It has been a week full of fun and learning. I am always amazed at just how much the kids are learning while traveling without ever setting foot in a classroom.
Beginning of the week we noticed that Jane keeps making fresh orange juice out of the local oranges. They are a LOT sweeter, milder, and plain out yummier than what we can get in Germany. This kid is not one who randomly grabs fruit in any shape or form and munches on it unless its strawberries or bananas. So this was something new and good. She is having a lot of fun squeezing them by hand and then actually drinking the fresh juices as well. So I thought what better time than to go to a garden store to continue the tradition at home.
All joking aside, I love outdoor plants. Our yard in Germany is basically close to exploding with all the new plants I keep buying every year.
While traveling I wanted to make sure to get a SMALL(!) plant in each country to put in our yard. This has worked great in Croatia, Italy, and France. But now I got the crazy idea to get a tiny orange tree that would grow into something big one of these years so we can have an orange or two. Orange trees from Spain are pretty spendy in Germany so I was looking for something small. Went to the garden store and the nicest people were helping us and explaining everything. Long story short, I went home with a 1.50m orange tree that cost a fraction of what it would have cost me in Germany. I love it dearly but have no idea how to actually fit it in the car to take it home. But hey. We will have oranges.
Another thing the kids found out over the weekend is horses can actually swim in the ocean! We still have no idea why, but while we were sitting on one of the many stone cliffs around the island, we saw two horseback riders who rode their horses along the shore. Of course, that didn’t seem like anything out of the ordinary. Menorca is made out of lots of small sandy bays, surrounded by stone cliffs. So they were just riding them back and forth on that small bay, but then they started to go deeper and deeper into the water. We thought that was a bit odd but figured they were trying to cool the horses off. And then they started swimming. The horses, with the riders on their back. Just swimming and swimming, all the way to the next bay around the corner. The ocean there was pretty deep and it wasn’t just a 5-minute swim. I am guessing the whole trip took them around 40 minutes. Absolutely crazy to see. We were really glad both horses and both riders made it ok! Really amazing. The horses did not seem to have any problem with it at all and it did not appear to be their first time doing it.
Then on Friday, it was January 6th, and with it came three kings day. We do celebrate it in Germany, but it is very different from the way they celebrate it here in Spain. From what we found online and heard from the locals, the 3 kings arrive in Menorca by boat the night of the 5th. A lot of people are going down to the harbor for that and there are huge parades. The children get gifts from the three kings instead of Santa, so it is technically their Christmas. It is, without a doubt, one of the biggest holidays of the year in Spain. Our Airbnb host was even nice enough to secretly leave some candy and chocolates for the kids, and a bottle of Spanish wine for the adults! It’s quite a huge deal so we figured we would try one of the traditions. One of the things we kept stumbling upon in quite literally every single store was the “Roscón de Reyes”, roughly translated to “the kings’ cake”. It is a round cake with a hole in the middle, topped with colored fruit and filled with vanilla whipped cream. So we got one at a store without knowing too much about it other than the fact that a paper crown was included in the cake box. Not knowing what was up with that we googled around and also found instructions in the cake box. Turns out that two things are baked into the cake. One hard bean and one figurine (in our case one of the three kings). The cake is then cut into pieces and handed out to everybody. You will have to eat really carefully to not bite on the hard bean or the figurine and lose a tooth
Whoever has the bean in their piece of cake has to pay for the cake.
Whoever has the figurine will be crowned king.
Jane happened to have the bean, and Chris happened to get the figurine. But oh what fun it was. Everyone was of course trying to get the king and avoid the bean.
It was so much fun we kept the figurine and are trying to remember to keep this new tradition alive through the years.
After all, that is was traveling and learning from other countries is for.
The boss, the general, and the brains of the operation. Anya is the mom of this crazy group of misfits. When not traveling the world and teaching her kids to be decent human-beings, she likes to bake, sing, be goofy. Aside from all that she does for Five of a Kind, she is also a short term foster mother for infants in need.
She also enjoys unreasonably spicy foods and is searching for a hot sauce that is spicy enough and yet still has some kind of flavor to it.
