Intimidation

The other weekend all the museums in Barcelona were open until 1am and free. Andrew, being the museum and free stuff enthusiast that we all know him to be, managed to drag me out to take advantage of the weekend. We tried the Picasso Museum, a must for anyone who comes here, but the line was down the whole block and we figured that while it's a must for anyone who visits, it's not a must for anyone who lives on the next street over and can pop over at any time that there isn't a line full of visitors. So we decided to head to the Museum of the History of the City instead.

On our way there we had to cross Via Laietana, a fairly major road in our neighborhood. Right as we were about to do so we noticed a few armored police vans pulling up and blocking off one of the roads. We might have been able to ignore that but then more and more vans pulled up and more and more policemen in full riot gear hopped out of them and lined up blocking the street. You can't ignore the potential for excitement there so we decided to hang around and see what was going down.

I called this post "Intimidation" because that seems to be the first impression policemen here go for. None of this Officer Friendly coming in to the schools to talk about how drugs are bad and policemen are your friends and are here to keep you safe. In Europe it's been my experience that policemen are here to make you feel like if you step out of line the kaibash will be brought down on you, swiftly and without mercy. Even if you're marching in a demonstration against facism, which is apparently what called them out in force (and riot gear). The funny thing was, they were just guarding this one side of the street, and not the other side that leads to where we live. Guess you can demonstrate against facists only in areas zoned for such. But we never got to see any heads knocked together, to Andrew's great disappointment.

Oh, the history of the city museum was interesting, but probably only because we live here and it was interesting to see how the city has evolved. Some remarkably well-preserved Roman ruins, though.

The rain in Spain...

...falls mainly on the weekends. In the mountains. When I'm trying to climb.

I was ultimately able to get a few climbs in after the weather cleared up somewhat, but friction-climbing on slippery granite was a very educational experience. The pics were taken from about 2/3rds up the face. As beautiful as this is, it's still not the nicest place I've been climbing here. That's the sea in the distance. The last pic is me, from a couple of trips ago. Next time Marie comes we'll get a pic of her too.

The Epic Voyage

This summer the Benson family is planning another great Bear Salt Lake getaway and so Andrew and I are heading home to join in the fun. It will actually be pretty exciting because the entire family will be there. This hasn't happened in quite a while, at least not since two, or three, or four more members were added to the clan.

There was talk of not letting the Bensons get all the fun and trying to sneak a Petersen family get-together in this trip, too. So Andrew and I went ahead and hopefully got the ball rolling by booking our tickets. Finally. It has been quite the task getting that done.

I thought it might be easier if we just posted an outline of our plans here so that anyone who was involved in them could have a place to refer to, but then something made me feel not so easy about putting all those details in a public place. So I will email everyone a more detailed timetable, but the gist of it is that both Andrew and I will head to Baltimore to visit with my side of the family for a few days. Then we're off to Utah for a couple weeks of bonding with Andrew's side of the family. Then he and I will head to California for a short bit for him and a much longer bit for me. He will fly out of SFO and head back here while I stay in California with Dad for a couple weeks before heading out to visit Holly in Minneapolis.

So there it all is. We'll send out emails to everyone with exact dates and times. We did just want to get the word out for anybody who actually checks this blog since I know everyone is trying to coordinate stuff this summer, or will be at some point.

Hungry?

Rik and Rok have got you covered, although I wouldn't recommend it. Oh what fun you can have with bizarre translations! We found this cereal at a local supermaket (does the brand in the centre of the box ring any bells for Nate and Claudia? I should hope so) and originally I just tried taking pics of it with my phone, but we went back and bought it so I could photograph it in style. I haven't had the courage to open up the box and actually sample, er, Choco Crack yet, but even if I had it wouldn't be anyone's business. Marie wanted me to add that other cereals at the store included "Bran Sticks" and something like "Crusty Cocoa," but I don't think our faux-Egyptian (Fauxgyptian) friends have anything to do with them.

Flamenco!

I guess party season is starting again. This time the Spaniards celebrated flamenco. I had read about a festival called Feria de Abril and a couple weekends ago Andrew surprised me by taking me there. As far as I could tell from what I read, some people got together a couple decades ago and decided to petition the city to have a four day festival. There wasn't anything in particular to celebrate, but they were Spaniards so reasons for celebrating weren't high on the agenda. Planning and having a party was. The festival was actually started somewhere outside of Barcelona but the Catalans decided to run with it anyways and turn it into an eight day event instead of a measly four.

The idea with this party is that groups from all over put together a flamenco performance and host it inside a tent. There were probably 30 giant tents each with a stage, seating and tables for several people, and lots of food and alcohol. The festival was free to get into and then you could choose a tent to eat at and watch or join in the dancing. It was actually really fun to walk around and see all these women dressed up in their flamenco dresses with big combs and fake roses in their hair. We got there about 10pm, which is when the party was just starting. The tents weren't really filled until about 11pm or so, and then everyone was eating and dancing away no matter their age or bedtime. Sometimes while a dancing group performed on the stage, men and women would get up and dance on the floor if the mood struck. Other times the tent owners would just play music while people ate and some people danced, not bothering with a performing group.

Outside of the tent area, there was a carnival with some of the scariest rides Andrew and I have seen. They just don't seem to worry too much about safety here. One ride consisted of a platform with several padded benches on it that were made up to look like mechanical bulls. When the ride started, the platform would gyrate and shake as much as possible, knocking people off the benches. Nobody was strapped in. There wasn't much to hang on to. And the padding didn't look too abundant either. Shoes were actually flying off the riders and into the crowd watching. But that was nothing compared to the ride with two giant metal cages on each end of a giant seesaw-ish thing. People would stand in the cages and then the cages would swing back and forth, almost going upside down. Not an unusual ride until you think about the fact that those people were just standing in the cages, no padding, no being strapped in, just metal bars to hold on to, and then they were swung 20-30 feet in the air. I guess most people there are too drunk to care about whether or not they might get seriosuly injured on the rides so the carnival thrives.

There were also stands selling artisinal foods and spices, and let's not forget the churros. We decided to keep it milder than our last forray into carnival churro food and so I ordered a piece of cake and Andrew tried to get just a few churros. Andrew doesn't like cake here because he says it's always dry so I chose a piece of the moistest looking cake I could find. There were about four layers of what looked like chocolate cake and then some filling. Unfortunately, the layers I thought were cake turned out to be buttercream frosting and the little bit that I thought was the filling turned out to be the cake. We each had about two bites before gagging and throwing the thing away. 4 euros! (6 dollars!)

Andrew was making fun of me for spending so much on some really bad cake so we went to get him his churros. The last time he ordered churros he didn't know how much to order so he got a half a kilo or something. It ended up being way too much and we debated whether or not it was kind of us to give the uneaten churros to a homeless man. We decided all that grease would probably cause him more harm than good without the use of his own private bathroom, so we didn't pass them on to anyone. This time Andrew decided to just try getting 200 grams of churros, hoping that would mean about 4 or 5 churros. It turned out to be pretty much like the same amount he got last time, minus one or two. I think between the two of us we ate about ten of them and that was only about half of what Andrew got. It was really all the deep-fried dough sprinkled with sugar that we could handle, but hah! it was 4 euros, so I got to make fun of Andrew for wasting 4 euros on a way-too-rich-to-eat dessert too.

We took the picture of the candy for Michelle. Just tell us which flavours you want, and we'll try to bring some to you.

Whole lotta videos

Hi everyone (like, all 6 of you that might ever read this),

If this post has a bit of a different flavour, it's because this is Andrew posting as Marie. First time ever.

Yesterday, May 1, was a holiday in...well, all of Europe, really. I had work off, so we took some time to walk around Montjuïc, a hillside on which there's a palace, fountains, park, a bunch of stuff from the '92 Olympics, and so forth. Noah, Aaron's son, requested videos of family members, so we set out to make him one. These are our attempts, each one poorer than the one that preceded it. Mostly. Marie won't let me post my favourite video, as it contains profanity, and also insinuation of potentially illegal activities (apparently it might be "against" the "law" to spy on your neighbours with a camera, or so I'm told).

Then, Marie found some stray cats, and we decided to take some videos of them for Sofia, Nate's daughter. She likes cats, we hear. I think it was mostly an excuse for Marie to play with the stray cats. So that's the point of the cat videos there. I've also thrown in a few other pics from that day. Hope this makes up for the fact that we haven't posted since, like, October.