Visiting Barcelona (Spain) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Barcelona (Spain) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

The next day, Laurent and I took the train from Puigcerda to the capital of Spanish Catalonia – Barcelona.  I enjoyed looking at the Catalan countryside, especially the farmhouses and the churches with arches in their bell towers.

Barcelona was a pleasant surprise.  The city was clean and full of chic apartment buildings and wealthy enough that tourists did not feel conspicuously rich.

We arrived at the station at 11 am and bought a map.  We took Avenue Provença to the Eixample neighborhood, which houses all the Art Nouveau architecture from the 1890s.  The curving metalwork on the balconies made you feel like you were under water.

Antoní Gaudi’s Casa Mila or La Perdrera as the Catalans call it, especially gave me this feeling.  I remembered being intrigued by this building the first time I saw it in a small photo in an art history book at the University of Chicago; the photo was small, but Gaudi’s genius was huge even in the small photo.

We hustled down the street to see Gaudí’s major work – the still unfinished Sagrada Familia Cathedral.  The Cathedral looks like sand that has been dripped from a fist to make a sandcastle.

The entrance to the Cathedral looked like a dragon’s mouth to me at first view.  After looking at other works by Gaudi in art history books, I think that interpretation is not too far fetched.  Laurent climbed the stairs to the top of the Sagrada Familia Cathedral while I sat on a park bench below and did people watching.

When Laurent came back down from the heights, we walked down Sardenya Street and found a small restaurant to eat at while we were waiting for the Picasso Museum to open.

For my sea-level Catalan meal by the Mediterranean Ocean, I ordered fried calamari as a starter.  I expected fried pieces of tentacles, but instead received whole, fried mini squid.

I squirted lemon juice on the fried calamari and drank them with the Estrella beer we ordered.  Then, we ate fried cod with oven-baked potatoes and ratatouille as our main dish.  I ordered flan made with condensed, milk, egg, and sugar and a caramel sauce for dessert. 

Just as a side note, the elite class of Cuba is mostly Catalan and eats this type of food along with the elite class of Mexico.  Catalan food is like French food for Ivy League graduates or wannabe Ivy.

We walked through the Parc de Ciutadella to find a statue attributed to Antoní Gaudi.  We enjoyed looking at the architecture of the Modern Art Museum in the park and smelled the flowers.  We found the fountain of Gaudi’s woman holding a parasol as we wandered around the park.

After visiting the park, we went to the Picasso Museum.  There were so many paintings in this museum that I was overwhelmed.

Picasso experimented with many styles, but the room that moved me the most was the room with his Blue Period paintings, especially his painting of a tired guitar player bent over his guitar and sleeping. 

We spent several hours in this museum, which is interesting in itself; the museum is made up of two palaces – the Castellet and the Berenguer.

The Berenguer family seems to have done quite well for itself in Barcelona, if you judge by the tomb that is in the Cathedral.  The gothic Barcelona Cathedral was the next stop on our whirlwind tour of Barcelona.

I liked the Cathedral’s cloister with ducks and palm trees best.  There were many chapels around the Cathedral with big iron bars in front of them.

The intricate lacework and polychrome statues were typically Spanish and brought back memories of my art history classes with four slides flashing across the wall of our art history classroom with Professor Rosenthal presiding.

His syllabus readings were huge with chapters from many books.  I stayed in Chicago over semester breaks and read all the art history books on the syllabus and would buy a library pass for summer semester and do the same thing.

When I read books about Goya’s paintings I thought that Spanish peasants were just as exploited as shtetl Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia.  I wanted to see the Prado Museum in Madrid one day. 

Time was flying, and we had a train to catch.  We were thirsty when we boarded the train and did not have any water.  Our thirst just increased over the next three hours back to Puigcerda due to the heat, but we survived.

We had a great visit to Barcelona thanks to our sturdy legs.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

Ruth Paget Selfie

Visiting the Spanish Enclave of Lluvia inside the French Pyrenees with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting the Spanish Enclave of Lluvia inside the French Pyrenees with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

After our siesta and lunch, we visited a Spanish enclave in France called Lluvia.  Various wars and treaties left bits and pieces of Spain in France like Lluvia.

I noticed that people in the Cerdagne region of France called themselves Catalan and not French or Spanish.  The shop owners in Lluvia spoke French, Spanish, and English.  They had no problem serving my mother-in-law in French.

I wanted to be trilingual like these people one day and could see that you could make money as a salesman, who could speak several languages selling quality products that were not as expensive as cars.

We returned home and ate another dinner of trout with sliced almonds.  The fatigue of walking in the heat for 6 weeks with no air conditioning in blazing hot countries was catching up with me.  The US has a lot of air conditioning.  (Even at this time, I thought you could park under solar panels that would pay for air conditioning.)

We ate another dinner of trout with sliced almonds.  The fatigue of the last few weeks was catching up with me.  I drank some slightly, sweet wine to go with the trout and almonds and went to bed happy.

The rest and my strong legs served me well on our mountain hike the following day.  We had a picnic lunch by the Val du Galbe.  We sat in the shade by a small stream and looked at the mountains.

We ate ham and butter sandwiches with apples.  I thought some good old American southern fried chicken would have been a nice meal after this hike.

From the Val du Galbe, we drove to Formiguères to visit a church built in the 5^th century AD in the “Roman-Byzantine” style. 

This Roman-Byzantine style at this church described a square church rather than a rectangular one.  Greek churches are usually square with a dome on top.  I also noticed that the priests in the sculptures held mass with their backs to the congregation.  The tour guide spoke French like a Spaniard, so I could understand what he was saying.

After our tour, we ate an omelet with fried potatoes.  I was making an inventory of simple French meals to put together in half an hour during our vacation.

We hiked up another mountain peak on our honeymoon vacation to the Vally d’Eyne.  I liked ham and butter sandwiches on half a baguette, so I knew I had a reward for my hike coming.

We found some trees and took naps in the shade after our hike and listened to a mountain stream tinkling nearby.

After our siesta in the sun, we went to the Spanish border town of Puigcerda.  Laurent and I wanted to visit Barcelona and needed a train schedule.  My father-in-law pointed out the buildings in town that had been damaged during the Spanish Civil War when we drove into town.

I was surprised that the buildings still stood without being repaired.  They made me feel incredibly close to George Orwell’s book Homage to Catalonia, which I read in college.

Laurent’s parents go to mass on Saturdays, so we headed out to Font Romeu for mass.  The Catalans sing whenever they can.  All the mass responses were sung instead of spoken.  Two nuns played the guitar.  My “mass French” had improved, so I could follow what was happening.

We ate grilled lamb outside that night.  My brother-in-law put up a screen and showed slides of “the royal wedding” in Joué-les-Tours, various photos of Versailles where my brother-in-law was in perfume school, and glimpses of a trip Laurent and I took to Lyons (France) to visit his aunt and uncle.

When we looked at the slides of Versailles, I said, “I’ll tell my American friends that my in-laws live there,” I said.  We sat around giggling eating popcorn with sugar on it like the French serve it.

A few days later, we celebrated the name days of one of Laurent’s family friends on August 15^th – the Assumption of the Virgin.  In Catholic countries, you have a party on the day that honors the saint you are named after with a nice lunch for your friends and family.

We went to a Catalan restaurant in a hotel for the celebration.  We ate cantaloupe with air-dried mountain ham called Serrano as a starter.

To this day, I still love the melt-in-your-mouth creamy white, fat on Serrano ham.  We ate roast lamb with small, green kidney-shaped beans called flageolets.

For dessert, we ate crema catalana with a caramelized crust on top and a slice of orange in the bottom.  This dessert is a tropical crème brulée.

I liked this simple Catalan meal from the mountain regions of Cerdanya and Rosillón as they were written in the Catalan language.  These meals reminded me of reading and marveling at the restaurant reviews of Jay Jacobs as a kid in Gourmet magazine, which read like Margaret Mead’s anthropology books.

After lunch, we went to Saillagouse to see Catalan dances.  Little boys dressed in black hoisted themselves to the top of human pyramids while girls clad in red danced around them.

I thought activities like this happened only for tourists, but I could see parents and grandparents taking pictures of grandchildren, too.  I was the only tourist in town and was having fun.

I asked to participate in the candlelight procession for Saint Mary at Font Romeu.  There is a man-made hill there that is constructed to look like a Calvary with crosses on it.

The procession started there and meandered through the countryside to the church.  The candles the church gave us fit inside holders that gave out enough light, so we could sing the words of Ave Maria in Latin.

The Latin words filled the air.  We all crammed into the church to hear the homily at the end of our procession.  Despite the words, I felt as if I had participated in a pre-Christian rite.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

Ruth Paget Selfie

Visiting French Catalonia (Pyrenees Mountains) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting French Catalonia (Pyrénées Mountains) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I slept on the train from Venice (Italy) to French Catalonia, which is in the Pyrénées Mountains range between France and Spain.  The historic capital of French Catalonia is Perpignan while the capital of the Spanish Catalonia is Barcelona.

Our train was waiting to enter France in Ventimiglia (Italy).  Laurent told me we were in the longest city in Italy, because Ventimiglia means “twenty miles.”

The water along the French Riviera glistened blue, flowers in many colors lined our path as the train sped by, and the fields just needed some black crows to look like a Van Gogh painting.

People swam here all along the coast.  We passed Cannes and Monaco, which I did gawk at looking out the window.

We arrived in Nice and took another train bound for Marseilles, which was waiting in the station.  We hopped on and sped to Perpignan.  

There is a wonderful painting in the Perpignan train station by Salvador Dali on the ceiling called The Center of the Universe.  You have to look up at and turn around to see the painting.  You can walk right under it, if you do not know that it is there.

From Perpignan, we took a train to Villefranche le Conflant and a funicular train up the hills into the French Catalan hinterlands where we would be staying in a tiny, Catalan village.  Laurent spent most of his childhood summers in this village.

We stayed in a typical Catalan home, which Laurent’s parents arranged for us.  My French mother-in-law took charge of our laundry to wash and dry on a line.  I would iron everything when it was done and volunteered to iron clothes for the rest of the family, too.

For dinner, we ate trout that my father-in-law caught in a mountain stream.  My mother-in-law sautéed the trout in olive oil with sliced and baked almonds.  It is hard to eat like this all the time, but on vacation I like this kind of food.

Laurent took me on a tour of the village where we were staying.  The church was cute, but it was more important for Laurent to show me where he and his brother played Cowboys and Indians.  Laurent was always the Cowboy.

Laurent showed me which mountain peaks were in Spain and which were in France. 

I wanted to ask, if it always “rained on the plain in Spain” in the valleys by the Spanish mountain peaks as in the musical My Fair Lady.

We ate Spanish Serrano ham for lunch.  The hot weather with no air-conditioning made me crave a lot of salt. 

You cannot live without salt, which is why food in hot countries is salty.  I learned in my chem-bio classes in high school (pre-med curriculum) that salt promotes the healthy functioning of brain chemistry (synapse communication if I remember correctly). 

(The surgeon-general should list how much salt (NaCL) a person needs and provide some kind of way to measure salt in the body.  A home urine test could do this.  People who live in hotter climates need more salt due to the greater loss of salt through sweat they experience.  Also, urine tests can be done for many things that you test with blood tests.) 

The heat in the South of France makes you want to take siestas as in Spain.

I flopped into bed after our walk and slept again.  I wanted to be in great form for more tourism after lunch when I woke up.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

Ruth Paget Selfie

Visiting Venice (Italy) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Venice (Italy) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

We made reservations to take an overnight train to Venice from Naples.  We ate an early dinner at the Trattoria da Giorgio.

We ate pasta made from the hard flour called durum with marinaria tomato sauce, which is just tomato purée with sautéed garlic, olive oil, and oregano.

We cooled off in the air-conditioned dining room and enjoyed watching the noisy television.  The newscasters in Italy looked cool in their black leather jackets.  Italian women newscasters in their leather jackets wear their hair long unlike French women newscasters, who wear it short.

I was tired and slept all the way from Naples to Venice.  We left our bags at the train station and set out in a ferry down the Grand Canal in Venice.

The palaces were beautiful one after the other, but I thought the logistics of living in Venice would be difficult with plumbing letting out into the canal, delivering mail by boat, and grand pianos being delivered by boat.

Water sloshed into the first floors of these palaces along the Grand Canal.  The palaces enchanted me, but I thought of the logistics involved in carrying out everyday life on water as we passed boats carrying garbage.

We did not have a map pointing out all the castles, but you really do not need to know the names to enjoy them – Peggy Guggenheim’s Palace has big lettering on it.  However, I liked the romance of not knowing what I was seeing, so I could come back to Venice again.

Finally, we stepped off the Palazzo San Marco.  I had already seen the most portable treasures of the Cathedral at an exhibit at the Chicago Institute of the Arts, but we still visited the church.

The musicians at the Café Florian were just beginning to play as we entered the Cathedral San Marco.  I am a Greek sympathizer and have to admit that I disliked seeing all the items that had been looted from the Orthodox Greeks at Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade.

I knew the Fourth Crusade still enrages Greeks, because they know most of the items in San Marco’s Treasury originally belonged to the Orthodox Church.

Next, we went to the Doge’s Palace.  My walks in Chicago made me able to skip up Sansovino’s Stairway of the Giants without a problem.

Every room seemed to be decorated with the golden colors of Veronese, Tintoretto, or Tiepolo.  Gold colors glisten in Venice due to the reflection from water.  Teacups with gold decoration look beautiful here for this reason.

We ate salty Venetian fish dishes at a restaurant.  Salt leaves your body with perspiration and can leave you feeling dizzy and weak in very hot climates.  I liked this food even though I did not eat it at home.

We walked around the Venetian Piazzas, which are like villages with markets.  We crossed bridges and walked.  I rested in a park by a graveyard while Laurent walked around.

Birds chirped in my lovely yet somewhat eerie resting spot before we took the train. 

Edgar Allen Poe would have written creepy stories about the people buried in this graveyard.  The truly rich had Palladian Villas on land and graveyards located on land as well. 

The Welsh writer James (now Jan) Morris wrote a book called Venice about living on Venice for a year when his/her children were small that I liked as well.  Scrambling for food, what I call food war games, were a daily occurrence. 

He/She stayed thin running around to each different village market buying food.  These markets were held on different days and you had to be friends with the vendors to even buy good food.

When my daughter Florence was born, the first I did was to learn to cook to insulate my family from “market food supply” shortages and price hikes after reading Venice by James/Jan Morris. 

By cooking I mean, cooking from dry goods in case of street rioting in a secured building.  We lived in Paris when I read that book, which does have a history of street rioting as did Detroit where I grew up.

By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

Ruth Paget Selfie

Visiting the Isle of Capri (Italy) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting the Isle of Capri (Italy) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

We started the next day out by going to Naples.  We found our way down to the port and caught the ferry to the Isle of Capri.

I turned my head around and thought the Bay of Naples look pretty in the distance with Mount Vesuvius behind us.

I never understood why people ranted and raved (literally) in Tiberius’s case so much about Capri until we arrived at the harbor of the Isle of Capri.  The crystal blue water around us glistened.  We could see down to rocks in the bottom of the water.

There were yachts all around us with white-haired men and blonds in bikinis.  The area all around the harbor was full of designer clothing stores and accessories firms. 

Once you started walking along mountain paths through all the hotels and villas, the Isle of Capri became very quiet.

Every place on the Isle of Capri was immaculately clean.  No cars or Vespas were allowed on the streets or mountain paths; it was very quiet. 

Bright pink and red flowers streamed down the side of whitewashed walls.  I wished we were staying in a hotel with a swimming pool.  The sunbathers at these hotels with swimming pools seemed to ignore their swimming pools, though.

We paid money to go to a private beach.  Groups of Neapolitan young people gathered at this beach. We swam through grottos and dove down to touch rocks that you can see at the bottom of the shallow water in the sun. 

We took the last ferry back to the Bay of Naples and admired the sun setting behind Mount Vesuvius in the background.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

Ruth Paget Selfie