Just a fun comparative observation of our groceries and the content of our fridges in different countries. Top two image are our groceries in Ireland. The bottom two images are our groceries in Morocco, sans the wine and beer ofcourse, plus a couple of more things we now consider Survival Supplies. They're instant noodles, (who knew this would become Tom's survival food too, where it is clearly mine!) chocolate cookies, some kind of canned fish (Tuna or Sardines), chili flakes and Sriracha (no pic).
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A word to the wise: it's good to back up your phone to your computer in case Something Bad happens; it's also good to make sure your backups are encrypted. It is even more important, though, to make sure that you're absolutely sure you have the password for the backup written down before upgrading iOS, just in case it goes Horribly Wrong and your phone decides it needs a factory reset. Apple, in their infinite wisdom, make it possible to back up your phone to a computer but not be able to restore the same backup half an hour later if you don't have the password you set a couple of years (and at least one laptop) ago written down. I think I'm going to try a combination of backups to iCloud whenever I have the bandwidth (i.e. not for several weeks right now) plus making sure I do a manual encrypted backups to the laptop and set a new password each time I try to upgrade anything.
We left Barcelona at the end of September for the Low Countries: from olives, wine, and anchovies to cold rain, beer, and moules frites. And to seeing a lot of people, only some of whom were expecting us there (Hi, Eric and Owen, if you're reading this). This is the Theater Tuchinski, which Susan's father was appalled we'd never heard of. We've been walking quite a lot: the Health app on my phone doesn't really seem fully trustworthy (sometimes it'll say completely different things for Susan and me, even though we've been walking together all day) but it says we're doing at least 3 miles most days, and sometimes more than double that. It's interesting, though, how different cities change how you walk. Barcelona was mostly wonderful (as long as you avoid La Rambla), with very distinct districts. El Born, the Gothic Quarter, and El Raval have small winding roads, often too small for traffic except the vehicles that come to hose the streets down at night, and excellent for wandering around. (They're also favoured by pickpockets and bag-snatchers, apparently, because it's so easy to disappear around a corner or bend.) Eixample, however, is laid out on a strict grid system, and all of the corners are cut off to make very wide intersections: this adds around 13% to the effective length of each block and makes it hard to decide when to cross the road. I'll write that up in detail sometime...
Ahem. Back to my original point: even though Barcelona's definitely not homogenous, it's a pretty good city to walk: mostly flat, and with good wide pavements. There seem to be a lot of people on electric scooters, but they're not too crazy. It's easy to stroll around while chatting to somebody. Amsterdam, on the other hand, has narrow pavements and it's much harder to cross the road. Getting across a typical junction seems to involve negotiating a bike lane, a traffic lane, two sets of tram tracks, another traffic lane, and a final bike lane, all of which may have their own independent sets of lights or work as zebra crossings (except for the bikes, which never stop for anything smaller than them). Brussels is less dangerous but quite a lot of it smells a bit. We were walking through the (under-appreciated and remarkably tourist-free) Hospital de Sant Pau yesterday... ...when what looked like a lime fell off a tree and hit my foot.... It smells more like an unripe orange than a lime. But anyway, it's tasty with gin.
Well, not us of course... Oh wow that's a building. You've all seen better pictures of the architecture than I can take, so here are some of the people who were there today.
So it's been just over two weeks in Barcelona. We're getting used to the nearby church clock chimes (a chime per quarter of an hour, and then on the hour we get four from the first bell plus the hour from a second bell, which sounds slightly flat: midnight goes on for 16 chimes), the constant battle between the electric trucks that hose the streets down (one drove through our street while I was writing this, and I grabbed the picture above) and the dodgy-looking (and worse-smelling) puddles in the calles, and the 77 (76? 78? I counted several times and got 77 most often) steps up to the apartment. We're not shopping at the nearby mercado de St. Catarina as much as we probably should be, but we are eating pretty damn well. The steps are quite a disincentive to go out for dinner, to be honest, so we've been taking advantage of the lovely fruit-n-veg shops nearby and cooking up a storm. Yesterday was the 308th anniversary of the fall of Barcelona in the War of Spanish Succession, which is a Really Big Thing here. There was a police helicopter hovering almost directly above us for most of the day, and massive crowds dressed mostly in Catalan flags. We were extremely boring and only went out to have Japano-Brazilian food in the evening: predictably it wasn't anywhere near awesome, but it wasn't a total failure either. And thank all of you who've commented or sent messages saying we shouldn't be trying to eat Asian food here, but please shut up: we miss our local sushi-ya and sometimes one has to follow one's heart (or stomach, rather). A note to anybody wanting dumplings, though: buy the frozen Japanese ones at the Chinese supermarket near Plaça de Catalunya and cook them at home rather than going to Mosquito in El Born. Oh, and I've never appreciated Susan's mee goreng more. Here's some Catalan food porn, though: tomatoes, mozarella, and anchovies at Tapas 24 (much more photogenic than the smashed eggs with bottifarra negra, but not as good) and the salted tuna heart with almonds from Quimet and Quimet (thank you so much for taking us there, Danijel and Isabella) I wasn't going to fill this full of pictures, but now I've started talking about Q&Q it's hard to resist: here's a picture of us with the lovely Jeff V. being very excited about the beer, and one of me being extremely pleased at having scored a very reasonably-priced pour of 25 year-old Laphroaig: Spanish lessons continue unabated, nevertheless. La pelota de perdición is not being thrown around the classroom as much as last week, possibly because our esteemed profesor fears a revolt. I'm ridiculously thankful for those French and Latin lessons thirty years ago (although there are a lot of amigos falsos there: if "we have" is tenemos then part of me wants to say tenevos not teneís next, and hablar sounds far more like avoir than parler). We only have a couple of days left, though, and everybody's tired. The cheap jokes (cf. proudly demonstrating my knowledge of the present tense first person form of "to be" with yo no soy mariñero, soy capitan) and obscure references (come on: who's actually ever watched a Bigas Luna movie since 1992) aren't coming as easily as they used to. Susan tried to turn a lesson on numbers greater than a hundred into a conversation today by asking how old our profesor is and got slapped down with arithmetic: nobody really wants to subtract 36 from 2018 in any language.
But, as a wiser man than me once said, we have sin gaz and con leche; we have fiesta and feria. And what more could you ask for? We've now been in Barcelona for a whole week, which was mostly spent sleeping and reading until getting off our collective arses and heading to a language school this morning to enrol for two weeks of Spanish lessons. So we're now a few hundred Euros lighter in the pocket and, in exchange, will be carrying around several kilos of shiny textbooks every weekday. Oh, and they come with these shiny coaster things that apparently have sound stored on them: how retro!
We're lucky enough to have a six-person class: one third Chinese, one third Swedish, and one third us. I managed to fight off the urge to try to be "helpful" in Mandarin with the counting for the first session, and then quickly gave up. It's hard enough to throw a ball around a group of people while counting backwards from 20 in any language, but having to learn new numbers and to say ¡Hola! whenever you get to a number that's divisible by three - I think our teacher may have just been making it hard while filling in the last ten minutes. Of course, though, there's a little place around the corner where you can get a beer and some croquetas to make the walk home easier. Data of note - I'm not sure whether I'll be able to turn this into some sort of infographic or whether it just makes me look like an obsessive, but I've been thinking about how to quantify our time, and so here are some metrics:
We passed many castles, but Leamaneh Castle, on the way from Bunratty to Loughrea was kind of special. It sits in the parish of Killinaboy, in the Burren region of County Clare (side note: Kil in the beginning of most places in Ireland like Kilreekil, Kilkenny, Kilinaboy means 'Church'.) I love folkloric stories especially when it involves really badass woman, in this case a pretty cruel woman. Reading up the legend of Leamaneh Castle, it is believed that the ghost of Máire Rúa, or Red Mary, walks its halls and her red haired ghost can also be seen in another castle. Her name was Máire ní Mahon, born in 1615; the name came from the colour of her hair as well as her foul temper. Mary MacMahon had at least 3 husbands however this article on the Irish Place says it's difficult to verify how many husbands she actually had, and this Abandoned Ireland article says she had 25 husbands. Leamaneh means Horse Leap, a folklore story about how Red Mary ordered one of her husbands to ride her favourite horse who took him to the cliffs of Moher and threw him off the cliff to his death.
The Castle had a 15th century tower and a 17th century manor house which was added later because of Mary's inherited wealth from her first husband. It has been left as an abandoned ruin since the late 18th Century. I've packed just a few brush ink pens and a thin sketchbook. My little pans of travel watercolour tin was corroded during travel, thus needs replacing. That's not all. I seem to be leaving the fashion illustration in Singapore, and haven't felt inspired to draw anything too specific, and doodling aimless seems to sit rather awkwardly in my mind. Maybe aimless is good? Last week, while stuck indoors because of bad weather, I revisited these two illustrators I've been following for a while, Julie Houts (Jooleeloren) and Liana Finck (lianafinck) on Instagram and found their style of using text to express a meditation of people and their thoughts, sometimes satirical, sometimes funny or sad with their drawings, quite entertaining and sometimes poignant. I do love me some poignancy. It was cold in the house, so I thought a hot cup of tea after dinner would be good. This doesn't happen in Singapore, but the caffeine in that tea kept me awake and helped my brain process ideas about conversations Tom and I had that could be turned into some kind of comic. The next day, the first sketch came out. Our friend Cindy calls us Tits and Sass, and I thought it would be fitting for a comic strip. The sketches are really rough, and I am not used to making animated facial expressions, let alone drawing ourselves. But here they are, I am doing them anyways. The thought process in doing a strip is a totally new one for me, I am not sure it's my cup of tea, what do you think? Is this something you'd enjoy seeing more of?
Kilreekil is a good 40 minutes east of Galway by motorway. This means it has comparatively nice weather (although, being in western Ireland, this doesn't say a great deal) but all of the exciting places are a long, long drive away. The two things you're really supposed to do here, apparently, are to go to Clifden and the Aran Islands. This is the only decent picture I got from our excursion to Clifden: it's An Caoláire Rua, Ireland's largest (or possibly only) fjord (or fjard - thank you, pedants of Wikipedia). Here you see the faintest glimmering of sun through the heavy clouds, which totally justified driving for five hours to not really see any other views. Inis Mór, by comparison, is pretty easy to get to: only 75 minutes' drive to the harbour and then a 40 minute ferry ride. By this time I was not quite driving like a local, but definitely complaining loudly at foreign-registered camper-vans and people going more than 20 kph below the speed limit. It's impossible to take pictures that do the scenery justice - or at least not with my limited skill and equipment. We decided to walk everywhere rather than hiring bikes (or a horse and cart), which meant we didn't get to see as much of the island as we might have, but saw almost all of it with nobody else around. This is Dún Eochla, which all the books say is a superbly preserved ringfort on top of the highest point of the island. Unfortunately, somebody's built what appears to be an enormous water tank in front of it, and put up gates and signs saying you can't actually go there. The big rocks in the foreground in the picture are the top of the water tank, which I climbed on top of to get the best view we could. The view down the hill from Dún Eochla: this is the best picture I got of how the place looks. The strange blue colour above the sea seems to be an atypical metereological phenomenon. Found this in a dry stone wall - a glacial erratic? The harbour at low tide - again, this is a pale imitation of what it really looked like. I'm fairly sure this is where I stayed the last time I was here, back in the early '90s. This was parked across from Joe Watty's Bar. Father Ted still casts a long shadow here: in one tourist information place they had directions to the actual house from the titles. They offer organic home-baked teas for ten euros a head, but ask that you book in advance.
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