Good morning lovely T Gang!
Here I am with another postcard to share and some photos about our life here in Spain, with a drink in it. Yes, I am linking up with Elizabeth for T for Tuesday. Anyone is welcome as long as there is something drink related in the post.
This is my postcard:
As you can imagine it is a card from the Netherlands. Not much to do with drink you say... well I could argue it is a milk maker!
So what have I been up to? Socializing! A lot of socializing! Our lovely Danish neighbours have come for a week's holiday. (their house is a holiday home so we only see them a few times a year). So we have had a few intense get-togethers.
My DH is the one with the hat. I'm not in the photo as I'm behind the camera. Our house is the white house top left.
I'm not going to bore you with all our escapades, but one of my girl friends celebrated her birthday by going for a drink in the nearby park. Her name is Conchi and she is the girl on the right.
I am again not in the picture but one of my friends took the camera and on the next picture I am sat on the left.
And here is the owner of the place, doing some waiting. His name is Santi (short for Santiago = James).
My drink is the glass with the red stuff. It is called Bitter Kas, which is like a bitter campari soda without the alcohol. It is very refreshing.
Now enough of the booze. Lets call it a day.
Happy T-day all of you,
Blessings,
Lisca
Good morning lovely Friday people!
I'm late this morning as we had a late night last night. (a bit of socialising with our Danish neighbours. There were 7 of them!) We were on the terrace until very late! It has only been warm weather since two weeks so not all the terrace furniture was out. With seven Danes coming we decided it was time to put the big table out. It has a metal frame and a glass top. It is too heavy for Graham, even with a friend, to bring up the stairs. So the four men were set to work as soon as they arrived. The table base, the glass top and the six chairs are now on the terrace for the duration of the summer.
My DH (L) and one of our Danish friends.
Here is my postcard for today:
It's from Japan. The image is an old woodblock art print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi called 'Goldfish', 19th century, Tokyo National Museum.
Natsuko, who sent me the card, used some really nice stamps:
Here is something that made me smile. I had seen this on the internet a while ago but the caption had the F word in it which I don't like. Now I have found one with a similar caption without offending swearwords.
It makes me smile because I am that grandma. I wish I had grandchildren who could explain the mysteries of the iphone. I can make a call. I have wifi on it but have not used it. My grandies would go grrrr too I guess. I am still writing my blogs on a computer, that is why I can't blog when I'm away.
That's it from me today. Annie is recovering from a well deserved holiday in Portugal, but she still posts Friday Smiles. Please join us if you have something to smile about.
Have a good week everyone and keep smiling!
Blessings
Lisca
Hi folks! Happy 7th WOYWW Anniversary!
Seven years is a long time. I've only been joining in since 2014.
Julia, who has been hosting this desk peeping fest for 7 years, is now having a sabbatical and so lots of best wishes and good vibes are going her way.
Thank you LLJ for helping out so that we can continue to satisfy our curiosity and see what other people have on their desks. This is the link if you'd like to join us.
This is my desk:
I'm in the process of making the envelopes to send the ATCs in, but I don't want to give too much away.
I'm very excited about the ATC swap that is happening today. It will be the first time I participate and I have 11 Post-It notes with an address on it stuck on the wall in front of me. I'm ready to roll! (All I need to remember is the asterix behind my name when I link up!)
We've been to a wedding last Saturday (our first Spanish wedding). If you are interested you can read all about it in yesterday's blogpost. I'm keeping this one short for a change.
Happy Wednesday, Happy WOYWW anniversary,
Lisca
Good morning my lovely friends! Happy Tuesday to you all!
I'm here to share a postcard with you and photos of a wedding we were privileged to be invited to last Saturday. I'm warning: it's photo heavy, but you don't mind that, do you? Just settle down with your favorite drink and enjoy.
I will be linking up with Elizabeth with T for Tuesday where we all share something that has a drink in it.
Here is my postcard:
It's called (not surprisingly) Russian Beauty. It was painted by V.Nagornov, based on an original painting by K.Makovsky "Kissing Bowl". Well, it does not look like a bowl to me but I'm sure there is something drinkable in there. Perhaps some hot coffee or tea... I hope this qualifies.
Saturday my DH and I were invited to a wedding. Our neighbour's daughter, Anais, got married to a young man from the village Jesús. (Yes, Jesús is a normal boys' name here in Spain). They have already been living together in the village for 8 years and now she has a permanent job, they are tying(have I spelt that right? I don't have an English spell checker) the knot. The photographer was busy taking pictures at her father's house, so I took advantage and clicked away. Isn't she beautiful?
Their little dog is called Fiona, and was also dressed up!
Here is Anais with the photographer:
The young people decided they would play a practical joke on the bride groom and Anais' cousin dressed up as a bride. (I'll explain in a minute what they did):
The wedding was to be held outside in the garden:
When all the guests had gathered, a large tractor with a chair on the front drove up with the bride... (her dad is a farmer)
Everyone applauded, and the groom looked at her eagerly only to realize that it was a fake bride!!
Here comes the real bride! On horse back!
This is the lovely horse she rode:
Andalusians love their horses. Dressage is something they are particularly good at here. This horse is saddled in a typical country way that everybody uses here. I'm sure they also have leather saddles, but here out in the sticks they do it like this.
The bride was 'given away' by her father and the groom by his mother. (I don't know if this is the custom.) No bridesmaids, only a couple of witnesses.
We then went to the restaurant,
where there were drinks and canapés and eventually a meal. The wedding cake had all sorts of figures on them depicting something from their lives. But the main figures were Shrek and Princess Fiona that obviously had a special meaning for them and they cut the cake with a sword.
There was dancing afterwards. My DH was wearing his kilt, which caused a bit of a stir, with the usual requests to know what he was wearing underneath. The answer is: nothing. But he has had problems with drunken young ladies at weddings before so for weddings he wears boxershorts under his kilt, just to avoid embarrasment.
We had a really lovely day. I hope you liked the photographs.
A happy T-Day everyone!
Blessings,
Lisca
Good Morning Friends!
It's Wednesday again. It comes round so quickly. My desk has ATCs on it and as we are going to exchange those soon, I cannot show them. If anyone would like to exchange with me next week, I have a few spare. Please contact me and we can sort out snail mail addresses.
Here is my desk (with the ATCs covered by some paper and postcards):
I took the picture last night before going to bed and then I noticed I had left an envelope with my address clearly written on it for the world to see. So with my sleepy head I bravely opened Photoshop this morning and figured out how to erase the address.
The red book is a traveling notebook which has started in Australia in October and has already visited several countries. I was asked to share some recipes. So I will cook paella this week and take a picture to go in the book with the recipe.
The wedding card is one I made earlier, ah I mean last week and it is ready for this weekend when we are invited to a wedding. The daughter of one of our neighbours is getting married.
I used ribbons, brads and decoupaged the image.
The postcard of Colorado came out of the green envelope.
Here it is close up. It is the Mesa Verde national Park, which preserves the site of ancient communities of Anasazi Indians, including 800 year old dwellings carved high into the sandstone cliffs. Very interesting for me as I live in an area where people have carved cave dwellings in the cliffs and I live in one of those (modernised) cave houses. It is great to see ancient dwellings. The postage stamps are lovely too:
Beautiful tulips.
The red envelope is one from the bank. I was due a new debit card, but it never arrived. Annoyingly I had to suffer a week without my card before they decided they'd better order me another one. Within days I found a new card in my letterbox. Hurray! Today I got another red envelope with a new card in it. Now I have two! So I will have to go to the bank again tomorrow and explain that I now have two and I only need one. My bank is not usually this inefficient so I don't know what went wrong there....
I am going to link up with Julia at Stamping Ground and join 'What's on your workdesk Wednesday' where we show and tell (what's on our desk).
I've shown and told. Now it is your turn.
Have a great week,
Blessings,
Lisca
Good Morning Friends!
Today I'm going to invite you all to come with me to our favorite restaurant. Normally my DH and I eat out every Tuesday, but this week, we went yesterday (Monday), so I have all the photos ready to show you around.
Here is the restaurant. It is called the Venta Vicario:
It is 25 minutes drive away from our village, but all the food is home cooked and it's a family run business: mum, two daughters and a son plus some kitchen staff. We know them all personally because we have been coming there for years.
As this is T for Tuesday, (I'm going to link up with Elizabeth and Bluebeard at Altered Booklover) here are the drinks we had. Fancy a nice glass of Spanish wine?
In our part of the world, every alcoholic drink comes with a free snack. It's pot luck as to what you get. Ours this time was bread with salmon and some olives. Very nice!
The 'special' today was the lentil soup, our favorite:
They also bring a salad that is included in the price.
Here am I enjoying my lentil soup:
Behind me is a display cabinet with gifts and also the bread department. They sell loaves of bread, baked locally.
Then we ordered our main courses. I had grilled white fish (bacalao), DH had ham, egg and chips and our friend had grilled meat (can't remember what).
I don't like chips, so I always get tomatoes with mine. Then my desert was 'flan de cafe', which is home made and coffee flavoured.
I bet your mouth is watering....
Looking around the restaurant, you can see we are seated in the bar part. (the dining room is at the back but we prefer to sit in the bar). There is always lots going on. Here is the display of hams (jamones) and wineskins. You can also see on the left some chorizo sausage and lots of sweets (candies as the Americans say and caramelos in Spanish).
Finally we have our coffees (I have mine with a dash of anis liquor). We were celebrating a friend's birthday so there were pastries that we had brought ourselves.
After we finished our deserts we get a complimentary drink, a sort of Baileys liquor. Yummy.
All this lovely food and drink (except the pastries) is included in the price. They call it 'Menu del Dia' or menu of the day. It is only valid at lunch time (from 2 pm until about 4pm, the Spaniards eat late) as that is the main meal of the day for most people. Most restaurants have a menu del Dia, except the very posh places possibly. I've been to some really classy places, and when we asked, we could have a menu del dia. Obviously the choice of dishes is limited but usually of a very good quality as they have this to attract customers. And it is good for the tourist industry too. We are happy as it means that although we are pensioners, we can afford to eat out every week.
I hope you have enjoyed our restaurant excursion.
Happy T-Day all!
Blessings,
Lisca
Hello Friends! I'm back again! We have been on a little holiday so I wasn't able to blog last week. But I don't like to be away from my computer for long.
We live in Spain so Portugal is not really that far. We drove to Portugal with one overnight stop. The reason I wanted to go to Portugal was that lovely white wine they sell over there called Vinho Verde. (see photos on Tuesday's blog).
Having bought several crates of the stuff, and spending one night over the border, we drove back to Spain and stopped in Seville.
The weather is lousy at the moment and has been for two weeks now. Cold and rainy. But when visiting a city it is better to have cool weather than sweltering hot.
I love doors and in an old city like Seville there are many interesting ones. The first photo shows a wrought iron door to a 'patio', the courtyard around which old Spanish houses are built. (I love having a peep).
These wooden structures are called 'Las Setas' (the mushrooms) for obvious reasons. They cover an archeological site from Roman times:
Sevilla is known for its horse drawn carriages. Of course these days it are the tourists who mainly use them.
Our budget didn't allow for a ride but i did like looking at the beautiful horses.
This tower is called La Giralda and used to be part of a mosque. When Spain was conquered by Christians and the cathedral was build in medieval times, the tower became the bell tower of the cathedral. The copper spheres, so typical of a mosque, had fallen off during an earthquake and have been replaced by bells.
Interestingly there are many replicas of this tower in the US. For example in the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City.
The old centre is completely pedestrianised and every little street is clearly named, so it was so easy (with a map) to negociate the warren of allyways.
The parks are large and beautiful.
And the key to this door would certainly not fit in my rucksack! Compare its size to the modern key hole just next to it....
I hope you liked our little outing to Sevilla! And I hope it made you smile.
To finish, here is a little funny:
I'm linking up with Annie at Friday Smiles and later on with Virginia at Rocking Your World Friday. Please join us with the good things that have happened in your week.
Have a lovely weekend and a good week ahead, full of smiles!
Blessings,
Lisca
Hello deskers all over the world,
I'm back again to join in and show my desk.
Not very spectacular, but I would like to direct your attention to the barely visible gas heater on the right. Yes, this is southern Spain, and yes, it's bloomin' cold!
Just behind the lamp is an electronic thermometer. It reads 12 degrees C out and 21 or so inside. Also against the back wall are the postcards I received last week and the postcards on top of my (closed) laptop are still to be registered and scanned and uploaded on Flickr etc.
The printout is a recipe of a chocolate cake without butter or eggs. I came across it the other day and decided to have a go. It was the nicest, yummiest cake I have made for a long time:
It's called Chocolate Crazy Cake. Click on this name and it will link you to Sweet Little Bluebird's site. And here is the really super easy way of making it:
I doubled the quantities for my 26" tin.
I missed last week as we were on a road trip to Portugal. We stopped in Seville for a few days. What a great city. Here are a few pics (quickly, as Mrs Dunnit doesn't like long posts):
The Plaza de España. Every province in Spain (and there are 48 in total) has a section like this. Of course we had to visit 'our' province Granada.
Some grafitti,
And moi in one of the many beautiful parks in Seville.
That's it from me today. I'm going to link up with What's on Your Workdesk Wednesday at Julia's Stamping Ground. I hope you will join me and show your desk too.
Happy WOYWW,
Lisca
