Dia de San Esteban

Sagrada Familia, Nativity facade

Gaudi seat at Parc Guell, Barcelona

Toni on our Gaudi style seat

There are literally hundreds of Saint's Days here in Catalunya and in all of Spain. Today is special because, not only is it Boxing Day, an English holiday, it's Steve's Saint's Day(Esteban). It seems there are around 2500 Saints with John Paul II having beatified over half of them.  I wouldn't mind seeing my hero Antoni Gaudi receive that honor. Lots of people have been lobbying for his sainthood for years. His designs and architecture are one of the reasons we were drawn here in the first place. The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is the most nature-focused, innovative and breathtaking cathedral in the world. We have an homage to Gaudi''s Park Guell as the focal point of the terrace/entry way to our house (photo). We worked on this trencadis (broken tile) or mosaic project for three months - my design and Steve's engineering and more patient tile placement.

Noche Buena - Christmas Eve

caganer 

Toni, Sunny, Wookie

Astrid and Jon, December 18, 2010

Dates found in Reus

Linda's watercolor of Cal Viudo in El Perello'

The wind today is the strongest yet this season! (121 kph or 75 mph -hurricane force!!)    We've experienced some blows in the past three years that have shattered two sets of propellers off the wind generator, bent the solar panels, and crunched the solar panel tracker. On the upside, Steve now knows how to prevent or at least deal with these setbacks. At 5am when the wind noise woke me, I decided to run a load of wash rather than waste all the juicy overflow coming into our energy converter. 
Yesterday we drove to Reus (city where Gaudi was born) 30 minutes away. Some beautiful Modernista (Art Nouveau) style buildings, shopping and great restaurants.   On the drive we practiced English and Spanish with our Italian buddies, Gab and Dan (she Daniela, he Gabriele) using my fab Kindle that contains a mega sized Spanish grammar book. Before a visit to the city market (a smaller but no less colorful version of La Boqueria in Barcelona) and lunch at our newly found favorite 10euro lunch spot, Rosa dels Vents, we spied some public works gents cleaning street trees who had, in  the back of their truck, an early Christmas present we couldn't pass up.  Photo shows our haul of dates that, when mature, should be sweet and bountiful enough to last the year.    
Two weeks ago when we last went to Reus, there was a Pessebre market, a bunch of stands selling manger figurines and other holiday decorations. Though we don't have a manger scene, or a tree as a matter of fact, (we do have a cat safe decorated bough of pine, olive, and cedar) we finally have our own caganer (photo). If you don't live in Catalunya, you probably don't know about caganers. The Catalans love to celebrate the life of the peasant and believe there must have been an ordinary person seeing to his needs among, or behind, the stable denizens at the sacred event.
              As this post seems to be turning into our end of year holiday letter, we'll include a few photos of exceptional events of the past year:  
     Here is the first of Astrid and Jon's WEDDING photos we received (Mr & Mrs Hoyt of Chester Vermont celebrate their one week anniversary on Christmas day!).  We watched the ceremony via Skype and we'll post Richard's pix as they come in.
     Dogs and Cat:They sleep together but not quite friends yet: Sunny, our 5 month old male cat born in the Burga Valley at Eva and Robin's, Mas Cubano, has taken the place of departed, Lulu, in our menagerie. 
     My recent watercolor of Cal Viudo, the traditional old mill in El Perello where we take our olives to be pressed.  They now have postcards, tags, and prints of this available.

Gabriele y Daniela, nuestros buenos amigos Italianos

14 Diciembre: Estamos muy contentos de haberos conocidos no solo por las comidas que hacemos juntos el martes o el intercambio lenguistico si no porque sois personas estupendas y no es un cumplido,es lo que pensamos de vosotros This is a comment from Dan and Gab about our intercambio - our language exhange - and our mutual admiration society.  In a later post we'll show photos of Daniela's paintings on traditional roof tiles that they sell at artisan markets all over Catalunya. These are beautiful and intricate!

Steve and Linda's new blog

We've gotten a little behind technology wise since decamping to Spain in Dec. 2007, but after seeing Tom and Susan's fun and beautiful blog, we thought we had to have a try.  Why La Vida Artesania? Mostly because since arriving here Linda's devoting more time to art, mainly watercolors, and selling originals, prints and cards at local artisan markets. We're also doing art projects together, our Gaudiesque mosaics - we'll show you photos of those.
We plan to relate our latest activities and incorporate some Spanish into the blog as part of our studies.  Every week we do an Intercambio with our Italian friends, Daniela and Gabrielle that consists of first some English language study for them, then sharing a meal while reverting to Spanish, our common language, for the rest of the evening.We've just added a weekly Spanish grammar lesson that our friend David provides. Right, the local language is Catalan - we'll talk about that later.
We harvested our olives in early Nov. and got 100 liters of oil. More info about our trees, the chupones, the moli, and the preserving will follow.
So welcome to our blog and la vida en Catalunya!
Steve and Linda