No more builders
It’s been almost a month since I last updated this blog, and what a month it has been. We have been for a long (felt more like short) weekend to visit my parents in Insch in Scotland. We managed to get direct flights from Barcelona to Aberdeen with flyGlobeSpan, but the flight times were a bit crap, so we arrived very late on a Thursday evening and flew back at 0700 on a Sunday morning. We packed a lot in in a few days including visiting my granny who we were delighted to see is looking rather well for her age. We also went to Balmoral castle - a first for both me and Isabel after an aborted attempt to visit last summer with my cousin Helen thanks to a stray dog (it’s a long story…). We also had the tour of the Lochnagar whisky distillery.
It was fantastic to see all my Scottish cousins and their families and Uncle George and Aunty Chrissie looking in such wonderful health.
Back in Barcelona we seem to have spent the last month continuously moving furniture around so that the builders could finish their work. After much hard work we are now in a situation where things are relatively tidy, and the cardboard boxes are getting fewer and fewer. We have a lot of furniture now although we are still waiting for some custom-made wardrobes for our bedroom.
Isabel’s brother Jesús and family (Mamen, Jesusito and Leonor) have given us the honour of being our first guests this weekend. They came down for Jesusito to sing in a choir at the Auditori in Barcelona on Sunday. When I say choir, it was really a huge chorus of children from all over Spain - I did a rough head count and there were 700 kids on stage singing a version of the Emperor’s New Clothes.
We had a fantastic lunch with them by the beach on Sunday prior to the concert. We all shared a bowl of arroz con bogavante (lobster with rice) in the Arenal restaurant. We would go there again because this was absolutely wonderful.
The title of this post is a little inaccurate because Emilio, our painter from Chile, will be back still finishing off during this week, but there really isn’t much to do. We have the feeling that he’s doing it really slowly because he enjoys working here so much - I guess that the air conditioning helps. 
