Laura’s Life

Thursday night was Aidan’s school disco.  He went dressed up as a zombie:

On Halloween morning, Orin and Evan dressed up for a party at playgroup.  Orin was a bumble bee for about ten minutes:

Orin opted to dress as Darth Vader:

But that lasted all of five minutes because he then dressed up as Obi Wan Kenobi.  I thought we were never going to get out of the house:

Here is Obi Wan Kenobi and R2D2 in their X-Wing on the way to the playroup party:

Halloween evening was spent at home waiting for guisers to stop by (we got nine).  Surprise, surprise - the boys dressed up as ‘Star Wars’ characters.  Aidan was Yoda, Evan was Darth Vader and Orin was Obi Wan Kenobi - but without the beard:

Totally random post this but I thought these photos of Orin and Evan were too cute not to share.

Orin, incidentally, has a bashed up nose and noggin because he face-planted on the pavement walking Aidan home from school on Thursday.  His nose bled so much and for so long that I thought we were going to have to walk to the hospital and it took us an hour to walk home.  Poor wee scone!

Anyway, Orin thinks he is uber-cool in his Darth Vader hoodie and Evan thinks he is cool because he is dressed in one of Orin’s old hoodies.

The boys were watching a live action tv show about a farm this morning.

Evan pointed to the piglet (the star of the show) and said, “That Mummy”.

Orin then compounded the insult by explaining, “Because you have fat cheeks.”

Nice!

Time to go on a diet then …

When it came time to collect Aidan from school this afternoon, Orin was not having any of it.  Fair enough, there was a deluge of biblical proportions going on outside but he and Evan were safely ensconsed in the under the buggy’s “rain bubble” so he had no real cause for complaint.  However, with time running out if we were to be there in time, I bribed him (Supernanny would not approve, I know) by allowing him to take his Old Ben Kenobi figure with him.

I arrived in the school playground and discovered that both Orin and Evan were fast asleep.  My first thought was “Aaargh!  Now they’ll never sleep tonight!” and my mind flitted forward to lots of bedtime squabbling and related shenanigans.  And then I noticed Orin’s hand.  Orin’s empty hand.

Noooooooooo!

He had dropped Old Ben somewhere on the route between home and school - a route that takes almost half an hour to walk and which has plenty of places for an Old Ben to go a-wandering.

Aaarrrrgh!

We have a household rule (created by me no less) that no Star Wars figure is allowed out of the house.  I had broken my own law and was now going to suffer the consequences.  Not only was I going to have to incur the wrath of Orin, all his screaming three year old rage issuing forth like lava at me, but I was going to have to confess to Chris that one of his beloved, treasured, childhood toys had been lost.  I could imagine the divorce papers citing “loss of vintage Star Wars figure”.

And then, just as the school bell rang, a woman approached me and handed me, you guessed it, Old Ben Kenobi.

” I saw this lying on the street and I knew it had to belong to your kids,” she said, no doubt also looking rather worried as my face lit up and I suppressed the urge to give her a bear hug for saving me from ruination.

Yippee!  Thank goodness the whole town - even people I do not know - know my kids to be uber-nerds when it comes to Star Wars.  She had seen the figure and had instantly known it belonged to our household.

Phew!

Possibly the torrential rain had Old Ben scurrying off to hitch a lift back to the dry desert climate of Tattoine but for sure he is never ever ever leaving our house again.

Evan’s new obsession: underpants!

He is so eager to be a big boy like his big brothers and wear pants that he raids Orin’s drawers and steals, well, his drawers and pulls them up over his nappy and onesie.  He is so proud of himself whenever he is wearing pants too, no matter how daft he might look.

Oddly, he seems to prefer pants with pictures adorning them whereas his older brothers act like they are allergic to any illustrated or patterned undies.

Anyway, here are some photos  - oh how I can blackmail my boys when they get older *villainous cackle*

Evan has been singing away for a week now, favourite tunes being “Twinkle Twinkle”, “Happy Birthday to You” and - somewhat oddly - the Weird Al Yankovic song “Yoda” (which is set to “Lola” by The Kinks). I tried (somewhat in vain) to get some video of him singing today.

Here he is singing a teeny bit of “Yoda” - with direction from Orin:

And here he is singing “Happy Birthday”. He has been singing this a lot lately, curiously even before Orin’s birthday, perhaps because the boys like to play at making and serving birthday cakes. Anyway, he decided it was Daddy’s Unbirthday so here he is:

On Saturday, we went for a hike around Barnluasgan but with the addition of a hike up and along the ridge between Loch Barnluasgan and Loch Linne.  The whole thing took us three hours.

Randomly, I start this blog entry with a photo of a beetle:

Chris with Evan and Orin ascending some steps:

Aidan waiting impatiently for us all to catch up:

Evan and Orin studying another beetle:

Evan using a leaf as a lightsaber.  As you do:

Orin eating some wild brambles:

Orin and Evan holding hands:

Aidan and Orin walking on Chris’ feet:

Do you think Evan’s jeans needed hitched up?

After a breakfast of pastries and more xocolata, we returned to the Barri Gotic.  The first day had been about wandering the city centre and soaking up the atmosphere, the second day was all about architecture and this, the third day, was to be about the history of Barcelona, especially its ancient history.

So our first stop of the day was at a Roman necropolis, discovered as recently as the 1950s and right in the middle of a busy shopping area.  The tombs nestled below streets lined with parked mopeds was quite an odd juxtaposition.  The necropolis turned out to be Chris’ favourite bit of the holiday:

We then went into the cloisters of Santa Eulalia, having not done so on the first night.  Thirteen geese are resident there, one for every year of Saint Eulalia’s life:

I also liked the carvings in the stone floor which ranged from memento mori to symbols of the city’s trades guilds:

Me in the cloisters:

Just around the corner from the cloisters was the Casa de l’Ardiaca - or Archdeacon’s House - outside of which was a charming letterbox decorated with swifts and a tortoise to symbolise slow and speedy post:

Then, nestled in a very dark corner of a narrow medieval street, we found the remains of a Roman Temple of Augustus, which was incorporated into a later building:

Then we entered the Museu d’Historia de la Cuitat, which houses an entire set of Roman streets beneath the medieval ones and a Christian palace dating from the sixth century.  For obvious reasons, no flash photography was allowed so my photos do not do the exhibits or scene justice.  It was, however, a fantastic museum and it was very easy to imagine Roman Barcelonians going about their daily lives:

The remains of a laundry and fullery could clearly be seen, along with a wine processing factory and a garum factory.  Garum was a fish sauce made from fermented fish yuckiness - so obviously that was my favourite part!

We then headed to the Port in search of lunch.  This is Chris beneath a giant lobster on Ronda de Litoral:

Barcelona has a system whereby you can borrow bikes by paying to unlock them from their stands and then you just return them to any other stand at the completion of your journey.  I liked this image of all the identical bikes lined up:

After lunch, it was time for me to face a major challenge.  We had decided to take the cable car across the port to Montjuic, the mountain that sits right on the bay.  I attempted to quell my vertigo by focusing on the great views of the city I would get but the height of the tower did not help settle my nerves any:

And when I got up the tower and saw the cables stretched out in front of me like mere cheese wire my courage was really beginning to fail:

It only got worse when I entered the car, which was like a rickety old tin can, and was squeezed in with umpteen other people like a proverbial sardine so that I became flustered by claustrophobia as well as vertigo.  The views were stunning - such as this one of La Rambla - but I was relieved I had only payed to go one way:

Me feeling happy to have arrived at Montjuic:

Chris with a view over the city behind:

We did not go into the Fundacio Joan Miro but I did like this funny statue outside the building:

We then ascended the mountain through one of Montjuic’s many public gardens:

As luck would have it, we reached the Museu d’Arqueologia just as the clouds rolled overhead and it began raining.  This, as its name suggests, was a museum housing ancient artefacts from Catalonia’s earliest settlers and a diverse group of civilizations and sub-cultures, some of which I had never heard of.

This is me in the museum:

Who am kidding?  I’m only a B cup! *chuckle*

Anyway, the museum began with neolithic Catalonia but the display cases were just a jumble of old bones and bags of small chunks of pot and flint.  Chris and I were bemused and wondered what on earth we had just payed our entrance fee for:

They finally deigned to explain that sections of the museum were currently being redeveloped, perhaps a notice that should have been placed nearer the point of entry.  It was, however, a pretty interesting wee museum - though there are only so many pots you can look at before your sanity wears thin.  Here are a few of my favourite exhibits:

It was still pouring with rain when we emerged from the museum so we headed to the nearest metro station to take the underground train back into the city centre.  This is Chris on the platform at Poble Sec station:

Options of things to do indoors were few and far between so we disembarked at Drassanes to visit the City Aquarium.  It was a bit of a silly thing to do given that aquaria are always expensive and we had no children with us but at least it was dry, the marine life on show were diverting and we both agreed that the tank tunnel was the best we had experienced.  Obviously I could not switch my flash on so the photos are a little blurred:

This is a terrible photo but I include it here simply because I just loved the nose on this fish:

How fantastic are these seahorses?

There was a Day 4 but that was all about taking the train to the airport and taking two flights and a long car journey to get home - so not worthy of its own blog entry.  Here is Chris at the airport:

And this is the plane having just taken off:

Our second day in Barcelona was all about “Modernisme”.  We had bought a walking tour guide to the city and used it to find a route that brought us to all the most important buildings in architecture’s Modernista movement, mainly in the area called the Eixample.

Our first stop was the Illa de la Discordia, a trilogy of stylistically contrasting Modernist buildings.  One of these is Gaudi’s Casa Batllo.  I love its use of sinuous organic shapes and the contrast between stone and glass:

Then we popped into the Casa Amatller, which was originally occupied by the chocolatier family of the same name.  We bought some chocolate for the boys in there as it is now a lovely wee shop.  This is a sculpture in its door frame:

Not even the pavements escaped the Modernista treatment!

This is me in standing on the Passeig de Gracia in front of Gaudi’s Casa Mila, referred to as La Pedrera:

La Pedrera:

There is a chain of children’s toy stores where their is a child size entrance as well as an adult sized doorway, which I thought was not only cute but fitted in with the whole Dr Seuss type style of architecture in the city:

After a brief wander around the gardens of Palau Robert and the Mercat de la Concepcio, we trotted up to the Sagrada Familia.  This is the famous cathedral, designed by Antonio Gaudi, which he worked on for the last decade of his life but which will not even be completed by the centenary of his death.  The exterior and interior of the building are both construction sites, the nave resembling more a builder’s yard than a place of worship.  I absolutely loved it and it was the outstanding highlight of my trip to Barcelona.  Strangely enough, that meant I took loads of photos of it, some of which are below:

We then had a fuel stop in a nearby cafe to munch on baguettes and salad and where I finally got to try xocolata.  It like a cross between hot chocolate and chocolate fondue.  The one I had that day was thicker than normal hot chocolate but not as thick as the one I had the following morning where the fluid was literally sticking to the spoon and glooping off in thick droplets.  Anyway, this is me drinking the xocolata:

After all the pounding of pavements, our feet could not countenance the long walk to Park Guell.  We, therefore, decided to purchase our tickets for the hop-on-hop-off tourist bus (something we were planning to do anyway).  This was a really efficient operation and it was a good way of seeing areas of the city we would not otherwise have made it to during a short break.  Here is Chris on the bus listening to the recorded commentary:

Park Guell was another Gaudi design and, therefore, full of fascinating architectural and sculptural bits and bobs.  It is also, however, a lovely public park in its own right and a welcome quiet break from the noise of the streets.

The famous mosaic salamander in Park Guell:

The famous undulating bench:

Then we got back on the tourist bus to rest our weary legs, see some more sites and arrive back in the city centre feeling recharged.  We completed our circuit on the red route and then switched to the blue route, which took us through La Ravel, up Montjuic and on a tour of various 1992 Olympic sites.  As well as giving us respite from walking, it also provided me with a different perspective on some of the Gaudi buildings:

We then foraged around the Barri Gotic to find somewhere to have a proper grown-up evening meal.  We ended up in a tiny medieval alley at a resturant called ‘Sinatras’.  Barcelona is not the place to be a vegetarian or even someone like me who does not eat red meat.  Options for dining are few and far between.  This place, however, catered for both Chris and I and at a reasonable price for the quality of the experience.  It actually felt quite odd to be eating out somewhere with proper table linen, candle light and no children to entertain.  We shared a goats cheese salad and breads then I had chicken in some kind of special sauce while Chris had sirloin.  For dessert I had a divine chocolate mousse and Chris had catalonian cream, which is like a hybrid of creme brulee and panacotta.  We also had a jug of sangria and some free champagne.  It was a real treat!

Thank the stars that Chris was born a dual national! 

The night before we set off for Glasgow, he discovered his UK passport had expired back in August.  Yikes!  Our whole trip could have been in jeapordy had he not been able to travel on his US passport.  It turns out you can travel in the EU on a recently expired passport but the computers would not accept it so he did have to use his US one.  The advantage of that (alongside not being totally verbally pulverised by me, of course) was that he just sailed through passport control in Spain, given the queue for non-EU people was non-existent.  It was a bit trickier on our arrival at Gatwick only because the immigration chap did not know whether he should stamp the passport or not.  He decided not to on the basis that Chris “looked very English”.  And with such snap judgements are our borders secured.

This is a view of Barcelona as the plane descended:

Anyway, our flights were thankfully uneventful and we arrived feeling unflustered in Barcelona airport.  The train station is attached to the aiport so a mere half an hour later we were in the city and walking to our hotel.  The Amister was a far swankier hotel than we are used to and our stay there was very pleasant.  It took half an hour to walk to the city centre but the route was interesting so we did not mind that.

Here we are in our room:

After unpacking and having a brief rest, we headed out to check out the city.  We decided to take a stroll down La Rambla, the wide street which cuts through the city down to the sea.  We were famished so we soon stopped off to eat.  We were between times for Spanish meal munching so our options were a little limited.  We chose, therefore, to sit out on the street and eat paella.  I had the standard kind and Chris had one with squid ink as an ingredient.  We both agreed that the food could have packed more of a flavour punch but at least we had eaten something authentically Spanish for our first meal in Spain.

This is just a statue I liked.  Something about a bull posed as if it was doing yoga appealled to me:

This is me in the Placa de Catalunya where La Rambla really begins:

It was quite a weird street, very busy and bustling.  Every few feet brought another street perfomer, most pretending to be statues.  I have a phobia of mime artists so I kept my distance as much as possible but had to admire the quality of their costumery.

There was a long stretch where every stall was selling flowers but most peculiar was the long stretch where every stall was selling animals.  It was like an open air pet shop and the range of animals was odd too.   Sure, there were plentiful budgies and hamsters but there were also tortoises, iguanas, a variety of fowl and even hedgehogs!

A dragon on the Casa Bruno Quadras:

La Rambla terminates at Placa Portal de la Pau where there is a monument to Christopher Columbus:

Chris, of course, was feeling particularly grateful for Columbus having discovered the New World otherwise he would not have had a passport to travel on.

Then we wandered around the Port Vell, admiring the views and flabbergasted by the size of the boats moored in the marina:

Roy Lichtenstein’s Cap de Barcelona:

We then wandered into the Barri Gotic, the medieval area of Barcelona, which was a maze of narrow streets packed with buildings full of historic charm and interest.  Chris particularly liked this area of the city because of all the glimpses of ancient Roman Barca it provided.  Here he is beside a chunk of Roman wall:

Our wanderings brought us to the medieval Cathedral of Santa Eulalia.  Here are some details from the exterior:

This is a view of the interior (not a great photo because I could not use flash) near where wee Saint Eulalia’s remains are kept.  This cathedral, incidentally, is where the six Carab Indians brought back by Columbus were baptised in 1493:

A view of the Cathedral behind the remains of the Portal del Bisbe, a Roman wall with tower and aqueduct:

An arch of the aqueduct:

Heading back up La Rambla to our hotel, I met Jack Skellington - the boys were so jealous!