On the train from Barcelona to Madrid near the end of our 10-day trip to France and Spain, I asked my younger son, Oscar, what he’d liked best so far.
“The black pool, it was the perfect temperature,” he said, nodding in agreement with himself. “Or that other pool, with the dogs.”
We’d been to the Chateau of French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, stayed in the shadow of the castle where Da Vinci lived his last days, sat and napped at the base of the Eiffel Tower, swam in the Mediterranean Sea, wandered Spanish architect Gaudi’s Palau Guell, and still, the pools were the thing.
“I would have said the high-definition TVs in the hotels,” he added. “But it was all in French or Spanish.”
I laughed. This is why I booked hotels with pools. And let the kids stay in the apartment in Barcelona and play computer games while the hubby and I pored over Picasso’s early work at the Museu de Picasso down the street. And why I allowed them to order familiar hamburgers and Cokes sometimes instead of the other delicious local fare we sampled.
Like most of my parenting experiences, travel with my kids is not exactly how I most-perfectly imagine it. They don’t always want to try the squid or discuss the finer details of the art at Centre Georges Pompidou.
Turns out foie gras and un-identified fish tapas don’t float their boat. And it was super cool for them to climb on the thousand-year-old walls of the medieval La Cite of Carcassone, but the pool and the unleashed beagle and black lab that roamed around it were more awesome.
I have to be so careful not to get too judgmental of myself or my kids for being who we are, even on foreign soil. We are somewhat set-in-our-way American folk for whom speaking foreign language doesn’t come easy, after all. We are New Yorkers, even in the middle of France, searching for places to tap into wifi as we impatiently wait for the bill. I might like to be otherwise, and I do my best to say bonjour and hola, merci, and por favor, but I attempt to squash the “shoulds” that arise along the road.
Yes, my kids “should” try every tapa, they “should” read with interest every brushstroke of the great masters, they “should” thank me and their father at every turn for this amazing opportunity to travel overseas.
But then I remember why we went to Europe in the first place. We traveled here to soak in other cultures, to see super old stuff in real life, and to realize that everyone’s pretty much the same.
I didn’t go to Europe until I was 25. I had planned a big trip in middle school, as part of a social studies assignment. It was a 10-day itinerary, to major sights such as London’s Big Ben, and that tower in Paris. A decade-plus later, I bought a ticket in to London to visit friends in both places.
My kids are already way ahead, even just at home in Park Slope where their friends are from all across the globe. And I am bound and determined to make the whole world seem to them a nice and inviting place where they can feel free to roam, and to find faces that feel friendly and decidedly less foreign after just a few hours.
After a day and a half in Barcelona, Eli turned his tanned, freckled face up toward me as we walked back to our rented apartment down the cobblestone streets of El Born.
“Spain feels really relaxed, kinda like New York,” he said.
I smiled.
Mission accomplished.
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