Today was our first tiny country! Andorra isn't even the smallest country in Europe (I think it's 6th smallest or something), but it isn't even half the size of New York City. Calib was convinced I made it up. Oh, so like I said, it is in Europe. You can't really tell in the picture, but I decided it would be best to write the country in different colors of chalk, depending on which kid's place mat it's on. (In case you weren't aware, the kids have colors for everything to keep track of school stuff without having to label it all). So, Andorra was blue for Calib's Europe place mat.
Andorra is in the Pyrenees Mountain range, which separates France and Spain. Basically there's a road into Andorra from France, and there's essential one road out of Andorra, heading to Spain. There's no airport, so basically you have to decide if you want to fly into Spain or France. The capital, Andorra La Vella is the only town in the whole country. It's basically a ski resort town, with some hot springs, and a big lake that's the result of a melted glacier. That's all Andorra really has to offer, unless you're a big shopper. This tiny country has over 2000 stores, that's 40 people for every one store.
Mushrooms and Berry picking are popular in the mountains, so we had raspberries and blueberries with dinner, along with some mushrooms in the pasta. Wine is big, so the boys got grape juice. A popular side dish in Andorra is Trinxat, a potato kale and bacon mixture. Look, I've never met a potato I didn't like, and these weren't bad, but they certainly weren't my favorite potato ever. They might be down there with my least favorite. Tonight was a big carbohydrate heavy. We also had Pa Amb Tomaquet, basically some garlic bread with tomato, aka bruschetta. The main dish was a little trickier to find something Andorran. They mostly have Spanish and French cuisine (obviously, given their location- they don't really grow/farm anything, so they have to import everything). We decided on the French Chicken Francese.
The whole thing was good, and I give it the spoon of approval. But, it wasn't my favorite. All in all, it's four spoons from us. Hayden was not thrilled with much of anything besides the grape juice and the bread. Peyton, shockingly enough gave it a spoon of approval. He liked everything but the trinxat (like me). Calib and Asa, meanwhile, ate everything.
Postcards were good today, Peyton's was even two sided. We've been having the boys explain their postcards and why they drew what they did at dinner before we vote with the coins.
A tricky little country, it wasn't exactly on either map, so we just put a dot of nailpolish, and scratched off the flag.
There postcard area is filling up, we've got the Afghanistan, Albania, and Algeria postcards displayed nicely.
Four down, 189 to go!
Next Up: Angola
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