Barcelona: the City 1

Barcelona is home to 1.65 million people, the travel destination of 7 million people a year and one of the most densely populated areas in Europe, second only to Paris. I’ll start my series on the city as such with a few panoramic shots to give you an idea. They were either shot from the Parc Güell or the Tibidabo, both which will get their own posts in the future.

The city in full
© Giliell, all rights reserved.

Shot from the ferris wheel in the Tibidabo.
© Giliell, all rights reserved.

Panoramic view, with the Sagrada Familia in the centre.

Panoramic view, with the torre de Agbar and the Sagrada Familia in the centre.
© Giliell, all rights reserved.

In the middle you can see the Torre Agbar or Torre Glóries. I never gave much of the interpretation that all towers are phallic symbols, but this one takes the cake.

A PG 18 rated tower…
©Giliell, all rights reserved

The Sagrada Familia, Gaudí’s unfinished masterpiece. The Catalan architect is all over Barcelona and we will visit one of his works, Parc Güell, later. Be advised to book your tickets in advance if you want to visit the place.

The Sagrada Familia
©Giliell, all rights reserved

Tummy Thursday: Hello and enjoy your meal

Welcome to a new installation here, which is Tummy Thursday (after the addition of Tree Tuesday the Thursday felt neglected).

Tummy Thursday is about food, and food is everything. It’s one of the most basic necessities like breathing, but it can also be a luxury item (I still don’t understand caviar). It is something mundane, consumed while walking to the bus stop (or writing blog posts) and it’s a celebrated art form. It is public and it is private. It is political. It tells stories about race, colonialism, migration, poverty and richness. It is also damn delicious.

The idea of Tummy Thursday is to show those sides and also to share recipes and our love of food. Submissions are more than welcome. We’re such a diverse group of people here, so tell me your stories, show me your recipes, send me your pics. I can be reached at nym(86-7) Ät the google thingy DOT Com.

One more thing before we come to our first recipe: the don’t be an asshole rule applies double here, since food is such a sensitive topic. There’s nothing against saying “not my taste” or some light hearted jokes about peas being a weapon invented by the horse devils, but absolutely no food shaming. Oh, and it cuts both ways. You wouldn’t be the first person that told me that eggplants are actually delicious and the reason I don’t like them is that I haven’t tried recipe X. You won’t trick me into eating cardboard again.

Giliell’s vegan chickpea curry

Nanny Ogg’s famous cookbook features a recipe for Mrs. Colon’s Genyoom Klatcbian Curry, which is introduced like this:

Few recipes in these pages have caused so much debate as this one. Anyone over the age of forty knows how the classic recipe goes, because it has been invented and reinvented thousands of times by ladies who have heard about foreign parts but have no wish to bite into them. Its mere existence is a telling argument for a liberal immigration policy. Like real curry, it includes any ingredients that are to hand. The resemblance stops there, however. It must use bright green peas, lumps of swede and, for the connoisseur of gastronomic history, watery slivers of turnip. For wateriness is the key to this curry; its ‘sauce’ should be very thin and of an unpleasant if familiar colour. And it must use a very small amount of ‘curry powder’, a substance totally unknown in those areas where curry grows naturally, as it were; sometimes it’s enough just to take the unopened tin out of the pantry and wave it vaguely over the pan. Oh, and remember that the sultanas must be yellow and swollen. And soggy. And sort of gritty, too (ah, you remember . . .)

Not only does it show again Pratchett’s genius in bringing roundworld issues such as appropriation of food and racism to a light hearted cookbook, it also is apparently still tasty, though I haven’t tried it myself. While I keep telling myself that my curry would at least be recognisable to people who actually cook curries for a living, the recipe has absolutely no claim to authenticity whatsoever.

Ingredients:

Veggies of choice, preferably some that become somewhat mushy. The exact combinations vary, but for me carrots are usually a must and potatoes for creaminess. Pictured below are carrots, a red bell pepper, half a Hokaido squash and potatoes. Not pictures are onions and garlic.

I lightly fry everything in coconut oil, then cover it with vegetable broth and let it simmer. Depending on whether you remembered to soak the chickpeas the night before or open a can, you add them now so they can cook, or later.

My seasoning varies as well, this time I used fresh ginger, allspice, black caraway seed, cumin and chilli. After about 20 minutes the potatoes start to fall apart and I add some coconut milk and the chickpeas and leave it for a few more minutes on low heat. You can serve it with naan bread or rice and it keeps well in the fridge.

Enjoy your meal.

Barcelona: Camping 4: Bougainvillea envy

This is not our first time at that camp site, but the earliest we’ve been there in summer, so many plants were still in bloom that you don’t see later, among them the big bougainvillea hedges.

I simply love that flower, but of course you can only grow it in pots in Germany and even when taken inside over winter they never reach the glory of their Mediterranean cousins.

Bougainvillea flower in front of a black background.

Bougainvillea flower in front of a blue sky.

Bougainvillea flowers in fromt of a white background

Bougainvillea flowers in front of a white background

The Daily Bird #776

Tree chickens!

The “private area” of the mini farm was directly opposite our caravan, and while it was protected with a reed fence, there was a tree that was higher than the fence and the tree had a ramp for the chickens. In the evening some of them enjoyed to walk up the ramp and then hop from branch to branch. I so love that chess board pattern one.

A black and white chicken among the leaves of a tree.

Barcelona: Camping 3: Lightning

The city of Mataró, where the camp site is located is wedged between the sea and the mountains, like the whole region. This makes land fit for construction scarce, but also creates a special microclimate where the mountains so to speak keep the clouds from escaping, so they experience frequent thunderstorms.

Source: Google Earth

One of those hung over the mountains one night when we were having dinner at the “chiringuito”, a small beach bar/restaurant. Wonderful lightning. As soon as we got home I grabbed the camera and the tripod and went to a location where I could possibly, hopefully, finally, take some pics of lightning.

Since I had never done that nor informed myself on how to do it, I simply set the camera to 30 seconds and kept shooting, hoping that lightning would happen in that time.

And I got lucky.

Only that while I was shooting the rain arrived and I was stranded a few 100 metres away from the caravan with the camera in the pouring rain. Since walking back was no option I decided to retreat under a tree and hold my skimpy summer dress taunt over the camera so it wouldn’t get wet. I just hope nobody took pics of the fat lady in her undies holding her dress over the camera.

The Daily Bird #775

To stay in line with my current series, this daily bird is one of the many bird shoots from the camp site. The stable of the mini farm is home to a colony of barn swallows, which constantly frustrated me in my attempts to take pictures.

They would mostly circle the vicinity of the farm during the day, but in the evening, when the pool was closed, they would come for a drink, despite the water being slightly salty. Sorry for the poor quality. The light was low, the birds were fast and the big lense starts at a 5.6 shutter, so the ISO was pretty high.

Swallow over a swimming pool, trying to get a drink

More serial shoots below the fold

[Read more…]

Barcelona: Camping 3: Friends

Camp sites are interesting social spaces, because for a short while they throw people together who then all have to get along with each other. For adults that may be stressful, for kids that often means new friends. Subsequently you get to know their parents and often you find out that just like the kids, you can easily pass some time with total strangers and amuse yourself over a glass of wine.

pixellated image of three girls eating ice cream.

There’s nothing like ice cream. It’s not that I was unable to take a proper pic, it’s just that I don’t want to publish recognisable images of children, especially not other people’s children. ©Giliell, all rights reserved

Funny enough, this was the second time at this specific camp site that the kid and parents were on a several months long journey through parts of Europe following the birth of a child. I don’t know if this is becoming a new trend with middle class families with one main breadwinner who then takes the paid parental leave and then they all take off together.

I’m not going to have another child to find out.

An unexpected guest

Last night I was sitting behind the house with some friends, when I heard a “plonk” where no plonk should be. I looked and found the biggest caterpillar I’d ever seen. It had crawled up a grass stalk but then gravity happened and it ended up on the terrace.

Turns out it’s the mature form of the Elephant Hawk Moth which are indeed about 8 cm (3″ and a bit) long. After taking the pictures I took the hapless traveller and put it some place with more green.

Picture of an Elephant Hawk Moth climbing a stalk.

Barcelona: Camping 2: The mini farm

As I mentioned before, the camp site used to be a piece of farming land, and they still keep some animals that reflect the place’s history. It has a “public” meadow where visitors can see them and a “private” meadow where the animals can go if they want their privacy. We were lucky to be next to the private part. The management offers you to switch places if you don’t like the animal noises, but I quite enjoyed the chickens (no rooster, though), the sound of the goats and the occasional braying of the donkey.

Once a week the children can enter the meadow for an hour, but it is also ok to feed them appropriate snacks through the fence.

Pitufo (Smurf), the donkey. His companion is a mule and he quite like scritches behind the ears.

Isn’t he a beauty?

In case you’re wondering about the leather strips in front of his eyes, they keep the nasty flies away.

[Read more…]

Barcelona: Camping 1

I was practically born into camping. My first camping holiday was when I was about six months old, and the few times I spent in hotels didn’t exactly warm me to the idea. However, in one way, camping is exactly like staying in a hotel: the term describes a wide range of options, from very simple to very luxury. The American version of pitching your tent in the wild and shitting in the woods is unknown in most parts of Europe, probably because we don’t have many bears that can eat you up. People here go to campsites, which range from simple to holy fuck, how much does that cost?

Campsites near big cities, like the one we stayed at, have a very interesting social mix, since the residents range from students on a 20 bucks a day budget (been there, done that, it was great fun) to people with camping “cars” that cost twice as much as our house, extra car not included. Interestingly, those peple also had the cheapest, most uncomfortable folding chairs on the market, the very ones Mr and I had back in the day when we didn’t have the money or space for anything that didn’t leave you with a sore back.

Anyway, we clock somewhere in the middle, with a tendency to pack too much stuff and create utter chaos:

A caravan with a sun roof in front of it. Table and chairs under the sun roof. Lots of articles of daily life are cluttered all over.

What I personally like about this version is that you’re as protected from the elements as you need to be, but as open as possible. The campsite is on a piece of former farmland, so you live in nature, which gets me to our constant companions this holiday: ants.

[Read more…]

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Barcelona: the City 1

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Tummy Thursday: Hello and enjoy your meal

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Barcelona: Camping 4: Bougainvillea envy

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The Daily Bird #776

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Barcelona: Camping 3: Lightning

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The Daily Bird #775

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Barcelona: Camping 3: Friends

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An unexpected guest

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Barcelona: Camping 2: The mini farm

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Barcelona: Camping 1

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