Quality Time, Barcelona Edition

In the constant rush of daily life, especially during the past month or so as we raced to finish up school projects and pack for this trip, I sometimes feel a longing for an intangible something else from my relationship with my kids and Raf. Like I'm missing something, some piece of the larger puzzle of life. 

Quality time.

I say this because we spend a lot of time together as a family. We're super lucky; Raf and I work at home and take the kids to and from school. We're all home for dinner and homework. We go a lot of places together. But when we're rushed or there are too many things to do, that "missing" feeling creeps up on me and I long for quality time.

There is nothing quite like living in a small space in a foreign city to bind a family together. I'm not saying I don't hear But Mom! She's *touching* me! Make her stop!! forty times a day. And I'm not saying I don't escape to the balcony a few times a day to get some "peace and quiet" from the traffic below (which is more soothing to me than the laugh track on "Friends," which is one of our only DVDs that works on the Euro DVD player). But it's been so good to reconnect like this, with hours upon hours and days upon days to just be together, wrestling and arguing and laughing and eating together. 

Barcelona B&B (Beach & Bikes)

There are no mistakes. That goes for life, as well as traveling. You want to plan, but you can't get too caught up in the idea of the end result; for one thing, you may never even get there, and for another, your desires may change and you may find yourself changing course anyway.

(note: Marlowe is trying out weird faces;
it's a rite of passage as an 8-year-old)

The first time we came to Europe as a family, three years ago, I was aching to see Versailles again. I wanted to show the girls the real palace where Marie Antoinette lived and the "movie set" of Sofia Coppola's gorgeous film. Decadence, luxury, style and royal living at its sumptuous, excessive best. 

This is it! I was going to say to them, arms wide enough to envelop Versailles and its grounds as a whole. This is it!

Well. 

That didn't quite work out the way I'd planned. The grounds were crowded and the lines for the palace (and even the women's bathroom) were deplorably long. The Metro ride back to Paris was at least 45 minutes (after a 15-minute walk to the train station). What to do? 

(Imagine the voice of a superhero TV show narrator) Just then, the Shachory family spied a sign at the edge of the fountain... "Rent bikes here!"... Thus changing the course of family vacations FOREVER...)

And so, a family tradition was born.

A few days ago, we rented bikes by Barceloneta Beach and rode north, helmet-free and unencumbered by anything but a backpack, picnic food and a few beach towels, along the sun-sparkling beaches of Barcelona. Past nude beaches and party beaches, naval installments and tourist traps, picnic benches and tapas bars, surf shops and structures built for the 1992 Olympics. 

It only takes a minute or two on a beach cruiser to change your attitude. The world seems better with the sun on your back. I found myself staying at the back of our group, watching my girls in their sundresses weaving in and out of pedestrians, laughing with their heads thrown back, hair flowing in ropy beach waves behind them, the tinkling sounds of their bike bells on the sea breeze. 

At the northern end of Barceloneta, Raf stopped short, eyes on the black-clad surfers lined up in the waves. 

"Surfers?" I asked, lightbulbs popping in my mind.

He didn't speak, a smile on his lips. 

It was a game changer. In other words, if we loved Barcelona before, now that he knew there was surfing, it was all over. Suddenly, the "... but there's no real surfing..." consideration was gone. Suddenly, Barcelona transformed into a viable, livable city for him.

Who knows? 

After two hours, we returned the bikes and grabbed tapas on the beach, served by a blonde girl from Palos Verdes who visited Barcelona four years ago and never left. Then we wandered up to Olimpica Beach and splashed a while and fell asleep on the hot sand, daydreaming about Barcelona and inhabiting all it has to offer. 

Casa Mila (Or "Imagining The Other Life I Could Have Lived")

Sometimes in my life, I've thought that our lives choose us, that we had nothing to do with it, trusting in Fate, the Universe, whatever. Lately, I'm rethinking that idea, wondering what it might mean if we are truly in charge of our destinies simply because we are "in charge" of our thoughts, wondering if we can change our lives by changing our thoughts. Using this philosophy, I've landed in a very content place of loving my life as it is, not as it ought to have been. I don't play the woulda, shoulda, coulda game all that much. It's not worthwhile to me. I have one life - this one - and this is what I'm doing with it.

But...

Yesterday afternoon, while the kids relaxed and watched endless DVDs of "Friends" in the apartment, Raf and I took a walk around the Eixample neighborhood. After a long morning and tour with the kids, managing their hunger and desire to shop and complaints about walking, I was eager to spend a little bit of time in the fresh air of Barcelona's early evening pedestrian crush without counting three kids in my periphery to be sure we were all together and no one was walking into the middle of a bus lane. 

We walked in the direction of La Pedrera (or "Casa Mila"), a Gaudi-designed apartment residence on the ritzy Passeig de Gracia. I find it ironic that this is my second trip to Barcelona and I'm awestruck by Gaudi's mad genius, and yet I've never set foot inside his buildings. And, for the most part, I've been okay with it; if I'm accepting reality, then this is the spot where my parenting reality and expectations about long European sojourns intersect. If I'm going to truly enjoy a trip to Europe with my family - with the intent to inspire a lifelong love of traveling and a cosmopolitan world vision in my girls - then I've got to suck it up and find places and activities that they will love, too. Museums and staring at wavy lines of architecture generally don't cut it with my kids (remember, we're the family that lasted about 2 hours in the Louvre... with a private guide...). 

Anyway, we've walked this route with the kids twice - it's about five or six blocks on the same street as our apartment, and then two or three blocks to the left on flat city streets. With kids, it can take 20 to 30 minutes of Are we there yet? and Dad, *that* was a gelato place! and My feet hurt...can we just take a cab? 

Therefore, I was surprised to reach Gaudi's Casa Mila in less than 10 minutes. Raf and I crossed the Passeig de Gracia as though we knew what we were doing. "We'll just see what's going on," Raf said. "No expectations."

That was good enough for me. We poked around the front, looking for an entrance line. 

Hmm... only a handful of people waiting... 

We looked at each other. I raised an eyebrow. Raf shrugged, both of us envisioning two possibilities: 

1 - the kids were swigging back cheap wine while playing with matches and throwing them out the third floor window like molotov cocktails at the Spaniards of Eixample

or

2 - they were on their second episode of a "Friends" marathon, hands in a third bag of chips, and truly enjoyed the parent-free afternoon of eating junk food with reckless abandon. 

We tiptoed inside and bought tickets, then took the breath-taking (literally) winding stairs up eight floors to the rooftop terrace, where a stage had been assembled for an evening jazz concert (which I knew the kids wouldn't go for, but still I daydreamed...).

The thing with Gaudi is, his designs are supposed inspired by nature, and yet they are otherworldly (in fact, our guide Teresa had mentioned George Lucas was inspired by Gaudi for his Storm Troopers). Over and over, I noticed comparisons to the Green and Green Craftsman style of the California bungalows I love so much and the natural, organic lines of Frank Lloyd Wright's homes. 

And still, I couldn't put my finger on it. Gaudi was different. Utterly mad as a hatter. Bombatic. Fluid. The poorly translated brochure called it "unclassifiable," which is as good a description as any. 

From the rooftop, we entered the spine-like attic, where an exhibit of models and scales "explained" Gaudi's work. Display cases filled with organic materials - the skeleton of a python, a dried-up skull of a goat, seashells, honeycombs, lacy tree branches - attempted to show the connection between nature and Gaudi's fanciful designs. 

It was there, in the attic space, weaving between models and renderings and trying to take it all in (while Raf reminded me of our kids sitting in a foreign apartment alone several blocks away) that I saw an alternative version of myself decades earlier, touring Casa Mila and changing the course of my life. 

Architecture, I heard in my soul. You could have been an architect. 

I imagined myself as a teenager, coming to Barcelona on a school trip. It could have happened - I lived in Naples... Why didn't I ever travel to Spain?  

I could feel that 17-year-old girl walking around with me, getting goosebumps, her life stretched out ahead of her like tanned legs on a sandy beach. I should go to school for architecture, I felt her saying, careless and carefree, hair wild, a mostly empty backpack slung over one elbow. Yeah, that might be fun.

We toured the apartment below, a gorgeous, light-filled living space that incorporated natural light on both sides of its inner corridor. There weren't a lot of people, so we wandered through the rooms virtually alone, the ghost of the girl I might have been and me. By then, I was smitten and the curved lines of the ceiling and Gaudi's well-designed Modernisme furniture only deepened my admiration.

What might have been... I wondered, picturing that alternative version of myself spending a homesick year in Barcelona, studying at the Universitat, learning Spanish, pining to be with my high school friends, riding the Metro in endless loops around the city. But by winter break and the following summer, my life would have changed again. I would have fallen in love with Barcelona, maybe changed the course of my life by staying, like so many ex-patriots.

What might have been?

Photo for Five / "The Holiday Card Shot"

Sagrada Familia

Before you decide to have three kids and become an official family of five, there are things you can't quite consider, like:

* At some point, you will have to wait for a shower; sometimes, this will feel like forever as you patiently allow each member of your house to go before you.

* Finding a table for five at a busy restaurant is tricky.

* You'll have to separate for plane rides, finding seats either beside or behind each other... or in entirely different sections...

* You can't get a taxi for five people in most cabs; you either have to split up or call ahead for a larger cab

* If you ask, "Where should we eat?" you'll get four or five different answers... and someone is always irritated by the decision

Park Guell

* When you're traveling, you will likely only get pictures with up to four of you in them because someone has to take the photo. 

We usually get around this last one by setting up a self-timed picture, which is great because it takes a few rounds to get the best photo... and the "bloopers" sometimes say more about us as a family than the posed shots (She's in my way... No, on this side, on this side... It's flashing, Mom,come on!!").

On this trip, however, we've had two great tours with guides who have accommodated my desire for shots of our complete family. Don't be surprised if you see one of these on our holiday cards.

 

La Boqueria

Food Porn, Barcelona Edition

As you may know, I tend to eat very clean, organic, mostly vegetarian or vegan food at home in California. I love kale. I love green smoothies. I know my way around a Whole Foods. I'm the kind of girl who asks, "Do you have almond milk?" at a coffee joint, then proceeds to inquire about whether it's organic, unsweetened, local, grown on a happy farm, etc. 

You know my type, don't you?

Anyway, Barcelona challenges all of my food limitations. Rather than wax poetic about the fiesta of food we've been consuming, I'll show you a photojournal of my gastronomic journey. 

chocolate and churros

postres

zumos naturales - fresh juices

a store dedicated to iberica ham... not vegan...

toasty bread rubbed with tomatoes

fried brie on an arugula salad with balsamic vinegar

tapas

Disorientation and Mad Genuis

Serena's modern interpretation of Salvador Dali

Despite jet lag - or to spite it - we dropped our luggage off at the aptly named Splendum Suites and went in search of a few well-reviewed cafes and markets around Eixample. Though I'm still not a big fan of Spanish food - or just not yet - we had a good meal at a sidewalk bistro and found a dusty little market (open late on Sunday night) to grab some cereal and yogurt for the apartment for breakfast.

Which came really early, since all of us woke up around 4:30 am. When it was finally a decent hour, Raf and Marlowe and I set out to explore. After a quick (but beautifully crafted) caffe con leche and zumo naranja (orange juice), we found ourselves wending our way through grand treelined boulevards and window shopping along ritzy ramblas. 

Marlowe and Raf at Casa Mila (La Pedrera)

Barcelona is the sort of magical place where you can happen upon a twisting palace of melting marshmallow towers, as we did, literally stumbling across a corner and looking up, into the beauty of La Pedrera, a building dreamed up by Barcelona's Dr. Suess of architecture, Antoni Gaudi.

What is it about Catalunya, the region that envelops Barcelona, that makes it produce mad geniuses like Gaudi, Dali and Picasso, classically trained artists who turned art, form and function on their ears? 

I haven't found the answer yet, despite visiting the Dali museum in the Barri Gotic or wandering through Park Guell or studying Casa Batllo. But genius seems to be called forth from some other place, somewhere so deep within the artist it can't be tamed and can only exist without limitations. 

Create columns that appear to be melting? Why not? Begin work on a church that won't be completed for a hundred years after your life is over? Certainly! 

Perhaps the sheer madness of these ideas is what sets such genius apart from mere mortals... Not only could they dream up such flights of fancy, but they had the audacity to imagine they could be done. 

It's disorienting to be in a city that exhibits such freedom alongside the neat and orderly 16-block grids of the master-planned Eixample district. But it's also lovely and alive and unpredictable, a good reminder that the flutter in my heart may be less of a struggle to understand and more of another crazy, impetuous, passionate feeling:

falling in love.

Ooo... Que Rica

When we walked onto the beach near Port Olimpic, we heard the cat calls of a stout old man fondling his nibbles 'n bits as he showered on the beach. 

"Ooo... Que rica!" he called to the female passersby. How rich! So nice!

While I don't advocate strange hobo harassment on most beaches, I have to agree with him with regard to the location and sheer beauty of Barcelona's warm Mediterranean seaside. Even though Serena got stung by a jellyfish (which the Spanish call medusas), the afternoon was well-spent dozing on rented beach chairs and wandering back to Eixample via the Metro. 

Maybe it's strange that we've longed to return to Barcelona for its beaches, particularly since our hands-down favorite beach is our hometown break at Zuma in Malibu (which is name-checked on all sorts of merchandise here, ironically), but when we bathed in the sunshine yesterday, we weren't disappointed. 

It's raining now, but we'll be here a few more days. If it's sunny, you know where to find us.