Barcelona

I’m listening to this song as I write this post. Freddy Mercury and his impassioned and rather over the top number seems somehow fitting whilst writing about such a colourful and vibrant city. I heard this song so often during the television coverage of the 1992 summer Olympics and often wondered if I’d ever make it to “Barcelona!!” – imagine if you will Freddy belting out that last word. I certainly never dreamed I’d be visiting at the age of 40 with a husband and 2 children in tow – as the saying goes, life is full of surprises!

The Croad ladies hit the streets of Barcelona.

To say that we liked Barcelona is an understatement. We loved it – Olive declared it to be the best place we have visited and we are already toying with the idea of going back in the summer. Three days really wasn’t enough.

Before all the Barcelona love however, we had a wee bit of Croad love. I know that the girls have been missing Richard but I got a feel of just how much they miss him when I saw their reactions on spotting him at the airport.

Richard took this photo as the girls rushed towards him. Tissues anyone?!

After the dramatic reunion we headed into Barcelona. We were staying just outside of the city centre and once we’d dropped off our things and had a quick freshen up we jumped on the subway and headed into the city. Our first stop was the Arc de Triomf, a structure which was built for the Barcelona exposition in 1888.

So now we can all say we've seen two Arc de Triomfs 🙂

From here we wandered through the streets until we arrived at La Rambla, the tree lined pedestrian mall popular with tourists and locals. We grabbed a quick bite to eat then stopped at a souvenir shop to make the etremely important purchase of flamenco dancer outifts complete with polka dot clip clop shoes!

I think this picture sums up beautifully just how Olive and Edie feel when they don their flamenco outfits. And oh how they can get some noise out of the shoes!

As we excited the souvenir store we noticed that people seemed to be congregating on either side of the street and we quickly grabbed an empty spot. Being in a predominantly Catholic country on Good Friday, I had high hopes of seing something religious and our timing couldn’t have been more perfect.

When these two appeared we knew something interesting must be about to unfold...

...definitely interesting! Olive and Edie were completely unfazed.

Of course those guys were just the supporting act and JC soon took centre stage.

His Mum was there too and was a big hit with the girls - "Oooo look it's Mother Mary"!

Saturday began with the obgliatory search for a good cup of coffee and then we hopped on one of the tourist buses. We were heading for Parc Guell – the garden situated on the hill of El Carmel – and decided to take the tourist bus so we could see a bit more of the city along the way.

Olive really enjoyed the trip on the bus and listened very intently to all the commentary.

Edie mostly just practised posing!

We saw many eye-catching sculptures...

lots of interesting modern architecture...

a giant easter egg...

an old bull fighting ring...

and Gaudi's masterpiece the Sagrada Familia.

Maybe he was responsible for the giant Chupa Chups too!

We spent a good couple of hours in Parc Guell – there was so much to look at and listen to, as musicians were dotted throughout the gardens. The colours seemed so much richer and more vibrant than here in Antwerp or maybe that was just the beautiful weather!

Picnic lunch in Parc Guell.

Some of the gorgeous Barcelona colours.

We headed to the waterfront for dinner – close to what was the Olympic Village. We ate a great meal looking out at the sea and the girls had a blast running around on the sand.

Fish sculpture near Barceloneta beach.

The floral adornments, as you have probably guessed, are part of the flamenco outfits.

The beach at nightfall - beautiful.

We woke on Easter Sunday morning to more blue skies and headed straight back to Barceloneta beach. We’d promised the girls a longer play at the beach and a chance to wear “our togs”!!

No togs for me however - quite happy with a latte and a stunning view.

I know...I'm biased...but they are stunning!

And just a little bit crazy too!

Around lunchtime we walked into the old part of the city and stopped for some tapas. Then more wandering, a quick rest at home and then back to Sagrada Familia for a closer look.

It really is spectacular.

We headed back to La Rambla for dinner and a glass of sangria - yum 🙂

Richard disappeared back to the States very early on Monday morning and the girls and I spent our morning exploring the aquarium. I’d located the whereabouts of a Camper store and was planning on doing some serious credit card damage after all that fish watching. However Easter Monday in Barcelona meant most stores were closed so no new shoes for me – probably just as well! We did manage to find a Desigual store that was open which kept the girls very happy. They love the riot of colour and pattern that hits you when you walk into a Desigual shop and there was much oohing and aahing and a teeny bit of purchasing!

So all in all it was a fantastic trip – just a little on the short side! There are oodles more photos if you click on the Flikr link – my camera tells me I took over 500! Rest assured I did whittle it down befroe uploading!

It’s a big day in our house tomorrow – Olive is turning six. Will try and write something quick tomorrow evening. Until then, crank up the Freddy Mercury – Barcelona!!!

The big F – or forty, fit, feestjes, friends and food

It seems that my life is revolving around the letter F at the moment – and because of this I have been very busy. Being busy is a great thing although my blog has suffered and I do miss having time to write. It doesn’t help that Richard is having a spate of prolific blog writing at the moment -however I can’t see myself sitting writing at 4am which is when he’s usually tapping away!

Turning forty was my first big f. Not content with one party, I threw a second one here in Antwerp. As my birthday fell on a Saturday evening it was a perfect excuse for a bit of a do.

The official 40 portrait. Saturday 4th of February, 2012.

I had a great night surrounded by new friends from all over the world – the complete opposite of my birthday last year. It was a good time to look back and reflect how far I’d come since that gloomy Friday last year when I sat, very glum in front of the telly, scoffing the birthday tart the girls had picked out for me at the local bakery.

I made my own cake this year - Nigella's pomegranate jewel cake - lekker!

The wine flowed, the conversation flowed, Richard made a beautiful speech, I gave a pretty good rebuttal (!) and I managed to kick on till nearly 2am. (Those of you who know me very well will recognise what a feat this is. I am, after all, the woman who suggested an end time of 9:30pm for my hen’s night!)

Doing a bit of speech making.

Birthday parties or feestjes have been an almost weekly occurrence since we got back to Antwerp. This does mean that I am practically on first name terms with the staff at In den Olifant (gorgeous Antwerp toy store), but mostly it demonstrates just how many great friendships that we, as a family, are making.

The Mega Mindy twins with birthday girl Milla.

Mask making at Charles' birthday.

Even Mum and Dad got in on the act.

Making friends with Natacha, Charles' precious baby sister.

The big 4 year old.

In addition to all our new friendships we were lucky last week to have time with an old friend who lives on this side of the world. I’ve known Davina since my early teaching days – nearly 20 years ago eek –  and she’s now based in London with her partner and baby. Davina and Jenson came and spent a few days with us and we had lots of fun taking them to our favourite places. It was really nice also to watch Olive and Edie with a young baby. Olive in particular was so interested and helpful – quite the mother hen.

Having fun at Aquatopia.

We also made sure Jenson's visit was very educational. Here O and E are instructing him in the all important art of iPad usage. J is for Jenson!

Olive in Mummy mode 🙂

So now to fit and food…and really what they are all about is yet another f word – focus. Our life in Belgium affords me a very great gift – time – and this year my goal is to put that time to good use. Two goals I want to achieve are getting fit and working towards improving our family diet. I’m running and getting back into weight training with the aim of doing the 5k race that is part of the Antwerp 10 mile event in April. With a friend I’ve made here, I’m doing an online course focussed on whole food. You might remember my earlier post where I revealed my vegetable deficient past! I’m hoping this course will be a good way to get some more plant based food onto our table – it’ll be just like the picture below!!

I suspect members of my family are engaging in some serious laughter and choking on their respective hot beverages right about now!

And f….inally – the other thing I’ve done is join the PTA – I’ve actually wound up as co-chair in fact. I was struggling with an f association for this – best I can come up with is there are f…ive of us on the committee!

Take care everyone. xxx

Back

So we are back in Antwerp after a wonderful four weeks  in New Zealand. Yes the weather wasn’t great, but seeing family and friends more than made up for it. I was planning on blogging whilst I was away, but we were so busy and selfishly I didn’t want to give up any of my precious time to sit on a computer.

I found coming back harder than I’d anticipated. Richard went back to work, the girls went back to school and I felt thoroughly depressed! Fortunately I came home with season 1 and 2 of Downton Abbey on DVD, and used that as  medication to get me through 🙂

I’ve decided not to blog about our trip – what I’ve done is put a heap of photos on Flickr and written captions for all of them. If you’re interested click on the link and you’ll get a small taste of our trip home. If you click on the set entitled New Zealand the pictures will come up in roughly the right order.

At the end of our first week back in Belgium, we celebrated Edie’s fourth birthday. We threw together a party and Richard managed to do a great replica of the Minnie Mouse cake Edie saw on YouTube – for some reason my girls love watching cake decorating clips!

The master at work.

Stage two complete...

and now for the tricky bit!

The finished product - Edie proclaimed it "perfect!"

Edie modelling her birthday present.

Making the fruit kebabs.

Our house all dressed up for the party.

Pin the tail on the donkey was very popular.

Richard is travelling back to New Zealand on Sunday but is under strict instructions to be back in time for my official 40th in just over two weeks.

Wonder if he’ll make me a Minnie Mouse cake too?!

Speelgoed

With another five weeks or so of zomer vakantie left I’ve been exploring things do with the girls outside of Antwerp. As I haven’t driven since I’ve been in Belgium us girls have had to rely on my bike or public transport to get around. Fortunately Antwerp has a great public transport system and as we now live so close to the beautiful central railway station, I’ve been focussing on places we can visit which require us to take a train to get there.

Inside Antwerpen Central Station

The city of Mechelen is about 25km out of Antwerp on the way to Brussels. We’ve been there before to visit the science and technology museum Technopolis. Mechelen also has a toy museum called the Speelgoed Museum – speel meaning play. Situated only 100 metres from the railway station it was the perfect place to start our train excursions.

We invited our friends Christina and Charles to join us. The girls were very excited to meet  friends in the big train station, find and climb aboard the right train and look after the ticket until it was time to hand it over to the conductor. After a short ride we arrived in Mechelen and found the toy museum. Edie had been in the midst of a grumpy tantrum but as soon as she saw the window of the museum, “I want to go home!” rapidly transformed into “I want to go in there!”

And they didn’t stop squealing and pointing and oohing and aaahing for the nearly three hours we spent in the museum. It was fantastic – a huge and varied collection that would appeal to young and old. The first two floors house the permanent collection and the top floor is home to temporary exhibits, the current one focusing on The Circus.

Charles turned into an amazing strong man when he went into the museum!

There were dolls and dollhouse furniture...

some seriously stylish tea sets...

Barbie, Ken and all their groovy pals...

even Jacinta's Barbie kitchen from when she was little!

Harry Potter and Hagrid were made out of Lego...

as was this old favourite.

Some elderly but rather distinguished teddy bears...

and so many beautiful puppets, marionettes and wind up toys.

The train section was a big hit with the kids. Here they are looking down through glass at trains zooming around underneath them.

"Send in the clowns..."

and the monkeys!

So all in all our first train excursion was a big success. Have got a few more up my sleeve so will keep you posted.

Take care everyone. Lots of love xxx

Dagsoep

It’s a stunning day in Antwerp – blue sky, a very warm breeze – the type of day when every window and door in the house is open, and a trip to the ice cream shop is a matter of survival rather than a Saturday treat.

And I have spent most of the morning in the keuken making soep!

Celeriac and apple soup. Recipe from MindFood magazine.

I love soup. It’s so much more than just food. For me it’s full of memory and comfort. My mum always had a pot of her homemade chicken soup on the stove during winter – spiced up with curry powder – just the way my Dad liked it. She also made a very tasty celery soup and I was thinking of my mother this morning as I made a pot of celeriac and apple soup.

Blame it on the market. When I wandered round this morning, admiring table upon table laden with fresh produce, a particularly large and unattractive celeriac caught my eye and I knew instantly what it’s fate would be. I love celeriac, not just the taste, but the fact that something so ugly can produce such delicious flavours, can in fact produce something beautiful.

You can also blame my bout of soup making on culture shock. You might remember one of my earliest posts was about culture shock and I listed several of the signs that indicated you were suffering from it. One of them was overeating and unfortunately that’s the one that has stayed with me as the others have one by one packed their bags and moved on to overwhelm some other recent arrival.

Seeking comfort in food is not uncommon – I’m sure we can all name dishes or foods that have comforted us in some way. Often it’s food from our childhood – mum’s macaroni cheese instantly springs to mind – as does her soup.

My comfort food in Belgium has been patisserie and chocolade. ( There is no dutch translation for patisserie. It’s one of those French words that has been assimilated into daily usage. Other examples are Voila, Ca va and Allez.)

Overindulging in patisserie and choocolade is fantastic for the tastebuds but not at all fantastic for your head or for your waistline! So it is time for this last lingering bit of culture shock to be firmly escorted from the premises.

In making soup today I was seeking a different kind of comfort. The comfort that comes from making something from scratch that is not only good for me but also tastes fantastic. The comfort that comes from hearing your daughter say, “that smells great Mum, can I have some?” The comfort of knowing that I have lunch sorted for the next week. And the comfort of knowing that were will be no negative feelings associated with polishing off a bowl  of dagsoep or soup of the day.

From this...

to this...

to this. Voila! A little bowl of heaven. Beautiful peonies care of the market too.

So as the weather turns colder in New Zealand I can highly recommend the aesthetically challenged celeriac as a great soup ingredient. If you want the recipe, let me know.

Am now off on aforementioned survival dash for something cold.

Love to you allxxx

Ik ben terug – I’m back!

Hello everyone!
It feels like forever since I last sat down at the keyboard to write and to be honest I have been conveniently finding other things to do in the past few days. The last few weeks have been such a mix of things and have seen us go through significant change again and it has unsettled me. Moving house, reuniting with and then having to say goodbye to close family, has left me feeling somewhat low and pretty homesick, and feeling like I just didn’t have the energy to write anything!
A couple of things however have spurred me on to get back in front of the keyboard. Firstly the knowledge of how helpful writing is for me – how helpful this blog has been – especially in those first months when everything here was so hard. Secondly my blog has been invited to be part of a website – http://www.kiwimummyblogs.co.nz. Up until now my readers have been my family and friends but now that I am featured on this site I am about to go global! To give you an idea, when I checked my blog stats today I’d had 44 visits and two strangers have subscribed to receive email updates when I post something new – I was only added to the website last night. I just couldn’t bear the shame of having all these people told about my blog and then have them go there and find – well – nothing! So – Ik ben terug!
I’m going to devote the rest of this post to pictures and these really may only be of interest to my family. I could write pages about our trip to Italy, our time with my sister and her family and our house move but I’d rather share these images instead. Hope you enjoy them.

Villa Gabriella - our home away from home in Castellina in Chianti.

How to keep four young children entertained whilst looking around beautiful old churches.

William and Olive were very happy to be back together.

The team wandering through the streets of Siena.

Approaching the piazza in Siena.

Edie and William tucking into their spaghetti.

Statues or monuments to the story of Romulus and Remus were regular sights.

The Croad girls and the McKenzie boys - world famous in New Zealand!

One of the aforementioned beautiful churches.

The walled town of San Gimignano.

Sir William and his ladies.

Pisa - not the leaning tower - obviously!

What do you call an Irish woman with one leg? Eileen!

Pisa was my favourite place - the children really enjoyed it too.

In the museum at Pisa there was a costume exhibition - some of the original pieces used in the Zefirelli version of Romeo and Juliet - Olive loved it.

Can you see what we had to watch on the tiny tv in our villa?

Our William is not impressed by the appearance of Kate Middleton in her wedding dress!

Back in Antwerp exploring the statue park.

Edie modelling the latest fashion in tennis gear.

Goofing around with my favourite statue.

I think that’s enough for now! I’m sure you get the picture that our time with family was great – thank you Sarah, Malcolm, James and William. We miss you heaps already.
Take care everyone xxx

A bit of housekeeping.

You’ve probably noticed that I’ve been tinkering with my blog. As I’m learning more about the whole blogging thing, I’m trying to incorporate what I’m learning into my blog, plus it’s always fun to change how things look.
I’ve added a blogroll which is a list of the blogs that inspired me to blog and continue to inspire me. Just click on the blog name and you’ll be taken straight to it. Richard’s blog is there – his is very different to mine but I’m sure you will enjoy it.
I’ve also added a category cloud which sort of groups posts that share some similarities in terms of the content. Finally I’ve added a link to Flickr. If you don’t know about Flickr it’s a great online tool for storing, organising and sharing photos. As I’m taking so many photos at the moment I’ve set up a Flickr account. So in the future I won’t have to overload my blog posts with pictures. There’s not much in there at the moment as I’m still learning about it, but if you click on the Flickr link you’ll go straight to my photos.
This will be my last post for a while as the girls and I are heading away and then we don’t get internet at the new place until early May.
Thank you all for reading and I’ll be back soon.