat outside in a tent across the street from the main restaurant.  The wait staff all wore t-shirts printed with yield signs in the middle of which were road sign style stick figures of waiters holding trays—they had to cross the street every time they needed something from the other building.  Alec, Zadie, and Milo finished early and watched the first part of the Osasuna game on the TV in the main restaurant while Matt, Jody and I had dessert.  And then we all hit the sack.

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On the Road with L'il Z

My sister Jody arrived in Barcelona on Tuesday with her partner, Matt and their almost 7-month old baby, Zadie.  It’s kind of criminal that I haven’t written since they got here.  We’ve been busy.   C.C. and Milo were so excited to meet their cousin for the first time.  They were enchanted by the video clips Jody had been sending, and making plans for where she would sleep, what she would play with, what she would eat.  So far, Miss Z. has lived up to the hype.  They love to sit and hold her on their laps.  Milo in particular is incredibly sweet with her—he reads to her and strokes her head.

On Thursday we rented Hooky Van Junior—a smaller version of the original hooky van—and, after a lengthy, sweaty struggle to fit our gear into the minimal storage space, we picked the kids up from school and set out for Rioja.  It’s a four hour drive with no stops.  Once you factor in puke threats, bathroom stops, diaper changes and the like, it’s considerably longer.  But everyone behaved and we pulled into the small town of Arnedillo, the site of our hotel, tired but in good spirits. 

Unfortunately, we hit a snag within spitting distance of our lodging.  The streets of Arnedillo—as in many small, old towns—are narrow and winding.  Following Dolores’s instructions (she is our GPS), we ventured down one street that was a tad too narrow and winding.  And we got stuck.  At the bottom of a steep hill, we practically got Hooky Van Jr. stuck between two old walls, and had to back up to get out.  This was no small feat.  Our lovely innkeeper assisted us, Alec kept his cool, and Jody and I tried to muffle our hysterical laughter so as not to aggravate a difficult situation.  And in the midst of it all, that happy little baby just hung in like a champ.  After we got out of the worst of it, the womenfolk and children unloaded in order to move the kids toward bed.  Eventually, Alec made it out.

The hotel, Las Pedrolas, is a lovely, renovated house dating from the 1760s.  The current owner transformed it into a hotel about three years ago and its seven rooms are sunny, comfortable, and tastefully furnished. So far we’ve had the place to ourselves, which is a good thing because we are not exactly the quietest travelers.

We had never been to Rioja, and we chose it for this road trip because we had heard that it is beautiful, the reputation of the food and wine is exceptional, and it is an important paleontological site. Yesterday, we covered the dinos and the wine, with a couple of good meals thrown in for good measure.  After a tasty breakfast of bread with local jam—strawberry with the scent of orange, peach with cinnamon—fresh fruit and omelette, we drove the short distance to Enciso.  Enciso houses the local dinosaur museum.   We explored it and picked up a map of the dino route.  There are 58 stops on this route, so it seems you can spend days in this area doing nothing but checking out the dinosaurs.  We went to one, but it was a very special one, where we saw actual dinosaur footprints in situ.  And I have to say, it is different just seeing them out there in nature than it is seeing them in a museum.  You can almost imagine what it might have been like, so many million years ago.

After that it was time for lunch, so we got a table at Petra, where we could sit outside in the shade.  It is artichoke and asparagus season in La Rioja, and we ordered artichokes with mushrooms, artichokes with jamon, fried artichokes with a romesco dipping sauce, white asparagus in vinaigrette with a creamy horseradish sauce on the side.  We were full before our main courses arrived.  The corner of the patio housed a wood-fired grill over which most of the meats were cooked.  We ate fresh, local strawberries with whipped cream for dessert.

We had to hit the road to make our afternoon appointment at the Palacios Remondo winery in Alfaro.  We figured we should hit at least one winery since we were in Rioja, and I had chosen Palacios Remondo because it’s run by Alfaro Palacios, one of Spain’s hot young winemakers.  He’s one of the people responsible for putting Priorat on the map—and I’ll be headed there on Monday.  Anyway, the family winery in Rioja was started by Alfaro’s father, but he is a fifth generation winemaker.   It seemed like a good place to check out, and I figured I could write a short piece for the i-wine review that would link to the priorat work (more on that some other time).

We expected to arrive at a winery set among fields of grapevines, and we were confused when Dolores led us to a building in the middle of town.  It turns out she was right, and the building is, in fact, where most of the wine is made, aged, and bottled.  I had warned Isabel, our guide, that I would be showing up with a posse that included two young children and a baby.  The baby was fine, but the children were in rare form.  Too much time in the car had juiced them up and they raced around among the enormous aging barrels and tanks.  It’s hard enough for me to act professional with my minimal wine knowledge.

After the tour and before the tasting, Alec peeled off with the kids to find a park where it would be socially acceptable for them to run around.  We all met up there eventually, and I fell asleep on a bench in the sun. 

By the time we got back to Arnedillo it was pretty late.  The kids were filthy, so we dunked them in the tub.  After our enormous lunch, Alec felt no need to eat again, but Jody, Matt and I needed a little something.  C.C. and Milo were on their way to sleep but Zadie was wide awake, so we left her with Alec and trekked into town for some sustenance. 

It was after 10 pm, but a restaurant called Florida was still open.  We shared a tasty salad topped with pimientos da padron and miniature octopus, perfectly fried.  We also got some peppers stuffed with shrimp and squid, and Matt and I had stew-y white beans with chorizo.  For dessert we shared a sort of fancy French toast—sweet bread soaked in egg, milk and cream, then deep fried, topped with sugar, and served with vanilla ice cream.  Super tasty. 

I realized about halfway through dinner that I had left my phone in the room, so if Alec had needed to make a mayday call, it would not have reached us.  But as we approached the hotel, all was quiet.  When we got to our room, Alec was reading on the bed, with C.C. and Milo sleeping in their bed and Zadie asleep in her carseat on the floor.  He’s still got it.

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