Spain – Page 17 – From Pyrenees to Pennines

A History of a Holiday in Fifteen Trees – 1

And … we’re back from a more-or-less internet-free month in Spain. We’ve been with my daughter and partner, who five months ago became parents. This had been the first window of opportunity to get there, what with Covid travel restrictions.

We got to know and love Anaïs, as she mastered rolling over, sitting up, and enjoying English nursery rhymes to complement the Catalan ones her other yaya (granny) sings with her.

And we got to know and feel quite at home in the seaside town that Emily and Miquel moved to just before Anaïs was born. Only 12 miles from Barcelona, it’s assertively un-touristy – no hotels, AirB&B, catch-penny souvenir shops or menus in several languages.

So let’s start off with what the Spanish do best, and enjoy a drink in a bar shaded by the trees that line the streets.

#TreeSquare

Spots and dots and dots and spots

Spots and dots. That’s the Lens Artists Photo-Challenge this week, as requested by Ann-Christine. What to choose?

I thought immediately of the year we came back from France, 2014. That was the year too when the Tour de France came to Yorkshire. We went Tour de France mad, and some people even decorated their houses in red spots in honour of the King of the Mountains.

I remembered Brian, the dog my elder daughter had. No dog is spottier than a Dalmatian.

I thought of a bubble-producer extraordinaire we met in London once, delighting children of all ages.

Outside the Geological Museum, South Kensington

There was that extraordinary murmuration of starlings that took place over our house. It’s an annual treat round here. Thousands and thousands of starlings polka-dot the sky. And afterwards, leave the car spotted and dotted.

Or what about Seville orange trees with glowing orange fruits brightening the winter Spanish streets – and then lying discarded as the season ends: until we come along and bag up a kilo or two to transform into marmalade back at home?

But then I thought about spots and dots in the here and now. Spots and dots in England mean rain on the window, rain on the windscreen. So I begin and end my post with weather, English style.

But … one more thing. No rain = no welly-boots. No welly-boots = no cheery whimsical feature in a garden just down the road.

Out in the Streets – in Pink

Pink. When I was a girl, I couldn’t be doing with it at all. Pink went with frilly dresses, white knee socks and patent leather shoes. Pink went with ballet lessons and Violet Elizabeth Bott. I utterly despised it, even though I was far too much of a wimp to be a proper tomboy. These days, I’m far less hard line. I treasure the first glimpses of spring time blossom, and all the glorious blooms of summer. I love a magenta sunset. I even have a pink jumper – though I don’t like it very much.

Today, let’s look at the streets. We’ll go to Spain, France, the UK, and South Korea in search of not-too-pretty in pink. The featured image is a scene from Cádiz.

Las Arenas, once a bullring and now a shopping centre in Barcelona.

And the market in Cádiz

Here’s one for Becky’s Bright Squares: a young Korean woman, bright and pretty, wearing traditional hanbok for the festival of chuseok.

And finally, a sunset above my grandson’s London primary school.

Click on any image to view it full size.

Life in Colour #10

Geometric Barcelona

I haven’t joined in the Lens-Artists Photo Challenge in a while: I wouldn’t like to fall out of the habit completely. What to offer? A miscellany? Maybe. Focus on one country – maybe Spain with its wonderful Moorish past? Maybe, but others have already offered wonderful images on this theme. Barcelona then, my daughter’s home? OK, why not? But this time, maybe not its must-see architecture, from Gothic to Gaudí. Let’s just walk the streets, travel the metro, visit maritime Barcelona, and see what we can see.

Click on any image to see full-size

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #141

A Window on Sants

About three years ago, we were in Sants, Barcelona. The flat where Emily and Miquel then lived was too small to accommodate us for too prolonged a stay, so an apartment in Sants it was – a part of the city we didn’t knw at all, but came to like a lot.

Once a village, by the nineteenth century it was industrialised – the textile industry – and home to Barcelona’s biggest textile factory. Now it’s home to Barcelona’s biggest station and travel interchange.

For us though, it was simply a busy working community, full of independent shops, a market, housing old and new. Let’s go and walk the streets for a while, and admire the often elegant windows. And as the feature photo shows, there’s washing. There’s always washing to hang out.

It’s an assertively independista part of the city: hence the Catalan flags and yellow ribbons. And they don’t welcome the destruction of their community by tourists that come and go. So we did our best to spend in neighbourhood shops bars and restaurants, and also hoped that, since we’re all-but Catalan in-laws now (and now, even Spanish grandparents), we might pass muster.

Monday Window – mañana

Monday Washing Line – mañana

‘How wonderful yellow is. It stands for the sun’

At the moment, we all need the glow, the zing that a good splash of yellow can provide. Luckily, Jude has provided the perfect opportunity for us to hunt down all our yellow-rich images, in her challenge Life in Colour. Let’s have an injection of gutsy, vibrant lemon, amber and gold alongside our long awaited Covid vaccines.

I’d thought of showing those springtime flowers we all love – aconites, daffodils, primrose, tulips and kingcups. But maybe I’ll save those for another day. Here’s a complete hotch-potch of yellows to cheer up a day which, here at least is thoroughly and dismally grey.

The sign that greets me whenever I leave the house

To view any image full size. just click on it. The quotation of the post title is by Vincent Van Gogh. No wonder he liked sunflowers. And the header photo shows one word from another quotation. Wander round the St. Paul’s area of London and you’ll eventually uncover the whole sentence, from Virginia Woolf’s novel, Jacob’s Room: ‘What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?‘ What indeed? In this area of London, enough to fill an entire guide book.

Monday Window, Monday Washing

This time two years ago, we were in Barcelona. One of our ports of call was the first house Antoni Gaudí ever designed, Casa Vicens. Once a spacious site beyond the city limits, it’s now squashed into narrow city streets, some of its garden space sold off. But it’s definitely worth a visit, and you can have a virtual look round here.

What the official site won’t show you is the views from the windows, and one thing I enjoyed, as I always do, was the sight of the Monday washing drying on the balconies of nearby flats.

Monday Window

Monday Washing Lines

Zest up your day with toast and marmalade!

It’s that time of year when the house is permeated by the bitter, bright, clean and honeysweet smell of marmalade-in-the-making, as a pan of carefully cut up peels, juice and sugar bubble away enticingly in the kitchen to make this year’s supply of Seville Orange Marmalade. Is anything more guaranteed to wake you up and start your day with a zing than a couple of slices of toast and home-made marmalade?

I first wrote about it here, on this day in 2011. I wrote about it often. But our most memorable marmalade year was two years ago, when I wrote about it again, on almost this day.

Up above your head, in many a Spanish street, are oranges, glowing orbs of colour that brighten the cityscape. And two years ago we were in Valencia, home of the orange. Finding windfalls abandoned in the Turia Gardens, we gathered them and brought them home. What could be better than marmalade made, by you, from oranges you’ve harvested yourselves?

Flashback Friday

Square Up

It turns out that my first marmalade post was written on 21st January. Today is the 22nd. I hope this isn’t a hanging offence, in the world of Flashback Friday.

Upstanding craftsmen …

… work high up on the highest spires of La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. The squares show one of these craftsmen doing his work, almost at the very top. The featured photo gives some idea of how Gaudí’s as yet unfinished cathedral towers high above the city.

Square Up

Puppets from a hidden Cádiz corner

To cheer you up on a cold and snowy Saturday (rain later), here are puppets, all from the 1970s and 80s, from one of Cádiz’s best-kept secrets: El Museo del Titere – The Puppet Museum.