Feeling Tall Again

I felt short in Amsterdam.  Or at least not tall.  I suppose that after six months in Barcelona, I have grown accustomed to towering over nearly everyone in my midst.  It felt strange to blend in so easily.  People spoke Dutch to me, assuming I was from there.  Now I’m a giant again. 

Lois—my mom—arrived on Sunday afternoon, after having spent a few days in Galicia with Myron and Raquel.  It’s good to have her here, and the kids jumped all over her as soon as she walked in the door.  She brought maple syrup and jeans, foot cream (I swear Neutrogena cracked heel is the only kind that works) and drugstore mascara—I can only find the expensive kind here.  For 70 plus, she did pretty well as a mule.

We walked around the Barri Gotic and the Born yesterday, had a yummy lunch at Cuines Santa Caterina,--artichokes are in season—and picked the kids up from school.  She’s already chipping in with laundry-hanging, but she doesn’t like leaning out of the 4^th storey window to do it, so she does it on her knees (see below).  I’m concerned that my neighbor, Francesca, with whom we share our clotheslines, will look out and think my mother is a dwarf.

Today we went to yoga, and Lois did pretty well hanging in there with an all-Spanish class.  We ate fabulous tuna burgers at a restaurant across from the yoga studio called Meatpacking.  The restaurant’s menu says, “In New York City, near the Hudson River, is a neighborhood where trucks bring the best meat from all over the country.  The meatpacking district is the best meat market on the east coast.” Which is kind of funny, since I can walk to that neck of the woods from my office at 13^th and 5^th.  C.C.’s teacher needed help with getting the kids to type up the fairy tales they had written, so I drafted my mom and we spent an hour helping 20 kids with 20 laptops type, save their documents, and quit.  I’d say that they got an average of two sentences typed.  C.C.’s story is 6 pages, so publication will not be any time soon.  I needed vanilla, which you cannot get at just any grocery store, so we took the kids to the Fabulous Baking Company after school for a cupcake treat and to get us a bottle.

Oh, and in case you missed Frans’s comment on a recent blog, she informed me that a group of wild knitters is responsible for covering up the city of Amsterdam to keep it warm in winter.  You’ve got to check out their website:

http://wildbreien.nl./