That time I moved to France and didn’t blog about it: preparing to move abroad during a pandemic

2020 will be the year that the world stopped for so many. But for me, it’s the year I got to live in France.

France was a lovely little séjour, despite those pesky aspects of living abroad. Every pain au chocolat  reminded me of being 16 and traveling around France with my grandfather, every new word learned was a small personal victory to untrain myself from Spanish while slowly making sense of street signs and school communications. In a year where no one traveled, a summer of exploring a new home base became our salve, the balm that soothed away all the scary stuff and ever-present threat of the virus.

Lyon France old town in a storm

We spent six months living in Écully, a wealthy village of 18,000 people just west of Lyon. The largest park was on the grounds of an old château (now home to Lyon’s premiere cooking school and the only hospitality school restaurant in France to hold a Michelin star), the village church and Liberté-Fraternité-Egalité-emblazoned mairie anchoring a small downtown that was once the carriage route to St-Etienne. It wasn’t Belle’s Alsace but it was pretty damn cute, the homes named for flowers, doors overgrown with lilacs and ivy and random châteaus hidden behind apartment complexes.

I didn’t blog. The attempt to jot down a vignette or two every week suddenly seemed a momentous task after a day trying to fumble through French and not get lost and perfect a quiche lorraine. I truthfully didn’t want to find the time to do it. And now, half a year since we returned to Spain, I am ready to talk about it. And, truthfully, I don’t want to forget.

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I have been a Francophile since I was a kid. Maybe it was growing up reading Madeline, or my mother’s obsession with French silk. I begged her to let me learn French at a fancy sleepaway camp in Minnesota, something I’d read about in a magazine. She scoffed that I could go to the park district camp and wade in a creek instead of drowning myself in baguettes.

By the time I was 13, she signed the permission form to let me start language classes – Spanish. I got the last laugh when I married a Spaniard and Nancy lost me to the mother continent.

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Lyon. While Paris has long swooned me, I fell deeply in love with Lyon. The city is home to the second largest urban area in France, crowned by the Monts d’Or and framed by the confluence of the Rhône and Saône rivers.  Les gones – a nickname given to the lyonnaises – are comme si-comme ça about all things Parisian, crown themselves as the gastronomic capital of France and have witnessed some of France’s most emblematic events. The Romans. The Gauls. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The Lumière brothers. Jean Moulin. Paul Bocuse.

Mon dieu, I was in love with this place before even looking for flights, much less asking permission to work from another country. I would wind my way through the streets of the Croix-Rousse like the old canuts, dine in every restaurant Bourdain had stopped in on Parts Unknown and pick up my produce and cheeses that reeked of grass and the countryside at the Saturday morning market. I had dreamed of living in France since kids were learning French on tapes, and it was finally happening. Quelle aventure, la France!

March 2020

As the weather warmed, so did my urge to get planning. When I first moved to Spain, fresh out of college, I literally left just about everything to chance. I had spent a few days in Seville and knew I liked it, but the prospect of living there didn’t register when I was subsiding off of gazpacho in the July heat as a study abroad student.

We interviewed with a relocation company that specialized in expats one afternoon. As the Novio’s job as a civil servant got a delightful smirk, hearing I was American and hadn’t yet mentioned the prospect of moving was troublesome to her. Add in two kids who needed schooling and a budget during a housing crisis, and she declined to work with us. I was aghast: someone was refusing our euros?

Little did I know just how much I would hear the word non when we eventually got to France that summer.

Well, then the rest of March 2020 happened, and I promptly cancelled my trip to the U.S. that summer and planned on an été français.

April – May

One silver lining of the pandemic is that housing options suddenly opened up, meaning that the offerings were suddenly ours for the picking. We weighed commute against price against outdoor space (post-pandemic trauma is real) and found a suitable place in Écully. I loved its proximity to the city of Lyon and the village’s town center; my husband loved that it was 1.5 km from the autoroute and only 20 minutes to his new headquarters.

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After we’d booked our house, schooling for Millán suddenly got solved, too. I had long heard the praises of the public education system in France, but that a spot at a crèche was about as difficult as getting one at an elite preschool in New York City. I took to Facebook as any old millennium would and immediately found a Facebook group called Españoles en Lyon.

Un tal Fulanito messaged me, un voisin d’Écully by way of Huesca, and he sent me the inscription forms, detailed information about timetables and the names of a few good places to check in town. On a whim,  I called one, not even realizing that there was a crèche a lot closer to our new digs.

“Âlo?”

I tried, in French, to ask about inscriptions. She told me someone would call back (I think), and he did (thank goodness), but it wasn’t until he wrote me an email that I thought to ask if he spoke Spanish or English. François (“me llama Ud. Paco, s’il vous plaît!“) was half Spanish, with an andalusian surname.

As it turned out, the woman who appealed to the mayor, Mme. Parfait, had called that morning to ask how many spaces François would need, and if I could just send the baby’s birth certificate and our proof of housing, he would ask for a five-day spot for Millán.

This.could.not.be.more.perfect.

Ville d'Écully

It was all falling into place. Enrique’s school was LITERALLY across the street, and Millán had somehow gotten a spot (COVID, you fickle bitch). We had a home, my Spanish to French translations had arrived, and I could finally start dreaming about ma via française.

I bought tickets for July 2, direct to Lyon from Seville.

June

As Seville began to awaken and we could finally leave our homes, that travel-panic mode kicked in. I still hadn’t learned any French and, despite having everything seemingly under control, I’d never been more wound up. The pandemic definitely made my anxiety shine hot and bright, and my family was often on the receiving end of grunts and shouts. We made tentative plans to come back in late October, when Enrique would have a school break, so I dutifully packed our bags for the summer and early fall, chose a few toys and books and helped the Novio pack the car.

He arrived to Écully on June 23, found the nearest supermarket, his way to work and a few other Spanish families. I moved in with his parents, juggling the kids and work while tip-toeing around my father-in-law’s schedule. As I was sending out an email invitation to 40,000 juniors in high school, I received an email from Transavia that my flight had been cancelled.

I rebooked on Air France for the same day, via de Gaulle, forwarding my mother-in-law the tickets to print.

Oye, niña: Millán’s name is spelled incorrectly, she announced as she passed them to me.

I was aghast. HOW could this be happening? She shooed the kids away while I called Air France. And waited. And waited. In a post-COVID world, there were so few operators that I was on hold for hours before the agent told me I’d have to call Air France in France. Cue more hours on the phone, a credit card that had reached its limit, my American card assuming the purchase was fraudulent and the tickets on July 2 selling out. I was nervous that borders would close just as soon as they’d opened up, so I hastily booked us onto the July 4th flight via Paris. It was three times as much as I’d paid on Transavia originally, and my privilege was on full display right then and there. I could afford to book and rebook – what would it be like fleeing for our lives when I was crying over an extra two days in Spain?

July

We made it to July 4th. As my mother-in-law helped me wheel the bag to the check-in counter at the Seville airport, I felt a sense of relief that we were almost there, that my gumption (or truly just my stubbornness) had got us this far. Millán slept the whole flight to Paris, waking up as we touched down. The airport terminal was practically a ghost town, but that didn’t stop my kids from rolling around on the ground, sticking their suckers on every surface and pulling their masks down.

Let me remind you that the early summer months was a very small breath of air, like breaking to the surface after being underwater. There is the awareness that the virus is still circulating freely but no one has really, fully let down their guard.

Breathe, Cat. You will be fine.

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Only NO ONE in France was wearing a mask when we arrived. The enormous Carrefour in Grand Ouest didn’t enforce them until later in the month when cases began to climb. Vieux Lyon, a UNESCO World Heritage site and huge tourist draw, merely suggested wearing them indoors. My family were the only weirdos masking up unless we were eating because we didn’t want to be assholes (and we didn’t know enough French to survive a hospital setting – despite everyone needing a hospital but me during our stay).

But WE WERE IN FRANCE.

I got to exploring the village in our first days, not wanting to spoil Lyon by going without the Novio. We found all of the bakeries, slowly working from one end of the display case to the other, with me clumsily ordering coffee. The betting house had cheap beers, so we stopped there after the park for Super Bocks and a sirop, the French version of a soft drink, for the kids. I even got a loyalty card at Picard for frozen foods.

Le (merde de la CAF)

One morning, we marched over to the town hall and asked to speak to the woman in charge of school assignments. She was impressed that I had gotten my documents translated to French and – voilà, Madame – gave me the cell phone number of his Spanish-speaking teacher, who wrote me an email that same afternoon.

I called François at crèche and asked about the adaptation process for Millán and how to complete his registration. Do you have the CAF? he probed, telling me that he could not finalize the process nor tell us how much we would owe for care until he did.

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And thus began the two-month odyssey into getting Millán registered for daycare. The CAF, or the caisse des allocations familiales, is the social services body that serves families and young people, often giving rebates according to salary. When creating an account online to request our family allowance, I realized I’d need a French phone number. That was easy. I’d also need a French bank account. Every bank we tried told us no – either because of U.S. tax laws, or because I’d tried to get a bank account without my husband’s signature (who could guess that the patriarchy in France was more dominant than in Spain?). One flat out refused because he said our short stay was not worth his time. The Novio was frustrated by having to take time off of work, and the CAF refused our Spanish bank number.

There was a bright spot: when we stopped by LCL, a woman heard us discussing the situation in Spanish. Odiel, a widow who had lived in Écully her whole life, offered to accompany us to other banks as a translator and quickly became a friend.

By the end of July, we had finally succeeded in opening a compte nickel, which is an account that is typically reserved for refugees before they are fully established. We kept the minimum amount – 20€ – in the account and paid Enrique’s school cantine through school intranet.

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Bank account and French number in hand, I applied for the CAF number online and went to Social Services to request help. After 10 minutes of bank and forth and calling another social services office, I was told to stop the following morning for a doctor’s appointment and to speak to the official in charge of the CAF in town. We were getting somewhere! I treated myself and the kids to macarons as the church bells rang. Because it was noon. And, just like Spain, everything closed in the middle of the afternoon.

The following morning, I showed up at the Maison de la Metropole, a trailer in the middle of a dirt lot. We saw a doctor, who spoke enough English to give my kids a clean bill of health and a few hints about the CAF, and then said they’d be closed for the entire month of August. Damn, Europe.

August

When I wasn’t dealing with bureaucrazy, Millán turned a year old and began walking, we spent a lot of time on our terrace and in the yard with the neighbors and finally exploring the city’s museums, parks and bakeries.

It could have been easy to mourn the loss of our summer in the U.S., but every weekend brought the opportunity to see how much we could cram into 48 hours. The hilltop Dauphinais castle at Allymés, followed by a walk around Pérouges. Down to Grenoble and to Vienne. We even made it to Geneva on our wedding anniversary and to the Black Forest to celebrate our birthdays. The weekdays meant working while Millán napped and spending the afternoons somewhere – often a park, a château or a park next to a château.

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Enrique woke up most mornings asking, “Where are we going today, Mommy?” My intrepid three-year-old definitely takes after his mother.

I would occasionally meet other families at the park who spoke English, or who I could cobble together our basic story. But my very Spanish children couldn’t muster getting out of the house before noon, which meant that the parks were often for us while families had their midday meal.

September

In late August, I took Millán to the adaptation days for the crèche. It was lovely to meet François, who was gracious but told me it was impossible to do anything without the CAF because the computer system wouldn’t let him input information.

In the meantime, I looked for childcare options for Millán. Getting an assmat, or an assitante maternelle, was also impossible without the CAF, and the micro crèche in town was 800€ for five days, part-time (we pay 280€ for full-time in Seville). I took to Facebook again, where we found a lovely nanny who had lived in Chicago before coming to Europe, and she watched the kids each Wednesday and on school holidays. Oh, yes – Enrique had no school on Wednesdays, so I decided to keep Millán home, too. My kids adored Natalia, and as Millán napped, we got to know one another over tea.

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Taking Enrique to his new classroom on September 1 was a slow, steady build up to a taste of freedom. For nearly six months, they’d been my little shadows. It was hard to work, to exercise, to sleep with the constant interruptions of kids. But it was also bittersweet after six months of new adventures, new milestones and time to grow as a family unit.

François called shortly after the start of the term and told me that we’d been given a provisional CAF number but had to present a number of documents. So, it was back to Maison de la Metropole, but I asked the Novio to come with one of his French coworkers for assistance. They took our documents, bank statements, copies of our family book and maybe two years off our lives due to stress, but we were finally given a provisional CAF number that was set to expire on December 31.

The next step was to petition for the spot to the mayor, who would have to cover any extra expenses if we weren’t able to pay for the schooling. At the end of September, I had both boys in school four days a week. Formidable, non?

October

Some time in mid-October, I suddenly felt adapted. I didn’t rely on my GPS or I didn’t fumble over my words at daycare to tell them when Millán had woken up (only to discover, a month later, that I had reversed word order). The library and children’s center recognized my children as les americains. I learned that the 69 on the license plates corresponded to the metropolitan district. Auverge-Rhône-Alpes shrunk to the Rhône shrunk to the le Metropole to le Grand Ouest and to Écully. Our world seemed small yet expansive simply because it was different.

We’d been to the big draws, and I jotted down small museums and villages to visit in our second half. There were wine harvests and film fests, and we’d hardly ventured to what Lyon offered further away from the Presqu’île.

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“They’ll never shut our museums or cinemas, pas les choses culturelles,” they whispered. Enrique was home on a Tuesday, thanks to the ever-present vacances in the French school system. We said goodbye to his sitter and I stuffed him quickly into the car, got some McDo and found a spot to park in Vieux Lyon. Another lockdown was imminent so I wanted to take him to see one more Guignol. A distant relative of Punch & Judy, Monsieur Guignol is the beloved lyonnais puppet whose shows were social commentary on the buttoned-up Catholic society in the early 20th Century. We loved him. The theatre was packed, and Enrique sat on a shallow, overturned bucket as Guignol outwitted the evil proprietor of Club Sandwich to get the francs that he owed Mama Swing, who didn’t even have money for a hotel and was forced to sleep out in the cold.

We ended the outing with ice cream from René Nardonne next to a slate grey river. It was the last time we’d be able to eat at a restaurant, but we were told one month until freedom and culture and normal life. You know, to save Christmas.

November

I held out hope that my December holidays could be cashed in on a museum day and eating somewhere on my ever-longer list. I had to laugh: my Spanish cellphone company informed me I’d start paying roaming on November 3, so I only used WIFI while at home (and I was ALWAYS home). We stopped spending money on entertainment, instead using our allotted one hour out of the house, time-stamped attestation in hand, to see how much of our one kilometer perimeter we could trace.

Life became mundane – gads! boring! – while in France. But we were in FRANCE. Where only the self-proclaimed gastronomic capital could have outrageous prices on every piece of produce but cabbage and fish that tasted like freezer burn at a fine dining restaurant. It rained every day and eventually the neighbor’s geese stopped honking.

December

I called Menchu on Tuesday afternoon to see if she was free. The Confluence mall, with its cheap parking and endless dining options, was our halfway point, a merging of both our rivers and our families and our shared experience. “Jo, muero para tomar un café” Starbucks and a long stroll to the car became a simple taste of freedom and we joked about how Madrid was wide open to the French, but we couldn’t venture further than 15 kilometers from our homes.

Christmas tree at l´Hotel de Ville

The month went by quickly. Packing, purging, eating through whatever was in our freezer. We planned for a Christmas with Ángel, Menchu and their children but prepared for a feast at home. The pandemic brought out the resourcefulness in me: we made wreaths out of paper plates, a nativity from a 12-pack box of Kronenburg. My car battery died, and I could somehow find a place to get it replaced after buying Christmas presents at Carrefour. The days ticked down, and it made me sad to think of the experience we had lost by moving abroad during a pandemic. For my husband, it was six months of torture. For me, it was six months of reminding myself how exciting everyday life can be.

C’est fini

As we pulled away from Chemin du Chancilier shortly before the end of 2020, I bouncily told my eldest to wave goodbye to his school out the window. Au revoir, Stèphane! Au revoir, petite section! He asked for the tablet as I felt tears prick the corners of my eyes. Down we went on the A-6, crossing the Presqu’île on a needle-thin bridge before turning south on the A-7, the gastronomic motorway between Paris and Marseille. Out past the refineries, the shabby outskirts, snaking down the Rhône towards the Mediterranean.

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I left Lyon with a heavy heart. Maybe it’s because Millán began walking here, and Enrique got his first stitches as I held his hand and looked away (and onto the Château d’Annecy, what!?!?!?). Maybe because it was my chance to live in a country that has forever captured my heart, even if the chance to really do it right was muffled by a global pandemic (can we say it again? Fuck COVID). Maybe because I need some challenge on a more regular basis.

When you meet people and know that your connection to them is fleeting, every minute seems important. François. Odiel. Julie. Menchu. Natalia. I have been overwhelmed with the generosity and warmth of the few people we have met and even wrote the mayor a thank you note to express my gratitude that he saved Millán that spot at the crèche.

Into 2021

What I may have liked best about those six months in France was how simple our days seemed. Even in the ho-hum of daily life, even when we were shuttered away, once more, in our homes, I couldn’t shake the tingly magical feeling. That we’d weathered a global pandemic, only to find ourselves more willing to try something new, to explore. And there were no extra distractions: no doctors appointments or social engagements, not always running off to see something and snap a few pictures. We had the space to grow together as a family over meals, trying to make sense of French pop songs and their odd music videos (Je te voie, Julièn Doré) or testing out all the snacks at the gas station as we visited little villages or explored further afield. I find myself craving the butter and cheese crackers that cost more than a 12-packs of cans of 1664 beer as I type.

There are little things about Lyon that have stayed with us: Millán’s favorite stuffed animal is called his beloved doudou, and Enrique’s birthday cake was a whimsical take on Guignol. We tend towards camembert when we can find it. I bought a six-pack of 1664 just because (I definitely didn’t get it for the taste) and work to French pop.

“You know we’ve been home for six months already.” The Novio is right, anything post-pandemic lockdown seems to have passed at warp speed since.

St Jean church Lyon

Home is where we are truly anchored. What we brought to France fit into my car, underneath kid feet or jammed into the crevices between seats. I brought a cheap bottle of Beaujolais jeune in Oignt on our third and final trip to that beautiful little village, and maybe we will drink it some day and reminisce about that time were were foules enough to move to a foreign country during a pandemic.

Yes, it was disappointing in many ways. I didn’t get the full experience I had been dreaming about since reading about the girl who lived in an old house in Paris, covered in vines. The French I learned was by way of a little green owl. The boys missed swim class and play dates and even catching a last guignol show.

Je ne sais pas, I still can’t put my finger on what France was. As the days fade into summer, as we plan for the long, hot months and the upcoming school year, I pine for it. Life seemed simple, simply because we had one another and a good rind of cheese and the balmy summer nights watching the sun set over the old farmhouse next door.

Am I vraiment folle for moving abroad during a pandemic? What other topics should I cover about Lyon or France?

Paris’s Jardin du Luxembourg and my musings on expat life

In a little old house that was covered with vines,
lived 12 little girls in two straight lines.

For as long as I can remember, I have been borderline obsessed with Paris. I blame my mom, who bought me Madeline books. Remember how the book started?

My house was neither old nor plant-covered. But I had a lamp shaped like the Eiffel Tower and black and white postcards of Paris in the 30s that I garnered at a rummage sale tacked to my bulletin board.
Eiffel Tower Paris

Growing up in the suburbs of a major city, my jaunts into Chicago seemed to go along with the soundtrack of a coming-of-age movie from the 80s: I wanted to live and breath the big city lights, maybe work for a glossy and have a string of good-looking boyfriends. Which is the plot to essentially every movie that came out when I was a teen.

When I asked my mom to let me study French in middle school, she told me Spanish would be far more useful in a future career. At 13, I didn’t know that learning another language would allow me to pivot from magazine editor to ESL teacher. Not as glamorous as I’d hoped, of course, but everyone starts somewhere.

“We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.”

Ever since I read Adam Gopnick’s account of expatriated life in the French capital, “Paris to the Moon,” I was resolute that I’d live abroad at some point in my life. I didn’t particularly love the book – required reading for one of my college courses about Parisian architecture – but I did love what it represented: freedom, adventure and a healthy dose of red tape.

Autumn in Paris

My class was meant to be a study in Eiffel and Hausmann. Instead, it was two Midwesterners waxing poetic about the bistros and brasseries just steps away from the Sorbonne. Iowa City is 4,291 miles away from Paris, but that Spring 2005 class somehow seemed to push me towards Europe and towards a city that held so many of my teenaged dreams.

I’d had one of those soul-restoring deep sleeps and woke up early on the first truly autumnal Sundays in Paris. My work trips always fall on a Sunday – a godsend for catching Parisians at play but nearly impossible for eating anything decent. I put on a Mango dress that passed as a raggedy version of Chanel and some lipstick and took the RER down to Luxembourg.

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Gopnick often wrote about taking his young son to the Luxembourg gardens – in fact, it’s on the cover of the original 2000 book, a collection of essays he wrote for the New Yorker. I’ve criss-crossed Paris on half a dozen occasions, but usually as the tote-along on a first timer’s foray into Paris, or as a 24-hour stopover punctuating a long work trip. I purposely booked the last Eurostars train out of London so that I could take advantage of a late September morning and visit the park.

Armed with a baguette (fine, it was left over from my London trip and a little soggy) and a jacket draped over my arm, I found the eastern gate of the gardens, constructed in the 17th Century by Marie de Midici. It was just before noon and the Eiffel tower peeked over golden-tipped leaves, reflected in the small, circular pool. My college professors has spoken about the Palace du Luxembourg – its history, its current use in the French senate – but I was contented to have it as a backdrop to the children sailing model boats, their flags and colors somewhat tattered, on the pool.

Cat Gaa in Paris

Olive green metal chairs ring the basin, some reclining towards the sky. I dragged a free sear on the southwest side of the park towards the sun and unwrapped my sandwich. A man crumbled the end of his baguette and fed it to a pigeon while a mother scolded her child in French for nearly climbing into the pool after the stick he was using to guide the boat drifted away from his fingertips. Chatter came from all around me in about half a dozen languages. I’ve always said said markets and plazas were the best place to catch Spaniards wrapped up in everyday life; in Paris, it’s Luxembourg.

Somehow, everything and everyone is picturesque and chic and unsoiled here.

Hell, even my soggy baguette tasted magical because I was eating it in Paris.

“This can shake you up, this business of things almost but not quite being the same. 
A pharmacy is not quite a drugstore; a brasserie is not quite a coffee shop; 
a lunch is not quite a lunch.” 

As a perennial American abroad, I now see my own adulthood reflected in Gopnick’s telling of the mundane – as well as the truly fantastic – parts of expat life. I didn’t know it at the time, but the cadence of my life in Spain would be similar: everything and nothing is the same as back home.

Later that afternoon, post-recruitment event and a few cheeky beers with colleagues, I returned on foot to the garden. Nestled between the 5eme and 6eme arrondisments, I had two choices: using Luxembourg as my anchor, I could follow a foot map along the highlights of the district, or wander around. My professors had laid out all of the 5ème for me, so I veered into the 6ème.

Parisian bistros

Snaking down the Rue du Condé that flanks the Odéon theatre towards the Sorbonne, some of the major highlights the professors talked about in class were suddenly right in front of me. Every alleyway offered me a glimpse into the allure of Paris. Long-legged university students pulled their jackets tighter as they glided down the steps of the Sorbonne’s medical school. It all seemed so Truman Show – until the cost of a beer and the snobbery when I asked to pay with a card brought this Midwesterner right back.

In Paris we have a beautiful existence but not a full life, 
and in New York we have a full life but an unbeautiful existence.

Gopnick’s wife says, upon deciding to return home, that “In Paris we have a beautiful existence but not a full life, and in New York we have a full life but an unbeautiful existence.” I find my experience to be the contrary: my life feels fuller and far more rosy in Spain.

Since that class, ARTH 3020: Paris and the Art of Urban Life, the Parisian joie de vivre and, alas, European life and the string of attractive (foreign) boyfriends has alluded me. My life in Spain is often chaotic and has a noticeable lack of afternoons whiled away at the brasserie down the block. But the small victories and the sobremesa and the afternoons in a complete trance over how I ended up here are fuel. They’re what has kept me in Spain.

Jardin du Luxembourg at dusk

I’m sure that, had I chosen Paris over Seville, I’d be fighting the urge to look at my phone while my child played with a model boat at Luxembourg. And that I’d have stepped in something or spilled on myself or still gotten a zit at an inopportune moment.

Every time I return to my childhood bedroom, I switch on the gaudy Eiffel Tower lamp and drag a finger along the dozen or so books that I haven’t given away. Paris to the Moon is one of them, standing between the Michelin Le Guide Vert that was its class companion and a well-worn copy of a Let’s Go Europe book, published in the same year as the summer I spent in Spain. In an age where mobile phones dictate where we travel and what we share – and even prevent us from losing ourselves in a city – the book is a tangible reminder of the life I chose in Spain.

“There are two kinds of travelers. 
There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has 
an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it. 
The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.”

If you’re my kind of traveler, you enjoy meandering around and taking it all in rather than ticking sites off of a list. I’ve been to Paris half a dozen times and have done all of the big draws, so this time I wanted to wander through a new arrondisment on a free evening I had in the French capital.

Eiffel tower at night

I used the GPS MyCity app for points of interest around the 5ème and 6ème during my afternoon off in Paris – you can easily download sightseeing or local haunts maps and use them offline in more than 1000 cities worldwide.

Comment below for your chance to win a year’s subscription to GPSMyCity and tell me a city you love to get lost in or hope to soon!

Disclosure: I was not paid for this post but GPSMyCity kindly offered me a one-year Premium Pass, which I’ll also us in Vienna next week. All opinions are my own.

A First-Timers Guide to Las Fallas

At nearly 6 am, small firecrackers still fizzled on the streets. I’d been awake for an entire day, driving from one end of Spain to the other before plugging my fingers in my ears every three minutes. This is Las Fallas, the Valencian festival celebrating Saint Joseph by burning a whole bunch of paper-mâiché effigies.

Fireworks and charangas? Well, color me hortera and show me the way!

Las Fallas Ninots Flamenco Dancer

I’ve used my Semana Santa holidays to explore the Balkans and India and had planned to walk part of the Camino up to Mérida in 2016. But when Valencia’s biggest festival falls during your vacation time and you have a friend offering up a couch, you curb your walking plans in favor of pyromania.

After a six hour trip from Seville, I parked my car at the end of the metro line in Torrent and hopped onto the train. Emily, a college friend, had recently moved to Valencia and into the trendy, central neighborhood of Ruzafa.

Beautiful ninots in Valencia

Almost as soon as I’d surfaced the street with a duffel bag slung over my shoulder and a pillow stuffed under my arm, I was met with smoke. Smoke from kids lighting firecrackers in the street at their feet, smoke from the stands frying up churros and buñuelos. The streets of Cádiz, Sueca and Cuba had become an all-out festival chocked with food stands peddling stuffed jacket potatoes and corn, people carrying cans of beer and ninots, two-story high effigies that would meet their fiery deaths during the Cremà.

It took me nearly 30 minutes to traverse the narrow streets that had been shut down, save foot traffic, to find my friend’s place via portable wifi in Spain. The ninots – the valencià word for puppet – towered overhead, depicting current events, celebrities and political figures, as well as nods to Valencian culture. Traditionally, each pocket of a neighborhood has a special sort of brotherhood, much like Seville’s religious hermandades, called a casal. Each casal pools together money, time and resources to conceive and construct a ninot and then display it on a street corner in the days leading up to March 19th, the feast of St. Joseph.

what is las fallas like

Valencia has 750 casales with 200,000 members – about one-quarter of the city’s population. That made for a lot of ninots to see (pick up a map of the most popular from the tourism office or look for city patrons on the main thoroughfares and in booths.

Emily’s flat on the eighth floor near the market was close enough to the action but far enough that I could relax for a short time. I’d arrived just after the Mascletà, a daily barrage of noise emanating from the city’s main square. Em and I hadn’t seen each other since we graduated, but we fell into a rhythm, gabbing our way out the door and into the street to gawk at the ninots, cans of beers in hand.

Ruzafa is not only the city’s hipster paradise, home to a dizzying amount of trendy eateries and bars, but a hotspot (pun intended) during Fallas. Every Haussmann-style street corner had a ninot stacked up to three stories and fanciful lights, arbor-style, surrounding them. Even in the middle of the day, young people stumbled around, throwing fizzlers into their wake. It was hazy, despite the overcast afternoon.

Are there fireworks at Las Fallas

Crossing Gran Vía de Colón, we ran right into the L’Ofrena des Flors. One of the Novio’s coworker’s wife is a natural valenciana and gushed about this part of Falles in which falleros don traditional costumes and bring bundles of flowers to a towering Virgen de los Desamparados sitting in Plaza de la Virgen. Behind the barricades, I craned my neck and stood on my tiptoes to watch the casales pass by, arms full of daisies and sunflowers.

Women falleras take their garb seriously – like southern Spain’s traje de gitana, quality dresses are handmade, unique and costly. Come to think of it, dressing for Las Fallas was more like the Feria de Abril than I could have imagined. Consisting of a hooped skirt and bodice, they are typically made of pure silk and embroidered. Once you add the lace shawl and apron, shoes, jewelry and hair do, you’ve practically bought a wedding dress.

Fallera Women in Las Fallas

child fallera

typical costume in valencia

And it doesn’t end there – each casal elects a fallera mayor, who plays the part of hostess and attends to a court d’honor. This means food and fresh flowers for twelve people, much like entertaining in a caseta – and just about as costly.

Night was falling as L’Ofrena ended. Firecrackers sizzled under our feet as we looked for a tapas bar with room to squeeze into. It was drizzling and the center of town was packed with revelers. Dessert was a classic farton, a spongy cake made from sugar, milk, flour and eggs.

Valencia city center

The night’s main attraction was surprisingly not pyrotechnics. Emily’s friends took us to an outlying neighborhood, Benimcalet, for a charanga. I confess: I have a soft spot for cheesy brass bands and Spanish wedding music. A small square was packed with people swaying back and forth to a rock band, and the old man bar anchoring the plaza served up cheap cubatas whose alcohol content was barely balanced out by soft drinks. By this point in time, I’d been up for 18 hours, and we danced and drank until the sun began to peek through the trees at 6am. I collapsed onto the couch, fully clothed.

A ripple of fireworks – the mascletà – rang through Ruzafa the next afternoon at 2pm. I was groggy, a product of both the deadly gin tonics from the night before and the crackle and pop from the rifles. I could already see smoke rising from the Plaza del Ayuntamiento.

I pulled on my boots and gulped down the coffee Em had made for me.Emily had already done her homework for the evening and had mapped out a route to see some of the city’s best ninots and lights displays before they’d meet their fiery end that evening. We spent the better part of the afternoon ducking out of the rain between visiting the city’s best ninots.

Tourists at Las Fallas Valencia

valencia festival las fallas

ninots las fallas mermaids

Popular lore says that the festival began as a way to burn off excess firewood on the spring equinox, eventually coinciding with the Feast of Saint Joseph, the carpenter. A typical piece of furniture burnt was the parot, a structure from which candles were hung. Over time, the primitive parots morphed into the effigies we see today, from rag dolls to elaborate, whimsical art pieces.

Like the chirigotas of the Cádiz Carnavales,  the majority of the ninots poke fun at politics and current events. We saw quite a few Rita Barberás, the former mayor of Valencia who was indicted for fraud in 2016, as well as ponytailed Pablo Iglesias, Belén Esteban and the King.

The rain meant we spent time drinking vermouths in Ruzafa’s trendy bars and watching the light shows on Calle Cuba. More than half a million colored bulbs glitter every hour after dusk, more than making up for the cancelled Cavalcada del Foc, a fireworks parade from Porta da Mar down Gran Via de Colón.

Light shows at Las Fallas

For hours, we powered walked, hand-in-hand, all over the center of the city, pushing past crowds and peeking into casales. The marquees were stocked end to end with tables and folded chairs, and scraps of food remained, untouched, in the centers. Falleras strolled in and out, often followed by a video crew.

As it neared 10pm, we were faced with a choice: nab a spot in the Plaza del Ayuntamiento to see the city’s falla be burnt at the very end of the night, or catch a falla infantil and one of the neighborhood fallas. We were at Convento de Jerusalén, just in front of the Estació de Nord.

the ambience of las fallas

This casal is part of the Secció Especial, amongst the most prestigious in the city (if you’re in Valencia before the Plantà on March 15th, you can visit all of the ninots and vote which two to save. They’re at the City of Arts and Sciences, and the expo is 3€ for adults and 1,50€ for children).

Just before 10pm, the casal’s fallera mayor and her pint-sized counterpart stood in front of the smaller, satire-free ninot. This close, you could see the fireworks-laden base that made up the whimsical, storybook creation. At 10 o’clock, the fallera infantil was introduced to the local media. She had a long string in her hand and tears in her eyes as a band made up of trumpets, drums and dolçaina – a reed instrument – struck up. She tugged on the rope, sending off a pinwheel of firecrackers that would eventually spark the effigy – something out of a bedtime story – in flames.

children's falla in valencia

I fingered the earplugs in my jacket pocket, not sure if they’d do me much good against the deafening sound of firecrackers being lit across the city. My face burned from the intensity of the flames and the black smoke rising from every corner in Valencia, turning my camel-colored jacket a dingy grey. The small-scale puppet burned quickly, fizzling out with the help of a firehose in less than 10 minutes.

We rushed through the throngs of people back to Ruzafa. The streets had been difficult to traverse during the daytime, but the proximity to the main attraction – La Cremà – meant that we were pushing through crowds staking out a prime viewing spot. We’d wanted to see one of the Secció Especial ninots, but couldn’t push through all of the people quickly enough. Ducking onto a side street, we got a front row view to one of the neighborhood fallas, a wizard holding a key with a devil on the side. No one seemed to know the significance.

political irony at las fallas

Emily snaked her way through the masses to a street vendor and got some snacks and a couple of cans of beer. Like Semana Santa, there was a degree of waiting around during Las Fallas.

Just before midnight, half a dozen firemen placed their helmets on their heads and stood poised to put out flames, lest they get out of control. The metal gates surrounding the sculpture were pushed back, leading festivalgoers to be crammed into doorways and even scrawl their way up light posts. I saw kids with firecrackers in their hands, ready to toss them at the open flames.

I glanced at my watch. At promptly midnight, the murmur reached a fever pitch and the firemen grabbed their hoses. I couldn’t see over the shoulders of the revelers in front of me, but heat rose from the bottom of my boots and up my legs. One of my greatest fears is dying in a fire (…and jellyfish), but stepping back from the flames was not an option. I had arms tangled in mine, elbows next to my ears and even a child underfoot!

Festivals in Valencia Las Fallas

Ninots burning in Valencia

The Cremà in Valencia

As quickly as it had gone up in flames, the statue burnt to the ground, a mass of smoldering ashes in mere minutes.

We tried to get close to the Plaza del Ayuntamiento to catch the city’s gargantuan falla, which is burned after all others have met their fiery demise. From the front of the train station, we only caught a sliver of the multi-story statue of a faceless man’s blaze of glory.

I found it disappointing that every single ninot was set ablaze at exactly the same time. I likened it to having to choose a bunk on the first day of summer camp – you never really knew it if was the best one, if your friends were nearby, or if you’d be stuck next to the kid who talked in his sleep.

ninots in valencia

The whooping and hollering in the streets lasted until the following day’s mascletà. My head was swampy, a mixture of warm beers and smoke inhalation. I’d spend another day with Emily traipsing around the Jardines del Turia before stopping by the Quixotic windmills in Castilla-La Mancha and the UNESCO World Heritage cities of Úbeda and Baeza.

Like the Tomatina, Las Fallas was a festival I was glad to see once, but it didn’t spark (sorry, I am the worst) enough interest in me to go back another year. It felt like waiting in a long line only to be slightly disappointed when you had something shiny and new in your hand.

Perhaps we didn’t do it right. Perhaps the rain hampered the festivities. Perhaps I just didn’t feel the true emotion, my senses dulled after a long car ride and the inability to shake the damp. And as someone whose favorite holiday is the 4th of July, even Valencia’s fireworks and fanfare weren’t enough to move it to my top-of-mind when it came to Spanish festivals. It was a lot of fun, laced with beers and laughter and smoke.

a first timer's guide to

If you go: Las Fallas is one of Spain’s coolest festivals and happens during the first three weeks of March, culminating with the Cremà on March 19th. Book ahead and consider staying in Ruzafa or L’Eixample, where you’ll be within walking distance of public transportation and all of the major casales. Also bring cash – lots of street vendors won’t accept cards. You can find an official 2017 schedule here as well as a map to all of the city’s ninots.

Valencia is a city I love more and more with each trip. Check out their crazy ice cream flavors, the UNESCO lauded Lonja de la Seda and the famous tomato slinging festival, La Tomatina.

Have you ever been to Las Fallas or Valencia?

Chasing Don Quixote: a Detour through Castilla-La Mancha

Bueno, Castilla-La Mancha isn’t exactly known for its long, winding highways,” Inmaculada said, dragging her fingertip across the screen of her mobile phone six consecutive times as the car pointed towards Valencia. It had been nearly 100 kilometers since I’d had to even move the steering wheel for anything other than overtaking.

Literally called the scorch or the stain in Spanish, La Mancha may not be famous for its roads, but it is renowned for two things: Don Quixote and Manchego cheese. Resting comfortably on top of Andalucía and cradled between Madrid and Valencia, its size and its small towns have intimidated me. Everything seemed a bit archaic, a bit sleepy and, mostly, a bit unreachable without a car and an extra-long weekend.

windmills and Don Quijote

Stretching out on either side of the highway as I drove Inmaculada and Jaime to Valencia was land. Sand. Barely a glimpse of a small town. Like any other Spanish student, we were made to read Quixote in high school and made a point of paying homage to a fictional knight bound by the ideals of chivalry and true love. But the landscapes I’d read about in Cervantes’s greatest novel were nothing but  flat and brown. A literal scorch of earth, true to the region’s name.

Three days later, I left the coast, shoes and jacket blackened from Las Fallas, and tilted back towards the heart of Castilla-La Mancha. The great hidalgo‘s “giants” were only a few hours away. I took my old, tired car, an allusion to the old, tired steer, Rocinante, with me.

The drive should have been easy enough: the Autovía de Este until it met the Autovía del Sur and a few minutes’ drive west to Consuegra, where eight or ten windmills stand guard on a jagged crest of mountain, crowned by a medieval castle.

“Destiny guides our fortunes more favorably than we could have expected. Look there, Sancho Panza, my friend, and see those thirty or so wild giants, with whom I intend to do battle and kill each and all of them, so with their stolen booty we can begin to enrich ourselves. This is nobel, righteous warfare, for it is wonderfully useful to God to have such an evil race wiped from the face of the earth.”
“What giants?” Asked Sancho Panza.
“The ones you can see over there,” answered his master, “with the huge arms, some of which are very nearly two leagues long.”
“Now look, your grace,” said Sancho, “what you see over there aren’t giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind and turn the millstone.”
“Obviously,” replied Don Quijote, “you don’t know much about adventures.

Per Trevor’s suggestion, I wanted to stop first in Alcázar de San Juan, home to a number of beautifully restored windmills that wouldn’t be run over with tourists. Spit out from the Contreras Reservoir that naturally separates La Mancha from the Comunitat Valenciana, the radio frequency suddenly switched to a CD, and soon the Eagles (could there be a more perfect band for a road trip?) were running through my stereo.

I calculated I had enough gas and my bladder could make it the 200 kilometers to San Juan. It was an easy jaunt on the A-3 until Tomelloso, where I’d hop onto the CM-42.

Maybe it was the Eagles or the long, flat, endless journey down the motorway, but I turned onto the wrong highway at Atalaya del Cañavate. As someone who uses landmarks to mark the way, the names of towns, echoing old battlegrounds and ruined castles, began to seem foreign. Stopping in Alamarcha, my phone confirmed what I’d suspected for several dozen kilometers: I’d gotten myself lost.

But the giants were calling, and I wasn’t too far off the path. Monty-nante roared back to life, I turned up the music and rolled down the windows. We set off, a girl and her horsepower, to slay giants. Or, take some pictures of windmills before lunch. The allusions end there for a bit, lo prometo.

Like our Quixotic hero, I blinked hard to make sure I was seeing what lay ahead. As soon as I’d gotten on the CM-420, the long, straight highways became curls around hills, between cherry and almond groves and without a soul or engine in sight. The brown patches of earth were immediately lush and covered in alfalfa, dewey from the previous day’s rain, and full of low, stout grapevines. I pulled over and turned off my GPS, happy to sit in near silence as Monty’s tires shifted effortlessly around curves. After all, this was as adventurous as my Holy Week travels would be.

“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”

I began climbing a hill at what I believed to be halfway to San Juan. Just below the cusp, I saw the stationary arm of a giant – a set of windmills protect the town of Mota del Cuervo. We nudged our way towards them, standing in a solitary row of six or eight.

Windmills in Castilla

molinos at mota del cuervo, la mancha

Windmill landscape

The tourism office was closed and my car was the only one parked in the ample gravel lot. I had the giants to myself, and I practically squealed. Lately I’ve been feeling jaded as I travel in Spain, as if nothing else can ever impress me the way that laying eyes on the Alhambra or the Taj Mahal did; but feeling the wind whip by my ears as I looked across the scorched Manchego plain reminded me that, yes, there is still plenty of Spain to discover.

But I had to press on, to not let perception or kilometers or a low phone battery squash my dream of seeing Consuegra when I was this close. I drove right past San Juan and its beautiful windmills atop an olive tree grove crawling up the hillside. As soon as I’d crossed the A-4 highway some 40 kilometers later, the giants at Consuegra began to come into view, huddled around a castle.

windmills in my rearview mirror

The town itself was dusty and sleepy, as I’d expected. Streets had no names, rendering my GPS useless. Monty chugged slowly up the steep, barely-meter wide streets as old women swept street porches and clung to their door frames. Images of the old hidalgo became commonplace – bars named Chispa and La Panza de Sancho, souvenir shops touting wooden swords and images of windmills and an old warrior atop a barebones steed.

Rounding the final curve, a man waved his arms up and down, pleading me to stop and flagging me into a full parking lot. “It’s International Poetry Day,” he said, “and the molinos are closed to car traffic.” Closing my eyes and throwing the car into reverse, I consulted the day’s plan. After getting lost twice and being pulled over by a Guardia Civil, I had to make a decision: resign myself to hiking 500 meters up to the windmills as the clouds closed in ahead, or drive back down towards Andalucía for a winery tour in Valdepeñas.

I chose to buy a bottle of wine in the DO and call it a day. I had dreams and bucket list items to chase.

The windmills were barely visible, save a few solitary blades reaching over the rock face. After an entire morning searching for them, it was like they had stopped spinning, as if the proverbial wind had been blown out of my sails. And coupled with a bus full of tourists, they just didn’t have the wonder that the molinos and my moment of silence at Mota del Cuervo had.

Even the clouds overhead looked menacing and about to burst.

Panoramica molinos de Consuegra

Windmills at Consuegra

I hiked to the farthest point from the castle, to windmills bearing less common names and without selfie-stick toting tourists resting on the stoops. These windmills were decidedly less picturesque but somehow more authentic.

A View of Don Quixote's Giants

panorama of Don Quixote's windmills

Maybe it was a pipe dream to think I’d have the windmills all to myself for an hour of reflection. Maybe I thought they’d be bigger, like the giants I’d read about in high school. But like all things in the chronicle of the hidalgo, not everything is always as it seems. Feeling a bit dejected and pressed for time, I climbed back into Monty-nante, a true warrior after 1000 kilometers over four days, and took the autovía south.

“Take my advice and live for a long, long time. Because the maddest thing a man can do in this life is to let himself die.”

It’s been over a decade since I’ve studied abroad, and half a lifetime since we read an abridged version of Don Quixote junior year of high school. And it’s been just over four centuries since Miguel de Cervantes penned the closing chapter to a masterpiece that endures time and place.

Molinos de Consuegra

In high school, I remember thinking Don Quixote was a fool, a haggard old man with pájaros en la cabeza who should have listened to his trusted Sancho Panza. Feeling very much like a pícara myself at this moment, I had a car ride to reflect on things and my somewhat failed mission to fulfill a teenage dream.

After a few weeks that could very well change the Spain game, I couldn’t help thinking that the old man had a few things to remind me: about perspective, about the clarity in insanity and that failure is also a means to a happier ending.

EXHIBITION

Have you ever seen the windmills at Consuegra?

Why You Need This Adult Coloring Book Dedicated to Wanderlust

It was a night like any other: I was watching clips of America’s Next Top Model (shame, shame) when my Macbook Air screen when blank. It was a sign for me to go to bed, I presumed, so I clicked it shut and set it on my nightstand.

The following morning, I heard the familiar cha-CHUUUUUN that my Mac cries when turning on, and even though the keys glowed, the Black Screen of Death stared at me. I remember sighing heavily before reaching for my phone for a homemade remedy, cursing myself for updating the system before.

work online

After a few uninspired attempts to reboot a perfectly healthy system that recently underwent surgery to make it faster and more secure, I relented and took it into the Mac repair shop in Los Remedios.

Mr. Mac confirmed my fears: the cable that connects the screen to the keyboard was shot, probably from my long hours watching American TV series, mindlessly clicking on wikipedia articles and writing for SandS, COMO Consulting and other publications. And it was going to cost me at least 500€ to fix.

OK Universe, I heard you loud and clear: My computer does not have to be my best friend.

I had ideas for posts bursting out of my head, 89 unread blog posts from other sites I follow and several emails to get to, but I opted for a nap. A bonafide, not-binge-watching-Shonda-Rimes-dramas-and-calling-it-rest nap.

Faced with an afternoon with not much to do and spending money reserved for rescuing my Mac, I was desperate to find an activity to do at home that didn’t involve a screen. I came up with cleaning, which I’d done two days prior or organizing my desk. From under a stack of papers and lesson plans for the month, I unearthed Travel Between the Lines, and adult coloring book that my friend Geoff and Katie Matthews of Wandertooth Blog sent my way. I smiled – the cover features Lisbon, where I had recently traveled with my family.

Adult Coloring Books

Digging out and sharpening my set of colored pencils, I turned on a podcast and set to work on the first photo I turned to: street scene of rural Barichara, Colombia on page 22. Three-quarters of an hour of shading, lining and sharpening later, I’d used bright colors to turn whitewashed Barichara – which could have easily been a town in the mountains of Spain – into a technicolor dream, complete with a shiny new motorcycle leaned against the wall of the home.

For someone who daydreams about far-flung locales, I didn’t want Pinterest or the internet skewing with my creative juices on this project.

Adult coloring books have made a splash recently for their stress-melting power. And as an early millennial with her heart still stuck in the 90s, I have to admit that I felt like a kid again, more concentrated on shading and what color to paint the roofs than my broken computer. Plus, I had something to do while chatting on the phone with my mom on Sundays or before bed that didn’t require another screen.

Skepticism hadn’t crossed my mind when it came to the adult coloring book craze, as it seemed like yet one more thing on my bookshelf. But here’s why you should have one:

Serious wanderlust is ahead

I met Geoff for an early afternoon beer at a cervecería buried somewhere in Macarena. It was early, but anyone ho can match me for beers after Spanish class is a friend in my book. Studying at Sevilla Habla language school, Geoff was spending a few weeks in Seville and would soon be joined by his wife, Katie. The married Canadians had been traveling since 2009 full-time and have been to more than three dozen countries.

And that’s where this book comes in. Katie is the wordsmith of Wandertooth and Geoff is the visual video storyteller, but there’s little need for words or moving pictures in this book: there are 47 black-and-white pictures of their travels from 29 countries.

detail of Travel Between the Lines photos

Flipping through, I recognized a few places – the effervescent Eiffel Tower of Paris, home to my childhood wanderlust; the chain bridge in Budapest, a city I fell hard for; the place of my expat nightmares, Plaza de España in Seville. But more often than not, I couldn’t tell if the pictures were Asia or Central America or Europe.

All of the photos belong to Katie and Geoff

When Wandertooth came up with the idea for Travel Between the Lines, they were already seasoned globetrotters who had lived around the world. They sent their personal pictures to a designer, who in turn transformed them into art you could personalize. As travelers and part-time locals in many of these places, it’s like discovering a new place with a fresh set of eyes. Plus, they share two-line vignettes about their travels to each of the destinations featured at the back of the book.

Katie and Geoff Matthews

Geoff and Katie Matthews. Photo courtesy of Wandertooth.

What’s more, some of the drawings are easy to finish (think attending high tea in London) whereas other offer more of a challenge – kind of like haggling at a souk in Morocco or wondering what exactly you’re eating at a street market in Taiwan.

And by being 8.5″x11,” they can easily adorn your cubicle or cork board once you finish and rip them out. Think of it as a Color Me Mine for the clumsy or the minimalistic.

Support small businesses and publishers

Perhaps more important than fueling your wanderlust during your morning commute, Katie and Geoff are digital entrepreneurs and small business owners – even if their office has sand for a floor. Your purchase of the Travel Between the Lines helps them keep traveling, creating and running a digital empire.

Travel Between the Lines Coloring Book

And, like every Canadian I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, they’re crazy personable and very nice! And they make excellent tapas crawlers.

So while those 500€ to fix my Mac ended up being 189€ (and thus a plane ticket anywhere during Holy Week), a few minutes doodling and coloring is tiding me over.

Want to Get Your Hands on the Book?

Break out your colored pencils – and your phone camera! I’ve teamed up with Wandertooth to give you an adult coloring book – and I’ll send it anywhere in this big, wide world. 

All you have to do is follow me on instagram and a tag up to five photos with a place you’d love to see featured in an adult coloring book with the tag #mytravelbtwnlines. Think exotic, spiritual, adrenaline-pumping…and anywhere in between! Or, you can tweet them to me at @sunshinesiestas with the hashtag #mytravelbtwnlines.

Be sure to include the city and country it’s in and a quick description, along with your name and first initial so that I can contact you if we choose your photo.

Contest runs until March 31st, after which the winner will be notified. Winner has until April 10th to claim their prize, lest another pinner take your prize!

You can nab Travel Between the Lines: Inspirational Coloring for Globetrotters and Daydreamers on Amazon, or enter this contest for a free copy, courtesy of Geoff and Katie. And – psst! – another book is on the way! You might even see my hand wrapped around a cervecita on a warm March day featured!

why you need this

Have you ever bought an adult coloring book?

The Curious Case of Spanish Extra Virgin Olive Oil

“Passion and quality are at the heart of this venture. It’s that simple.”

I sneezed, a clear sign that spring was about to settle onto Andalucía for a brief period of time before melting into summer. The breeze picked up, and I wrinkled my nose, lest any more oliva pollen enter my system. For as andaluza as I sometimes feel and act, my allergies gave me up as an utter fraud, calling attention to me in a group of nearly 50.

Bodeguero puppy

Isaac Martín, event coordinator for Basilippo, an award-winning olive oil producer internationally recognized for its quality, kicked off a tasting event that was punctuated by my sniffles. Set at an old hacienda buried within acres of olive trees, an internet search for foodie experiences brought me to one of western Andalucía’s foremost producers of liquid gold, extra virgin olive oil.

Teetering on winter and spring, I was willing to risk puffy eyes to learn how to properly taste olive oil and look out for its quality and properties. As a staple of the Mediterranean diet, its health properties have long been touted, but not all aceite de olivo virgen extra is created equal: supermarket buyers often have to pick between an entire shopping aisle’s worth of brands and varying quality.

Arbequina olive oil from Andalucía

And the good stuff doesn’t come cheap.

The Basilippo brand, made with the manzanilla and arbequina varieties of olives, has been my go-to brand when bringing home a nice bottle for foodie friends, but I shamefully catalogued what I used to cook with or a dress a salad with at home: whatever came cheapest and in a plastic bottle. I had a lot to learn, and creative packaging could not longer be a barometer for quality.

And for a small-batch, family-run brand, passion for the ripest fruit and top-tier production practices, only the best would do.

Inside Hacienda Merrha’s lofty tasting room, several round tables sat armed with jewel blue tasting cups, a brasero disguised underneath by heavy cloaks. Diego Vergara, responsible for the company’s marketing, held up two sherry glasses full of orange juice as we sat. 

Properly tasting olive oil

His explanation of how to distinguish extra virgin olive oil was simple: one was an orange juice squeezed from ripe oranges. The second was a bastardization of orange pulp, colorants, chemicals and mass production. In other words, it was a soft drink meant to mimic the flavor of orange juice. If the product was bruised or off, the taste and aromas would be off. Perfection is this business, amidst mass production and knocks offs, truly came down to passion for the cleanest, most natural product.

The scents naturally found in olive oil – grass, banana and traces  of fruit – laced the air as the heater next to our legs in turn heated the smooth, rounded tasting capsules for optimum olfactory pleasure.

Flavors present in EVOO

Oil exists in dozens of varieties, and olives have been picked, pressed and packaged into olive oil for nearly eight millennia. Extra virgin – considered the healthiest and ripest state of the olive – occurs when no heat treatments have been applied to the product and is made from 100% olives of the same type. All other oils wane in quality, thus driving down the price. Packaging can also make a difference, as olive oil loses its properties with exposure to light or heat.

Again, I fully admit to being ashamed of the marca blanca I have stocked at the back of my pantry.

The three blue cups sat before us. Two contained about a tablespoon of product and were covered with a plastic condiment lid. The third, sitting at 7 o’clock, was filled and quickly covered. Blue cups are typically used in blind tasting as, unlike wine, color is not a factor in determining an oil’s quality. Smell and taste take all the credit here.

como degustar aceite de oliva

Olive oil’s properties are strongest when it’s as close to harvest as possible. The generous pours came from a bottle only a few weeks old, and Diego generated a bit of heat to release its intoxicating smell by cupping the glass in his hand and rotating it back and forth as if opening a bottle of pickles for about 15 seconds. Next came a quick whiff and recapping the jar.

We’d all come for the tasting portion of course, and sloshing it around your mouth like Adolfo of Plus Vino showed me to do wouldn’t cut it:

Olive oil has different tastes on your tongue and taste buds. Sucking in air as it travels towards the back of the throat makes it taste more viscous and potent. And I wasn’t the only one who got a burn in the back of the throat – slurps were followed by gags, coughs and grunts, the sign of a quality harvest.

Moving on, we paired a vanilla-infused organic oil with both regañá crackers and a crisp, hard cheese, as well as a pineapple ice cream drizzled in olive oil. Though most of Basilippo’s bottles come with recommendations for consumption, the kitchen serves more innovative dishes.

The man immediately on my left seemed to be some sort of aficionado and asked the white elephant question: How did Basilippo feel about the “adulteration” of Spanish olive oil? 

Brought up as extended family of the Rubinellis and the Dell’Alpe dynasty – a Chicago-based import company known for its quality Italian products – olive oil has always been a staple in my family’s kitchen. And until moving to Spain, I was convinced that Italy produced the highest quality product. But European olive oil is on par with organized crime – even though Spain produces roughly 40% of the world’s olive oil, most is shipped in bulk to Italy before being bottled, giving the impression that most olive oil is coming straight from the Boot.

How to do an olive oil tasting

This has been going on since the Roman occupation of Spain, when olive oil was used in commerce and called liquid gold (and in all fairness, my Italian relatives have a soft spot for Spanish cuisine). I’ve long felt that Spain is only beginning to embrace competing on an international market with its food products, and I’d likely consumed them as they paraded as Italian. 

But Basilippo’s product was meant to stay with the connoisseurs, a thead that runs thorughout its four generations of olivareros. International consumption is definitely on the table – they’ve won numerous awards worldwide and run a quality assurance program attended by visitors abroad – and they’ve got a strong local following. I thought back to Isaac’s powerful speech in which his love for his business reach my consciousness despite the sneezing and nose blowing. Passion isn’t so much an ingredient, but a habit at Merrha.

Diego explained that close to 10 pounds of olives are necessary to produce a single liter of olive oil of any quality, hence the small batches coming out of Basilippo (the production comes from just 20 hectacres of olivos). By the time our group of nearly 50 hit the gift shop, we’d depleted a large portion of stock. I introduced myself to Isaac, chuffed that so many phenomenal gastronomic treats now formed an important base in my diet.

fried olives from Andalucía

Unsatisfied with a few morsels of bread for mopping up oil in the gift shop, I sneezed my way back to the car and we struck out towards El Viso del Alcor. Craddled between Mairena and El Viso, this privileged land was believed to have been inhabited as Tartessos. It’s also home to one of the zone’s most innovative tapas bars, MasQueTapas.

All of the dishes on the two-paged menu are made with products from down the road at Basilippo and the place was packed on a rainy Saturday. As the waiter brought out drinks, he laid down a small dish of fried olives.

“But heating the olives changes their properties,” Kelly said, popping one into her mouth. “So these are probably the rejects.”

Low quality or not, they were exquisite, proof that a small sliver of land in my backyard, with its rolling groves of olive trees (and toxins for my system) is producing what could be the world’s most perfect crop.

a tasting at Basilippo

I’m on a mission to do something new every week of 2016 – from visiting a new village to trying a new bar or restaurant. Have suggestions for in or around Andalucía? Please share them, and take a tour of Basilippo‘s immaculate grounds, just 30 minutes from Seville (they’ll even pick you up if you use public transportation!). You can buy their products in small gourmet shops like Oleo-lé in central Seville.

Have you ever attended a strange food tasting?

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