International Women’s Day (Also: The Story of My Mother)

I don’t normally post on Saturdays,  but since it’s International Women’s Day (well, when I started this post, it was), I figured, “Why the heck not?” and so here we are.  (To be completely honest, I really just wanted to post for my Things I’m Loving bit because I found so many cool things that were so relevant to today, so I actually have nothing real planned out to write, so bear with me! Also check out everything below because they are super neat and awesome and inspirational and kick ass women doing things!)

I have to say that I was lucky growing up and being a girl. I mean, ridiculously, superbly, out of this world lucky. Of course, that’s not something I knew at the time and wasn’t until I left home and started talking to people and started expanding my reading and hearing people’s stories. But, I was. Starting off with my mother.

Summer in March

Madrid has been warm. And by ‘warm’ I do mean, “We hit 20° yesterday, today was 24° out and the weekend’s supposed to be sunny as all heck.” To which all my Canadian and American family and friends are going, “We still have five feet of snow,” and, “We don’t care about you and your stupid weather.” While the Madrileños have continued to sport thick winter jackets, scarves and toques, my friends and I have labelled ourselves as even more foreign with our t-shirts, sleeveless dresses and capris. (I had a small child point and giggle as I walked by today and I spent the rest of my walk wondering if  I had something on my face before I realized I was the only person not wearing pants and yup, that’d be it.) Which meant that, when I met Alex’s parents on Wednesday, we got to take advantage of the terrace on El Corte Inglés in Callao. It had been on my list of ‘places to go’ for what feels like ages, but I just never made it (which is just sad when a person considers how much time I actually spend around Callao) and I’m glad that the day I did finally get up there, it was on a brilliantly sunny day.

Favourite Photogs: Bernat Fortet

I saw a few of Bernat Fortet‘s Color Hunting photographs as I was scrolling through my tumblr the other day and had to click on over to his site. While I’m not really big on the rest of his work, his Color series is definitely interesting and eye catching. It hits more notes as art photography over photojournalism, but I am a big fan of how well his colour pairings go together and how clean and simple they all are. I would have no problem buying one as an art piece to hang on my wall. 

On a Saturday Night

 

Saturday was good. It was easy. It was a ‘spend the day in your pajamas because everyone went out last night and no one’s alive yet’ kind of day followed by Alex and I buying sandwich supplies from Ahorra Mas because he could not wait for dinner and sitting on a cold, slightly damp stone bench at Principe Pio waiting for another friend to arrive for dinner. (Naturally he wasn’t all that hungry by the time it came to order.)  Madrid was chilly and slightly damp and kids were running through the puddles in front of us.  We stopped in front of a restaurant we told each other we’ll have to try in the future. We came back to Rivas and finally stopped in at that tapas bar on my street and Alex hit his head on his beer glass and I didn’t fall off my stool, so all in all, it was a wonderful evening. 

Favourite Photogs: Gerda Taro

Gerda Taro was born Gerta Pohorylle to a Jewish-Galician family in Stuttgart. She fled Nazi occupied Germany  for Paris in 1934, where she met Friedmann Endre. He taught her photography and together the two of them invented Robert Capa and Gerda Taro as a ruse to earn more money off their photographs, as Americans were paid more than Europeans for their work.  They were found out, but the two of them kept their altered names, the names they eventually became famous by.