Meeting Mei while visiting “Japan” in Gracia

As I have already advanced a couple of times before we had a blogger meetup with Mei from Ice Pandora this August waiting for us. For those that don’t know her, she is a lovely crafter from the Netherlands (can you remember the colorful & fun crochet banner she made for our blog 1st anniversary? it was ace!) and she shares not only her creations, but also her recipes & eating experiences (she is a foodie!) and daily adventures at Ice Pandora.

When she sent an email telling us that she was coming to Barcelona we knew that of course had to seize the chance to meet and luckily she was in for our proposal with a local flavour to spend the day: we were going to have breakfast at one of our favorites cafes, Café Cometa, and then visit Gracia neighborhood, that she still had to discover.

Café Cometa massive wall art always makes me smile, I’m sure you can recognize some of the artists!

We chose the avocado toast while Mei favored the egg one, everything here is delish and with a cute presentation!

Since two cameras were clearly not enough, Dani was also paparazzing with the iphone, ha! I have to apologize here for not taking a picture of him and Mei together, make sure to check the last link in this post to know my daily feelings ;)

Mei was so super sweet as to bring us the cutest gifts, two of her crochet creations (!!), rilakkuma socks (she knows me well!), Japanese goodies (more on that on another post) and a gorgeous Italian notebook altogether with Dutch sweets.

Strawberry crochet brooch, amazing! We became the strawberry girls! (she was also wearing one)

In fact our Gracia outing was not a random idea, during this week there is a holiday where neighbors dress the streets according to a theme which we like to visit it each year. One of the most amazing conditions to create the decorations is that they have to prioritize the use of recycled materials. Each street participating in the contest (there is also a prize behind for the best street) spends the whole year gathering materials to create the decorations and thinks about creative ways to construct them. This year thanks to the streets decorations we were able to visit Paris, Japan, an airport, a funfair, the playmobil medieval castle and walk through Vivaldi’s four seasons, not bad for a single morning, right? *wink*

This recreation of the Fushimi Inari trail brought back many good memories, awww!

Verdi Street won this year competition with their homage to Japan.

This pastel ceiling is made entirely of bubble wrap, isn’t it attractive?

The Japanese flag was made out of recycled CD cases.

We stumbled upon “castellers”, the traditional human towers, brave guys!

I was able to confirm that I have a lack of social skills whatsoever – introvert guilty, ha! But we laughed, had fun and Mei was the sweetest (and hope she could cope with my forgetful silly head, oh good… this image really sums up my feelings, anyone else with me?)

Do you have meetup experiences to share? How was it like?

Had to post this image, is too funny! Goofy Mei and me not following the memo… face palm – Thanks girl for the visit!