The problem with mobile blogging...

Although the photo on the last blog of Paula and David Bowie serenading each other on her birthday is nice, I wanted to put a photo up all of the girls at our candlelit cooking class.

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One year anniversary (plus a few days)

As unreal as it may seem, a full year of travel has passed by for us. Using the term 'passed' makes it seem like someone has died or we haven't been conscious of what a rare, incredible experience we have made for ourselves. Thinking back on what we were thinking, feeling, and doing a year ago is a comedic endeavor - we actually had no idea what we were doing. We were terrified of spending any money which meant a lot of aimless wandering and empty stomachs. We still do not like to spend so much money and firmly believe that wandering around a city is often the best way to get to know the place, but suffering is unequivocally out of our lives. In fact, we are pretty good at this whole traveling thing by now, but were very happy and grateful to have a 2 week reprieve from our lifestyle as my mother and later on my sister in law came to pamper us.

The benefits of my mother's arrival proceeded her by exactly 10 kilometers. That is to say, George gave up at that spot and my mother was able to quickly lift our spirits through her motherly comfort, dry white wine, and clean clean beds. Our two weeks in Portugal and Spain were action packed.

We drove through landscapes covered in olive trees as far as eyes much better than mine could see, went to a flamenco show which was surprisingly impressive, toured beautiful Moorish buildings, gawked at Las Meninas(!) and Guernica(!!) on the SAME day, and got to the bottom of Spain's 20th century history, to name a few.

On my mom and Katie's last day with us we took a cooking class in Barcelona. It was a great experience the whole way through. Our instructor was a soft-spoken woman who knew of Amma our favorite Hugging Hindi Saint and wore sequin covered sneakers - two points to her. She then tells us that we are going to learn to make the group's three favorite Spanish dishes - gazpacho, tortilla espanol (a fancy omelette filled with potatoes), and paella. While Katie and I are blanching tomatoes, the power goes out. Although this delayed our cooking and prolonged our 'starve', we happily imbibed in the fully stocked refrigerator's supply of wine in the impromptu candlelit kitchen - thankfully only the eating was ahead of us! It was a wonderful conclusion to a lovely two week 'vacation' from our usual traveling.

Due to George's death, we took the opportunity to change around our plans for the next month or so. A day after the Fox ladies returned to the States, we boarded a plane to Budapest, Hungary. The city is beautiful and all, but honestly we are having a tough go at it. We have had a huge shock to our systems as we currently find ourselves in the first properly cold weather in a year and a half. Within a few days we will be in Serbia on a bio-dynamic, sustainable farm just as we were at the same time last year in Argentina. My hope is that in the past year I have become patient and calm enough not to have a near breakdown this time around while picking burning, fly-covered weeds eight hours a day in the fields. Progress reports to follow.
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George was euthanized.

Worth noting: here we are waving hello to the homeland as we overlook the Atlantic on continental Europe's most Western point, yayer.

So yesterday morning we woke up at 5 am in order to make it to Lisbon in time to meet my mother and commence two weeks of comfortable beds, bountiful beakfasts, and flowing wine amongst other things. The drive into Lisbon was easy, maybe too easy as we are accustomed to getting hopelessly lost at least once on every drive, which of course means that something is bound to go wrong. 10 kilometers outside of Lisbon we pull up to the toll booth and as my foot is firmly on the brake, George starts to roll backwards. As we are blocking the morning commuters into Lisbon, we push the car out of the way, or at least try to when a man jumps out of his car and says in accentless English, 'do you need some help?'. Thank god for Canadians. After our new friend made a call to his mechanic, we saw George towed away and told by a man with no front teeth and a pinache for flirtatious lip movements that George was dead - he conveyed this to us by clasping his hands together at the side of his head and pretending to sleep after trying to make engine work. Moral of the story, George is legally dead and being compressed into a small block to be sold by weight - we are in mourning. Thankfully my mother has arrived and we are already enjoying the luxuries and comforts of having some mothering.
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