A dog of a summer





Last summer, we spent eight balmy days in Cataluña in Spain. Now that we are sliding inexorably towards winter, that holiday feels like it could have been a hundred years ago.

 

Outside the trees are bravely revealing their skeletal limbs, their cast-off clothes lying forlornly in a sodden heap at their feet.

Inside, the clocks have wound their limbs back, their cast-off hour lying hidden in the darkness of a shortened day.

As I scowl at the wind and rain, and pull what Ned Nederlander calls my "sleeping bag with sleeves" around me, I find myself yearning for some more Catalonian warmth, and feeling a little guilty that I thought the summer holidays dragged on for too long this year.

Who am I kidding? At the time, they did drag on for too long. They dragged on for sixty three days. To give that some context, it is equivalent to the gestational period of a dog. That gives the term "dog day summer" new meaning, especially since I think that being pregnant for sixty three days and popping a cute little puppy or two out at the end of it must surely be preferable to amusing De Jongens for the same period.



Vondelpark in summer - worth sticking around for

For a couple of reasons, amusing De Jongens was particularly challenging last summer. Firstly, there is the rather large chasm that exists between their idea of what constitutes "amusement" and Ned and my interpretation of the same term. Furthermore it was, by any measure – at least by any climatic measure - a complete dog of a summer here in The Lowlands, making it more difficult than it might have otherwise been to prise the game controller out of their hands and get them out and exploring. Then there was the surprise factor that we completely failed to anticipate - nearly every one of their friends returned to their homeland the second that school finished.  The prolific tears and heartfelt goodbyes (from parents, teachers and students) in the school foyer on the last afternoon should have sounded warning bells for me.  These were people who didn't exect to see each other for quite some time. A few of them were leaving Amsterdam for good, so even after only six months, we suffered our first ex-pat heartbreaks.
 
Us, we were the naive long-summer first timers who stayed put.  We had envisaged fun-filled days of hanging out with new friends, exploring our beautiful and fascinating new country together.  Instead, we rattled around an empty city, wondering where everyone had disappeared to, and finally understanding the sadness in the school foyer! 

Despite that, there were definite high points of the summer. Italy was one of them. So was Paris. Cataluña was another.  We struck a deal whereby if De Jongens came to Barcelona for four days and let us show them one of the world’s most amazing cities, we would balance the tour with four days beach/poolside.  The latter, they decreed (despite not being invited to negotiate), must involve no walks longer than 100 metres without prior approval from King Juan Carlos, no museum visits, no historical sites, and absolutely no art galleries under any circumstances. The promise of a trip to Camp Nou, the home ground of FC Barcelona, had Kleine Jongen, a long-term supporter of that team, eating from the palm of our hands. Grote Jongen, a Real Madrid supporter (ipso facto a Barca hater) took longer to convince, but in a rash moment I offered to take him to Madrid on a future break, and suddenly we had him onside too.
 
Negotiatons complete, all four of us willingly, even excitedly, set off for Spain. How I yearn for those warm, sunny days again now.
Barcelona was too lovely for words.  Ned and I revelled in the opportunity to bumble again through a language that we have some vague knowledge of.  It made a nice change from the usual order of things here in The Lowlands, where we are often cruelly ridiculed by our own children for our pitiful Dutch vocabulary and appalling accents.  


Un otra vino blanco por favor, y un poco mas tapas

We rented an apartment in the centre of the city, in a classic old Barcelona building, above an Iberian ham shop, next door to the world’s best churros maker.  In the same narrow pedestrian street, a stone’s throw from the Ramblas, was an antiquarian book seller, a milliner that looked like it hadn’t changed since Franco was a lad, and a dimly lit hole-in-the-wall bar.  The place was stacked literally to the rafters with wine, cheese, dusty tins and jars of artichoke hearts, pimentos, sardines, capers, tomatoes and a hundred other apparently-edible mysteries.  Cured hams hung from the ceiling, fresh copper-coloured bread sprawled seductively across the glass counter while all manner of cheese and olives beckoned from within it. As Ned and I stood transfixed in the doorway, a jovial Spaniard gestured to one of the three tables jammed into this cramped den of gluttony.  With De Jongens back at the apartment, mesmerised by the London Olympics, we obeyed immediately.
 

The pillars in the cathedral branch like tree trunks;
like strolling through a stone forest.
Look how the sun streams through the "forest canopy."

A definite highlight of Barcelona was La Sagrada Familia – Gaudi’s still unfinished, yet stunningly beautiful cathedral. I had last seen it in 1998 when it was pretty much an empty shell with a dirt floor and a lot of potential. This time I found myself standing inside the doors with tears running down my face, so breathtaking was the transformation. Even de Jongens looked impressed, not once rolling their eyes and asking "How long until we can leave?" 

Our fascination with the great Spanish architect continued as we toured Casa Battlo, the house Gaudi designed and constructed for an influential Barcelona family.  Lots of ideas there for our next home renovation . . .  ceilings shaped like shells, chimneys shaped like dragon's tails, attics shaped like a whale's rib cage. I loved it.


Add across, down and diagonally; all add to 33, Christ's age at death

Awed as I was by Gaudi's creative brilliance, I couldn't help wondering what ever happened to the tram driver who hit him in 1926, or to the taxi drivers who witnessed the accident but refused to take the unconscious genius to hospital because they thought he was a vagabond (like that's a reason for not helping him). He died a few days later from his injuries. Thankfully his legacy remains scattered through the city.
 
 







Cuter, cheekier, smilier

The relentless London Olympic Games telecast combined with a few jugs of sangria rekindled our latent aspirations to athletic glory, and we were feeling faster, higher and stronger than usual. 
 

Thus we felt compelled to visit the Barcelona Olympic Stadium  and nearby Olympic Museum – an inspiring and fascinating temple to human achievement, not to mention IOC politics (La Sagrada Sportiva perhaps?).



Barca boys

The city from the Montjuic cable car

Our lovely Amsterdam neighbours were in Barca at the same time as us, which turned out to be a very pleasant coincidence. Their boys are also football mad, so all the males in the group dribbled off to Camp Nou, while we mums moved effortlessly from morning coffee on Montjuic overlooking the city, through lunchtime sangria in a quiet cobbled square, to Spanish rioja and tapas with our families that evening.  

We then hired a car and moved to the Costa Brava, exposing ourselves to a different sort of temple. The holiday parc temple that we had taken such a cyberspatial punt on comprised one thousand – read that again slowly and let it sink in – one thousand – tent, caravan and cabin sites. Like us, the majority of the occupants seemed to be climatic refugees from northern Europe, all worshipping the plentiful sunshine. Dutch, Geordies, Poles and Finns bowed down, sunburned shoulder to sunburned shoulder around the enormous dolphin-shaped pool (sadly designed with no Gaudi influence whatsoever, so that it was quite simply a pool shaped like a dolphin, and only recognisable as such from a low-flying aircraft). The only real imaginative touch was the daily aqua-aerobics program held within the dolphin's belly! Ned Nederlander and Kleine Jongen were the only people in the entire place (one thousand sites, remember) who wore sun shirts. The rest simply fried. It is possible, but I think unlikely, that they had applied the Factor 5 sunscreen that we saw for sale in the local supermarket.

I was the only female wearing a one-piece swimming costume, at least in the traditional sense. Ned tried to make me feel less like a grandma by pointing out that he could see dozens of other women wearing one pieces too.  Eventually I realised he was referring to the many women, of all shapes, sizes and ages, who were wearing only the bottom half of a bikini – one piece indeed, but a very small piece.  As the lone Antipodean representatives on-site, and indoctrinated as we are with the Slip-Slop-Slap mantra for avoiding skin cancer (“slip on a shirt, slop on some sunscreen and slap on a hat” for non-Australian readers), it felt like a flash-back to 1970s holidays on the New South Wales coast, with their long seasonal cycles of burn, blister, regret, peel, repeat. 

Ever the revisionist, I developed a Slump-Slurp-Slink approach to the holiday; slump in a chair, slurp on a gin, slink back to the cabin for a nap.

 

It's a dog's life.