marta in barcelona

That's a photo of Marta on La Rambla, the main walking street in Barcelona. At the beginning of La Rambla, you are likely to find teams of street performers doing flips and spins and breakdancing moves (to some pretty obscene dance music, I might add). Marta loved it. She sat right up front and made sure she had a euro to give when the hat came our way after a performance. Then in other places, like in restaurants or in our apartment, she practiced her breakdancing moves.

In a way, Barcelona was Marta's kind of place. It was filled with generally extroverted people who didn't mind saying "hola!" back after Marta yelled it at them. Sometimes, though, Marta couldn't get their attention, so she might yell "hola!" three or four times until her victim responded.

Epp built up the trip by playing Marta a YouTube video of Barcelona that features Freddie Mercury singing his anthem of the same name. On the first night in town we went for a walk along the beach and Marta was skipping with joy singing "Barcelona! Barcelona!"

Along with "hola" Marta learned how to say "como ti llama" (what's your name) or to add the word "guapa" (which means 'beautiful'), so she might yell to a young woman "hola guapa, como ti llama!" She also mysteriously learned the word for milk, "leche", so one day I noticed she was sitting in our window yelling "leche" at passersby. I wonder what they thought about that.

The weird thing about parenting a 4-year-old is not knowing their limitations. Your daughter insists she can climb something -- and maybe she can -- until she falls and hurts herself. Then you feel like it's your fault for letting her climb it in the first place. But what if she had climbed it fine without your help, but you spotted her anyway, to her great annoyance? Then you might feel like you were a control freak. It's hard to know when not to be a control freak and when to give the invisible leash a bit more slack.

Case and point, one day we visited the Poble Espanyol -- a Disney-like reconstructed Spanish village set atop Montjuïc, overlooking Barcelona. It was a fairly touristy experience that filled my mind with flashbacks of my own childhood trips to Cancun and Florida. In fact, in one cafe the radio was blaring out Madonna's 1987 hit "La Isla Bonita".

Marta went to touch a piece of modern art made out of steel on the grounds of the Poble Espanyol, and I instinctively told her not to touch it. "What's she going to do with it?" a passerby commented, "that steel is two inches thick." I felt ashamed. I had become the parent I never wanted to be. The one that tells kids not to touch things they cannot break.

So I decided I needed to relax and give Marta more freedom. But then she started sliding down the side of a small hill, until her butt was black with dirt. "What happened to her pants?" asked Epp. I saw it happen, but I didn't want to intervene. Had I been more controlling, she wouldn't have gotten dirty. Ugh. It's so hard to tell when to apply authority and when not to. In an ideal world I would have let her play with the sculpture and stopped her from sliding down the hill.



I am really glad though that we went on this trip together because I had to spend huge chunks of my day ferrying Marta around on my shoulders. It was good exercise for me, and I think it will be one of the first trips in her life that she will remember clearly when she gets older. I don't think she has any memories from our trips to Amsterdam and Scotland in 2005. So, of all places, Barcelona will be one of *those* places for Marta.

That's the funny thing about traveling with kids. It's sometimes extremely challenging, but the reward is all of the strange situations you find yourself in. For example, Marta really wanted to take the tour bus, the Bus Turistica. It was raining that day, but we shelled out our 40 euro, because we figured that the amount of walking or cab rides it would take to see all the sites we saw on the tour bus would exceed the cost of the day pass for the tour bus.

We couldn't see anything from the inside of the bus, we decided to ride on the top of the bus, despite the rain. And so here we were, traveling around Barcelona on a bus with umbrellas as our own protection. In a way, it offered better views than we could have obtained any other way.

Children also get you places. For example, we wanted to ride the cablecar down from Montjuic to our apartment in Barceloneta. However, the ticket machine would not accept our cards. We tried every card we had and it just would not accept them. Finally, we explained our problem to the man at the gate, who took one look at Marta's sweet face and let us ride for free.