Went walking last Monday

This took a while to post, cause just after I came back, the computer died....  sigh, though it has since been repaired, so here I am posting!

ANYWAY, it was great, we went off one afternoon and came back the next evening, staying in a gorgeous casa rural.

See?

It had snowed at the higher end of the walk, and in some places, it was gorgeous, sparkling off all the branches...

We had laughingly said that these mountains are furry at this time of year, they look it, no?  A fur coating of trees?

Lots of views of mountains in the distance.

Sun was starting to go down here and made a spectacular effect in the valley.

Though it doesn't look it, we went down this crazy spectacular descent in the dark.  Great fun.

Walked by this church on the way to our place for the evening

Check this joint out!

This is where I slept....good deal, no?  And if we were invaded, I had the windows to shoot them through...though no bow or arrows.

Inevitable...cows.

The second day we went up and up and up beside a stream with plenty of lovely places to swim....must do that again when it's hot enough that you want to!

Abandoned farm house right up at the top of one of the mountains.  This was a barn, clearly.

Gingerbread houses

Here's what youngest did with hers:

Eldest, however, never got around to hers, so it became mine by default, so, gradually, eating the candies, then the Man finishing them off, I just melted the white chocolate for snow, smeared it on the pieces and called it done.

Post-modern style.

Walking in the new year!

Normally I go walking with a group of people from the village, and (almost) always, we go to the mountains, that's what the group is in fact called, the group of the mountains.  Sounds better in Catalan.


This year though, to start off the year, we went to the sea!

Nice day, no?

Look who came in

and looked kind of unhappy.  He normally lives in the back pati, but somehow found himself just INSIDE the door, instead of just outside it where we see him sometimes.

Put him back, after a quick photo shoot!

Taking photos

I am no great photographer, as anyone who as read this for any length of time knows, but I do like snapping a photo from time to time. 

Sometimes I see people taking TONS of photos, and it feels like they aren't experiencing what they are doing, being so wrapped up in photographing it, and I do believe that that can happen, but for me, taking a photo when I am out and about tends to work more to help me notice and remember and appreciate the beauty and wonder of where I am and what I'm doing.

Sometimes it's a photo of something stupid, but still something that makes me amazed.

What about you?

Spain

I wanted to wait to post this till most of the festivities are over.  Unlike the Spanish gov't who passed this just a day or so before Xmas so no one would be around to protest.  

Did you happen to see in the news?

The Spanish Cabinet, in Madrid, has approved anti-abortion laws, it's been sent off to the next stage in gov't, whatever the legistature is called..  We're heading back into the 50s here now. (that was under Franco, just saying)



 

Did you know that they are also trying to pass a law that would make it illegal to take a photograph of a cop at work?  Really?!?!??  Hello fascism!


IN- 
INDE - 
INDEPENDENCIA!!

Time to go, boys and girls.  How I wish I could vote.

Eldest has left the building

In fact, the country. 

We are consoling ourselves with happy movies and cocoa.

It's been lovely having her here, see her again in June.

Arts Santa Monica

Went off to Arts Santa Monica with Eldest yesterday.  It was pretty darned cool honestly.  The best for me though was Eldest's exclamation when she saw the video at the top.  There were two bits of toast flying around attached to balloons, as you can see in the video there, then, on the left you can just make it out, there floated in....

"Oh, my goodness!!!!  It's a Salami!!!"

Maybe you had to be there, but it was just so funny!

The salami was floating out fast, so I didn't get the best photo of it.

You also got the chance to impale yourself on these gigantic skinny carrots, that did look quite ominous as you walked towards them down the hallway.

They also had a funky little yellow trailer camper, with a video that was a study of the kinds of architecture - more or less - that people create related to where they go and park these little camper vans....

Neat outing.

Reading in three languages

That sounds like horrid bragging, and I suppose at some level I am excited about this, but here's the real back story.

For a few years now I've been able to read in Catalan, now I can with considerable fluidity.  There are some words I don't get, but on the whole I don't have any real problem.  If I sit and analyze the sentences I am occasionally depressed by my spoken and written Catalan, I cannot express myself the way Catalans do.  Something I should actually study. Wonder if Conrad did that.  Study the way people wrote, and tried to imitate their styles to gain greater ability to write in English.  He was at least tri-lingual and probably quadri-lingual (Polish, Russian, French and English) and though reportedly spoke with a heavy accent, wrote some of the best English literature that we have.  *sigh*

In October or so, I started Spanish lessons, and low and behold, despite my general ineptitude at learning languages (never got a mark higher than a 5 in French thoughout high school and had to drop it in the final year as I was failing dismally) I can do this!  It helps we've been here more than 7 years, and I do hear it sometimes, and my students relate it to words in English occasionally,

Still, I've read two novels (short ones) in Spanish!  Like Water for Chocolate, which I really enjoyed (again) and El Príncepe de la Nieble which was fine...and I am delighted!  I don't understand as much in Spanish as in Catalan, in Catalan I expect to understand everything but the occasional word, in Spanish I expect to understand everything but the occasional sentence.  That's how it seems to work, you understand at a generally paragraph level, then sentence level, then word level.

Since my chief reasons for learning Spanish is so that I can read some of the amazing writers that are working in the language, that is a bonus!

Today, though, we went to an exhibit at the CCCB - which is an amazing place - always love what they do and the curators are geniuses.  It was about a Catalan writer, Salvador Espriu, who was educated before the civil war, endured the war itself and lived under Franco, through the transition and died in 1985.  An amazing time to be alive, not fun, but amazing.  Eldest got one of his books of prose for Christmas.

The man could write, he is famous for his poetry, and plays more so than for his prose, and the exhibit was, as always, very well done.

It was, however, humbling.  What a vocabulary the man had.  There were quotes from his writing on the walls of the exhibit and such a lot of words I didn't know.

Whew

Back to the drawing board, and I think I may have to read some more of his work.

Who'da thunk that cabbage could be so cool!

I was cooking up a little bit of red cabbage for dinner, a pho type soup that lacked bean sprouts for garnish...so I sliced up the cabbage really finely - well, my chef brother in law would not have called it a fine slicing, but by my standards it was, then I tossed it into boiling water, to which I then added salt.

Look carefully at the picture......

See the blue in the water?

That was SO cool!  The water went really really blue, then a beautiful deeper and deeper blue until it went purple.

You should try it, it was beautiful...and yummy too.