Spain
We recently took advantage of our proximity to all sorts of great European destinations and headed out to Barcelona for a few days. Here are a few random notes about the trip:

- I Love to explore new places through running and biking. The highlight of the trip was long meandering runs through interesting streets, past cool buildings, markets, monuments, the beach, etc. - SANS STROLLER!!! Yay! Rob and I played tag team with the Smalls at times so that we could each enjoy some pure, unadulterated freedom.

- One of the times I did go running with the stroller, I accidentally made a bit of a scene. Smalls and I like to play this game I made up called "Runaway Baby". Here's how you play: when you get to a downhill, you take your hands off the stroller and cry out "Runaway baby! Runaway baby!" in a way that amuses your kid while you chase right behind. Or you just yell "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah" as you run behind. Ideally, you really should do one of those two things in an exaggerated way that shows passersby that you are just having a good time. More ideally, you only do it when there is no one around to witness. I messed up the game and forgot those rules and out of no where a Spaniard comes sprinting towards us, great distress written all over his face, trying to save this seeming runaway stroller.
Ooops. I hope he got a laugh out of it. No authorities came knocking on my hotel door later that night, so I guess all's well that ends well.

- Barcelona does not stink nearly as bad in March as it does in July. Seriously. Don't go in July.

- Where ever we travel in the world, Rob always finds an Adidas shop that he has to go into. He has a radar. I am not sure what the appeal is when we just went to the same store in Stockholm. Then he called me out on my strange need to go into that cheap, full-of-random-crap-store you also find in every city. But you just never know what you might find! We'll call it even.

- We got to visit with some old friends from our Malibu ward, the Schroder kids and Amanda Carr. Rob used to be their Sunday school teacher and I used to tutor math to Amanda. It was fun to see them so grown up. Something charming about meeting up with old friends in a foreign land several years later. It was cool to see that Amanda is studying to be a nurse. I felt so proud of her. It made me feel a little wistful that I could have ever taught at a single high school long enough to have old students come back years later and see what they'd made of themselves. I always used to think that when teachers said to come back and visit that they were just being polite, but now I understand differently. Seeing the kids in Spain made me think of all sorts of students who I grew to love and would enjoy seeing as adults. (I actually quite miss teaching!)

- Restaurants in Spain don't open till 8:00 at night. Which is funny because in Sweden pretty much everything but the dinner restaurants are closed down by 8:00, or way before. I think these two countries are about as polar opposite as you can get when it comes to social things. I've also become so accostume to Swedes quiet disposition that the outgoing, gregarious nature of the Spaniards kept catching me off guard.

- Now that I am finally thinking in Swedish, all of my Spanish has gone to pot. Too bad. I had to think surprisingly hard even just to come up with "gracias".

-Vacation is fun.