Holidays: Sagrada Familia 2

Last time we looked at the front, now it’s time to enter. I momentarily feared I was going to be shot at the security checkpoint because I jumped towards my backpack as they were trying to open it. But the nice people were trying to open a backpack full of camera equipment holding it so that my lenses would fall out. They afterwards agree that it’s a nice camera…

Anyway, when you enter you walk past a gate with flower and plant decoration, complete with assorted beetles. I couldn’t find out if there was something special about this fellow, but it was polished shiny from all the hands, so it seemed customary to caress it as well.

Visiting in the evening is amazing as the sun shines directly through the windows, basking everything in light and colours. We were extremely lucky with the weather. In Mataró it had rained all morning and when we set out, it was still cloudy. In Barcelona the clouds tore up, the air was clear and fresh and the sun shone all evening. When we got back we saw that in Mataró the rain had returned with a vengeance…

Tummy Thursday: Me gusta la cocina mexicana

Earlier this week I told you about our trip to the Sagrada Familia and that we wanted to see it at night time. This meant that after we left the cathedral we went for dinner. Of course a tourist city like Barcelona has restaurants galore, many of them trying to push the menu into your hand while you’re walking past them and for me that’s the most failproof way to make me avoid a place. Yet still you find lots of small places that offer good food, especially if you love international cooking. For this meal we found a nice Mexican place where we ate while it got dark.

Starters: Frijoles refritos (mushed baked beans) and nachos with cheese.

My main course: marinated grilled beef, cactus, pumpkin flower and sweetcorn, guacamole and stuffed habanero, served with tortillas.

Dessert: Guayaba marguerita. I love guavas and they’re so rare here that I consume them whenever I can find them or their derivates. It was delicious.

Holidays: Sagrada Familia 1

This year we decided to finally visit the Sagrada Familia, Gaudí’s masterpiece, which just now got a construction permit. I went there 20 years ago, when you just showed up, threw a few bucks at them and then explored at your leisure. Now you have to book in advance, have a 15 Min window to enter and then have to go through security like at an airport. We bought “evening tickets” which are cheaper and give you an hour to explore the cathedral, which we deemed to be enough with the kids and also we wanted to see it again later in the dark. The entrance prices showed why the whole thing is absurd, since the kid who had to pay reduced admission was complaining and staring at her phone the whole time, while the kid who got in for free called it “the best thing she’d ever seen”.

Let’s start with the outside.

You enter the cathedral through the “Birth Portal”. Why it’s called that we’ll see in a minute.

You can clearly see the older and newer parts here.

And here we have him, baby Jesus, apparently needing a bath in a tub.

Holidays: The Moon, Part 1

I didn’t know there was going to be a lunar eclipse, but one night I decided to take the camera to the small beach next to the campsite. That “beach” was our evening retreat. It’s actually only a cut in the line of boulders put up to secure the higher coastline where the railway tracks are, but it was a nice place to sit and have a drink. Taking pictures that night wasn’t that easy since I didn’t take the tripod with me and I got increasingly drunk.

The first pictures are taken before the eclipse, with the rising moon and the sea.

I wanted to catch the moonlight on the sea, but I would have needed a tripod and a half-coloured filter to darken the upper half of the image.

Tummy Thursday: Senegalese Food

There’s a saying in German that states that “the farmer won’t eat what the farmer doesn’t know”. It’s again this intersection of class and culture, where the educated classes take pride in “discovering” new tastes, while certain parts of the working class take pride in never trying anything new, especially no “furrin food”. Of course, both positions come with their racism, where the latter is more obvious than the former. I was lucky to be raised in a family that loved food. My grandparents could never travel the world in person, so they tried to travel it with their tummy, even though some of grandma’s creations would probably not have been recognised by the people who actually invented them. Mr, on the other hand was raised in a family that sees lasagna as exotic and his parents have never eaten a single Döner. Mr has tried to shed that attitude, but mostly ended up in a position where he will eat foreign cuisines, but only after they have been thoroughly approved by white people. Italian is standard, Chinese is ok, Greek is high end. So when we came upon a tiny Senegalese restaurant in Mataró, he was not happy when I proposed to eat there and the kids enthusiastically agreed.

Guess who enjoyed his meal the most?

The restaurant was tiny (less than 2m from side to side and probably 8-9 m long). The cook prepared three different dishes, as Senegale food is stews that take time to prepare, and starters, so we simply ordered one of each and shared among us.

I’ll definitely try to cook some of these, hopefully with better results than grandma…

Holidays: Park Güell: Straight Lines are of the Devil

The last pics from Park Güell. The columns make your head somewhat dizzy, and we have a bunch of silly tourist pics where the kids try to keep them from falling over of where I aligned the camera with the columns and the kids “slide down”. No pics of the kids on the net, though.

Apparently even the trees decided to play along…

Holidays: Park Güel, el Dragón

Centre of Park Güell and home of the unofficial mascot of Barcelona is the fountain with the lizard statue. There’s some poor fucker who’s job it is to tell millions of tourists that they mustn’t sit down and I don’t envy them.

Holidays: More Park Güell

Some more details of the tiles at Park Güell. It certainly is one of my favourite places in Barcelona, once conceived as a settlement for workers, with a sustainable water recycling facility and communal area. It was never finished, but has become one of Barcelona’s tourist attractions.

You can see how the colourful tiles have been smashed up in order to fit them to all the curved surfaces.

Here they look more random. Anecdote has it that the Barceloneses thought Gaudí was crazy for commissioning perfectly good tiles and the smashing them all up…

The building to the left is not part of Park Güell but an older one.

This area is underneath the “balconies” we saw yesterday.

It’s hard to see in the pic’s, but none of the columns goes up straight.

Holidays: Park Güell

I think we had some of it already last year, and I noticed I didn’t take too many pics this year, but it’s still lovely, every single time. If you ever visit Barcelona and need some “Gateway Gaudí”, this is where you go. It#s reasonably priced, since this years there’s a shuttle bus from the underground station and you get all the quirky loveliness that characterises Catalan “Modernisme”.

Part of it is under restauration, so you can see it without all the other people visiting.

Holidays: More Chillin’

Holidays: Have a sunny, lazy Saturday

This fellow for sure had.

Tummy Thursday: Churros con Chocolate

One of the kids’ favourite places in the city of Mataró is the Xurrería, which absolutely does not offer tourists an authentical churros experience. It’s simply the real thing, as evidenced by the fact that is was closed for holidays during the second half of our stay, something no tourist oriented business would do at the height of the season. That’s something to say about the city in general: tourism is a factor, and a welcome factor, but it’s not a big enough factor for businesses, especially bars and restaurants to rely on it exclusively. This means they need to provide a service that makes regular customers come back. I understand that I’m the worlds biggest hypocrite here when I want to go for a holiday but not where there are too many tourists, but I can live with that. It means good food.

Here you see “porras”, a thicker variety of churros with my “cortado”, an espresso with a bit of milk. Traditionally you eat them with “chocolate” as in the next picture:

These are the more commonly known churros with their typical shape. The chocolate is thick and dark and not overly sweet, so you can dip your churros in and enjoy the whole thing. It’s more like custard in that respect, only that it’s delicious.

Holidays: The Eye of the Dragon

Komodo dragons are wonderful beasts and I simply love their majesty. I know they’re plain weird, using both venom and biological warfare to hunt. You got to give it to an animal whose hunting strategy is : bite once and wait for a week until it drops dead.

And as a bonus: self portrait in the eye of a dragon, a close up from the picture above. That’s how I want to go, trying to take a picture of a dragon and then being unexpectedly eaten.

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