Drawing

Since we were going to meet friends from Barcelona in Montreal last month, Pau made a small package with gifts for his parents and brother, so Albert took it back to Barcelona to them as early birthday gifts with free shipping.

To Jordi, Pau's dad, we got this very fun book, with 642 things to draw. It just says a word (in english, so he can also practice vocabulary) and a small blank space to illustrate each word.

Last week Jordi sent Pau some pictures of what he had been drawing:

All these fun drawings made us want to try too, and I enjoyed a great sale on chapters to get the 642 things to draw for Pau and the second book, 712 more things to draw for Jordi in advance for christmas or something.

I know I didn't get me one and it sure wouldn't hurt to have a reason to draw more (or to draw all together, because I definitively don't draw anymore at all.), but I can always just copy the words from Pau and draw in another notebook, right?

Radio 557

Some months ago I lost my backpack in the Skytrain with my laptop inside and someone took it. It was a terrible thing. The "find my mac" app from Apple was supposed to block the computer but it did absolutely nothing. Thanks to Chrome, I could see from another device all the things that this person googled trying to wipe everything out of the laptop until he finally did so. Also, Gabi did a great detective work on Craigslist and we were 99.9% certain that we found the laptop, but we couldn't contact the guy.

Anyways, I'm telling this because today I remembered that between lots of pictures that now are lost forever, there were the radio podcasts that I did with my friends from Barcelona three years ago. I am actually really proud that we got to broadcast 42 programs, and today, searching in my old emails I could get some of the cover pictures of the show, which brought me lots of good memories. The covers were made late at night by Oriol Roca while Albert and I were uploading the thing.

Grillin'

We're on patio madness mode around here. It's definitely not summer yet, but it feels nice to be able to sit outside just because.
And then I saw this post on Buzzfeed (talk about procrastination!) about vegetarian grilling recipes... Combined with a portable barbecue sale on Canadian Tire and our new balcony, I guess I figured out what could be the next home upgrade. Pau is not THAT on board with my idea, but I would love to grill pizzas and sandwiches and vegetables and try to have an actual barbecue at least once with all the fake meat we can find here in Vancouver.
Off course the 10 dollar grill from Canadian Tire is not nearly as pretty as this Cast Iron Grill

Or as portable as this flat fold grill (I can only find the uglier black version for sale)

But I just wanna grill an asparagus and Gardein chicken lunch like this one!

and grill away like Bob Dylan!

Balcony

We have finally fixed our kind-of-a-balcony. Pau says it's a "back porch".
It's a bit of space we have outside of our back door, by the stairs that lead to the back alley. Each of us neighbours have a piece of land like this that sometimes get invaded by people coming up or down and ours has never been anything.
We had a nasty small couch that the previous tenant left behind resting there that got substituted by our own old couch after we got a new one for the living room. After we finally sold the couch we were left with an open storage space. There was my bike, Pau's bike and two abandoned bikes we found on the streets. We sold them one by one and in the end there was only my bike and garbage left over from our kitchen renovation. Once there were also some embarrassing bags filled with kitchen garbage that we forgot to take down and got attacked by racoons (up in the third floor!).

We have been dreaming about this for a while and with summer starting to show its face, we decided it was time to take action. We took the old countertop and other junk to the dump, tied the bike standing up, cleaned the infinite amount of black dust and spider webs that we've been gathering for all these years and off to IKEA.

We managed to fit everything (perhaps illegally) in the smart car from Car2go and drove home through a storm. When we got home the storm had already stopped so we did some easy IKEA carpentry work transforming our nasty old space into a great summer spot! It got so great that we're working from here right now, even if it's still a bit nippy out.

The next step is to get some string lights for the night time. We already bought a huge pack of tea candles on this trip to IKEA, but string lights look so nice and cozy and pretty...

I've been researching on which on to get. I really love the look of the globe lights at night, but Pau has a point, they don't look so good during the day.

We're leaning towards the japanese lanterns made with nylon instead of paper so they can stand the Vancouver drizzle and look good in the day and night time.

But I've seen so many other fun novelty or more expensive string lights online...

I like the mini street lanterns or the "cafe" lights with a metallic dish on top from here. And I like all of the caged string lights a lot as well.

Bamboo lights for a tiki look, or straight tiki lights.

From the fun novelties ones that I'm sure we won't get, there are thousands of great ones (including some penis lights)

But I would have the greatest fun with these grape ones, just to reenact this video over and over:

Québec

Pau went to a Genetics conference close to Montreal and I tagged along for a short vacation. We spent four days at the hotel in an amazing room with views to a frozen lake. It was great, although Pau had to work most of the time. He presented a poster and a short talk and I couldn't be more proud.

After the conference we spent the rest of the week in Montreal, getting to know a tiny little bit of the city. Right in the first hours a couple passed by us on monocycles. We were definitely in the city of Cirque du Soleil and Just for Laughs. Not really our kind of entertainment...

We rented a beautiful loft on AirBnb. Beautiful on the inside, that is. The building itself was really squatty and noisy, but it was fun and a lot more private and cheaper than a hotel. I was prepared for all the cold weather I expected from april in Quebec, but luckily it was sunny and warm every single day we were there.

I don't want to say we were disappointed with the city because we did see some really nice places (like old montreal, one nice neighbourhood with lots of cafes and bookshops and this art instalation with musical swings), but I admit I was expecting a lot more. French really is the first (and pretty much the only) language there, which is awesome but made me feel a bit weird at times, having to explain I don't speak french everywhere. It was one of my first trips, and definitely the longest, to a place where I don't speak the language at all.

I'm probably spoiled by the way things are in Vancouver, because I felt the city to be a little bit decadent and dirty. There were abandoned buildings right downtown and a lot of potholes on the streets and sidewalks. It was also weird to see a lot of strip tease and sex- related shops everywhere. The shop's windows were also dark, dirty and decadent... I wish we taken more pictures to illustrate it all. We're still not very good in the picture taking department.

As for the culinary adventures, there was not much on the conference phase since we were stranded on the hotel eating buffet food, but in Montreal we tried Shabu Shabu, which is a sort of Japanese fondue, that has nothing fondue-y or tasty about it, unfortunately, because the idea seemed really fun. It's a pot of vegetable stock placed on top of an electric stove to which you add tofu and vegetables to cook, dip them on different sauces and much, while sipping on the vegetable infused stock. It all ended up tasting next to nothing with very strong hints of a foul algae. Definitely a one time thing.

While in Chinatown we bought some fake meats made with shiitake mushroom to cook at home that were really tasty. On our last day we had veggie burgers and poutine at a very very cute place on Mile End, that nice neighbourhood, finishing up with a sugar and lemon crepe and coffee for desert.

...

This is Pau taking over. It was a very lucky coincidence the that the first time we're in Quebec my best friend's band from Barcelona is playing there. We got to spend almost 24 hours together which fuelled me up with social happiness enough to survive until we next time visit Barcelona. Plus we went to an awesome punk show with Crazy Spirit, Glam and Una Bèstia Incontrolable. Pretty preeeetty cool altogether.

Just an ordinary French-Canadian punk car, I guess.

Glam.

Crazy Spirit.

Punk house breakfast.

Last but not least, we bought a totally awesome vegan shitake mushroom lamb in a Chinatown supermarket and we cooked the best of meals. Too bad that we didn't take any pictures of neither the frozen package nor the final outcome.