I have grand plans for the sun gold tomatoes I got from the FedCo sale last weekend…

Actually, I was playing with goats and sheep last weekend, so a friend who works up there grabbed me a couple. They are twice the size of the one I got last year! Last year my single plant was about 2.5 m tall, and that was with pinching off the suckers! My friend says she doesn’t bother pinching the suckers on these, and her single plant grew to ramble about 15 feet across the yard.

So, I have high hopes that the two plants will cover this trellis with mounds and mounds of little golden orange jewels.

I built the trellis today out of a junk Norway maple that DH cut down last weekend (so the back garden would get more light). He just rolled his eyes at the thing when I started it, but I like it, and the neighbors commented that they like it… and in the end he likes it too.

The weekend was also about iris… cleaning out the front bed… the nasty goutweed is winding its way all through the iris and I think it keeps it damp and nice habitat for those snails that like to munch it. Hopefully a bit of air will help them. They have good and bad years, not sure how last year was.

Here’s the nasty goutweed in the Siberian iris, on the left (didn’t get to this yet), and the weeded out part on the right.

And somebody gave me some dwarf dark purple iris! So I made a place for them… bigger iris to the side and bee balm behind. I dug up some big clods of the Siberian iris that had pushed its way into this little bed… and put it down in an open spot left from clearing out some goutweed.

I’ve been knitting little fish. But no spinning… yet! Maybe next weekend!

The recap of the Spain trip is being interrupted to tell you about the fabulous weekend I had with some friends in Bethel, VT. We were hanging with our pal Kristen at her farm. There were newish babies and a very new baby (born the evening we arrived)! Lots of snoggling with said babies and the bigger sheep and goats too. Lots of talking and laughing and playing with fiber. Doesn’t get any better, right?

But now I want a drum carder.

(Sara’s thinking, “I don’t know, man, that’s some orange”)

I ended up with a lot of “before” sheep and goat pics, but very few after. This is Anna (the ewe) with Atlas (her lamb), before and after.

ETA: Anna and Atlas on the left… Sophie and Stella, the lamb born the evening we arrived, on the right! Skippyjon is dad to both.

Yep, she ended up on her butt… but a few minutes later his feet were trimmed!

Sorry for the word-light post, but there’s no other way I’ll be getting these things posted if I don’t just do it whatever way I can.

We had a fabulous time!

And I still want a drum carder.

We were in Barcelona for six days, and it probably deserves at least two posts. When I was in Spain, I saw so much that was blog-worthy, but at this point, I’m ready to start talking about fiber again! So, grab a cup or glass of something, sit back, and wander through the Barcelona with me…

The bus from Bilbao had signs all over that we shouldn’t eat on the bus, in contrast to the other buses we were on. I think it was this bus that had 3 university students sitting just in front of us, and they kept me pretty well entertained. It was a young couple and a guy friend. And who ended up sitting together? The two guys, who never stopped talking. She slept for a bit.

We were in the next to last back seat, and at some point I moved to the very back, because it was very hot in the sun. Not long after, we took on three younger riders, whose seats (assigned) were in the back. They were actually pretty entertaining too. Clearly a very different accent, more local, less “educated”. But the youngest (maybe 13) was so curious about where he was, and the oldest (maybe 16) was giving him quite the geography and cultural education.

After many hours (at which point we were very hungry and thirsty), we pulled into a truck stop off the highway, in Zaragoza (lisp the z’s!)

It was a very busy place, and at the bar we had the most fabulous chicken and roasted red pepper sandwich, along with a cheap but tasty glass of wine. I think there was a full-service restaurant, as well as indoor sitting for the bar, and outside picnic tables, and I’m not sure what else. Car parking was under a metal shade. And, like in most places we visited, there were large school groups there.

Parts of the scenery between Bilbao and Zaragoza reminded me of the Badlands in North Dakota. And the hills right outside the truck stop were also fabulous.

We arrived late in the day, and tired, to a much smaller room than we had expected. It was, without doubt, the worst of our accommodations, and the second priciest (100 euros; the parador was only 40 euros more a night, and we got an incredible breakfast buffet with that). There was not room to walk on either side of the beds. My pillow looked like a sanitary pad. There wasn’t room to put both suitcases on something. And it was 75 steps from the street to our room.

We managed to use the ipad to call my friend Alba who was over at Llanarium‘s Stitch and Bitch. We were too tired to figure out how to get there before they closed, so she came and met us! And we went out for a lovely Indian dinner. I must’ve been sleep deprived, because I have no photos of this! She gave me the most lovely gift, yarn dyed by her friend Marga (you can also find her on etsy).

lace-weight baby alpaca and silk! yowza!

Honestly, I don’t remember the sequence of what we did in Barcelona. We were staying in the Raval neighborhood, which we learned (after we got there) is also known as Barcelonastan due to the many Pakistani immigrants living there. I think there were 10 halal butchers in the two or three blocks of Carrer Hospital (Hospital Street), as well as 5 vegetable/fruit markets and two pastry shops.

It was extremely noisy there. Our windows looked over about 5 dumpsters, and they got emptied twice during the night. The first night we thought the neighborhood was primarily Arabic (but it’s primarily Pakistani, with a large dose of Arabic), and so in the morning we exclaimed “and that was without alcohol???!!!!” There was lots of loud talking and arguing all night long, and about 5:30 am the women came out and yelled at the men, and the kids started yelling too. But the next night was worse, some guy yelling “help help” and the sounds of things crashing into dumpsters and “doctor doctor” (in English, though much of the rest was presumably in Urdu or who knows what). A morning or two later, I heard loud noises (8 am or so) on the street, and peeked out from the balcony. I think what was happening was pressure from outside the neighborhood, harassing the people who lived there. We got one hour sleep one night. And then I started wearing the earplugs. And life improved dramatically!

Anyhoo…

The first day was rainy and we took the funicular up to Montjuïc. We visited the Fundació Joan Miró and just wandered our way back down into the city. Miro’s art amuses me… it is playful and colorful (no photos allowed, check out the link). We had a great lunch at Le Font del Gat, where I learned the waiter was from Peru, and the diners next to us were from from Italy.

On the way back down into town, we stopped at the Caixa Forum, where they had a Goya and Delacroix (and others) exhibition. We saw Goya’s Clothed Maja/La Maja Vestida, which was fabulous, because at the Prado we saw the Nude Maja/La Maja Desnuda. In Madrid, I thought I liked the nude better, because she has such a lovely glow to her skin, but in Barcelona, I decided I like the clothed maja (gypsy) better… maybe it’s the glint of gold in the fabric, maybe it’s the suggestive tease.

We managed to visit La Bouqueria, but it was closing as we arrived and we never managed to get there when it was fully open (we arrived on Good Friday, I think). I was shocked at a stall that was selling dried mushrooms… yikes they are expensive! We must have some serious wealth stocked in jars at our house (dried porcini, reishi, chagga, black trumpets, bluets, hen of the woods, chicken of the woods, and more)… I recognized some of what we have in the market, most of it around 80 euros or more a kilo.

We walked over to La Barceloneta and I put my feet into a new body of water, the Mediterranean Sea!

The natural gas building was a lovely surprise, it was gorgeous. Hmmm… for some reason I thought Spain had banned hydrofracking , but I may be wrong. It’s a huge problem in NY and PA, and if you live there and don’t know about it, let me know, I’ll hook you up with a friend who can tell you a lot about this (and why it is a very bad idea).

View of Montjuïc in the photo with boats in the foreground. There’s a cable car that goes from Barceloneta to there, but we didn’t take it. The last photo is public art, La Cara de Barcelona, Face of Barcelona, by Roy Lichtenstein.

I think my favorite part of Barcelona was the Barri Gotic/Gothic Quarter. Here are a bunch of photos of this area from somebody else.

There are walls built by the Romans that are about 2000 years old!. The walls still stand and have been repaired in places.

The courtyard at the cathedral,

The angels visiting somebody… I thought this was at the cathedral, but I’m not sure we went in there.

We found a stone in Hebrew in an alley near the Ancient Synagogue. Here’s a link to the synagogue’s page. It is one of the oldest synagogues in Europe, and I thought I read that since the synagogue in Jerusalem was destroyed, it may be the oldest in the world. Apparently that is up for some debate. It was closed when we were there, and we didn’t get back to go for a service or a visit. I saw a great website while I was in Spain that showed images of the place as it was “rediscovered” (I think in the 1970′s) and as it has been restored (of course I can’t find them now).

Giant coat hanger art at Plaça de Sant Miquel

Walking around the old quarter,

The Barcelona Franca Train Station, a lovely old-fashioned iron and glass rail station,

Just some things that amused me wandering around,

I think I have to save the rest for another post…

fiber updates

I am going to VT this weekend to hug baby goats! (and hang out with friends…)

The snow pile at work is still there.

Another bus ride, from León to Bilbao with a half hour stop in Burgos. Sadly I didn’t have my camera handy when we saw a shepherd walking his sheep over the highway just outside of León… he was leading maybe 80 of them! The bus pulled through several villages, with quick stops in each, and half an hour in Burgos… enough time for a coffee (on the left, some village, on the right, a view of the cathedral in Burgos).

We had some great views of the Cantabrian Mountains… they are crazy!

Bilbao was really a great city. It sits on the Nervión River and because of its industrial background, it seems the city sometimes gets a bad rap. It shouldn’t. It is beautiful! For some reason it reminds me a bit of Boston.

The Guggenheim is here, and is supposedly partly responsible for the city becoming something new. Jeff Koons‘ Puppy is here (the Spaniards say “POO-pee”). I’m not a huge fan of his, but Puppy is great!

The museum is crazy looking. I especially liked the Richard Serra exhibit “The Matter of Time” (there’s a pic on the wiki link). It was so disorienting to walk through his sculptures! Outside, on the river side, mist would rise in front of the museum.

Here’s some views around the city….

The Zubizuri footbridge (Basque for “white bridge”). That glass snail-looking thing is the subway entrance!

We met our first Pastor Catalán (aka Gos D’Atura in Catalan, or Catalan Shepherd) along the river under those lovely trees. She was very sweet! And don’t you love that the stairs all make it easy for wheels (wheelchairs, strollers)?

People in Bilbao (the Bizkaia) speak a unique language, Euskera aka Basque aka el vasco, which is not related to any other language in the world! Luckily they all speak Castellano (aka Spanish) too. They also keep what feels like more regular hours to us… dinner is from 8-10 pm rather than 10-midnight, and you can get breakfast 8-9 no problem. Our typical breakfast was croissant and coffee. In Bilbao, they liked to stab the croissant with a fork!

We also had the best and most fabulous lunch in Bilbao… menu del día for 12 euro, enough to make dinner pretty much unnecessary. Complete with a bottle of water and a bottle of wine!

Salad of escarole and baby eel substitute (gula), bacalao al pil pil (cod), some wonderful duck and mango thing, and profiteroles. It was so good, we went here the next day, which was also good, but not quite so fabulous.

There was a cathedral in the old part of the city. We didn’t visit the inside, but it was interesting to note that there are lots of shops built right into the back side of it!

Window shopping was fun, as everywhere. (We did a lot of window shopping during siesta hours)…and, as everywhere, there were these shops that had rather unattractive (and really expensive) baby things,

And in the silicone kitchen shop, you can get all sorts of things…

The cars everywhere were intriguing, and this one on the Renault showfloor was especially so… the Renault Twizy,

Skunkfunk… I mean, who thinks of these names? I did love the wall of live ferns and mosses though…

I also liked that this shop put newspaper on the mannequins…

Holy week wasn’t as big a presence here, but we did see a bit of it…

We went grocery shopping at the Super BM!

We bought red nylons at Boutique de la Media… they are all the rage this year. It is a lingerie shop, with lots of lovely things, and so, given that I am on the “ultimate bra quest”, I asked the lovely (and very tiny!) Rosa if she had something in a size 30H/32G… Her eyes bugged out a bit, she said let me see your tag, and then she proceeded to bring me really lovely bras that all almost fit. I didn’t want to spend too much time, and they were hugely expensive (as in 140+ euros), but I was impressed. She said her shop specializes in the hard to find sizes… small bands and large cups as well as larger bands with smaller cups. So, if you’re in Spain and need a bra, go here!

Apparently while I was in the dressing room, the other woman told Ginny “she’s a little crazy“. Ginny asked which one. And she said, “well, it looks like the both of them.”

After two days and nights in Santiago de Compostela, we headed off to León by bus, with a stop for a bus change in Ponferrada (say it with all the trilly r’s).

The scenery between Santiago and Ponferrada was fabulous. I think we went straight east on the N-547 to Lugo, and then the A-6 (bigger highway) to Ponferrada.

grapes from the bus…

We didn’t have any time to explore Ponferrada, but we did note that they have a 24-hour car wash… something we’ve never seen!

At the bus stop I noticed an older woman dropped off by a taxi, along with a big sack of potatoes (25kg/50lbs) . She couldn’t carry them, and asked somebody (who I thought she knew) to help her. I went up and told her that I was happy to help, and she declined, and then I told her that I could carry the bag, please give it to me, and so she gave up her half and the other woman and I quickly took it where it needed to go.

After a few minutes she came over and chatted with us… Amelia has a sister (or sister-in-law, I forget) in Washington DC, where are we from?, why are we in Spain?, why do I speak Spanish? where did I learn it?, what do we do?… And then she said why are you going to León?, come to my house! (in Toreno, about 15 miles to the north). We felt like we had to get to where we were expected, but I have some regrets that we didn’t make it to Amelia’s in Toreno… it’s a smallish village, ~10,000 people, maybe I’ll send a letter and it will find her.

The Spanish landscape from the bus intrigued me. Old villages and small farms and not much else. Except that the landscape around León was frankly a bit boring. Think Ohio. But drier.

Catedral de Santa María de Regla de León, a gothic cathedral!

While we were walking around that night we heard a little squeaking noise. I told Ginny it sounded like a bat. And then… There! Flitting about the plaza… el murciélago/the bat… isn’t that a fabulous word???

This cathedral has a lot of interesting stained glass… I think compared to other cathedrals there is more glass… and much of it has floral or botanical themes. The pics are fuzzy so don’t embiggen…

In the courtyard of the cathedral, Queen of Sheba and King Solomon (and a bunch of others that were taken off of the front of the cathedral)

So many people in that last painting are telling each other something…

We also saw the Basilica of San Isidoro, including the fabulous and very old (12th century) romanesque frescoes (The Royal Pantheon).

And some amazing treasure and old, old books. Of course we couldn’t take photos. But if you are a researcher, you can go to these old libraries and actually look at these books that are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years old.

Ginny says the Roman column we saw in León is probably the oldest thing we saw on the trip. I’ll believe her. It’s dedicated to Marcus Aurelius. There was a stork nest on top of this, and we saw the stork in it!

Parts of the old city walls,

The weekly market,

Where you could also buy palm fronds, as it was Holy Thursday and Good Friday was coming right up…

The Procession

Did I mention we were in Spain during Semana Santa (Holy Week)? We saw a bit of a procession (think parade) one night, and the next night was a wonderful Holy Thursday Procession…

We learned that the band practices all year for this! Ginny thought one of the drummers was having simply too much fun. He was rather enthusiastic with his booming (you can hear him here).

After we saw them march here, we ran ahead and saw a part we missed…

and then we ran ahead again and saw it from the beginning!

Apparently, these floats (pasos) are usually carried by people (costaleros or penitents) hidden by a cover. I rather liked seeing everybody. They are heavy! The pasos can weigh up to 2 tons! Some of the penitents walked the procession barefoot. The silvery paso is carried by women and appears not to be as heavy as the one with Jesus (and presumably Joseph of Arimathea, who gave him the tomb)… only because there are fewer people carrying it.

Each float had somebody who would guide it (important for the curvy streets) and who would indicate when they should stop. This person also pushed back the crowds as needed (this happened on one of the sharp street corners). One of the photos shows one of the floats stopped… it sits on legs and the costaleros take a break and walk around.

I was also totally entertained by the window displays for Semana Santa, especially the display in the homeopathic pharmacy.

And then, after a time, the procession made its way back to the church from the cathedral… we only watched the beginning of it this time,

We thought we arranged for two nights in our hostal, but when we arrived, Fernando (who had one hand with black painted fingernails) told us that it was only for one night. He said also that where his hostal was wasn’t really a hopping place for evening life. But when we looked out from our balcony, it was like looking down into a mosh pit. He arranged for us to get another hostal, but out of the old part of the city, for the next night. León is pretty small, so it was only a 15 minute walk away.

We had the absolute worst meal of the trip in León. I also ate tripe (at a different place) as a tapa.

Callos? Sure… (again with the food words being hard, and being willing to try whatever they were serving). They were apparently pushing the tripe. It was actually fine, but not something I’d look for in the future.

Outside of the old city,

León also has a Parador. Think about it if you ever go there, though it is more expensive than the one in Santiago.

It sits on the Rio Bernesga, which in real life didn’t look like much of a river, but it does look better in the photos.

León is also on the pilgramage route, and you can see scallop shells here and there, as in the walls of the parador, and in the sidewalks.

We saw several fabulous lighting shops, where these really cool lights were not especially expensive. And this fabulous kitchen goods shop had real food in the display!

Flea market outside the veggie market, I was tempted by this knit chain mail!

In addition to the bra/baby things/lacey junk shops, we saw a real knitting store, which was closed for siesta. Katia… nothing that looked interesting to us!

And I bought a 2 Euro scarf at this other flea market just before we left (on another bus, to Bilbao).