Barcelona Blog Day 2 -- Science Museum

February 4, 2015

It was forecast to be rather rainy again for our first full day in BCN. So, we opted to spend much of the day inside as I had wanted to check out the CosmoCaixa science museum. But first, we ran to grab breakfast across the street from our hotel.




We were floored that Jason and I got coffees (mine "fancy") and all 5 of us had a pastry for a total of a whopping 8€. Yup, that's it! I was also excited to speak more Spanish. Jason wanted jelly but I could not remember the word for that in Spanish. I was able to go up to the lady and ask all in Spanish "Do you have...oh...How do you say..." and then I said 'jelly' in English and mimed spreading it on the bread. And in Spanish she was all, "Oh, you want butter" and again, in my Spanish, I got to be all, "No not butter, it is sometimes strawberry or grape and you spread it on bread" and then she got it "Mermelada?!" which is still not quite the word for jelly but sure, strawberry marmalade, fine. :) Then I took the kids back up to our room for some water and told the cashier in Spanish that my husband was there and was ready to pay our bill. :) Probably this isn't that exciting to the rest of you, but, living in Germany, I was so excited that I was able to communicate in the local language. I could understand and be understood. It was refreshing. Sometimes I forget how exhausting it is to have to work so hard at communicating. I was pleasantly surprised at how well it went for me with Spanish. When I attempt German, I have to work really hard at working it all out in my brain if I even know the word in the first place and then I mess up the articles (masculine, feminine, neutral) all the time and can't remember which order the words should go in the sentence so I end up sounding like Tarzan or something only able to speak in the present tense "Me want". My Spanish can just flow much better. I'm sure I still sound like Dora the Explorer with my very basic sentences and my obvious Mexican-influence versus actual Spanish accent but still, people, it was exciting. Be excited with me. Easton heard me and was like, "Mom, you are awesome." Woo hoo!

Anyway, we hopped on a train and then a bus. But, the whole time we were in Barcelona, our phones didn't do great with mapping. I had counted on being able to refer to them.


So, we took the bus a smidge too far and ended up "just outside Barcelona, hiking in the foothills of Mount Tibadabo. I was at the end of this path and I came to a clearing and there was a lake, very secluded..."

Oh wait. No lake. No crying woman bathing in the lake. (Bonus points if you get this reference.)


Anyway, we were up a smidge too high on ol' Tibadabo there. But the view was indeed lovely:




So, we ended up walking back down the mountain a ways before we got to the museum.






Checking out the museum's indoor rainforest we can see from here:


We walked up to the information counter inside and I totally had to do a double take when I saw Albert Einstein (yay, German!) and Charles Darwin sitting there in between the other live helping humans:


The museum was free for the kids and only 4€ for me and Jason. We tried to pay with a card but it had snowed and according to the employees, "It only snows once every 5 years here and since it snowed today, our computer systems are down." Say what? Of course we leave Berlin to go to Barcelona where we are there for the once every five years snow "storm". But anyway, whether it was the weather or not, we made it into the museum:


The Antartica exhibit:






Mesmerized by the Foucault pendulum:


More exhibits:








It was a fun family time and not at all crowded.




In the rainforest part, they had blowing floor vents, so Autumn pulled a mini-Marilyn:


We stopped for a small snacky lunch in their café and headed outside for a bit:




They had this interesting weather exhibit out there and it reminded me of when Ben "moved the island" on LOST:


A small collection of video clips from our time at the museum:


Eventually we left the museum, walking along the streets of a city that looks very different from our current home:








And back to our home-for-the-week on the train:


Easton the goober on the escalator. Since he didn't have too many pictures above:


They had these little "seats" lining the small street from the underground to our hotel:


We had some cereal and such back in our apartment for dinner and then kids were really confused when we said it was time for bed because they hadn't had a real "lunch" and thought the cereal they'd just had was lunch rather than dinner. Ah, traveling.

After the kids went to bed, Jason and I watched the Bachelor that aired in the U.S. the night before and pre-purchased tickets to visit the Sagrada Familia the next day.

Day 3 is here.

Barcelona Blog Day 1 -- Travel Day

One of the things we (mostly me) had been looking forward to with living abroad was how easily we could travel to other parts of Europe. In November, as winter was really starting to settle upon us (which is gloomy, dark, and wet here in Berlin) we thought about heading somewhere sunnier and warmer for "Winter Break" which is the first week of February for Berlin schools. I looked around for various deals and came up with Barcelona. There are tons of places much higher on our "to visit" list, but, for the time of year and budget, Barcelona was a good choice. We'd love to see London, but it's rather pricey and probably even wetter than Berlin at this time of year...not really worth "escaping" to in February for my money. We'd also super love to visit Paris, and if we do that, we'd super love to see Disneyland Paris as part of that trip...again, not really in the budget for the quick get-out-of-Berlin holiday break we had in mind. So, I wanted something "low pressure" (not too much we HAD to see) and south-er. :)

Well, would you believe that I found flights from Berlin to Barcelona for €282.95 TOTAL?!?!? For five of us!! Yes, that's round trip. That's not even 57€ per person (currently that's equal to about $62 USD). Cheaper than a train, by far. Combine that with a fairly decent booking.com rate on a 2 bedroom hotel apartment and all five of us were able to enjoy a 6 night vacation for less than the cost of flying just one of us home to Colorado.

February 3, 2015

Part of scoring the cheap flights was because we chose to travel Tuesday through the following Monday. So yeah, the kids missed the first day back at school after break. That's actually quite frowned upon here in Berlin but guess what: I never asked permission. I actually didn't even call them in absent. And no one called me to check either. Reassuring, no? ;)

Anyway, bright and early Tuesday morning we headed down to our train stop. It was lightly snowing and we walked to the corner to catch the U-bahn for the first leg of our journey. Berlin has two airports. Tegel is the nicer one in town...but the budget airlines fly out of an airport called Schönefeld. And it's on the outskirts of town. So it's about an hour from our flat, actually. 2 trains and a bus. We headed out eating muffins I'd made the night before:


The other way the budget airline stays "budget friendly" is to nickel and dime passengers where they can. So, baggage restrictions. Each passenger is allowed one wee carry on bag. But it's smaller than a typical carry on. EasyJet (the airline we flew) allows 50 cm (19.7 inches) x 40 cm (15.7 inches) x 20 cm (7.9 inches). British Airways (what we moved to Berlin on), for comparison's sake allows 56 cm (22 inches) x 45 cm (18 inches) x 25 cm (10 inches). The big kicker is that, on EasyJet, that's all you're allowed. No "personal item" like a backpack or computer bag or purse. Yep, not even a purse. And definitely no free checked baggage, which is really not surprising these days.

We didn't even own enough tiny carry-ons but our friends let us borrow two and then we used Easton's Angry Birds backpack from school and two small suitcases that we already owned.

Waiting for the train, they run a lot less frequently in the wee hours of the morning. We left before 6 a.m. to make it to the airport for our 8:50 a.m. flight.


Eventually we made it to the airport. Which is a very strange (to us) airport. They don't have a bunch of gates. And they don't tell you your gate until, seriously, like 15 minutes before boarding. So, every single traveler is sort of just there in a big mass waiting for the screens to update. We killed a little time in the bathrooms and gift shop:

(Easton was being a bit of a punk so I cut him out of the picture.)

Finally they posted our gate info and we made the surprisingly long trek to get there. And then the planes all sit out a ways from the building itself.


Before long we were on our 2 hour long journey to Barcelona:


A 57€ ticket is also not going to include "luxuries" such as in-flight drinks or snacks, either. But Dalton is one thirsty dude. Like, all the time (and not easy to be around if he's über-parched). So we had to cave and fork over some money to buy a bottle of water from the flight attendants. But it sure made him happy:


I also had to work on the flight to make sure Autumn didn't get motion sick. We (she and I) were really good about not staring down at her device the whole time. We'd look out the window quite a lot. She actually never felt sick at all...which surprised her when she landed, "Hey, I didn't get goopy!" Hooray!

Once we touched down in Barcelona, we wound our way through the airport to catch the train into town. They only come about every half an hour or so:


But it wasn't too long before we were on our way to the stop closest to our hotel:


It was raining quite a lot and there were many exits from the train (we didn't come up out of the "right" one to be closest to our hotel). Jason stopped a lady to ask for directions but she didn't understand English so I had to suck it up and jump in with my Spanish. I was afraid she'd speak only Catalan and not understand mi español but she totes did and I totally understood her as well. She was extremely friendly (we've gotten used to how things can be in Berlin, I think) and she sort of walked along with us telling me about how the street we were looking for is "muy larga" and part was "aqui por la izquierda" (here to the left) and "allí a la derecha" (there to the right) and what number were we looking for? She got us right to where we needed to be. So friendly. In the rain!

I went to check in. The guy at reception spoke excellent English but told me I needed to leave a 2000€ deposit for incidentals and potential damage. I was like, "Two thousand?! Thousand??" and he was like, "Yes, but we will refund it". Then a little voice from around the corner piped up "two hundred". Whew. The building with the apartments was across the street and a few doors down from the hotel. I think locals even lived in this building. It was big and clean enough.

Autumn's bed was all set up for us:


That is our exact same IKEA couch as we have in our flat at home, just a different color. :)

The light coming from the top right of the picture above is the small kitchen.


Here is the other angle to the dining area and the balcony:


Off to the right there would be the hall to Jason's and my bedroom and the two bathrooms.

The view from the balcony:


The boys shared a room towards the entrance to the flat. Two twin beds:


It was a great set up for a picky eating family of 5. We headed out into the neighborhood for hummus and falafel for lunch. It was excellent and I got to speak more Spanish. We stopped for a few groceries but they didn't have the same sorts of things we were expecting (no vanilla yogurt for one). We came back to a still-cold room so the hotel staff came to check it out, delivered us blankets and we took forever looking at menus online and then we headed out looking for a pizza place. We walked to three different ones. The first was questionable and the other two were closed so we headed to a busy looking "cafeteria" but that was only a bakery. So we stopped at a fruit stand and headed up to eat some dinner with groceries we had in the flat. Jason headed out to buy himself a can of soup. But he doesn't know Spanish. So the lentil soup he bought wasn't vegan. It wasn't even vegetarian. :( Dalton was feeling homesick (for Berlin!) and when I gave the kids showers, we ran out of hot water during Autumn's. But the hotel had delivered us a couple of space heaters and an adorable Google Translated apology note about the heat in the flat. Time for bed. We would put Autumn to sleep in J's part of the bed so we could stay out in the living area with the kitchen and TV without disturbing her and then Jason would carry her to the sofa bed each night.
Day 2 is here.

Barcelona

Gosh, it's been a month now but our family visited Barcelona at the beginning of February.

People in the past have asked, "What are you going to do now that all 3 kids are gone all day?" and the answer is "The same stuff I had to do before...just with fewer kids." Seriously, I'm not taking naps and watching movies or visiting museums. Mondays are spent grocery shopping and running various errands...everything is closed on Sundays so there's lots of catching up to do plus getting stuff for lunches, snacks, and meals for the week. Tuesdays we host small group so it is my day to clean the flat. Wednesdays I participate in (and sometimes host) a women's fellowship. Thursdays is German. Fridays are half days for the kids. Commuting time is nothing to sneeze at. Food prep, dishes, laundry (you can't not do laundry for a day when you've got a family of 5 and a washer/dryer combo the size of 4 towels), school stuff...

That explains, hopefully, why I haven't blogged in so long. Yesterday's blog and this montage are only possible because Dalton has been home sick. Eventually I do hope to blog about Spain, but until then, here's a montage like I love to do:

Acht ist Pracht

I don't even know if that really makes sense in German. Probably it doesn't and no one would ever say it. Probably it's an adverb or something or needs to be attached to some other word or said in some other order. Oh well. Fluent Germans, feel free to laugh at me behind my back. ;) To the rest of you: Acht is eight if you didn't already know/assume that...my kids made the "oct"/acht octopus connection early on.

The obvious title for this post in English would be something like "Eight is Great!" so I was trying to be all clever in German "Acht ist...." but I know all of, like, 5 adjectives auf Deutsch. And the only words that rhyme with "acht" that I could think of were, like, conjugated verbs: macht (make), gemacht (made), bracht (which I think can mean vomit among other things)... So then I was going to be all "eight is wunderbar" and then it suddenly came to me: pracht. There is a café run by Christians here called "Prachtwerk" and I was thinking, "I don't know what the name even means"... ('Magnificent Work' according to Google Translate) and when I typed in "Acht ist Pracht" Mr. Internet told me "Eight is Grand".

Perfect.

And if the internet says so.... well then...

Moving along.

Dalton is eight!


Last Monday the 23rd was our little man's big day. And, by some lucky coincidence, their teachers had some sort of training so the boys didn't have school! Happy birthday to Dalton indeed!

Jason took the day off work and we kept Autumn home from Kita to have an all-about-Dalton day. He woke up to gifts and Dunkin Donuts:


Hey look, it's an 8!


His actual birth time.


This photo op has oft been a tradition for our family, but I wasn't really feeling it this year as it was technically still Sunday the 22nd in Colorado (where he was born) when it was 7:57 a.m. here in Berlin. Oh well.

After breakfast he dug into a few gifts:


And when he had opened them all and was already content with what he had received, Jason whipped out the first clue of a small treasure hunt (we did one for Easton and we knew Dalton was probably hoping for a hunt too). Eight clues for our eight year old. And at the end?! Treasure indeed: his very own iPod Touch!


We thought about taking the kids to a museum for the day but Dalton was perfectly content to check out his iPod, play Xbox with Easton with the new figures he received, and build new Legos. In his jammies. With all his family around. Truly a perfect day for Dalton. I spent part of the day making cupcakes as we had some afternoon fun to look forward to...



We had talked about some possible party ideas for Dalton...we found one that sounded cool but then they said that ALL party guests MUST be at least 8 years old (his closest friend is only 6 and then there's Autumn) and, when they didn't have school, I proposed, "hey, how about we go see a movie with a few friends on your actual birthday?" He loved the idea. He voted for Paddington but it was long gone from theaters here so the only other English version "kid" movie was:


We (me and mein Mann) hate SpongeBob, actually. I have never let the kids watch it. I think it's rubbish. But....whatcha gonna do? They're much older and actually exposed to much "worse" now so SpongeBob "Sponge Head" it was (seriously, that's what 'Schwammkopf' means. How redundant. 'Square Pants' would be something like "quadrathosen" if I'm not mistaken. Anyhoo...).

So, around 3 o'clock in the afternoon, we headed over to the Sony Center where the movies are most often screened "OV" (original version = ENGLISH!). We met our few friends there and settled in with popcorn. The movie was so so. Hardly any of it was "3D". And Jason even nodded off at one point. Shhhhh. ;)


After the movie we hopped on the train with everyone back to our flat. Jason rode one stop further to pick up some pizzas. Dalton showed off and shared his new iPod while we waited for Jason to show up with dinner.


And Murray gave me a hand with the cupcake toppers. I don't use artificial colors in food/frosting so I like to add décor in other ways. I forgot to have Jason print anything at work the week before so I had to hand draw them myself. And then, I stupidly miscounted how many kids we'd have, so Murray saved the day by drawing two more characters for me:




We ate. (Our friend from India asked for ketchup to dip his pizza in.) We sang and had cupcakes and, as the next day was a school day, our friends left. Dalton got a couple of FaceTime calls and a recorded Skype message from family in the States and he went to bed an exhausted and happy camper. After the kids were in bed I had to rally and whipped up some brownies for Dalton to share at school the next day. Brownies are definitely American but everyone liked them (according to Dalton) and Easton's teacher from Ireland (who teaches Dalton something or other) asked if she could have seconds...and Dalton told her no! Ha! He was like, "Well, since there's not enough for everyone to have two..." which is a perfect response had it been another student. I had a big laugh over that. Oh, our Dalton!