Welcome Jim/Cecelia and Catalonian Customer Service

Let it not be said that I am naive about why friends and family visit this site. Yes, I know that all you really care about are the photos, and especially those of our adorable kids. Indeed, Grandma Jill's recent complaint about one of the photos of Cory and Addy in a playground in front of the iconic, beautiful La Sagrada Familia was "why do you need those weird spires in the picture behind them - just focus on the kids' faces for god's sake!"

So in the interest of catering to the lowest common denominator, which I suspect is how all internet traffic is driven anyway, I provide below some new pictures:

- Jim and Cecelia have arrived for our first official visit from out of towners. We have retraced our steps to some of our favorite spots in the city - Parque Guell, Mont Juic, Tapas 24, Olympic Park, and lots of overall wandering around. Jim and Cecelia are currently roaming around Northern Spain somewhere on a 4 day road trip - they left with no specific plans, no reservations, and only a general map of Spain to guide them. Impressive, and even more so when we heard from Jim yesterday via cellphone that they had found a fabulous hotel in Rioja and had managed to make friends with the owners of a local bar. We've had a blast with them so far - it's really been fun to be able to play tour guide - and eagerly await their return so we can follow up with a trip to Sitges and do some fine dining.




- We finished our glorious trip to Rota to visit the Casey- Minchin crowd, and I've added a new Rota gallery. Rob and I mentioned in the past our belief that the ultimate act of kindness toward our family is to invite us over to one's personal residence, enduring all the panic and destruction this usually entails. On this count Jean, David and especially Sean (their wonderful 8 year old son) deserve special mention. Not only did they let us ransack their house, Sean resisted any territorial instincts and actually invited Cory and Addy to play in his room on more than one occasion. I will leave it to your imagination to picture Cory's reaction to being in the bedroom of a real, live eight year old, let alone one with as many cool toys as Sean. Jean and company also went on a special shopping trip to the military base's commissary, providing us with such essential rations as 10 boxes of Kraft Mac & Cheese, 3 bags of real Doritos corn chips (every Spanish supermaket offers no fewer than 80 varieties of potato chips and no varieties involving corn), and a copy of the Golden Compass, which Rob and I have wanted to see for some time. Thanks Jean and David for your generosity and your warm welcome, and thanks Sean for letting us crimp your style. Hope to see you all in Paris!

-Finally, for those with more time to burn than they could possible admit, I have greatly expanded our gallery of cool architecture and doors/knockers. I'll understand if you choose to look at Cory and Addy instead. Oh yeah, and I'm sure few will be surprised to hear that my dad was the first to make the inevitable "I didn't think you were interested in knockers, Matt" joke. Love ya dad!


OK, having dispensed with the main attraction, I am hoping perhaps one in 20 of you will humor some funny stories about interacting with Spanish bureaucracy and "customer service" values. These are of course from the vantage point of us uptight Anglosaxons, but I suspect they would be universally understood.

- Trying to get into the Catalonian Museum of Art. This fabulous museum (which is apparently best known for its impressive collection of Gothic art) is perched above Barcelona on Mont Juic, and is inside a beautiful old structure composed of several old churches relocated from other parts of the province. Walking up to the front door, which is a simple glass structure, wholly unimpressive in comparison to the building itself, we were temporarily blocked by a crowd of Chinese-Spaniards taking wedding photos. They were using a revolving door and easily visible metal detector inside as background instead of the gorgeous museum grounds. I'm not sure I'll ever understand why.

That, of course, was just the start of our adventure. We walked into the cavernous lobby of the building, the most noticeable aspect of which (other than the beautiful Gothic architecture) is a collection of large signs pointing to about a dozen different hallways leading to separate exhibits and parts of the museum. There was no ticket stand in sight, so Rob and I looked at each other with some confusion, wondering if it could possibly be true that we would be seeing this museum for free, commenting that such a free institution would be unheard of in the US. We proceeded directly to the hallway labeled as leading to the Gothic art, and walked a couple of minutes to get to the entrance of the exhibit itself. We were greeted at said entrance by a nice, but serious young man who asked us for our tickets. Upon telling him we had seen no place to buy them, he simply pointed us back to the lobby from whence we came, telling us we needed tickets to get into each exhibit. Other than being frustrated that there was no obvious place to buy tickets when we came in, we realized that his presence likely meant that each and every exhibit had to have its own ticket taker. And this kind of mass employment, we thought, was likely even rarer than free admission in our home country.

Upon re-entering the lobby, we found the small ticket counter tucked in a corner of the lobby, and approached the rather dour looking agent staffing it. The ticket desk was littered with cardboard signs advertising different types of ticket packages available, the largest of which promoted a daily ticket for 12 Euros. We started to buy the daily ticket, only to notice in much finer print a mention of an "annual pass" further below. We interreptued the ticket agent's process to ask about the annual pass, which she grimly informed us was available for 20 Euros. We happily informed her that we were tourists in Barcelona for a full three months, and that we were more than likely to attend this lovely museum more than once, so we would therefore like the annual pass. She sort of sighed and said, in Spanish, this is more "complicado" and proceeded to pull out two forms that each of us had to fill out for the pleasure of becoming annual members. This was all happening, of course, to the dismay of the line beginning to collect behind us. About midway through filling out my form - she had only one pen - Rob noticed a smaller sign advertising, in Spanish, what appeared to be a three month tourist pass (what a coincidence - three months!). Rob proceeded to ask the not so nice lady about this other offer, to which she replied without noting the fact that we had just told her we would be in town for three months, "oh, this is a good pass, it is 20 Euros also, but you can get into 15 different museums for free for three months." We both chuckled nervously, handed her back our forms, and asked for the special three month passes. These, it turns out, required no forms at all, and she handed us our nifty plastic cards and told us to keep the receipt from this lengthy transaction "somewhere very safe." Like the Chinese wedding photos, I'm likewise sure I'll never know why.

Feeling very proud that we had just navigated a Kafkaesue Barcelonan mini-bureaucracy, Rob and I walked proudly down the long Gothic exhibit hall to hand the stern ticket agent our new passes. We were greeted by the same young man, who pretended he had never seen us before and proceeded to tell us that we could not walk into the exhibit with the same small gray backpack we had been carrying during our first interaction. Rob and I both laughed audibly at this point and asked where we should put the offending backpack. Back in the lobby was of course his reply. Five or so minutes later, we were back again and were finally allowed, with what I swear was a bit of a smirk, into the Exhibit. I will close by saying that this single exhibit of Gothic art was so beautiful and impressive that it would have been worth many times the trouble to see. And we will therefore no doubt be using our nifty three months passes to enjoy the museum at least several more times in the future.

A second cute story comes from my experience at El Corte Ingles (which you will recall is THE high end department store in Spain), where it required no fewer than three sales agents to purchase a new camera. I walked into the nicely appointed camera department, noticing four or five idle sales attendants standing there, only to be greeted by the phrase "Que quieres?" when I walked up to one of them. Now I am certainly no expert in Spanish, but to my untrained ears, that sounds a lot like "Whaddaya want?" Given the less than enthusiastic welcome, I was glad I had done my research and walked the gentleman over to the display window and pointed to exactly the model I wanted. I asked in Spanish if they still had this model, which I had seen on their internet was on sale, and he said he thought they did, but he would have to "go look" and could I wait "a moment" for him to return. I of course said I would, and watched him disappear behind two swinging doors in another department.

After about five minutes, another salesperson - this time a woman who had definitely been there not five feet away when i first walked in - approached me and said, as if we had not both been standing there awkwardly for five minutes and as if she had not seen my first interaction, "Is there something I can help you with?" I replied in my awkward Spanish that the other gentleman had been helping me and had gone to look for the camera. Some sort of revelation seemed to cross her face and she said "Oh, I see, let me see if I can find the camera you want." I suspect you can now guess that she, too, disappeared through the same doors, and, after another interval of 5-10 minutes, I was greeted in a similar manner by a third sales person who had been there all along. This one, I am glad to say, disappeared behind a different set of doors for no more then three seconds, re-emerged with my camera, and quickly closed the deal. I was dying to ask what happened to the other two salespeople, but concluded that if I acted like there was anything even slightly strange about the whole transaction, I would come across as an even more awkward tourist than I already had. When in Rome...

Those are but two of the many customer service stories we have accumulated, but I suspect that after two paragraphs without photos, I have already lost all but a very few of you, so I'll wrap up with one unrelated story about the difficulties of transitioning with toddlers. Cory, as I have written before, is having more angst around our temporary move, and very frequently mentions that he "wants to go back to South Orange." In the bath the other night, he asked for what may have been the 30th time, and not in a negative way, "Dada, why are we staying in Barcelona for a long time." I provided the same reply has has received many times: "Because it is nice here and we want to have an adventure." And I of course always add "But don't worry, we will go home afterwards." He then grinned innocently, appeared satisfied, and went back to playing with his bath crayons, only to ask innocently over his shoulder "Dada, what home?" Ouch. The truth is, the kids seem happy most of the time, are settling into their new school very nicely (they come come home with new Spanish every day - yesterday they walked in the door asking for "besos"), and we are glad to be here.