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.

Photos of the Day

Justin and Me

Like many parents, Alec and I fell into the “kid music” trap when C.C. was very little.  And, once you are in, it’s like quicksand.  Really hard to get out, especially once you start taking the little bugger to Music Together classes, where they give out CDs featuring classics like “Little Liza Jane.”  It was years before I stopped humming, “Hello, everybody.  So glad to see you” when I walked into my own classes.

But we made our way through those years with heavy doses of Dan Zanes, Pete Seeger, and Leadbelly.  And then, slowly and cleverly, Alec began to integrate the grownup music—Springsteen and Dylan, Neil Young, Guns ‘N Roses, and the Gourds.  He did it with patience and perseverance, working through the initial protestations until the kids were belting out the Cure’s Friday I’m in Love from the backseat every Friday after school.

But now, for the first time, one of our children has come home with his own request for music—something he has never heard in our house or car.  Milo got a ride to soccer last week with his friend Jonas’s mom.  Jonas has a sister, Sarah, who is nine and is VERY into…Justin Bieber.  When Milo came home, he told Alec he had something to tell him, in private.  He pulled Alec’s ear down to the level of his mouth and whispered:  “Daddy, Justin Bieber is okay.  He’s pretty good.”  Perhaps he had heard us mocking JB a couple of months ago when Bieber came to Barcelona.  In truth, I had never heard a Justin Bieber song, so it wasn’t really fair to judge him.  Or if I had heard one, I couldn’t put the song together with the singer.

Alec clued me in and, the next day on my way to school with the kids, I baited Milo. 

“So, Milo.  What are you listening to these days?  I just downloaded this new CD and I can’t stop playing it. Does that ever happen to you.”

“Well, there is someone I like, but I want to tell you about it in private.”

This is interesting, no?  Somehow he intuited that it might not be cool to be a Bieber fan.  But I didn’t want him to feel embarrassed about what he liked so.  After school, when C.C. went to the park with Elke and I asked Milo if he wanted to read The Cat in the Hat, he said, no, he wanted to listed to Justin Bieber songs on the computer.  So we did.  Lots of them.  And then I asked him if he wanted me to buy one of the albums for him. 

I enabled the problem I currently have.  Because ever since then, Milo has been walking around the apartment every waking moment, my iPad tucked under his arm blasting My World 2.0 like some kind of modern day, miniature Radio Raheem, albeit less political.

Although the content of Milo’s obsession does not derive from Alec’s and my musical tastes, Milo inherited the practice of playing one song, or one album, over and over and over and over directly from Alec.  Alec is somewhat more conscious about subjecting the rest of us to whatever he is playing in an endless loop on any given day—he does it in the car, or in his office wearing earphones.

When Milo came into the kitchen for breakfast on Monday clutching my iPad, the strains of “Baby, Baby, Baby Oh” signaling his imminent arrival long before he stepped over the threshold, C.C. ran to my bedside table for some earplugs.  I want to support the development of my son’s musical taste, but I’m not ready to plug him into headphones, because that, too, is a slippery slope.  I don’t want him to know just how easy it is to tune me out from now until he’s of age.  And yet I am also unprepared for JB to become our constant background music.  The kids know that I am sensitive to noise, any noise, even noise that I like.  So perhaps we will just have to establish some limits—hours in which JB is allowed in the public spaces of the apartment and hours in which he must stay in the kids’ room.

I should admit that I’m not really one to talk.  I listened to my Barry Manilow Live! double album constantly, and way past the age when it could be remotely considered cool.  Alec, on the other hand, asked his parents for a Johnny Cash album at the age of 5, and followed that up with a request for the Beatles White Album.  But we can’t all be that cool.

I asked Milo if maybe he might like his own iPod—he could use it this summer on our long car trips, and we could load it up with his favorite books and music.  “That would be great, Mom,” he said.  “Peter has a nano, and so does Talia.  There’s three things I would want to put on my very own iPod.  Justin Bieber, the Ramones, and Lucinda Williams.”  There’s still hope.

The Penis on the Beach

After a slow start yesterday, Alec went to the market to shop while I went out to replace C.C.’s scooter, which had been stolen months ago at the Barceloneta.  Elke stayed with the kids, who were happily wrapped up in their imaginary dragon game.  The scooter theft was a big deal for C.C.  She had left it parked a few meters away from where Alec and some friends were sitting to eat, and when she went back for it it was simply gone.  It was nearly impossible for her to wrap her mind around the idea that someone would just take it when it did not belong to him or her.  It makes me sad to have to explain such things to my children.

The forecast predicted that Saturday would be the nicer of the two weekend days, so we decided to go to the beach, where the scooter would come in handy—the promenade along the beachfront is great for biking and scootering, and it’s just much easier to get the scooters there than it is to get the bikes.  The forecast, by the way, is rarely correct, but it’s all we have, so we (sort of) rely on it anyway.  On our walking/scootering way to find a nice, not-too-crowded spot, we saw a person wearing an inflatable penis suit walking the beach (see photo below).  Odd, and certainly something I had never witnesses, but no one else seemed to bat an eye.  I found it to be rather remarkable actually, which is why I’m documenting it here.

The kids jumped in the water while the grownups lazed about and ate delicious, perfectly sweet cold watermelon that Alec had purchased and Elke had cut into chunks.  We swung by the FC Barca store at Camp Nou on the way home so that Elke could pick up some jerseys for her kids.  The place was MOBBED, probably because Barca had just sewn up the League championships on Wednesday (this is different from the Champions League final that will be played against Manchester United on May 28, in case you are trying to keep all of this straight).  There is nothing like a big victory to initiate a run on the sale of team regalia.

We had plans to go out with our friends Vibeke and Eirik that evening for dinner, but Elke had not slept well the night before and, given that our reservation was not until 9:30 pm, decided to stay home with the kids and turn in early.  Alec and I met Vibeke and Eirik at Restaurant Me, near the intersection of Carrer de Paris and Muntaner.  Me bills its cuisine as a blend of Vietnamese, New Orleans and Catalan cooking.  Sounds like a stretch, but it really works.  I had a green papaya salad with beef jerky, and then scallops dusted with Cajun spices and a radicchio arugula something or other on the side.  A great local white wine.  Delicious, well-executed, and satisfied my constant craving for spicy food here in Barcelona.

It was 1:30 by the time we got home, and I slept until the glorious hour of 10:30.  When I shuffled into the kitchen I found Alec sitting on a chair facing and reorganizing the refrigerator.  Have I mentioned our refrigerator?  It is very small.  As much as I admire the ability of Europeans to live with much less stuff than Americans do, to drive smaller cars and live in smaller spaces, as much as I have embraced the practice of hanging out my laundry to dry, I have not been able to love my small refrigerator.  I love the idea of buying and chilling the food I will eat for the next couple of days, but it’s not my reality.  I love keeping a big pot of soup in the refrigerator to eat all week for lunch.  I feel better when I have leftovers.  I have a thing for condiments—jams, spreads, mustards.  Alec cooks big batches of beans and rice for the kids that constitute their side dishes for days on end.  So what ends up happening is that we do a lot of shoving of various items into the fridge and quickly shutting the door before anything falls out.  Periodically Alec gets fed up and does something about it.  This morning he was doing it, and I am proud to say that at this very moment I would show anyone the inside of my refrigerator.

Alec and the kids met up with Vibeke, Eirik, and their kids to go to the Miro museum and then swimming at the pool.  Elke and I went downtown to visit La Pedrera, the apartment building Antoni Gaudi designed on the Passeig de Gracia.  I had never been.  It’s pretty spectacular, especially the roof terrace, which undulates and is punctuated by Seussian towers and nooks.

Elke leaves tomorrow morning, after having spent the past four days with me in one long conversation.  We have known each other for 20 years, since our first day of orientation at Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, where we both studied planning.  We only lived in the same city for the first three of those 20 years, but when we see each other, or talk on the phone, we click right back in.  Somehow we have managed to maintain the connection, and I’m very grateful for it.

Photos of the Day

Living for Tomorrow

Today, Milo found a watch he had received as a gift months ago.  He brought it to Alec and asked:

“Daddy, will you set my watch fast so that I can live a little bit into the future?”

 

Through Bilbao, and back to BCN

On Wednesday we got to sleep in again, then met with city officials for a few more hours.  Sarah and I had lunch and plotted our next move.  There is another slow city—Mungia—in the Basque country, but the contact person there had not responded to our calls and emails.  Mungia is only a few kilometers from Bilbao, so we decided to head in that direction and have a sniff around ourselves.  The drive, in the light of day, was gorgeous—green and winding.

Mungia is quite a bit bigger than Lekeitio.  We found our way to the historic center, parked, and walked around a bit.  Mungia is not as outwardly charming as one might expect, causing us to ask—Why is Mungia one of six slow cities and not, say Cadaques?  We are both curious about why a particular city wants the slow city designation, and then how the philosophy of the slow city lands in that place.  On the one hand, I’m relieved that Mungia, from the outside, seems quite average.  I’ve been a bit worried that we would find only overly precious, pretty towns in our work.  Perhaps if we had been able to penetrate the surface and talk to people, we would have discovered Mungia’s inner beauty.

But we didn’t, and it was 5:30.  We had a 9:30 flight, so we decided to drive to Bilbao and check out the Guggenheim.  I had been itching to go but the work came first, and Sarah had already been there so I didn’t want to push my agenda.  But there we were with a couple of hours on our hands, within spitting distance.

Even with all of the hype and buildup, the museum impresses.  The building itself is gorgeous and it relates fabulously to its site on the water.  We needed a snack, which we got at the museum café, and then had only an hour or so to see what we could see.  The Richard Serra installation on the ground floor completely drew me in, and took a bit of time to explore.  And then we checked out a temporary exhibition called The Luminous Interval—contemporary art from a the collection of D. Daskalopoulos.  Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Chris Ofili—it worked, some of it made me feel calm, some restless, some provoked.  I’m glad I went.

And then it was off to the airport and back to Barcelona, where I met my friend Elke—my fabulous friend Elke, who is visiting from Atlanta—at the airport.  After a morning of work and physical therapy today—my knee is feeling worse, not better—we had a great lunch in the light filled space of Cuines Santa Caterina and then soaked at the Turkish baths for a couple of hours.  We stopped by Formatgerie La Seu for a cheese snack from Catherine the Scottish Cheese Goddess.  She had read my blog post in which I had called her “a bit prickly” but seemed to embrace the label and not hold it against me.  And now Alec is making some sort of Spanish stew that features the enormous, gorgeous cabbage he and Milo bought me for Mother’s Day.